Go West is fully-funded, and to get it to 100% it has also mutated into a paperback.

This is great news for me, as I have always wanted to be in paperback.  I mean, there’s no Beatles song called Hardback Writer, is there? Justin Timberland didn’t say he was bringing hardback, did he?

Anyway, it’s a paperback and I am very happy.

GO WEST is nearly funded, which is exciting. Thanks everyone who pledged.

If you're one of the very few people on earth who hasn't pledged, then this is what you get:

a crazed careening romp around modern Britain

a lot of fine comedy

a harsh assessment of the dreams of the Prince of Wales

a fond tribute to John Peel

and about seven minor untruths, inserted for the look of the thing…

The core of this book, as I may have mentioned in these rants before, is The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford, one of the few accidental humorous classic novels of all time (imagine a Barbara Cartland novel written by a nine year old girl who had read a lot of romantic fiction and could not spell). It was successful all around the world, although some doubted its authorship (Winston Churchill,…

And we're back - Go West is nearly among us.

For those new to this page, Go West is a detective thriller about fakes, frauds and lies. Our hero is the world's only "antiques whisperer" and he's on a road trip which takes in the world's fakest royal village, the lying author of Peter Pan, the funniest book in the world, the man who painted Gus Honeybun (see below), and the tape-recorded ghost of…

I wrote about Go West, in passing (sort of) in Record Collector magazine. Which reminded me that I had used Record Collector to do some research. There's a label in Germany who specialise in blues and folk reissues. They do gorgeous boxed sets with photos and notes - and I learned in an RC piece that the man who does their artwork had a dilemma. He would get old photos of long dead bluesmen - faded…

I'm making a list of songs associated with John Peel for a CD and playlist for pledgers - if anyone has any suggestions, please put em up here.

I am after songs John Peel loved and songs associated with important moments in his career - and I think I'll put Teenage Kicks on twice...

John Peel turns up a lot in Go West, partly as a symbol of integrity but mostly because he's great.

And the fact that in his early career he changed his name from John Ravenscroft to John Peel allowed me to drag in the weirdest DJ Name-Change fact ever: that when British DJ Rick West took up his new job at a radio station in Seattle he was told that he would have to change his name as the previous…

I'm going to Waterstone's in Gower Street next Monday to talk up Go West, with a bunch of other Unbounders who will be talking up their books. It should be fun, especially as I don't have a speech and I'll probably forget what the book is about.

Come along - Unbound books are great and maybe we'll all end up pledging for each other in a kind of Rat King tangle of love:

https://www.waterstones…

When I started planning Go West, I was playing a lot of old John Peel shows - transferred to mp3, they sound great on my iPod in the car. There is a slightly strange sensation in listening to recordings of live radio shows, which were once very much of the moment, and I know my love of them is as much nostalgia (I loved John Peel, his show, and the music he played) as anything else. But they are great…

One of the things about Go West which made it entertaining to write is that every time I put someone or something real in the book, I googled that person or thing with the word "fake" next to it. This is how I discovered the truth about one major historical character's reputation, a myth about a famous Devon spinster, and a story about the painter Robert Lenkiewicz.

I love Lenkiewicz. He lived…