The first thing I ever wrote that was over 800 words. Earliest drafts I’ve found on coffee-stained floppy disks have “LOOSE FITTING GENES, SUMMER 97” written on them, so by my count (on my fingers, just now) I was a bored, twitchy and frustrated 25 year old when I got the urge to turn my blinkered, one-view, maddening, maniacal, tedious and fundamentalist views on evolutionary psychology into a piece of fluffy romantic fiction.
Me being me, and my head being my head, I stopped and started and restarted and gave up and started again over the course of a year or so.
A few words on...
T-Shirt & Genes
Can’t remember what I was doing at the same time. Working for Books Etc in Bayswater. And playing in a band I think. “Smallville.” I’ll have to check me dates.
Anyhoo, it was a jumbled mix of Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins, with a paragraph’s load of Hugh Laurie, Douglas Adams and Plum Wodehouse shovelled in. Rude, sweary, derivative and laddish, it was an exercise in comedy writing more than a novel. Those kind enough to read early drafts all said the jokes could be trimmed back and I could do with inserting some breathing room. Of course, while you’re pausing to take a breath, I normally crowbar in a feeble joke, so that advice fell on deaf leppards.
Eventually, three chapters and a copy of The Artist’s & Writer’s Yearbook got me signed up by Elizabeth Wright at Darley Anderson Literary Agency. That was a very good day. Took me another year to finish the book, at which point my life was turned upside down when Darley Anderson, in a breathtaking and still, to this day, quite startling move, managed to get 4 publishers interested.
(A word on this, fellow writers. True, common thinking says an auction is the only way to make any kind of money from your first novel. However the expectation that comes from a much publicized 6 figure 2-book deal with a major publisher is something that will come back to bite you in either the scrotum, if you’re a fellah. Or, I dunno, your ovaries, if you’re a womanly type).
Random House picked up
the newly titled “T-Shirt &
Genes” and published it as
part of a two-book deal in
paperback – for reasons that seemed right at the time – in October of 2001 to (what the marketing department’s accountants must have considered) a lukewarm response.
Tony Parsons – who was DAME MIDBROW LAD LIT at the time, what with his “Man & Boy” squatting at the top of the bestseller lists – gave it a glowing review.
By a Ripley-esque, baffling, bewilderingly spooky coincidence, I had given Man & Boy a glowing review a few months before in Books Etc’s monthly magazine. What are the chances? Derek Acora must be in the building.
Reviewers liked it. Apart from the Daily Mirror, who appeared to think the thing "juvenile." Presumably in a bad way..
I immediately cracked on with writing the follow up.
The collected
ill-informed drivel
of
Richard Asplin
A few words on the subject
A few words on the subject
Click cover for a judiciously
cropped selection of reviews
As far as science teacher Charles Ellis’s love life goes, chaos is more than just a theory. Caught giving his fiancee Deborah and out-of-hours practical biology lesson, Charlie suddenly finds himself single, unemployed and lost in the thoroughly unscientific world of blind dates, blind lust and blind panic.
Charlie begins to research this crazy little thing called love and comes up with some very surprising data indeed. Science has some very strict ideas about what men find sexy, what women find sexy and what this whole sexiness is for.
But they’re just theories, right? You’re not supposed to put them into practise. Are you?
