Tuesday, December 31, 2024
End of 2024 Review
Writing
In 2024 I wrote 55 stories. Most were very short and can be found in my SECOND HAND HANDS collection. But I did manage a few more substantial pieces:
* 'Masala Island' - a science fiction novella that might turn out to be the first part of a novel. Not sure yet.
* 'Special Treatment' - the first (lengthy) chapter of a new novel that will be a weird Western called THE BOOMERANG GANG.
I also wrote more pieces for various story cycles I am engaged on, including CITY LIFE, which is almost finished, and I began a new fantasy series set in Wales called MY BEASTLY UNCLE. I finished my huge (100,000 words) DABBLER IN DRABBLES project in four volumes. There will be an omnibus edition next year but I have vowed never to write another drabble. This project took up too much of my time and the end result was too small a reward for the effort involved.
I wrote a lot of poems, but I do feel I am rapidly moving out of the poetry phase I have been in for the past five years. My poems are only absurdist ditties anyway. If it wasn't for Borderless Journal regularly publishing them I might have given up already. I note that I have written 2174 poems in total, of which 161 were written when I was younger. I think this is almost enough for anyone.
I wrote only one article and no plays at all. For some reason I lost interest in writing non-fiction. I love writing plays but they are never produced and only rarely published, so my motivation has been lacking somewhat.
Conclusion: a much leaner writing year than last year, but that's hardly a surprise. Last year was excessive.
Published Books
GROWL AT THE MOON (Telos Publishing) was my only trad published book this year. I am very happy with the way it has turned out.
All my other books were self published, but one of them, IN THIS POEM, I think is my best poetry collection so far, for whatever that is worth.
My novella, MY RABBIT'S SHADOW LOOKS LIKE A HAND, was translated into German and published as Der Schatten meines Hasen sieht aus wie eine Hand.
Among anthology appearances, I think that my 'Thirteen Castles South' in INFERNAL MYSTERIES (Egaeus Press) and 'What Actually Happened' in MEDUSA (Flame Tree Publishing) were the two standouts.
As for sales: when it comes to my work trad published in anthologies, I have no idea what the numbers are, but when it comes to my self published books and ebooks, this year was my most profitable so far. I sold 3340 books. My ambition is to sell ten of my books every day. I haven't achieved that, but am inching closer. These figures are still miniscule when compared with big writers out there.
Other Stuff
I began the year in India. I returned to the UK and spent time in Bristol, Birmingham, Exeter, Swansea, Ystalyfera, Aberystwyth and Pontrhyfendegaid. I hiked the whole of the Gower coast and did other hikes in mid Wales. I was a guest of honour at the Podgorica Book Fair in Montenegro and I have been invited back for next year.
Reading
The best novel I read in 2024 was undoubtedly PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov. I had been meaning to read it for decades. Astounding in every way. Getting back into Nabokov last year is the best reading choice I have made for a long time.
The second best novel was THE MAGUS by John Fowles, which despite some passges that dragged, turned out to be a masterpiece.
I was also happy to finally engage with Malcolm Lowry. ULTRAMARINE made me an instant fan. Now I will seek out his other work.
A SEASON IN SINJI by J.L. Carr is the best novel by this writer that I have read so far. AUGUSTUS by John Williams was good, as are all four of his novels (but ultimately STONER is the only essential one).
OMENSETTER'S LUCK by William H. Gass has some of the most incredible dialogue exchanges I have encountered in fiction. Not an easy read as a novel, though.
LIFE IS ELSEWHERE by Milan Kundera might be the best novel I have read by him. My enthusiasm for him has somewhat waned over the years and I wish I had read this one before the others.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole. Brilliant but creaky in parts. I can almost understand why his editors kept pushing for revisions, but they should have published the novel anyway, knowing that he would probably go on to write even better things, and it's a shame he never got the chance to do so.
As for short story collections:
LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE by John Barth is sheer genius. However, I can understand why many people wouldn't like it. The stories tend to be writing about writing. But they are immensely clever.
THE SECRET OF THIS BOOK by Brian Aldiss is a late collection but one of his best. Lots of the stories don't work well but those that do are tremendous and the volume is satisfying as a unit despite the weaker material.
As for non-fiction, only one book really stood out for me this year. THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU by Sam Knight. A good reading year, all in all.
Thursday, December 12, 2024
Dabbler in Drabbles #4
Together, all four volumes contain exactly 1000 drabbles. The first volume has one hundred of them, the second volume two hundred, the third volume three hundred, and the fourth volume four hundred. This is a Pythagorean number sequence and rather nice, I feel.
There is a frame of sorts, but it is contained within the main text. The cyclops Polyphemus is telling the drabbles to the centaur Chiron. Some of the drabbles are told from the viewpoint of Chiron, but it is only Chiron's viewpoint as imagined by Polyphemus, and Polyphemus knows this and allows his imaginary Chiron to know it too, which means that the real Chiron also gets to know it (because he is listening on our behalf). But it gets a lot more complicated than that.
There will be a whacking great big Omnibus edition next year, hardback as well as paperback. I began this project when I was in India just over a year ago. A sensible person would have used those 100,000 words in a novel. Not me, I'm not very sensible. But I did learn something from this project, namely never to write another drabble as long as I live, and I won't.
