Gary Davison

 …Paul Burman and my good self are still having an inter-blog carry on this week. This week -slash- this month. It’s the summer, kids are off, everything takes that bit longer.

Our next subject, after the techno blogs, is films. Movies as they say over there.

We’re going to pick our favourite films from the last four decades, one from each, then a few wild cards thrown in at the death.

Today I had a quick look at the 70s and there are some great films out in the 70s. Even though I was only just born, I remember watching these when I was early teens, I think.

Here’s a sample of some of the 70s films that are floating around: Taxi Driver, The God Father, Star Wars, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Superman. Tasty selection or what?

But would one of those be my choice for the 70s? What about…

 It’s going to be violent, just a matter of nutter, gangland or rubber.

I’ll give Paul a tug, se how he’s getting on. i know he’s been busy with a new website, which is looking rather nifty. Have a look, go to paulburman.net, or just click HERE.

What a laugh. Karen and me watched it the other night and it’s a right laugh.

The story isn’t anything you wouldn’t have seen before, but as the saying goes, it’s how you tell them.

Ricky Gervais is hardly in it, but his humour is all over it. And when he is in it, it’s side splitting.

Any story that can get me singing Slade’s ‘Cum on feel the noise’ three days later must be good.

 How shit’s this weather? Warm and pissing down, doesn’t get any worse. Much more of this and I’ll be putting pictures up of women drinking water to cheer myself up.

Complaining about the weather is a definite sign age has got me my the leg and dragging me into the pit. No more moaning about the weather, although I quite like the idea of women drinking water.

If the Banker was an animal, this might be him. And he’s every right to be so confident having NEVER lost a footy bet to me in 5 or 6 years.

This year he’s going to get skinned. The bet, as usual, is that we pick one team from each division. The team that finishes ahead of the other in that division wins. It gets complicated if there are the same number of divisions won and The Banker appears to steer the rules in his favour. This year there will be no dodgy rulings required. Here’re the teams

The Banker -Man U, Hull, Sheff Wed, Shrewsbury.

The 2010\2011 champion - Chelsea, QPR, Peterborough, Chesterfield.

It’s time for the bankers to take a pasting for a change, game on!

 Over the past few weeks I’ve been on a decent run with the betting. Which is a good thing as I’m about to enter into another bet with The Banker. Five years no wins, so I need a bit in reserve when tackling the very fortunate finance man.

I had a decent win when Louise Osweeeeeencfi won The Open a few weeks back. With that in mind I betted big at Doncaster races when we were there and had three winners in five.

Regular followers will know this is a rare purple patch so I must take advantage.

This weekend I’ve lumped all the winnings on the world number 2 to win or be placed at the last major of the season, the USPGA. As soon as I had splashed the cash, I opened the paper and ready the headline: I’ve got arthritis and I’m struggling to walk - Phil Mickelson.

Knackered joints or not, Lefty will be in the shake up and at 14-1 is a great bet.

 For about two years now I’ve had tennis elbow. That’s what the doc said, and as it turns out he was more or less right. Sort of right.

I’ve had two injections in the elbow, physio, still it was hurting like hell.

Now the other elbow has decided to chip in with a nice pang every time I let rip with a 4-iron.

Over the past few weeks I’ve turned to the Chinese to try and sort it out and despite  a lot of people saying it was a waste of time, sticking needles in your head, feet, hands and elbow and blasting them with heat for an hour, is working. Less pain, especially in the long term injured elbow. I only get a little aggravation when I’m playing golf and none at all when I’m not. Not sure how it will fair over a long period after the treatment finishes, but so far se good.

 So that just leaves the dodgy left knee so I think I’ll be having a massage on my calf before the next run.

Age is all about running around the ship patching things up until the cloth is so thin you have to come back into port and get a new one.

Not sure I fancy a new cloth, just look at Mickey Rourke, they were clean out of cloth when he came in and  gave him a welder’s bench instead.

I’m sitting on the couch, looking at the trees in the back garden, laptop on my knee, dictating these words straight onto the screen using a headset and Dragon Naturally Speaking.  Both my PC and this here laptop have changed the way I write, and every now and then I try out a different approach in the way I use them, but it all adds up to the fact that they’ve made the writing process infinitely more enjoyable and innovative – given me greater scope to play with words. 

Everything associated with this bundle of technology – the Internet, networking, blogging, researching – have opened opportunities for me as a writer that I otherwise wouldn’t have had … and cheers to that.  (Not completely sure about the voice recognition program yet; it’s great for first drafts but can be a bit of a bastard at times and doesn’t help the refining process.)

The second bundle of technology I’d be gutted to lose has to be my iPod Touch and the Sony Dream Machine I dock it with.  After watching Vanilla Sky a number of years back, I hankered after a more sophisticated alarm to wake me in the morning than the old digital thing that sounded like a truck reversing over my head – the exact scene it managed to ram into my dreams practically every day.  My Dream Machine wakes me with whatever music I’m in the mood for (and the iPod’s then ready to let me check emails and see what’s happening in blogdom before I crawl out of bed).  Although I usually leave the music on shuffle, it uncannily knows that I want mellow at 6:40 in the morning and I’ll drift awake to Nina Simone, Cat Power, Billie Holiday, Piers Faccini – something bluesy and soothing – although occasionally it’ll throw a wet flannel at me by thundering out Led Zeppelin or Daft Punk instead.  Now, if it could also make that first crucial cup of tea of the day it’d be even better.  I’m nothing without that first brew.

