Wotcha

Wotcha' a contraction of the 15th century English greeting 'what chere be with you?' Watcher n a person who watches or observes somebody or something. A voyeur. Say WOTCHA! to Bart Raines, who's condemned forever to be a watcher after a childhood prank left his eyelid glued to his beloved telescope. Stuck with one eye that can't not see, he's turned voyeurism into a lucrative blackmail industry. Say WOTCHA! to former rock star, avid coke fiend, Richard 'Winston' Smith who's watched by millions among them erstwhile school friend Bart, who's orchestrating revenge for Winston's teenage betrayal through the sinister global surveillance network he calls the Daisy Chain. Say WOTCHA! to high class whore Daisy Chains (neé Raines) and her teenage son Joe, who's abducted along with his girlfriend by a sinister 'Christian' cult, which leaves the kids to die, hogtied and helpless in a derelict drainage tunnel slowly filling with sewage. Watched by the world's media, Winston, Daisy and Bart reunite to use fame and the Daisy Chain to save two teenage lives and their own souls from the filth that's about to drown them. Wotcha! is a comic spit in the eye of born again zealots with a wink and a twinkle to the rest of us but it's also deadly serious. Mining a rich seam of coalblack humour and sex, drugs and rock and roll, it starts on a bittersweet nostalgia trip and builds up to the pace of a thriller. CONTROVERSIAL STUFF? Its themes and explicit language make this a candidate for one of those 'parental advisory' stickers they put on CDs these days. Does that make WOTCHA! a book that people aged under sixteen shouldn't read? In the author's opinion absolutely not. 'If rude words and references to sex, drugs and rock and roll upset you per se, this book's not for you. But if you believe, as I do, that a sense of humour is what separates "naughty" from "evil", I think you might enjoy this story, laugh at the funny bits, think about the serious bits and read the redemption between the lines.'

Autorentext

Aged fortynine going on twentyfive, Kev Saunders has always been a writer of various descriptions. He started by spending his twenties failing to be a rock star (but only just) and has since written and sung on many internationally released albums ranging in style from punkfunk, trip hop/acid jazz and chillout to seriously hard rock with the likes of Marden Hill, After Dark and Takashi O'Hashi. He's also been a freelance copywriter for the last twenty years, writing everything from TV and press ads to corporate brochures, sales promotion concepts, web copy and so on and on for some of the world's bestknown companies and brands. A few years ago, tiring of life as a hack of all trades, he decided to upgrade that job description to 'novelist' and made the only New Year's resolution he's ever kept: to put the bread and butter stuff in a folder of its own in the Apple Mac desktop in his head and open a new one entitled: serious writing. He began writing WOTCHA! straight away and also fired off an outline idea for a short comedy film called BUST to a UK Film Council scheme called Digital Shorts. Long story short, BUST beat hundreds of other scripts, was produced and premiered at the Brief Encounters Film Festival, screened at the ClermontFerrand Film Festival, Cannes 2003 and the Cambridge Film Festival and was recently featured on Anglia TV's STEPHEN FRY'S SHORTS series. Invited to submit a feature film idea to the UK Film Council's New Feature Film Writers' Scheme, Kev was ultimately commissioned to write St Peters and Paul 'a black comedy about how bad the good can be and how good the bad'. While working on St Peters and Paul he also took on his first ghostwriting commission: LEAVE IT TO ME is the 'autobiography' of the late Don Murfet manager of Adam and the Ants in the eighties, 'security man to the stars' in the seventies and a generally scary gangster since the sixties. In between all his writing work, Kev's also Music Director of Hertford Music Festival and a number of other annual events, a member of MENSA, a creative consultant on youth music projects and vocalist with three or more bands.