The covers are geometric and garish. That's how I wanted them. The cover of the Omnibus will be much more pleasing to the eye. So there you have it. DABBLER IN DRABBLES is done!
Wednesday, December 04, 2024
Second Hand Hands
These are mostly brief tales, strange, offbeat, imaginative, inventive and playful fictions featuring ghosts, werewolves, giants, pirates, mutants, spirits, witches, elephants, sentient mirrors and a parade of other odd characters.
I delight in language as well as concepts, in form as well as content, in comedy, tragedy, horror, mystery and paradox. I hope the reader will feel equal delight, or at least some delight, when reading this book, which I believe has a unified sense of timeless weirdness.
It is a collection of concise absurdist fiction (and I still maintain, and always will, that there is a significant difference between absurdism and surrealism).
A complete list of all the stories in the volume can be found on my Aardvark Caesar blog, where I keep a public record of all my books as they appear.
If I had to choose a favourite story among the fifty, I might select 'Candles' or 'So Far Untitled' or 'The Editor'. But there is no requirement for me to choose.
Tuesday, December 03, 2024
Growl at the Moon
I wrote it last year when I was living in India. The idea for the first (lengthy) chapter came to me while I was playing badminton. Everything followed quickly after that. The entire book was written in one month, feverishly, and the frenetic pacing of the writing was responsible for the powerful momentum of the story. That's what I think anyway. But the work was easy, the prose flowed, and I am happiest when projects seem almost to write themselves.
The publisher issued the following summary of the novel to entice readers:
"Bill Bones was a normal human being until he studied under a Mojave Shaman and was transformed into a man-dog called The Growl. Now, driven by a keen sense of justice, The Growl is on the hunt for the villains who killed his boss, newspaperman Ridley Smart and he’ll stop at nothing!
Crossing the deserts and forests of the American continent, The Growl searches for the men he must kill. Along the way he meets more beast-men, more magicians, the avenger Jalamity Kane who is seeking to rid the world of the beast menace, and other dangerous characters, from the artificial to the wild, from the robotic to the demonic.
In the deft hands of Rhys Hughes, this inventive tale becomes a masterpiece of twists and turns, exploring and questioning our definitions of humanity, discovering the very meaning of what life and reality might be."
I am extremely happy with the way this book has turned out. I love the cover and I am delighted it has been published without delays. (Delays are the bane of every writer's life, I imagine). Telos have been marvellous to work with. This is the third book of mine they have published, all of them novels.
I am planning to write two more Weird Westerns in the future. In fact, I have already written the first chapter of the next one, The Boomerang Gang, and I have long had the idea for the one after that, Fists of Fleece. I am sure I will finish both in the next year or two. Whether they will be published by Telos or not when they are ready is another question, a question with an answer that depends on how well Growl at the Moon sells. I hope readers out there will take a chance on it...
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Triple Obscura #2
If the project is successful, there will be other anthologies along similar lines, for example QUADRUPLE OBSCURA featuring four writers, each contributing 15,000 words of fiction. And then QUINTUPLE OBSCURA featuring featuring five writers, each contributing 12,000 words of fiction. And then SEXTUPLE OBSCURA featuring six writers, each contributing 10,000 words of fiction, and so on, with the total wordage of each book being no more than 60,000 words.
Who knows where it will all end? Feasibly with 60,000 different writers each contributing one word of fiction. But that's very unlikely.
But anyway, I have drifted off the point, which is that the second issue of TRIPLE OBSCURA is now available for purchase. The featured writers are Kristine Ong Muslim, Tim Newton Anderson, and Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. No idea yet who will be in the third and last issue. The book is available from Amazon and elsewhere...
Saturday, July 06, 2024
In This Poem
The ebook is free from Amazon for the next four days. None of the poems in this new collection have been previously published.
The official blurb for the book runs as follows:
75 poems, none previously published. Concerned with such topics as mythical beasts, robots, ghosts, gods, dilemmas, metaphysics, trousers, bridges, haircuts, paradoxes, windows, journeys, brackets, pretzels, dinosaurs, thunder, duels, bears, kangaroos and dozens of other objects, ordeals and ideas. Always entertaining and offbeat. Regarded by the author as his best poetry collection to date.
"I would call him an indubitable modern sentence master." — SAMUEL DELANY
"Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humour.” — A.A. ATTANASIO
"Wit and whimsy and word-relish, high spirits and bittersweet twists." — IAN WATSON
Yes, I am especially delighted with this one.... :-)
Monday, July 01, 2024
Around the World in Eighty Ways
It should have been published four years ago by an independent publisher based in India (with a unique typographical layout) but that didn't happen, because small press projects often don't happen. That's just the way it is.
Publishing it myself means that it will be restricted in terms of exposure and sales, etc, but at the end of the day (and even at the beginning of the day) it is better for something to be available to the reading public than for it to continue hibernating in a memory stick.
So, for better or worse, the book is now out there...
As always with a new Gibbon Moon publication of mine, the ebook is free from Amazon for a few days (three in fact) and here is the link. An earlier collection of mine, Crepuscularks and Phantomimes, is also a free ebook but only for one more day, so you'll have to move fast if you want that one, and here is the link for it.
