Red Diesel

Further to my brief blogpost about looking for women (ahem), yes, it’s true. I’m teaming up with app developer Russell Quinn and the rather fabulous illustrator Johanna Basford to produce a kind of digital über-book. This will contain a rather beautiful version of my literary novel Red Diesel (each chapter takes as its title some form of romantic gesture, from flowers and chocolate right the way up through to diamonds and Johanna is creating frontispieces for each chapter tied to each of the themes), and Russell did the recent McSweeney’s app, so the design should be similarly lovely.

For reasons that will be apparent to readers of the novel, Red Diesel will be packaged with Miguel Cervantes’ novelette The Dialogue of the Dogs as its companion piece. And this is where Johanna’s beautiful craftsmanship will really come into play. But you’ll just have to wait to see that.

In the hope of maintaining the possibility of having a publisher buy the book to release in the traditional manner, this is going to be exclusively for the iPhone. (Frances, an app is like a cross between a small programme and a website that you can install on your mobile – To get a clearer idea of how they work, check out Canongate’s demo of The Death of Bunny Munro app, which is about the best book app I’ve seen to date (that’s ‘cause our one’s not out yet of course).

A good deal of the content will be available as a free sampler on the app store, with the main app selling for around a fiver. The Red Diesel app is due for release sometime in the spring. (Aliya is polishing off the copy edits for me at the moment, and I’m trying to sort out the details of the video content too.)

In the meantime, as I mentioned in my previous post, I urge you to urge others to enter the competition we’re running for a cover model for the app. To enter just join the Flickr group I Am Mila and upload a photo to it.

Here’s the blurb for the book:

Red Diesel

Alex Mooney hasn’t seen his friend Mila since she disappeared twelve years ago. Now she’s turned up on his doorstep looking for a place to stay. Both of them know Alex’s wife and brother-in-law won’t be as happy as he is to see her.

A quiet and introverted man, Alex’s life is world away from Balkan gun-running and Mexican drug dealers, but these appear to be the reasons for Mila’s return.

Red Diesel is a novel about memory, love and the implications of the choices we make, or it’s about guns, sex and death, depending on your point of view.