Bile damaged, meat stained, radioactive, rodent chewed books for sale

Ambushing Amazon

Would you buy a bile damaged, snot encrusted, baby-been-sick-upon radioactive novel that’s been dropped down the toilet, has the wrong cover, holes drilled through it, and blank pages? Many people would, and did.

My short story collection sawn off tales had been out a couple of months and I had a few copies lying about at home so I decided to sell them as signed copies on Amazon. There’s an area on the site called The Marketplace where anyone can sell books. I offered them as signed copies, and I did sell a few and as a treat I decided that each buyer would get a little free gift, to make it more personalised. Initially the free gifts were copies of literary magazines in which were a few extra stories by me. However, I soon began to run out of free magazines and looked about the house for other stuff I could offer free. There were plenty of books I didn’t need any more around so I decide to offer Phillip Roth’s Everyman free with my next sale. Then the next stage of my Amazon marketing plan occured to me. After all, which was the free gift? Roth’s Everyman or David Gaffney’s Sawn Off Tales? It actually didn’t matter. The deal was the same either way and as Phillips Roth’s page on Amazon got plenty more traffic than mine, I decided to sell Roth’s Everyman with a free copy of my book. This entry on the marketplace site would also act as an ad for the book and even if people didn’t buy my second hand copy of Everyman, it might send people to look at my book, read the reviews and maybe even buy one.
The problem was five minutes later I sold the copy of Everyman, which meant my little advert was gone. If this viral marketing strategy was to work I had to make sure my ambush ad was up as long as possible. Also, it needed to be connected to only bestselling books, to maximise the traffic. I identified the top twenty fiction sellers on Amazon, bought a copy of each book and offered copies for sale, trying to make sure that a) my book was the cheapest so it would appear at the top of the list and b) no one in their right mind would actually buy it, thus maximising my ad’s lifetime on the page. Here’s a few of the ads I used.
QI book of general ignorance. £4.50
Dropped down toilet so still damp and a bit smelly. Free sample of David Gaffneys hilarious Sawn Off Tales with every purchase
A short history of Tractors £3.00
Book stored on pig farm so strong odour of animal feed. Free sample of David Gaffneys hilarious Sawn Off Tales with every purchase.
The Kite Runner £2.50
Book printed in error without a spine so held together with bulldog clips. Free sample of David Gaffneys hilarious Sawn Off Tales with every purchase.

Notice also that I was now offering only a sample of my book (a few copied pages) as I couldn’t afford to send out a free book which cost me £6.50 each time. Surely no-one would buy books described in this way. But, no. They bought them. Copies of The Book of General Ignorance (loose pages and in the wrong order) and The Short History of Tractors (huge stains and a corner chewed off by the dog) sold like hotcakes and soon I was stuffing books into envelopes with sample pages of my book, at a financial loss each time of about £2.00. That I had to supply the books was problem enough. However, the other question in my mind was, did the buyer expect the books in the state I had described them, and would they be disappointed when pristine copies turned up? Should I be spilling milk on them, ripping out pages and getting dogs to chew them? And the other problem was, every time I sold one, the advert disappeared from Amazon so the whole purpose of my plan was defeated. I had to list them again. I upped the ante. I would make these books so undesirable that no-one in their right mind would want one in the house. I put several ads up on the site with the following descriptions

Cheap ink used in this edition causes headaches and coma in pets.
Printing error means every page printed with image of Bruce Forsyth.
Has wrong cover - Donkeys Get Aspergers Too - but text inside okay
Bile damaged from colostomy bag.
Has had eye-holes drilled through for comedy spy prop.
Blood stains on cover and inside from bedroom fight.
Baby sick on it but will clean up nice.
Most writing obscured by mucous damage.
From abbatoir staff room. Some gristle and meat may still be present.
Ex-nuclear plant library stock. Checked, safe caesium level, no polonium.
Rodent attack leaves just one page readable, but it’s a good one.

But still they sold! I even took to pleading - please, please don’t buy this book buy the one below, but it still didn’t work. So what was the next step? I had the addresses of all the people I’d sold to. Possibly I should visit each buyer and offer a free reading in their living room? Maybe ring them and read them stories down the phone? Maybe I should just write a better book.