I am pleased with Around the World in Eighty Ways. It's short and snappy, like an elastic longitude line on a globe.
Monday, June 10, 2024
Dabbler in Drabbles #3
The third volume of my Dabbler in Drabbles project has been published. As I have said elsewhere, this is a four volume work. There will be one-thousand drabbles in total.
The first book features 100 of them, the second features 200, this new book features 300, and the fourth will feature 400. This is an allusion to the tetractys of the decad, and the reason for a classical analogue of this kind is that the sequence involves the cyclops Polyphemus and the centaur Chiron as the teller and witness of the drabbles.
I have a mild obsession with the classical myths and legends and this stems entirely from my exposure to the Ancient Greek tales at a very impressionable age.
The four collections will be published as soon as each is ready, as paperbacks and ebooks, and after the fourth has been released, an omnibus will be prepared that will contain all the drabbles.
In some ways, I think this was a crazy project to embark on. Writing drabbles is difficult, not so much because of the requirement to keep coming up with new ideas (that's one thing my brain seems to do without any prompting) but to hone each drabble down to exactly 100 words. It's the precision of the wordage that takes up a lot of time... But it's too late now. I have written 600 out of the proposed 1000 and I might as well continue going until the very end.
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
The Sunset Suite
Now that this book has been published, I have been thinking about the weird Westerns I wrote in the past and those I plan to write in the future.
The first weird Western I wrote was the middle part of my novel Captains Stupendous.
The second was my novel The Honeymoon Gorillas, which I guess can be seen as a collection of linked short-stories rather than a novel.
The third was the collection Weirdly Out West, which contains short-stories, one-act plays, an article, and poems.
The fourth was Yee-Haw, a collection of poems and illustrations with one-act plays and flash fictions.
My next weird Western will be Growl at the Moon, a novel I wrote last summer. It shuld hopefully be published later this year. And next year I plan to start work on another, a novel called Fists of Fleece that I conceived more than thirty years ago but still haven't done anything about. There might be others after that, I don't know.
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Rabbit's Shadow in German
The reason I would choose this one is because it showcases all the things about my writing that I regard as most fulfilling to me. It's an integrated work with a philosophical concept at its core and a twist ending; but it also consists of a mosaic of smaller tales and poems, and some of those tales and poems are OuLiPo based; also I believe that the language of the text is lyrical and suitably witty. That's my opinion anyway...
And to my delight, this is also my first work translated into German. Peter Mordio is the person responsible for arranging this alchemy and I am hugely indebted to him. Christian Veit Eschenfelder is the translator; his task was very difficult, and although I won't go so far as to compare him to David Bellos translating Georges Perec, I certainly am amazed that he agreed to tackle such a complex project as my novella.
Der Schatten meines Hasen sieht aus wie eine Hand is available in paperback and also ebook editions and I am hoping it will be the first of many translations of my fiction into German...
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Dabbler in Drabbles #2
The collections will be published as soon as they are ready, and after the fourth has been released, an omnibus will be prepared that will contain all the drabbles. But that probably won't happen for quite a while, because writing drabbles is hard work. The ideas come to me easily enough (I have been writing weird fiction for so long that now my subconscious offers me original ideas almost hourly) but the precision of the form is tricky. Adjusting a microfiction so that it is exactly one hundred words long requires a good editing eye. But I like to challenge myself and I enjoy writing flash fiction and so drabbles are absolutely a form I need to get to grips with, and I believe that I have.
This book is available in paperback and ebook editions, and the ebook is currently a free download from any Amazon platform for the next two days (today and tomorrow). This link is to the relevant page on Amazon US but look on your own Amazons if you are in a different country...
Tuesday, January 02, 2024
Dabbler in Drabbles #1
It might be supposed that one-thousand drabbles spread across four volumes means that each volume will feature 250 drabbles. But this isn't the case. I have devised a different scheme. The first volume contains 100 drabbles; the second volume will contain 200 of them; the third volume 300; and the fourth and final volume 400. That's one-thousand in total but every volume is of a different length. After the last volume is published there will be a large omnibus edition.
The first volume has just been published. Furthermore, the ebook edition of Dabbler in Drabbles #1 is free from any Amazon outlet for the next five days. This link is to Amazon US but check your own Amazon if you are in another country.
To quote the blurb about the book: "A drabble is a flash fiction that is exactly one hundred words long. And here we have a cyclops who is writing them and telling them to his friend, a centaur. One hundred drabbles. The stories are miniature adventures, comedies and tragedies, tales of space and time, accounts of voyages and discoveries, many of them ironic or paradoxical, some of them featuring robots and monsters and ghosts, but each one compressed into an easily-digested snack for the mind. And this is the first volume of four..."
Saturday, December 30, 2023
End of 2023 Review
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I was supposed to give up writing short-stories last year, when I finally wrote my 1000th, but I kept going (as some people said I would).
And 2023 turned out to be my most productive writing year ever.
To make sure of this, I put all the fiction I wrote this year into a single document and did a wordcount. 344,919 words in total. This is so far ahead of my yearly average that I am genuinely surprised.
