the year of living saintly

(The Ozzy version of the Saint Jack DVD on sale at Orchard Road, HMV, probably the biggest DVD outlet in Singapore, and it's one of their bestsellers. Yes, my book should be there alongside it - we're working on it...)

If 2005 was the year of researching and writing Kinda Hot, then 2006 has been the year of seeing the book in print and experiencing the highs and lows of getting the thing into people's hands and discovering what they think. A friend kept saying to me that the publication was just the beginning of the 'long-haul' and she was right, you would hope that a book when its out there would take on a life of its own and start making its own way in the world... and in a way it does. But it also lies inert on shelves in innapropriate parts of bookshops, or worse, sits in a warehouse because no one bothered to re-order it.

After a a period of fervently emailing the publishers about disappeared stock and bad shelving, or coming up with new ideas about how to promote it, you do have to drop out of the race to a certain extent. Its time to move on.

Actually, it sold decently. I think about a quarter of what was printed (2,500 copies) has shifted so far. Most of this is Singapore buyers, but thanks to the power of the internets the Amazon sales have been steady as a group of the devoted and dedicated Saint Jack-lovers/Peter Bogdanovich fans/Singapore-in-the-70s nostalgists have tracked it down.

This sounds like I'm wrapping up the blog - and actually I'm not - there is a Saint Jack related interview with a key local crew member in the pipeline that will be up here in the New Year I hope. And I never even posted about my wonderful afternoon with Le Pierre himself, Pierre Rissient, who dropped by Singapour in November and took me to lunch and told me how accurate he felt the book was, even if he wasn't the biggest fan of the movie. But as those who've noticed the paucity of posts of late will have guessed, I am busy on other projects, including the very earliest stages of finding a home for Book 2. So this is merely a long-winded way of saying something simple:

Thanks for reading.