David Gaffney

Through the medium of modern dance

The bin-men laid out the recycling boxes and pressed play. Latin beats spluttered out, and from a wheelie-bin sprang a woman in floaty clothes. She danced as she demonstrated how to recycle. A bin-man battered hell out of a bongo.
Within every bottle are pieces of all the bottles you’ve ever used, they sang
The dancer had long ochre hair. Freckles. She hated newsnight, and laminate-flooring. She liked celeriac. And ferris wheels.
She was my ex-girlfriend.
My insides churned with recalled desire and when she’d finished I gripped her arm. But she pointed at the label on a tin. DO NOT REHEAT.
When we lived together I dealt with the rubbish; a monstrous heap of unloved packaging and decayed food. We threw away more than we ever had. It was better when everything got burnt. Ash-men came with an ash-cart and grey flecks wheeled in the air, getting in our eyes.

Container driver

It was a last minute cancellation so one day we’re in a travel agents, the next frying in coconut oil under a saturated blue sky.
But I couldn’t relax. ‘I can’t stop thinking,’ I said, ‘about the people who cancelled. The bloke was a container driver, like the ones who drop off at the yard.’ She looked blank. ‘Heart attack. Smashed through the central reservation.’
She squeezed her eyes against the sun. ‘Don’t think about it.’
‘This is his holiday. We should go home.’
She didn’t agree. So we trailed round the market, the pearl factory, the melon farm, the barbeque, neither of us having the heart for it.
‘I wonder what he would have thought of it,’ I said.
‘The container driver?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think he’d have liked it,’ she said
‘He’d have bloody hated it,’ I said and began to dance to the pulse of the Bontempi organ.

Life just bounces

The salesman’s skin glistened with sweat. ‘Where’s the big money?’ he cried.
‘Bouncy castles!’ we replied.
‘Correctamundo!’ His legs quivered like a manic preacher’s. ‘And I know that those of you who respect yourselves as people will sign up today.’
The words of the presentation echoed in my head as I stared at the rusted generator and sagging vinyl edifice that covered the lawn. All my redundancy, everything, sunk into this. Rowena would kill me. I had no van to transport it and no money for advertising.
I switched on the power, the generator throbbed and clunked, and slowly the gaudy plastic puddle rose up to become a quivering enchanted fairy palace. I thought about the others back at work, the ones who had been kept on. Then I flicked off my shoes and jumped in. I bounced. It was good, bouncing away. The salesman was right. Everybody wants to bounce.

To buy sawn off tales or listen to podcasts click here
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm

my new book - sawn-off tales

You can get this book from Amazon, Tesco, play.com, direct from ww.saltpublishing.com, and in bookshops
















To listen to podcasts or to buy sawn off tales at a 20% discount click here
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last to know

He showed me the back of my head in a mirror and I nodded.
‘£6.50 then,’ he said, and pressed the foot pedal. The hydraulics sighed as I sank to the floor.
‘I normally pay five.’
He indicated the price list. ‘It’s been £6.50 for a while’
‘Yes, but. . .’
What had happened? I was regular. Only new customers paid full. It was never spoken of, but that was the system. The barber could tell that someone else had cut it; the blending between the longer and shorter sections was poorly executed.
‘Look me in the eye,’ he said, ‘and tell me you haven’t been to anyone else.’
‘I haven’t been to another barbers in years.’
The barber sucked in his lower lip. ‘So we’re talking home clippers.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and felt my cheeks redden in shame.
‘Ok. Call it £5.50. I know you won’t do it again.’

To listen to podcasts or to buy sawn off tales at a 20% discount click here
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm

how I wrote sawn off tales - a tale by tale account

How I wrote potato smiles

I wrote potato smiles one night after I’d been out for a drink in a old pub in Loweswater called the Kirkstile Inn. It turned out that this pub was owned by some posh fellah from London who rarely visited. However, the pub had been struggling over the past few months. Not selling much bar-food, not getting the tourists in, basically just selling beer to the local farmers. So, for the first time ever, the owner fellah had driven 300 miles up from London with his ladyfriend to sample the wares, see what it felt like to be a punter. He was sitting just behind me and when it came to ordering the food his very posh ladyfriend, who had a screechy voice like the queen and Brian Sewell had been mashed up in a matter transportation unit, said to him oh Roger what do think those are? Potato smiles?
Potato smiles? says he. I have no idea.
Lets try them, she says, they sound delish!
And they order the game pie and rack of lamb with two side-orders of Potato Smiles, not realising she’d been reading off the children’s menu.
I didn’t see what happened when the Potato Smiles arrived, cos we had to go, but it got me thinking about how this would make a good story. I thought about how maybe the potato smiles caused a row between them; I thought about food being used to communicate things – like the urban myth concerning a couple who fell out so badly they communicated only by alphabeti spaghetti, spelling out things like useless twat and stupid bastard and evil bitch every tea time. Yet this idea didn’t really make a story. So I took them further into the future and thought that maybe the two of them eventually developed a real love of potato smiles, and maybe this became the bond between them, maybe even over the years the only remaining connective tissue. And when she eventually leaves him, you get Potato Smiles, the story as it now stands.