But maybe I shouldn't be. I have been lucky enough this year to work as a full-time writer. It's not a situation that is likely to happen again.
My wordage was increased by the fact I wrote two novels:
* Growl at the Moon (a Weird Western; accepted for publication next year).
* The Devil's Halo (a supernatural adventure-comedy, currently being considered by a publisher).
And I also wrote two novellas:
* The Sunset Suite (another Weird Western; currently being considered by a publisher).
* The Trojan Panda (a work I plan to include in a collection of novellas that I will submit once I have finished writing all the other pieces for it).
Apart from those four lengthy works, I wrote 54 short-stories ranging in length from flash fictions to novelettes. Among the stories I am most proud of are 'The Soul Garden' (published in Nightmare Abbey #4), 'Ghosts on the Road' (published in The Horror Zine Fall 2023), 'Dynamiting the Honeybun' (published in There's No Way to Escape, a Boris Vian tribute anthology issued by Raphus Press), and three tales that haven't yet been published or accepted, 'Carpe Tedium', 'The Simian Flipflops' and 'Rip Van Winkle and Juliet'.
I had too many short-story publications in too many anthologies and magazines to list them all, but I will briefly mention that my J.G. Ballard tribute story 'The Go Players' (written last year) was published in Reports from the Deep End, issued by Titan Books; also my story 'The Wizard Killers' was published in the Fantastic Schools Staff anthology, part of a series of very nicely produced hardbacks.
As for my books... I had 14 published this year, but bear in mind that 11 of those were self-published, so if we are going to be strict about this, then I had three books published. They were:
* The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm (Telos Publishing).
* The Coffee Rubaiyat (Alien Buddha Press).
* Adventures with Immortality (Oddness; illustrated by Mike Dubisch).
I also had a chapbook published by Mount Abraxas Press, The Graphologist and Other Stories, and I mention this because chapbooks from that publisher always look very stylish.
Among my self-published books, five were poetry and three were fairy tales; but in fact those three volumes of fairy tales can be regarded as one work: Starfish Wish was a slim sampler for My Big Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales, a very large work that was too big to be bound by the printer; I broke off part of it and published that part separately as My Little Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales.
As for reading: I read a total of 48 volumes in 2023, though three of those volumes (the Henry Green omnibuses) contain three novels each. Some of the stuff I read this year was time wasted, but it is impossible to know before we have read a book whether it is a waste of time or not. That's the price a reader must be prepared to pay. The main thing is that the good work I read was truly outstanding and can be listed as follows:
* The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem.
* The Complete Enderby - Anthony Burgess.
* Sixty Stories - Donald Barthelme.
* Caught / Back / Concluding - Henry Green.
* Loving / Living / Party Going - Henry Green.
* Despair - Vladimir Nabokov.
* The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear - Walter Moers.
* The Bald Soprano and Other Plays - Eugene Ionesco.
* 1982, Janine - Alasdair Gray.
* The Narrow Corner - W. Somerset Maugham.
* Pigs Have Wings - P.G. Wodehouse.
* Voss - Patrick White.
As for my personal life: well, I no longer tend to talk much about that in public. I spent the year in India but enjoyed two visits to Sri Lanka. I climbed Sri Pada and it was nice to get back into mountain climbing. I was a guest of honour at the Goa Literary Festival (a relief to be invited somewhere to speak). I got married. I began playing badminton regularly... I am looking forward to 2024 and that's all :-)
Wednesday, December 27, 2023
The Graphologist Book
It is a slim volume featuring four of my stories, namely:
1) The Tipping Point (a story inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's tale, 'The Room in the Dragon Volant').
2) The Puppet Show (inspired by my interpretation of the particular and peculiar atmsophere found in Thomas Ligotti's work).
3) The Filtered Ones (a tropical ghost story).
4) The Graphologist (a brief tale about self-hatred).
"Ghosts, puppets, and demonic coincidences. Forbidding symmetries and paradoxes of perdition. A quartet of tales that will throb like tiny troubled brains inside your expanded mind."
This is my last book of 2023. I believe that this has been my most productive writing year ever, but I need to double check that claim.
My next blog post will be the last of the year and it will be a summation of a year that turned out to be really quite remarkable...
Friday, December 01, 2023
Triple Obscura #1
If the project is successful, there will be other anthologies along similar lines, for example QUADRUPLE OBSCURA featuring four writers, each contributing 15,000 words of fiction. And then QUINTUPLE OBSCURA featuring featuring five writers, each contributing 12,000 words of fiction. And then SEXTUPLE OBSCURA featuring six writers, each contributing 10,000 words of fiction, and so on, with the total wordage of each book being no more than 60,000 words.
Who knows where it will all end? Feasibly with 60,000 different writers each contributing one word of fiction. But that's very unlikely.
But anyway, I have drifted off the point, which is that the first issue of TRIPLE OBSCURA is now available for purchase. The featured writers are Jason Rolfe, Boris Glikman, and myself. No idea yet who will be in the second and third issues. The book is available from Amazon and elsewhere...
