Sporting Tales

Hi, and welcome to this page. I'm Guy Cook and Sporting Tales tells you about my writing. I released the novel Culture Man on Amazon in May 2017, and published a short story, The Overarm Dog, back in November 2012. The loose link between the stories is a sporting element, such as a swimming race or a tennis tournament, although this doesn't take centre stage—like most stories they're about human dreams and challenges and our reactions to them. Both are available as paperback or Kindle eBook. As the Velvet Vandal (our mysterious villain from Culture Man) would say: Be aware, there will be more stories to come!

I also publish a more factual blog, which has articles, so far, on writing, sport, literature and science—details are further down the page. I spent much of 2019 developing an article on the blog about writing. Hopefully it's made me a better writer, and I’m ready to start writing more fiction now.

Culture Man

Culture Man is a full-length novel of 230 pages. Rob develops superpowers and determines to win the local tennis tournament. But a supervillain starts stealing the city's culture and draws Rob in. Helped by his best friend, his ex-girlfriend and a captivating physio, he negotiates rooftop battles, a raid on a top secret laboratory, escaped anteaters and much else, as a thrilling climax approaches. The city of Winchester - England's ancient capital - is woven into the atmosphere of the story. The initial seed for this book came from a New Year's resolution of mine to do something cultural every week for a year (mostly in and around Winchester, where I live).

The UK Amazon link is www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07179KFNZ and the US link is www.amzn.com/B07179KFNZ (Kindle editions). To select the Paperback click on Paperback in the Formats box.

A link to read the first five chapters online (the Amazon "Look inside" feature) is at Culture Man: free sample. Alternatively, you can click on the image to the left.

You'll also find it on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/book/show/35267183-culture-man.

For a bit of fun, look at the Word Cloud of the book, created with thanks to Wordclouds.com. It uses phrases from the book and description to create a picture—clicking in the middle will take you to the Amazon (UK) page.

For more details and a full list of the locations you can find it, see Culture Man details.

The Overarm Dog

The Overarm Dog is a short story of about 30 pages, which gave me the chance to learn about writing and the process of getting published on Amazon. It's about a dog learning the front crawl. How can you resist that?

The UK Amazon link is www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00AFZG26Q and the US link is www.amzn.com/B00AFZG26Q (Kindle Editions). To select the Paperback click on Paperback in the Formats box.

A link to read the first chapter online (the Amazon "Look inside" feature) is at The Overarm Dog: free sample. Alternatively, you can click on the image to the left.

You'll also find it on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/book/show/21140351-the-overarm-dog.

For more details and a full list of the locations you can find it, see The Overarm Dog details.


Blog

You can check out my Sporting Tales blog, which is a foray into factual writing. There will be posts in a variety of areas such as sport, literature, science and politics. I expect this to make me world famous.

Update Dec 2019: I've just published Writing Skills from Culture Man on the blog, which is my guide to writing and grammar. It took most of 2019 and became a labour of love in the end—it is pretty long, but it's free and immensely useful to me (and hopefully other aspiring writers).

Media Links

OnlineBookClub.org – for a review of Culture Man

This is my fifteen-minute radio interview on Radio Solent's Nick Girdler show from 9 July 2017.

Author Links

Check out authorly progress and updates on the Facebook page.
Follow my Twitter page for tweets on writing, literature and anything else that occurs to me (including the occasional cartoon).
Here's my Amazon UK author page and here's the amazon.com author page, where you can see my profile and access all the books.

Email me at guyccoook@yahoo.com.