How I wrote last to know

last to know is based on a barber shop in Manchester inside Afflecks palace called Max Headroom I used to go to years ago. Mine was a simple haircut as I recall - a number two back and sides and a three on top - for which I was paid a fiver. For some reason, I started going some where else, then returned a few months later, and it was then that I noticed the price went up to 6.50. Yet my mate had his cut there and he paid only 4.50 - for exactly the same cut. He explained that the barber pinned the prices to the first time you started going and put them up only if you left and then returned. I wondered how he kept a record of all of this in his head. It fascinated me the fact that he saw every customer with a permanent price written through him like blackpool through a stick of rock. I suppose with this story I was also thinking about intimacy, about and how it’s quite a close relationship you have with barber - him touching your head, your face and your neck and helping you make personal decisions about your appearance. He never used to speak, this barber, which is a great quality in a barber and shared by the barbers I now go to. The story was originally called Betrayal when I went through a phase of one word titles, like Pet Shop Boys albums

How I wrote Enclosures

Enclosures comes from a time when me and my girlfriend were unemployed and living in Walsall. We had a trip to Dudley zoo and were looking at the giant tortoises when the keeper came along with the tortoise’s dinner, and in this big bowl were chopped orange, pineapple, lettuce, banana, tomatoes and other delicious stuff and were living off toast and cheap cheese and we though how lovely to have all that fresh healthy fruit, vegetables and salad if we could afford them. We envied those lucky tortoises in the zoo and wondered if the unemployed were zoo exhibits maybe we’d get better treatment.


How I wrote Little Jan

I worked in an office where there was a Jo and a little Jo. Jo was quite large and I always wondered how upset she might be every time she heard them talk about little Jo. There was always a thing about the long stapler - it seemed a very valuable resource in this office, but I could never understand why. I am now told that there is a science fiction book in which a long stapler holds the secret to the whole universe.




How I wrote no turning and using the facilities

These stories are companion pieces cos they’re both about people who try to stop you using some facility they own when using it does not wear it out or incur them any extra cost – like turning round in their drive or using their toilet. I was driving down to Plymouth to get a ferry when I took a wrong turning off this roundabout and found that everyone had taken the same wrong turning as the signs were so crap. There was a drive which was perfect for turning round in. But the man who owned it didn’t agree. He had erected a no turning sign. But what could he do? Make you turn round again and stay at the bottom of the road? For the rest of your life? And the toilet one I originally had the idea that the landlord of this pub hates tourists coming in to use his toilet so much he devises a system that store up the urine of toursists who hadn’t bought food or drinks ands then run after them with their urine in a plastic bag saying you can have this back. But that storyline didn’t seem to work, which is a shame cos maybe its funnier.

To listen to podcasts or to buy sawn off tales at a 20% discount click here
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm

Cica Lights

Cica lights

Mum and Trevor were getting serious, what with her new glittery top and the way she stroked the sleeve of his knobbly jumper like it was a hamster. But you can put up with that. When he bought me new trainers my heart sank. The box declared in scrolly italics, Clarks, and when I lifted the lid, pink lights winked through tissue and my worst fears were confirmed.

Cica Lights. A Nike copy with pathetic flashing bulbs in the heels.

I was dead if I wore them. Like the boy who wore a Blue Peter T shirt on non-uniform day and had since developed a stutter and started hanging with the science-fiction lot.

So I told Trevor about the nights my Dad stayed over and Trevor stormed out taking the shoes with him.

My mum was insupportable. But relationships come and go. Your choice of trainer leaves an indelible mark.

To buy sawn off tales at 20% less than in the shops, see http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm


You know, quiet






The room he was given had seven wardrobes. Seven. At night the wardrobes oppressed him. Dark brooding figures shuffling closer to his bed, faces glowering out from the whorls of polished grain. The landlord wouldn’t let him get rid of them. They were classic. Solid. So he had to think of a way to use them. The TV fitted into one, Hi Fi in another, cooking equipment in a third, and various bits and bobs in the rest. But he couldn’t think of anything to do with the last one. Then one night he dragged his duvet into it and had the best night’s sleep ever.