Friday, November 24, 2023
FLIPPANT FAIRY TALES
My massive book of fairy tales has just been published, MY BIG GLIB BOOK OF FLIPPANT FAIRY TALES. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of fiction. I don't actually think the stories are glib or flippant but that's a pre-emptive strike against those reviewers who don't like me for reasons that have little or nothing to do with my work (you know the kind of person I am referring to). Anyway the book I had published a couple of months ago, STARFISH WISH, was a sampler for this one.
The former volume has been in preparation for what feels like ages. It is done now at long last. 313 stories contained in 773 pages. These two books don't include ALL my fairy tales, fables, parables, whimsical flapdoodles and paradoxical picaresques, but they do contain many (or even most) of them. I put in a lot of work to make this happen, foolish amounts of work, in fact, over many years, decades. It has been a very tough climb.
But whatever happens now, whatever my writing future holds (or doesn't hold), at least I can point to the two GLIB books and say: here you are, here I am, this is how my imagination works. And that counts for something.
Review PDFs are available for anyone who feels they can review one or both of these volumes...
The big volume has a real ISBN and all that proper stuff. The little one doesn't. It is like a little amateur brother to the big semi-professional chap.
The covers are variants of each other. Makes sense. The ebook editions of both volumes are currently free from any Amazon outlet but only for the next four days, so if you are reading this after November 27th 2023 they are no longer free.
Monday, November 13, 2023
Three Favourite Reads and One Hundred Short Stories
There is a website devoted to books that I am very fond of. It is called Shepherd and it acts as a refreshing alternative to Goodreads. It is mercifully free of the negativity that can often be found in some corners of Goodreads. They are currently running a feature called The 100 Best Books of 2023, an overview compiled from the lists created by many authors who were asked to name the three best books they had read in one year.
It has been a long time since I read an author who appealed to me as strongly as Henry Green does. His style is unique or almost so, the structures of his novels are unusual, his grasp of characterisation sublime and his ear for dialogue perfect. But there is something decidedly odd about his work. It is more menacing in tone than any rational analysis would lead one to conclude it should be. He is like a more brutal (but that's not quite the right word) version of Firbank.
Another thing I guess I ought to mention is the recent release of an ebook collection of one hundred of my short stories. This collection is called (simply enough) 100 Short Stories and it includes some previously unpublished stories as well as work that has already appeared in magazines, journals, anthologies and some of my other books. The earliest story in this collection was written in 2004 and the most recent was written just a couple of months ago.
Wednesday, November 08, 2023
The Golden Fleas
The first book issued under the Gloomy Seahorse imprint was More Than a Feline, a collection of cat-themed stories and poems. That was at the end of the year 2013, exactly one decade ago. The last book to be issued under this imprint is The Golden Fleas, a story collection published two days ago...
The Golden Fleas contains previously uncollected work that is among my earliest surviving fiction. In fact, this new book has been created primarily for those select few readers who have expressed a wish to read all my stories. When I recently examined the contents of my published collections to date I noted that many of the stories I wrote between the years 1989 and 1995 don't appear in any of my books. These stories are cruder than my later fictions, true, but I do believe they have some value...
...and now they are available to be read.
Sunday, November 05, 2023
The Graphologist and Other Stories
The chapbook includes a story called 'The Tipping Point', which is my attempt to write something inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, although ultimately it doesn't really resemble a Le Fanu tale in structure or plot; yet it has something of the same mood that infuses his work, or so I believe. Le Fanu, for me, was one of the best ghost story writers of all time. I much prefer his slightly offbeat visions to the drier and more elitist pontifications of M.R. James.
The other three stories in the chapbook are 'The Puppet Show', a sort of Ligotti tribute; 'The Filtered Ones', my attempt to write a tropical ghost story and my own favourite among the four pieces; and the title story, 'The Graphologist', a brief horror thought-experiment about a paradoxical situation.
The chapbook is one in a series of booklets that includes work by Douglas Thompson, Stephan Clark, Jonathan Wood, Christian Riley, and others. It has been published by the legendary and rather elusive Mount Abraxas Press and this means I have no good idea where you will be able to purchase it, nor any of the other chapbooks in the series... Getting hold of Mount Abraxas productions is never the easiest bookish task in the world!
Friday, October 20, 2023
Adventures With Immortality
I am especially honoured and delighted that my book has been illustrated by one of my favourite artists working in the science fiction and fantasy spheres, Mike Dubisch. His illustrations are absolutely intergral to the progression of the text.
The hardback is available from most outlets that deal with books but I have been asked to prioritise links to Barnes and Noble and I am more than happy to do that...
My stories examine the consequences of immortality by taking those consequences to a logical extreme. Among my science fiction reading friends, I often see discussions about immortality, usually in the context of asking the question, "How would you pass the time if you were immortal?" And people generally answer that they would do everything they had ever wanted to do, try every activity, acquire all knowledge, because they would now have unlimited time in which to do things.
But I wonder if people are failing to understand that a physiological change also produces psychological change. If you could suddenly fly, you would soon lose your (natural) fear of heights. The change in your physical capabilities would alter your psychology.
So it is with immortality. If you had unlimited time in which to do things, all sense of urgency would be gone. There would be absolutely no motivation to do anything. Everything could be put off for another day and almost certainly it would be. And put off again and again forever. That is just one logical consequence of the quality of immortality taken to an extreme. I deal with this consequence and many others in the book.
