Xangans: Stories From the World's Greatest Blogging Community (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781452868608)

I was born in England. Not the England of bustling London, nor even the southern counties, but the North of great industrial towns, separated by vast expanses of hills and moors, the land of "Wuthering Heights." I read a lot from childhood onwards, and attempted my first short story at age eleven. "Would you like to be an author?" a girl asked me in my teens; "there's no money in it," I replied, not from desire for wealth, but from desire for life, and travel, which require a solid job to bring in the cash. So I worked, and travelled through life, though experience, through the world, yet always the dream of the novel drifted in the back of my mind. Europe I saw, touching its worn stone, and ancient Istanbul, and crazy Rio de Janeiro; and America too, from cold Toronto to sweltering Miami, touching its chill chrome, its smooth plastic. My first published novel is Wake of the Raven, the first of a series chronicling a disastrous love affair from the early nineteen-fifties to the end of the century. I wanted to first try something completely different next, in a different style, so my next published was Zorn, set in 2035, tracking the loves and misadventures of a group of teenagers in a changed world of the not too distant future. By this time I was well aware of the difficulties faced by an as yet unknown author, and attempted a project that had been cooking in my mind for a couple of years: to publish a collection of short stories, poems and blogs writers on my favourite social networking system, Xanga. I titled the book Xangans, and I hope you'll find this collection as interesting to read as I found to edit.