He decided to stay in the wardrobe. He would move in a radio, and would eat there too. Eventually he would get six more people to live in the other wardrobes. Because he was the last person to keep himself to himself.


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Potato Smiles

Potato smiles

When Debbie left I ate nothing but potato smiles with no-frills ketchup. One day I looked at the fluffy orange discs grinning up at me and decided to save one. I stuck it to the wall next to my bed and it cheered me up. The next day I saved another, but I’d had one of my funny days, so I stuck this one upside down, to make a frown. I did this for years and the pattern reminded me how well I was doing.

The man from environmental health had a big oblong body built for blocking doorways. ‘The neighbours are talking about a smell,’ he said.

I locked the door and made him sit whilst I removed the smiles and heaped them on a plate in front of him. The sauce bottle was rimmed with decaying ketchup scabs. I squeezed, squeezed hard till his plate was full.

To buy sawn off tales at 20% less than in the shops, see http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm

The kids are all right

The kids are all right

When I heard about the boy whose parents dressed him as a girl till the age of 12 I thought, lucky kid. My parents dressed me till I was 13 as popular crooner Perry Como. They even encouraged me to carry, but not smoke, a beautiful briarwood pipe and I would stab the air with its stem to emphasis a point and suck on it when deep in thought. Yet I wasn’t unhappy; it was normal. My cousin had it much worse, as Max Bygraves.

One day I was house-training the dog. The sleeve to Swing Out Perry was on the floor and before I could stop him Engelbert squatted and squeezed a neat little turd right in the middle of Perry’s polished inane features.

The next day my mother let me have my fringe cut like Dave Hill out of Slade. Kids have to be allowed to express themselves.

To listen to podcasts or to buy sawn off tales at a 20% discount click herehttp://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm

new unseen sawn off tales

All mod cons


Jake invented a prescription glass windscreen for his car so that he could drive without wearing his corrective lenses. He enjoyed the feeling of freedom - no plastic pads digging into his nose - and it had the added advantage that car thieves couldn’t drive the vehicle unless they happened to have the same degree of myopia.

Jennifer needed a lift. However, she soon began to complain. She couldn’t see, everything was blurred, and to stop herself being sick she had to stick her head out the window like a dog.

‘You idiot,’ she said to him when he dropped her off.

He wouldn’t ring her again. A permanent relationship would mean grinding the windscreen to suit two different people and he could imagine the arguments – it would be the self-cleaning bed-sheets saga all over again. He went to bed, turned up the shipping forecast and drifted to sleep.


Pretty, ain’t it?


Mrs Kalinsky spoke through wreaths of smoke from the cigarette she had permanently cocked at the side of her head. ‘This is Alfred.’ The fat pampered cat looked up at her. ‘He’s insured for two grand.’ Her long nylon-clad legs made a hissing sound as she crossed and uncrossed them. ‘Double if he gets run over.’ She stroked the flabby ball of fur. Bars of shadow from the Venetian blinds made her expression unreadable.

But I couldn’t go through with it. Then two weeks later a ginger tom got flattened on the A556 out of Eccles. I scraped him into a bin bag, dyed him Alfred’s colour, and took him to Mrs Kalinsky’s vet.

I didn’t see Mrs Kalinsky again for weeks and I never got my cut. Then from the window of the police van, I saw her with the vet in a restaurant, drinking wine. And laughing.







Using the facilities

We came home to find a fat bloke sat on the toilet, his trousers round his ankles, reading a paper and chortling.
‘It says here,’ he said, ‘that some bloke swallowed a live snake and it lived inside him for years.’
‘What are you doing in my house?’
He folded the paper and rested it on his bare thighs ‘Day out?’
‘Who are you, exactly?’
‘Keswick again I bet. You’ve been to Keswick five times this year. Chips from Fryups?’
‘What do you want?’
‘The Crown does chips.’ He smacked his leg with the rolled newspaper. ‘Plate of, two pounds. But you never bother. However, you use The Crown’s facilities all the time. Waltz in, straight to the bogs, never mind you haven’t bought anything, or contributed to the upkeep of the lavatories. Well I’m the landlord.’ He stood and pulled his trousers up. ‘And now you know how it feels.’


