Publishing date etc for 'The Well of Shadows', my memoirs of the London Underground

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Oh eddie. Tied up with string in brown-paper wrapping. How...lovely. Thank you.

just drive wrote:Oh eddie. Tied up with string in brown-paper wrapping. How...lovely. Thank you.

These are a few of my favourite things.

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here you can hear people say about the madrid metro, I don't remember exactly what it is, maybe that it is based in the London metro... and they mean it as a prestigious fact

el aliencito wrote:so are you convinced now that eddie is not a teddy bear communicating its spirits fumes through the interwebs as you've been insistently telling me all this time?

No no otro. Eddie is this bear. It's in the story. It must be true.

pinhedz wrote:I might add that the Soviets never provided the masses with decent housing or automobiles. The Moscow metro system was one of their greatest sources of pride (along with tsarist-era literature, art and architecture).

pinz. Does it still look like that, or are they photos from another era? I can't imagine any form of mass transport without graffiti.

would you believe a story told and so distorted by a CO2 junkie?
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http://marknixon.com/photographs/muchloved/

el aliencito wrote:would you believe a story told and so distorted by a CO2 junkie?
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http://marknixon.com/photographs/muchloved/

What a cute site

I think Louis and his story best suit eddie, what with the connection to trains:

Louis (42)
Belongs to Dara Ferguson

Louis has track marks
on him from falling off a train

el aliencito wrote:the madrid metro....is based in the London metro... and they mean it as a prestigious fact

<hollow laughter & hacking cough> Poor deluded fools. The London Underground was the world's first metro system...and many things wrong with it today stem from that simple fact.

The NY subway, for example, can run 24/7 because its architects learned from the elementary error of the London metro's design which didn't (and still doesn't) incorporate parallel tunnels to enable engineering work to take place without shutting the whole system down at night

as I don't remember exactly what sometimes I've heard I can't tell you what it is they relate to the London one (and don't know how trustful my blurred memory is)
(edit: just asked to someone who I thought had told me about that and it seems it was not so at all )

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https://mymzone.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Great-Bear.png



https://acrosstheuniverse.forummotion.com/t700-alternative-london-tube-maps

but why would soviets want it to "resemble tsarist-era palaces"?

el aliencito wrote:but why do soviets would want it to "resemble tsarist-era palaces"?

I think it was the grandeur and prestige of the ancien regime they were attempting to emulate, but if you study Pinz's pix carefully, you'll notice that 'heroic' proletarian artwork has been grafted on to the basic Tsarist architectural template.

pinhedz wrote:Ah--page 132

You've reached p.132? Well, that's encouraging.

^ I'm very grateful for your impressions, Pinz. I've printed them out for further study.

Melville gets a mention in the opening 'A Season in Hell' chapter.

Yes, Mr Charon is one of many names which have had to be changed to protect the guilty and keep me out of the libel courts.

Santa was originally a Falstaffian variant on the folklore figure of the Green Man. As far as I know, it was the Coca Cola company that endowed him with a red-and-white suit to match their logo.

I well remember the Johnny Mac lunar thread, which might well have been the original inspiration for the 'Lycanthropy' chapter. Evidence (from A&E nurses, nightclub doormen & LU staff) that the phase of the Moon affects client/customer behaviour is necessarily anecdotal, but no less convincing- to my moon-struck mind, at least- for all that.

I don't know how things stand in the US, but in the UK there is a general crisis of confidence in the motives and even the basic competence of middle management, a legacy of both the Thatcher and the Blair administrations. One could cite the MP's expenses scandal, the Murdoch newspapers' illegal phone hacking, the myriad crimes of the banking industry, police backhanders etc etc in support of this. I've known a few decent managers (as I think I concede in the book), but only a very few. I'm pretty sure that I also mention the painful consequences (to my generally lefty thinking) of the application of 'political correctness' to managerial appointments.