Friday, October 13, 2023
The Coffee Rubaiyat
The Coffee Rubaiyat has been published by Alien Buddha Press. It's a spoof of the first edition of Edward FitzGerald's translation of Omay Khayyam. 75 quatrains to match the 75 of FitzGerald's translation. The originals are all about wine. Mine are all about coffee. I preserved the AABA rhyme-scheme and mostly mimicked the metre (not always).
But it's more than that. It's a genuine prayer and eulogy to coffee. Yes, coffee, the second most traded substance in the world after crude oil (and a damn sight tastier). People often talk about how wine is bottled sunshine. Well, coffee is night in a mug, the kind of night where you feel energised but tranquil and want to go for a long walk to the sea. And when you reach the sea and see the surf washing the shoreline, you understand that this is the cappuccino of the gods.
Anyway, enough blather! The book is available from Amazon and elsewhere, and there is even a pocket-sized edition, which is smaller and cheaper than the main edition.
Monday, September 11, 2023
Odd Socks
This rule doesn't apply to omnibus editions of my poetry. And the reason for this is because I invent the rules. The first of these omnibus volumes is ODD SOCKS, a collection of (what I think are) the best poems selected from my eighteen previously published poetry books and chapbooks.
600+ pages of verse, so it's a hefty volume, and to mark the occasion the ebook is a free download for the next five days, starting right now.
It's free from any Amazon outlet. This link is to Amazon US, but look on your own Amazon too.
Yes, the cover is a bit amateurish. This is because I'm not a designer and have become very reluctant to use AI art programs in recent months (I had no problem with them when I first discovered them). The feet in the photo are my own. One of the socks is mine (but who wears socks in India?). The other sock is my fiancée's. She pointed out that hers is inside-out.
The second omnibus volume will be a book containing all my poems, or nearly all of them, right from my earliest surviving poems circa 1976 to the last poem I will write this year. It will be called THE KOALA TEA OF MERSEY and will be 2000 pages long.
Monday, September 04, 2023
Aardvarks: Earth Pig Poetry
I went through all my poems to see if this was true. Turns out it nearly was (I had to write a few more to make up the shortfall). Anyway, I put that collection together and here it is... Aardvarks: Earth Pig Poetry.
It's a slim collection but quite a nice one, I think. The print edition is only $3.99. If you like aardvarks, the book might be of particular interest to you. If you don't like them, what more can I say?
It includes poems that are only tangential to the subject of aardvarks, but it also features two long poems that are unquivocally about them. One of these is about eighteen different aardvarks and what they do in their spare time; the other is a short-story in verse form about a were-aardvark during the night of a full moon.
Monday, August 21, 2023
Coffee and More Coffee
This is a collection for coffee nuts like me.
I started writing it in June. It is exactly as long as the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and is about coffee instead of wine, because at the end of the day (and also at the beginning) I prefer coffee.
I am especially pleased that this one isn't self-published, even though I am very fond of my self-published poetry books.
It consists of 75 quatrains to match the 75 of Edward Fitzgerald's translation (the first edition). I preserved the AABA rhyme-scheme and mostly mimicked the metre (not always). One of my most ambitious poetry projects, I think.
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
Handful of Sesame
As well as pubishing my own work, I always planned to publish books by other writers. Late last year I managed to secure the rights for a new English-language edition of the award-winning novel, A Handful of Sesame by Shrinivas Vaidya. I acquired the rights for all countries except India. Recently I acquired the rights for India as well.
The novel is available as a paperback and also as an ebook. A sweeping historical novel, it was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2019. The original work Halla Bantu Halla won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award. The book was translated by Maithreyi Karnoor.
The novel is set in the fateful year of 1857. Here is part of the official description of what the book is about: 'Two brothers, emissaries of a northern king, on a mission to garner the support of the southern rulers, wander lost and hungry in a forest not far from their destination. They are captured and one of them is hung by the British. Caught in the rough and tumble of the mutiny, the other brother settles down in a place that was never meant to be more than a temporary refuge. He spends his life far away from home among people who do not speak his language.
The novel spans the story of three generations of his family living under the burden of inherited nostalgia, a story that unfolds with all its flying fancies and stumbling follies on the threshold between tradition and modernity. Set against the backdrop of the freedom movement, the novel explores the lives of the people of the Dharwad region of Karnataka; their acts of faith and the realpolitik of ritual. Masterfully and sensitively translated from the Kannada, A Handful of Sesame is funny, tragic, ironic, satirical, lyrical and deeply allegorical of a young, modern nation.'
Wednesday, August 09, 2023
Nine Free Ebooks
I am raising the price of my ebooks (most of which are currently at 99 cents) by one dollar. This is because at the moment royalties are very small even when sales are quite good. To mark the occasion I am making nine of these ebooks FREE for a few days. This is a one-off and won't happen again. The ebooks in question are:
COMFY RASCALS (flash fictions)
THE POSTMODERN MARINER (fantasy)
THE WORLD BEYOND THE STAIRWELL (dark fantasy)
CREPUSCULARKS AND PHANTOMIMES (weird fiction)
CTHULHU WANTS YOU (horror comedy)
VAMPIRES WITH FAIRY WINGS (fictional biography)
CARRYING WOMEN ACROSS RIVERS (poetry)
THE DANGEROUS STRANGENESS (one-act plays)
THE NOSTALGIA THAT NEVER WAS (flash fictions)
These links are to Amazon US but look on your own Amazon, where they are also free... :-)
Sunday, July 02, 2023
Lovecraft's Chin
The free PDF can be downloaded here. Only click on this link if you really want to download it, as the download should start automatically.