Lucky winner

I can move round this shop quicker than you would think so when he grabbed the hula-hoops and legged it for the door I was there before him. He was a decent guy, though. He apologised, he’d got no vouchers, no hostel, nothing, and I said, don’t worry, eat them. So he wolfed them down and handed me the empty packet. And that’s when I saw the winning ticket at the bottom. I didn’t know what to do. It was his prize by rights. We carried on chatting. Officially he didn’t exist. His lawyer had taken him to the end of the line and now he was down for deportation, but they couldn’t take him because Iraq’s a no-fly zone. So he was a non person and got no support at all.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t give him the prize. Tickets to the Stereophonics. I thought he’d suffered enough.

A feel for format

It was time for the hilarious anecdote and I was going to give my I-got-married-dressed-as-Elvis routine with the 8x10 to back it up, but this producer wasn’t going for it. So I told him, if it was good enough for Strike it Lucky, I think it’ll work here, on what was, I reminded him, a school-run filler for cable. I know game shows. ‘Andy, you treat the camera like a friend,’ Tarrant once said, ‘and that can’t be learnt.’ It’s true I have something special. It’s a feel, a feel for format.

Then this producer starts asking about hobbies and I told him: ‘Game shows, game shows are my life.’ Then he says that they won’t need me after all. They want people who are more real.
‘When did I cease to be real?’ I says.
‘Judging by your CV,’ he says, ‘somewhere between Fifteen to One and Family Fortunes.’


A good deal

We were on the train and Lindsey had been gassing into her phone for ages. ‘That was Carl,’ she said, ‘He’s in the Mona Lisa of bad fake oirish pubs.’
‘He rang just to chat?
‘Yeh.’ She made crocodile jaws with her hand and snapped them together. ‘I’ve never had a man like it.’
‘Unfuckingbelievable.’
‘Well,’ she smiled wistfully into the mobile as if Carl was peering out at her. ‘He got a good deal – Orange, thirty hours off-peak free. So,’
‘So he uses it’
She spun the little clamshell Siemens on the table and we watched the blurred propeller until it stopped. ‘He’d ring anyway. What deal’s Frankie on?’
I turned my Nokia upside down and stroked its shining steel curves. ‘Cell-net, Pay-as-you-go.’
‘And does he ring?’
‘He texts.’

A phone on the next table pinged and our hands whipped to our handsets like cowboys rushing to draw.

END

To buy sawn off tales or listen to podcasts click here http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm

How I wrote sawn off tales

I hadn’t heard of salt press but on poet Ian McMillan’s recommendation I parcelled up my manuscript and wrote their address on the envelope. Seventy short stories, each exactly one hundred and fifty words long. The odds were utterly against me. No one wants to publish short stories, least of all by an unknown. And stories that took less time to read than to suppress a sneeze? I was chancing it, I knew


I began to produce these ultra-short stories – Sawn off tales as I call them – when I was commuting from Manchester to Liverpool. It was a daily fifty-minute journey, often elongated by windscreen-wiper failure, fights on the train, or getting stuck behind the ‘stopper.’ But I had a book as did most passengers. One day whilst ruminating on the number of train journeys it took to read a novel, I began to wonder how long it would take to write one. I wanted to find out. I was intrigued. I’d written a few things on the train and reckoned that the optimum output I could achieve on these fifty-minute journeys was between five hundred and a thousand words. Call it five hundred with a bit of proof reading and editing. There and back, that’s a thousand words a day, five thousand a week, taking just four months to reach a respectable length for a novel of eighty thousand words. Throw in a bit of time for shaping it up, and call it six months to a first draft.