Thanks for the information about the link between blood pressure and temperature. In this bleak, snowbound January, I thank my lucky stars that I no longer have to drag myself in to work amid the Antarctic conditions of the Aldgate gateline any more. (Did you notice the shot of the Aldgate station entrance on 7/7 in the vid you posted)?

Publication day is about 3 weeks away, and still copyright issues are a nuisance. I've had to cut the Dylan and Rolling Stones lyrics because I'm not prepared to pay the kind of money they're demanding to reproduce short extracts from 40-year old lyrics. I also think I'm going to have to ditch a few prose quotations in favour of simple paraphrases. I can see this being a last-minute rush.

Once more, thank you for your engagement with the book, Pinz. Much appreciated.

Crikey! I had no idea that Anna Karenina hung out at Wapping tube station:

pinhedz wrote:Ms Just Driver and Tigerlily: If you're pm-ing Eddy instead of posting on the forum, please copy it here so the rest of us can see what you think.

I'm certain Tigerlily would have no objection to my reproducing the PM I received on ER:

"Yesterday I had 45 minutes of uninterrupted time to devote to reading (a luxury on a Saturday!) and am on page 24 Really enjoying the book!

I'm glad you have included the glossary of terms. Your readers in the UK will, I'm sure, be more familiar with alot of the place references, and I'm thinking that your initial Kindle release in only the UK will translate into big sales, which will help you in the long run with a wider distribution.

This is good stuff Ed, and you should be proud..."

Ms Just Driver is probably on the high seas by now in her prawn trawler, but she assures me that she has her copy of the ms carefully stashed in a plastic bag.

pinhedz wrote:Good thing she has a plastic bag. Does she know about the tidal wave?

Ms Just Driver wrestles crocodiles. She laughs in the face of tidal waves.

I am on page 124 now !!

Because I work at a public library, I find myself totally relating to your dealings with the customers, it's like a universal truth.....and you describe it so well....the sad, the funny, the scarey, the crazy....

It is so interesting to learn about this tight, contained world of the LU, where there are rules and procedures for everything....and the ridiculousness of some of them.

We here at ATU (and at ER) have known for years what a fine writer Eddie is. IMO his fan base is going to be expanding very soon

Thank you Eddie for sending me your book

^ Tigerlily, you're an absolute sweetheart. We at ATU and ER have known that for some years.

^ Disquieting. I have a serious literary rival.

pinhedz wrote:Eddie informs us that Londoners who took cover in the LU during bombing raids were also accused of unworthy, unsportsmanslike conduct. They should have been out on the street defiantly shaking their fists at the dastardly enemy bombers.

That was, indeed, the official position when German bombing raids on London first began. Eventually, common sense prevailed.

Not all British initiatives during WWII were good ideas. At one point, Churchill floated a scheme for arming the Home Guard (a kind of domestic militia) with pikes.

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pinhedz wrote:I see that there are a numbers of websites that discuss new literary works. I don't what it takes it to create a "buzz," but around the publication date we should see what we can do to create a BUZZZ.

I've sent pre-publicity material to passenger pressure groups, the London Mayor's office, LU's in-house magazine 'On the Move' (carefully edited, that one), The Guardian, the Independent, Private Eye, the London Review of Books, Granta, family, friends, former colleagues, ER and Facebook. The other literary websites will take a bit of research. It also ought to be worthwhile sending a reminder to agents/publishers in the trad publishing industry who rejected the sample chapters I'd sent them first time around.

Right now, the actual publication is the priority. It's going to be frantic getting it 'out there' by Feb 14th. This will go right down to the wire.

I have finished reading

As with most of what we read, there is that bit of us that relates personally on some level to what the author writes. For me with this book it is that, in the end, Eddie gets himself out of Hell. He finally realized that what he started with good intentions years earlier (taking a job with financial security) turned out to be toxic for him. I applaud him for making the conscious decision to take the leap away from this living hell before he lost his nerve, for writing about it (which I suspect was a healing move), and for realizing that we don't need to put up with shit in our lives no matter how old we may be. Life is just too damn short to spend it in misery.

Bravo Eddie!