I think it's funny and I hope you will too, though if you are a fanatic for Lovecraft you might not. That's the risk we take when we do things like this. It's unfortunate, but some devotees of the Weird take things far too seriously, and then they get angry, and their anger becomes bitterness, and really the whole thing becomes even weirder than the Weird fiction they believe they are defending. My own view is that Weird fiction (or fiction of any sort) doesn't need to be defended. It can defend itself perfectly well.
Anyway, the book is there to be read for free and I will say only one more thing about it. Lovecraft often disparaged people, entire races of people in fact, so any disaparagement or mockery that comes his way is entirely his own fault. He has no one to blame but himself. As for the argument that he was "of his time", that's fine: I am also "of my time", so if his foibles can be justified that way, so can mine. Let us at least try to be logical and consistent.
Friday, June 23, 2023
Jazz Hands Pterodactyl
The ebook edition also happens to be a FREE download from any Amazon outlet for the next five days (starting right now).
If you do download it, I would be grateful if you could also promote it by sharing the link. This link is to the free book on Amazon US, but look on your own Amazon too.
My poetry has been compared to that of Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash, Ivor Cutler and Richard Brautigan. Not very often have I been so compared, true enough, but I have occasionally been compared in this manner, yes indeed.
My new collection includes poems about dinosaurs, dictators, writers, jazz musicians, explorers, metaphors, armchairs, dogs, devils and more.
It also includes one of my personal favourites of all my poems, a mini-mock-epic called 'The Voyages of Caractacus Gibbon'.
Thursday, June 15, 2023
Starfish Wish
Now for the book itself. STARFISH WISH is a sampler of modern fairy-tales and fabular fantasies. It's a taster for a much larger volume that will soon follow (closer to the end of the year). Most of the stories it contains have never been published before: some are long, others very short, flash fictions in fact.
I designed the cover myself. I used an online art program to do so. I am not an artist or designer. I just mess around with things until I end up with something I like. In the old days (ten years ago) I made covers by making models and photographing them. I prefer this new digital method.
Here is the back cover material...
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Two New Poetry Books
Two new poetry books of mine have been published.
The second is Flunkey Monkey, described as poems that monkey around, poems that would swing from trees and eat bananas if they had limbs and mouths; poems that are cheeky and a little mischievous; poems that are rather hairy; poems that see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, but see, hear and speak lots of absurdity; poems that use simian similes and monkey metaphors. Monkey-poems.
The first of these books requires a little explanation. Twenty years ago I had a chapbook of poems published that was illustrated by an artist named Carole Humphreys. I decided to resurrect this chapbook and publish it myself, together with the illustrations. But then I thought, why not write new poems for the old illustrations?
The illustrations were based on a set of existing poems, and now a different set of poems can be based on those illustrations. From illustrative to ekphrasitic in one mighty bound! The book contains lots of other poems that weren't inspired by illustrations.
The second of these books is currently a free download from any Amazon outlet, but only for the next three days, so if you are reading this after 25th May you have missed out on the offer. I regard this as my best poetry book so far (by far) but who am I to judge these things?
As for the title... A few mornings ago, I woke up with the words "Bestseller Monkey" on the tip of my tongue. Never one to refuse the gift of a dream, I decided to give my next poetry book that title. And so I did.
But Amazon rejected the title on the grounds that you shouldn't have the word "bestseller" in a book title. Fair enough. They asked me to choose another title for the ebook edition. I plumped for Flunkey Monkey.
However, to my surprise, although they rejected the original title for the ebook, the paperback passed through the vetting process with the title unchanged. So now I have a poetry book that has two different titles, one for the paperback and another for the ebook...
I am supposing that it won't be long before they notice that the paperback title violates their naming policies and I daresay the paperback will have to be removed soon. But in the meantime, Bestseller Monkey is on sale!
Sunday, April 23, 2023
Pastel Whimsies
My new book has been published. It's a concise collection of whimsical stories about ghosts, monsters, mythical heroes, giants, talking cats and pots of custard, divided into four sections: (1) crime, (2) fantasy, (3) science fiction, (4) horror.
Of the twelve short-stories in the collection, ten have never before been published. Most of the stories were written last year and the book could have been published in 2022, but what with one thing and another there was a delay. Not that this matters.
The title for the collection, Pastel Whimsies, was suggested by something the late Joel Lane said to me many years ago when we were discussing the works of Lord Dunsany. I am an enthusiast for Dunsany's stories; Joel wasn't, and he declared that he had no intention of wasting time reading "pastel whimsies". The next day I wrote a Dunsanyesque story called 'The Pastel Whimsy' which I sent to Joel (who said he enjoyed it). That story appears in this book.
