Spank Gold Volumes 7a/8a/9a: The Furlough Trilogy (digital edition)

Once more for the people who weren't listening (or more accurately chose not to).

Between 2009 and 2010, I wrote six books: collections of Edinburgh reviews, London Film Festival reviews and travel pieces, all taken from this website and covering the period 1989-2009. I liked the idea of having a physical copy of all this stuff I'd written, sitting on my bookshelf, and possibly other people's bookshelves too (yeah, right). But even back in 2010 e-readers were growing in popularity, so I grudgingly created a series of digital editions of the six books, using the laziest method possible (i.e. taking the PDFs used to make the print versions and selling them as is).

Jump forward to 2020, and that six week period during April and May when I was on furlough from work. By then I'd racked up another decade's worth of content on the site, and it seemed reasonable to use this free time to assemble a few more books. They've all been on sale for a while now - another Edinburgh collection, and two more sets of LFF reviews. And if you haven't bought them yet because you don't do paper, then I'm afraid that I have some bad news for you.

Yes, it's time to fire up your electronic devices and pay a fiver apiece (bargain!) for the digital editions of the three books in the Furlough Trilogy. (Or pay more to have them on lovely lumpy paper.) Full details below.

Spank's Edinburgh Diaries Volume Three: 2010-2019

AN ADVENTURE TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING! The Tenties! A decade so uncertain that by the end of it, we still hadn't worked out what we were going to call it. A decade so tumultuous that when we had a year which included two dodgy election results and the death of David Bowie, we assumed that we'd hit some sort of low point of human civilisation. Feeling nostalgic for the Tenties? Don't blame you, really. Happily, when Spank The Monkey went to the Edinburgh Festival on seven different occasions during that decade, he kept a daily diary on the internet, describing all of the shows he'd seen and all of the other exciting things he'd done with his Pals. So now that the Tenties are over, he's tidied those diaries up a bit and put them all in another book for you to enjoy. Well, to read, anyway.
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Spank's LFF Diaries Volume Four: 2010-2014

AN ADVENTURE TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING! (Although to be fair, I didn’t do anything for five of them.) The years 2010-2014 were turbulent ones for the London Film Festival. Its Artistic Director Sandra Hebron stepped down, and took her boots with her. Clare Stewart took over, and taught us all how to Love, Laugh and Chunder. Unluckily for Clare, she joined the festival at a time of massive Government cutbacks, meaning that one of the first things she had to do was reduce it from 16 days long to 12. Still, look on the bright side: if it wasn’t for those cuts, this book would be even longer than it is now. Because the LFF ran for a total of 68 days between 2010 and 2014, and Spank The Monkey was there for the vast majority of them. He saw nearly 200 feature films, shorts programmes and live talk events while he was there, and documented them all day by day on his website. Many years later, long after everyone’s forgotten that there was once a film called The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper And The Deluded Followers Of Joanna Southcott (or TPSTLCATDFOJS for short), you can finally read all those reviews in this book. Be there, or be deluded.
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Spank's LFF Diaries Volume Five: 2015-2019

WHO is Tstateia Atteanb? WHY did Rupert Murdoch marry Jerry Hall? WHAT led most of a cinema audience to believe that Neneh Cherry had killed a guy? HOW do you say ‘how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?’ in Norwegian? WHICH Adam Sandler film did I describe as ‘not the cure for cancer’, as opposed to all the other ones that presumably are? The answers to all of these questions can be found in Spank's LFF Diaries Volume Five: 2015-2019, the fifth book in an ongoing collection of London Film Festival reviews, lovingly scraped from my website and padded out with gratuitous footnotes. Actually, it’s just occurred to me that all of those questions are answered in footnotes to the main text, which might suggest that their answers aren’t quite as important as this overly dramatic blurb might suggest. Oh, never mind, just buy it anyway.
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In summary, therefore, here's a link to all my e-books, and another link to all my paper ones. Right, I'll shut up about these for a bit now.