Liverpool - FA Cup Winners

What more can I say! Gerrard, best player in the world!

King Billy - the Opera

Yup everyone's writing opera these days! I've been approached by a Dublin based opera company to write a ten minute opera, with a view to expanding it to a full length production if it works out. Having been given free rein to write about any subject that takes my fancy I've come up with a story called 'The Two Williams', which features King Billy (that's King William to you) on the eve of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 accidentally changing places with his modern equivalent - a washed up drunk whose only job in life is to lead the Orange parade every Twelfth of July. Plan is to showcase the opera at a venue in Belfast, possibly the Grand Opera House. Will keep you posted.

The Titanic Times

The next children's book will hopefully be called 'The Titanic Times' - it's set on a 'new' Titanic, built in Belfast and setting sail on its maiden voyage, which again ends in disaster - the end of the world. Yes, another laugh a minute book from Colin Bateman.

New novel

The title of the next novel, after much debate, will be I PREDICT A RIOT. For those of you who don't live in Northern Ireland (or indeed those who do but didn't know about it) - for the past year I've been writing a weekly serial in the Belfast News Letter called 'Belfast City Limits'. It started out as a bit of a soap opera about Walter and Margaret and their doomed attempts to go on a date that doesn't end in chaos, but it soon turned into something else - violence, paramilitary ornithologists, poisonous carrot cake and a detective called Marsh Mallow. The series ended in April after about fifty episodes - but I enjoyed doing it so much that I actually ended up writing something like 132 episodes. These have now been collected together to form the next novel. The change in title was needed because it was just too close to 'Belfast Confidential', and also anything with Belfast in the title is a hard sell anywhere outside of Belfast.
Many thanks to everyone who's been in touch about Belfast Confidential - it has had the best reaction and reviews of any of my books (since Divorcing Jack) in fact.

Readings

I really am the laziest sod on the planet - I always have great ideas about updating this on a daily/weekly basis, but it always turns into months. This time I promise. No, really. Seriously.
So to start off, many thanks to everyone who turned up to my readings in Belfast and Holywood this week, they were really good fun. Nothing else planned in the near future. Next thing in my diary is the Aspects Festival in Bangor in September.