Tomorrow Jodi and Paul will be interviewed live on Conversiations LIVE with Cyrus Webb

Cyrus has been described as the male Oprah. He has a radio and television show, an internationally recognized book club and has a bi-monthly arts and entertainment magazine.

We are incredibly excited that Cyrus invited us to appear on his show, and hope that as many of you as possible can listen in.

Please do spread the word. The link to the show page is here. I believe you can listen to the show live from that page, but if not, you can certainly listen by going to the main page:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/conversationslive.

If you can’t listen live, you can visit the Conversations LIVE blog to listen to on demand episodes either as a stream or download them.

The show goes out on Friday 5th February at 8pm Eastern Standard Time (that’s the East Coast of the USA for those who don’t know).

As we are an international bunch of authors, with an international group of followers, we’ve prepared a list of local times for the live show:

Friday, 5th February 2010
Pacific Standard Time: 5pm
Mountain Standard Time: 6pm
Central Standard Time: 7pm
Eastern Standard Time: 8pm

Saturday, 6th February 2010
Greenwich Mean Time: 1am
Central European Time: 2am
South African Standard Time: 3am
Indian Standard Time: 6.30am
Australian Western Standard Time: 9am
Australian Eastern Standard Time: 11am
Australian Eastern Daylight Time: 12noon
New Zealand Daylight Time: 2pm

This should cover all the major cities from where we get visits to the site. If I haven’t mentioned your local timezone by name, then I apologise, but hopefully you can work out your local time from the above!

We hope you join us for what should be a stimulating discussion.
8pm EST, 7PM CST, 6pm MST, 5pm PST
1am GMT, 2am CET
11am AEST, 12noon ADST

Word of mouth continues to spread, and we’ve spotted the third review for The Red Book, this time from Heike Margot, who discovered the anthology thanks to our own Emma Newman.

(Incidentally, Emma has her own anthology fresh out, the wonderfully titled From Dark Places. You can buy it now from Smashwords now.)

Heike has this to say about The Red Book:

Chinese Whisperings are 10 stories about 10 different people. The twist in this collection is that each new story takes a minor character from the story before and makes him or her into the main character. The whole thing works extremely well. It is not a novel in chapters, and therefore slightly disconcerting when you meet the person or persons from the story before in a completely different setting. But it works wonderfully…

You can read the entire review here. My favourite quote is “they all make your spine tingle”, which may just make it as a cover blurb for the paperback!

The second review of The Red Book comes from German based Dan Powell, who was a huge supporter of Chinese Whisperings as it inched its way to completion and then finally to publication.

Despite this, Dan’s history of literary deconstruction left us as editors both excited and trepidatious when he let us know he’d be writing a review. There is nothing like having your work picked apart by someone who pulls no punches and seemingly manages to shine the light in the dark spots you missed. Paul suggested some ‘panic pills’ to ease the pain.

Dan has this to say:

What is perhaps most striking about The Red Book is the fact that, on finishing the final tale, it leaves the reader with a desire to return to the beginning and experience the various threads of plot and character again, certain that a second read will unlock deeper complexities of connection.

Dan’s review is thorough, looking at the anthology as a whole and as individual stories. You can read the review in its entirety here.

In the last few months of 2009 we asked people to help us publicise Chinese Whisperings by twittering and encouraging people to come to the site and acquaint themselves with the writers, their stories and the project in general, and comment or ask questions.

As a deal sweetener we threw in The Red Book Reversed which is a special edition, electronic copy of the anthology told backwards – thus major characters bleed into the background, becoming minor characters from story to story.

It came about after an editorial bungle which saw a new writer come on board while Paul and I were both away from home. When I sent through the stories I didn’t think to say which order the stories actually ran in. When I returned home there were some questions waiting for me in my inbox about how the stories went together – one character seemed out of place.

I realised, the stories had been read out of order – but it gave Paul and I the spark of an idea – what would happen if you read the stories backwards? Would a new and unique narrative emerge?

You can decide.

The Red Book Reversed has a unique front cover and an afterword which doesn’t appear anywhere else. It is worth owning a copy just for the afterword alone.

For those of you who missed out on winning a copy last year, there are two copies left to go to new Twitter followers.