Posts from ‘Rule No.5: No sex on the bus’
Karaoke World Tour – Austria
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
It’s time to jump back on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour and for Chapter Eleven we’re off to Kirchberg in Austria. When I worked as a tour leader for Top Deck dragging drunk 18 to 30s around Europe (the stories from that became my book Rule No.5: No Sex on the Bus) the itinerary would often include a couple of nights at Club Habitat, a traditional chalet in the heart of the Austrian Tirol. The quaint old wooden chalet had squeaky floorboards, squeaky beds, squeaky stairs and squeaky doors, but it certainly wasn’t squeaky clean. Club Hab (as it was affectionately known) had possibly the most debauched karaoke night in the world. The bar itself was nothing special. It was tiny with a low ceiling and the walls were covered with framed photos of the bar in full swing. And in full swing it certainly was. Most of the photos showed large groups of girls standing in neat lines at the bar with their breasts out… (read more)
Buses, Booze and Bonking.
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
It was ten years ago this week that I began writing my first book ‘Rule No.5: No sex on the bus’. The original title I had for the book was actually ‘Buses, Booze and Bonking’ and I’m so happy that I changed it. I think I probably got half my book sales just from the title alone! A great title can certainly help sell a book (or at least make it stand out in the crowd). My friend Peter Moore also had a great title for his first book: ‘No shitting in the toilet’. I did a bit of a search on the net and found a bunch of other book titles that I quite like…
Even God Is Single, So Stop Giving Me A Hard Time.
English as a Second F*cking Language.
If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?!
When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (read more)
No one wants to read that shit (Part 2).
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
(…continued from previous blog)
Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. That’s pretty much how I chose my literary agent. Out the of three agents that were interested in me I chose the one who had a posh English accent because I thought he sounded, well… literary (even his name, Anthony Williams, sounded literary). I now had an agent – although I didn’t have anything that resembled a publishing deal yet I could at least now throw ‘my agent’ into conversations. ‘My agent’ sent the manuscript to two publishers to begin with and I soon discovered that there was a whole chain of people to get through before anyone comes close to offering you a deal. The chain begins with a ‘publishing editor’ who has a read of your manuscript and decides whether it’s… (read more)
No one wants to read that shit.
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
I’ve had quite a few emails over the years asking how I got started in the travel-writing caper, so I thought I’d share with you how it all began.
The first thing I did was to get retrenched.
Twice.
I’ve had two silly dreams come true after I got retrenched. The first time I ‘lost’ my job (I was working as an art director in advertising where retrenching is as common as refilling the water cooler) I searched for another job straight away, but there was nothing around. Then, one day simply out of sheer boredom, I was flicking through the employment section of the newspaper and spotted a job for ‘summer tour leaders in Europe’. That sounded like fun, but what really caught my eye… (read more)