As for my third most-cherished piece of technology, you’ll probably think me a real hick, but after twenty years we finally traded in our old wood heater for a ritzy-titsy gas fire (glowing embers, realistic logs, the lot) the other week.  So good is it that a friend recently spent two hours sitting by it and then asked why we’d still got a wood heater.  It might sound like nothing to crow about, but it’s winter right now in this hemisphere and it’s been a cold one at that, and I was getting heartily sick of clambering up trees with a chainsaw, stacking several square metres of timber, of spending weekends slamming down a log splitter, to say nothing of getting a fire going after work each day, so it’s bliss to walk into the room, flick on a switch and be able to sit down next to it with a decent glass of shiraz five minutes later.  There’s technology for ya.

Check out Paul’s blog (sidebar or click on blog) to see my take on going techno. No mention of glow sticks, vicks or dust masks, honest, me lud.

Click on Paul’s cover of his new novel to buy it online. I’ll be posting up a review soon, but don’t hang back for me whatever you do, get tucked in.

Word of mouth, according to my publisher, is still the number one tool for selling books. For about three months now, Fat Tuesday has been selling every single day online. It was up to the dizzy heights of 3000^th in the charts the other morning. This may not sound that great, but what you have to remember is that there are over 10,000 books published every week and Fat Tuesday has been out for nearly two years now. Multiply that by that and basically it’s showing a clean pair if heels to quite a number of novels.

How it works online is that word of mouth goes from one book to the next to the next and similar books sell and get attached to other books and it’s basically like a good virus. Fat Tuesday is getting sold with lots of other books and is on a lot of front pages of other amazon novels now.

I don’t know how amazon does it, but I’m guessing if a book is selling a lot then it will promote it and I take it this is why I get the occasional one of these landing. What I need now is the amazon film people to take notice. There must be a way. I’m off to find one.

Are you looking for something in our Fiction category? If so, you might be interested in these items. Fat Tuesday Streakers The Amateurs Friday at the Nobody Inn Kill Your Friends Friction Beat the Reaper The Seven Days of Peter Crumb   See even more similar items Fat Tuesday by Gary Davison Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £4.96 You Save: £3.03 (38%)   Rate this item: I Own It     Streakers by Gary Davison Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £4.36 You Save: £3.63 (45%)   Rate this item: I Own It     The Amateurs by John Niven Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £5.59 You Save: £2.40 (30%)   Rate this item: I Own It     Friday at the Nobody Inn by Mark Hayhurst Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £4.96 You Save: £3.03 (38%)   Rate this item: I Own It     Kill Your Friends by John Niven Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £5.00 You Save: £2.99 (37%)   Rate this item: I Own It     Friction by Joe Stretch Average customer review: RRP: £8.99 Price: £5.99 You Save: £3.00 (33%)   Rate this item: I Own It     Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £5.13 You Save: £2.86 (36%)   Rate this item: I Own It     The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn Average customer review: RRP: £7.99 Price: £4.49 You Save: £3.50 (44%)   Rate this item: I Own It     See even more similar items If you already own or have experience with the items shown above, please let us know by using the link provided near the item. For problems unrelated to this email, please contact customer service . Thanks, Amazon.co.uk

Seeing as Paul Burman and myself are going to be blogging together this week on technology, I thought I’d give you a taster from my new free app of Einstein quotes. After being on a two day bender at the weekend which I’m still trying to recover from, this quote makes perfect sense after what I’ve seen this weekend:

‘Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.’

Newcastle at the weekend: groom agrees to drop his pants and bend over so mates can shoot him in the arse with paintball guns.

This is paul burman’s second novel and it was unleashed last week. With me being away on holiday I missed the big countdown and launch.

Not to worry, my copy has been ordered. I opted for the free supersaver delivery on amazon. They say 5-7 working days, or something like that. It nearly always comes in two days.

Two days and I’ll be getting stuck into an extremely well written novel that promises to pack a poweful story with a sprinkling of humour and love. And of course there is a mention of a robbery and strange goings on in this new town I’ll be visiting.

Paul has been giving some insight into how he wrote his new novel, what he was looking to achieve and explore and how writing affects our lives. It’s well worth a look, so head over to legend press (there’s a link on the sidebar) and there are several posts there.

Paul’s first novel, The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore, was released around the same time as Fat Tuesday. It’s a literary novel, beautifully crafted and it holds fond memories for me. Not just the reading of it, but the timing. Paul and I were both being published for the first time and sharing in the euphoria at seeing our books in bookshops around the country, on amazon, in the newspapers. Paul living in australia, me here in Newcastle, both on cloud nine and having a great time.

  One day, Paul was sitting on the toilet reading The Sun. He had been stuck on 3-down for over an hour. Realising he was not a crossword king, but unable to leave the comfort of the bog, he picked up a pen and began writing.

You’re expecting me to say something with shit in it, aren’t you? Naughty. It’s Monday. No swearing on a Monday.

One hour later, and one stone lighter, Paul had wrote a short story. So talented is he, it was snapped up by another publisher, and there it is in the 10 Journeys anthology.

My mate is on top of his game, so get tucked in to any or all of these. Shall we ask him to come on here this week for a natter?

‘Paul, will you come on here this week for a natter?’