MP3 of Crusaders reading at Writloud 11.08.08

You can follow this link to hear me reading a selection of shortish bits from Crusaders at RADA this Monday night past. The MP3 starts with an explanatory preamble, but you can skip that if I hereby explain that what I read was 4 chunks from the 'back-story' of Stevie Coulson, concerning his bitter childhood and bullying stepfather, his discovery of 'the iron' that will make a behemoth of him, and the forging of his mettle on his first night as a professional doorman at a Gateshead disco-pub. There are 4 main characters in Crusaders but on the face of it if you had to say one was the protagonist, based upon word-count alone, it would likely be the Rev. John Gore. However an early review in the Tatler alerted me to a viewpoint held by a good few other readers subsequent, namely that in terms of the level of drama and the gravity of actions and consequences then Crusaders is really The Steve Coulson Story. So there you go. You write something and then a year later, if you're lucky, somebody tells you what you actually wrote.