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June 2006

THE RISK OF DARKNESS…

The third volume in the Simon Serailler crime series was published on June 1st. If you would like to buy a signed copy for just £12 and POST FREE, for the first two weeks of June only, please either pay via our secure server, NOCHEX – go to http://www.longbarnbooks.com/order.htm or send a cheque to LONG BARN BOOKS, EBRINGTON, GLOUCESTERSHIRE GL 55 6NW.

I am hard at work on the next and thank you to the many people who have e-mailed to ask when they can read it. I’m going as fast as I can !

My Blog on the website (http://www.susan-hill.com/pages/blog/index.asp ) is establishing itself with a very friendly and regular lot of people who add their comments and a lot of visitors who do not. I hope you enjoy it. I try to mix the daily Blog – there is an ongoing ‘100 Books you Must Read’ series of threads, notes about our life here in rural Gloucestershire, and occasional rants about the state of the world/the book world. I also like to remember writers I have known in the course of 45 plus years of being in the business and try to convey something of them as people as well as recommend their books.

I have a wonderful programme which gives me statistics of how many visitors come to the website each day, from where they are referred and even more excitingly, from which countries they come. There have been visitors from, among all the usual UK, American and European places, visitors from Paraguay, Senegal and Iceland. I am still hoping for one from the only continent not yet to have sent a visitor – the continent of Antarctica. If you know of anyone going there on an expedition with a laptop, do ask them to communicate and make my day.

Talking of websites, my publishers, Chatto and Windus are part of the Random House group and they have a big website for all their books and authors and to mark the publication of THE RISK OF DARKNESS they have given me my own page on it.. very exciting. www.randomhouse/susanhill.. there is a competition running there too.

I am writing some new short stories – well, two at once, which is possibly not a good idea. We shall see. I think they give me more pleasure and satisfaction to write than anything else and there seems to be a bit of a revival of enthusiasm for the short story form too – many people write them, fewer read them.

I have had the chance to help promote the form a bit myself. Penguin books have let go of the rights to my two early collections of short stories, A BIT OF SINGING AND DANCING, and THE ALBATROSS and I have snapped them up to re-issue under the Long Barn Books imprint, as one volume, newly arranged and with a new addition and one or two omissions of stories I felt didn’t stand the test of time. The collection is called FARTHING HOUSE and OTHER STORIES, and it is being promoted by Waterstones this summer. As part of that promotion, I have been asked to choose ten collections of short stories by other people to be promoted alongside my own – which was a great pleasure and privilege. I could have chosen fifty not just ten, but I think those I have finally selected make a balanced selection and I really hope it will help bring some fine writers to a little more prominence in the bookshops and so to a lot of new readers.

Some time ago, I decided that after upwards of 40 years, I was calling a halt and never ever appearing to speak about my books in public again. No more Lit Fests or Bookshop events. I need the time for writing and the books must speak for themselves – they’re grown-up enough. But new authors need to do this sort of thing to become known so I am delighted to be going to the Ways with Words Literary Festival at Dartington in July, to talk to Helen Slavin about her first novel THE EXTRA LARGE MEDIUM which Long Barn Books has just published and I do hope to meet plenty of old and new friends there.

The summer beckons. The schools are coming to the end of their exams so all is quiet on the set-book front now until October or so when the website will start to hum again with enquiries about essays and homework and ‘Please will you explain what you meant by…’ e-mails. I can concentrate on writing books. And also on starting the final stretch of my Masters degree in Theology, which is a Dissertation of 25,000 words, besides which a novel of 150,000 suddenly seems a breeze. After I have done my MA – and hopefully actually got it – I am wondering whether to embark on a Ph. D. My Shakespeare scholar husband, he of Professorial status and dozens of Honorary Degrees, suspects I only want to do it so I can compete with him but let’s face it, I will never catch him up now and I really don’t want to be a Professor. Doctor Wells (the degrees go with my married name ) will do nicely.