It’s always a blast choosing material for a gig; especially if it’s in a different town where you haven’t performed before. Tomorrow night (Monday) I will be a stranger in the strange land of Glasgow (actually, my sister’s lived there for 30 years, so I’m practically bilingual).

I plan to do the human jukebox thing for the middle story and let the audience choose from a selection, based only on the title and my unreliable summary of what it’s about, so let’s hope they’re up for participating. I have heard Glasgow audiences are very shy of shouting out. Unlike the rowdy Edinburgh ones.

The process of sifting through the material has also got me started planning my next collection, Duality Tango. This will be mainly prose and some poetry; it occurs to me that a lot of my performance-slanted stuff is about Jekyll and Hyde-stylee preoccupations – and the last story in the collection is definitely going to be Hyde’s Last Words, a piece I did at Illicit Ink last year at the Bongo.

Other contenders will include things like Isabel Allende Goes to the Cowdenbeath Game, Abduction, Postcards from the Radge, and The Slime of Miss Jean Brodie. Anyone that’s seen me in action and has a particular favourite, please feel free to suggest something. I have one possible publisher I’m going to try, and after that I’m going down the self-publish route. I can’t exactly see Faber and Faber going for it…