So the next day I boarded the 8.12 at Manchester Piccadilly, rushed for a table seat, and instead of whipping out my paperback, set up my laptop and began tapping away. But after a couple of weeks it was clear that the novel wasn’t working. What I’d produced was a set of separate little stories, sketches almost, of around five hundred to a thousand words long. Some of the pieces seemed OK, but what were they? What were they for? I left them to ferment for a few days, hoping that time away from the work would give me a new perspective, and then I was saved.
A new website called The Phone Book needed hundred and fifty word long stories to send out as text messages and I was their man. All that was needed was a bit of editing. Initially, as I hacked away at my over-stuffed paragraphs, watching the sentences I once loved hit the floor bleeding, I worried. It felt destructive, wielding the axe to my carefully sculpted texts. Was I reducing my glittering prose to a bloody stump? Yet the results surprised me. The story could live much more cheaply than I’d realised, with little deterioration in lifestyle. Sure, it had been severely downsized, but it was all the better for it. There was more room to think, more space for the original idea to resonate, fewer unnecessary words to wade through. The story had become a nimble, nippy little thing that could park on a sixpence and accelerate quickly away. And any tendencies to go all purple or smoky - if it sounds like writing, write it again as Elmore Leonard said – were almost completely eliminated. Adjectives were anthrax.
It worked. By the time I got to Birchwood I had five hundred words of the story mapped out, by Warrington I had an ending, and at Widnes there was a real story waiting to be completed. As the train drew in to Liverpool Lime Street there it was – half a page of story; a beginning, a middle, and an end, with character development, and descriptions, everything contained in a polly-pocket world.
But when I clicked word count I was dismayed. Twice as long as was needed for The Phone Book.


On the 17.20 Trans-Pennine express home I set about reducing the story to the requisite one hundred and fifty words, and this turned out to be the biggest challenge of all. It took the whole journey to get it down to two hundred words and to achieve that much I had to re-engineer it completely. It was like demolishing a building from the inside, without it falling down on top of you.


In the end it took two more journeys to get the story down to a hundred and fifty-one words and another whole journey to reduce it by one. But when I had finished it I sat back, looked at it, and smiled. The future was ultra short stories and I was going into production. Sometimes I’d produce quite a long story – maybe even a thousand or two thousand words - then I’d chip away at it. I found that the essence of my longer stories could be encapsulated in tiny fragments of themselves. They became snapshots, little flashes that took you a big journey. As I produced more and more I found that these stories, small as they were, had a huge appetite; little fat monsters that gobbled up ideas like chicken nuggets. The habit of reducing text could get out of hand too; I once took away the last two sentences of a story and realised I had reduced it to a blank page. Maybe I should have published it - eight bars rest?
Luckily The Phone Book liked my stories and published them, and I continued to churn them out each day on the train, whilst the train guard announced the delays the tea trolley rolled past, and a succession of passengers sat next to me reading over my shoulder.
My subject matter was strongly affected by writing on trains.


The way you say park


He had been listening to her voice for years; the percussive, slightly guttural approach to Newton-le-Willows, the gorgeous ripe burr in the vowels of Hazel Grove, the absolute absence of sarcasm when she apologised for cancellations. Today he was singing along in his head as usual when he heard her inject a new enunciation into Eccelston Park, giving the word ‘park’ greater emphasis and putting a little suppressed laugh at the end of it.
This was significant because it was his name. Parker. And each time she said park she made the same little flourish.
He decided not to go in to work and instead stayed at the station, listening to the way she said park. The staff wouldn’t tell him where her office was, but tomorrow he would discover her name and shout it on all the platforms. That way she would know that he loved her in return.



Trains are a great place to collect stories too. The Manchester to Liverpool train was full of interpreters from countries all over the world, travelling to the Home office to help asylum seekers with their interviews.



With tongues

He said he was in the Albanian builders federation and I interpreted this for the immigration officer exactly, leaving out that the federation was nothing more than a drinking club for blokes with cement mixers. My job was to interpret, the rules were very strict. Then he said that the reason for his persecution was that he was gay. Now this immigration officer was a Sun reader who always mouthed off about homosexuals. So I had to change what he said from gay to a member of New-Free-Albania.
The officer wrote this down and looked at him. ‘Who is the leader of New-Free-Albania?’
So I said in Albanian, ‘Who is your favourite gay singer?’
He thought for a long time then said, in clear English, ‘The Pet Shop Boys.’
I interpret for the police now and make things up all the time. It isn’t a problem here, it actually helps.




One week after sending the manuscript to Salt Press I got a call from Jen, their editor. They wanted to publish it, and quickly. All I needed was a quote for the cover, a photos for the sleeve, and we were off.
I don’t commute that route any longer –my new job covers the whole North West of England involving train trips to Blackpool, Lancaster, East Lancashire, West Cumbria and Cheshire, so my stories have grown quite a bit longer. But last time I was on a train to Lime Street the guard’s identity badge took me right back – because that’s where I got the names for all of my characters.

David Gaffney’s Sawn Off Tales is available in bookshops now

To listen to podcasts or to buy sawn off tales at a 20% discount click here
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smf/1844712826.htm