I am delighted with this little collection. I am especially pleased with the stories featuring the detective Belo Custardo, the caveman story, and the story about demonic critics (I had the idea for that tale when I was 15 years old, but only recently sat down to write it). One of the other stories, about two trains, has my favourite last line of any of my short stories.
Another story, 'The Library', is a flash fiction that I plan to extend into a full length story and is therefore not yet part of my official bibliography, but I think it works well as a flash too, which is why it is here.
As a promotional device, the ebook edition will be a free download from any Amazon outlet for five days starting from Monday 24th April.
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Wistful Wanderings
My new novel has just been published. I love working with Telos Publishing. They are excellent and I don't think any author could rightly want more from a publisher. They published my novel Captains Stupendous some years ago and it so happens that it is now on special offer, only £3 for a book I think is one of my best adventure tales. The link for that offer is here.
I regard my new novel, The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm, as an even better novel (just my own view, of course, and who am I?). As well as being available directly from the publisher, it is also available from Amazon in paperback and ebook editions. As I have said before, it's an adventure story but a little more philosophical than most adventure stories.
My thanks are to Ana Da Silveira Moura for providing the initial nudge that started the first chapter/story rolling. Salutations also to Jim Burns, the legendary cover artist. I have always wanted a Jim Burns cover, ever since I saw the covers he did for Jack Vance's Durdane Trilogy when I was in my teens and had just started reading fantasy and SF.
For the next few days, in order to help promote my novel, my collection of Lovecraftian stories Cthulhu Wants You will be a free ebook from any Amazon outlet. I am striving to reach new readers with this freebie in the hope that some of them will like it and then go on to purchase The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelm. Trickle-down doesn't work, we all know that, but maybe capillary-action-sideways still has a chance. Let's see! Free for the next five days. Feel free to share.
Whatever happens, my new novel now exists as a real item in the world and is available to be read, and that's something very nice to know. Review copies are available, epub, mobi and PDF. Contact me if you think you might be able to review it. Thanks.
Friday, March 03, 2023
New Novel - Perceval Pitthelm
Cover reveal. One of my favourite ever book cover artists, Jim Burns, did this cover for my forthcoming novel, which is due to be published on March 23rd by Telos Publishing.
Already this year I have ticked off three long-standing items on my bucket list. I climbed to the summit of Sri Pada, had one of my stories turned into a comic, and now a Jim Burns cover! I have wanted a Jim Burns cover since I first saw the covers of Jack Vance's 'Durdane' trilogy when I was about 16 years old.
Anyway, I am very pleased with the way the novel has turned out, an adventure set in Africa, Brazil and the Sahara Desert, taking place between World Wars One and Two. Philip José Farmer was a big influence on this, as were Karel Čapek and Michael Moorcock, but there's also (I like to think) an influence from less obvious sources such as Mia Couto and Alvaro Mutis.
The novel began life as a long short story called 'The Knees of Kionga' that I wrote for publication in Portuguese ten years ago, thanks to the encouragement of my friend Ana Da Silveira Moura. As the years passed, I added sequels to that story and ended up with a novel that I regard as my best adventure novel so far. I believe I have successfully captured a certain 1920s/30s atmosphere. You know the kind of thing I mean; the tropics, the misadventures, the spirit!
The novel is available for pre-order now. Here's the link:
I would certainly urge any readers at all interested in my work to check out this novel :-)
Sunday, February 05, 2023
Mountains and Goa
Sri Pada is 2243 metres high, which makes it almost exactly twice as tall as the highest mountain in Wales. At the top there is a 'sacred footprint' that some say belongs to the Buddha and others say belongs to Shiva. The idea is to climb it at night and witness the sunrise from the summit, at which time a Brocken Spectre effect takes place.
Marco Polo mentioned the mountain; Ibn Battua climbed it in 1344; and the first known ascent by a British climber was in 1815, by Lieutenant William Malcolm of the 1st Ceylon Regiment. It is a very promiment peak, which probably explains the fascination it has had on people throughout the ages.
This photo shows my first view of Sri Pada from the place where I stayed, in Maskeliya, a village near Hatton, where the famous and remarkable climber Eric Shipton was born.
After I returned to India, I had a few days of rest before I flew off to Goa as a guest of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) 2023. I constantly seem to be going to airports, taking a flight somewhere. I was given a chance to talk about my work over the past 30 years, the five million words of fiction I have written in that time, including 1000+ short stories.
The event went extremely well. I relished the chance to talk about my own work but also about writing in general: fantasy, metafiction, OuLiPo, Borges, Calvino, short-stories, poems, inspiration and other bookish things.
It is the first time I have given a public talk on literature since I did a talk about Cortazar and the Latin American 'Boom' in Portugal back in 2014.
This photo shows me waffling on about something while being incisively questioned by the rather magnificent Maithreyi Karnoor.
Also, to celebrate the fact that my novel, Nowhere Near Milk Wood, is now twenty years old, and bearing in mind that it's actually a fixup of three novellas, the individual novellas are being issued separately as ebooks. The Long Chin of the Law has been available for a while; but now Martye to Music and Taller Stories are also available. I also have a new book due out soon, which I will talk about in my next blog post, which should be very soon for a change :-)
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