The Spoons That Are My Ears!

A mere four (or it five?) months late, the first instalment of the free ebook version of the so-called 'Winter' edition of Sein und Werden is finally here. I could have done this a lot sooner but I felt blocked for some reason, unable to get the formatting right. Basically, I am not cut out to be an editor. But anyway, it is here now; and the second part should be out soon.

In the meantime, please enjoy part #1. To get it for free use the following coupon-code: HU56B

And this link is the place to get it from: THE IRONIC FANTASTIC #ONE

After part 2 I see no reason why there can't be a part 3 and then a part 4 and so on. In fact The Ironic Fantastic series could be run indefinitely. Certainly there is a dearth of outlets for this kind of fiction, for genuinely original and ironic, absurdist, whimsical fantasy. I don't fancy editing them all myself, though! I might look for an editor or editors willing to take on the workload.

Yesterday I finished writing my 700th story. 'Shelling the Toad' was an idea that gestated in my head for a decade and a half before I sat down to actually write it. Finally it has been encapsulated in prose and I am delighted, etc. I seem to be delighted a lot these days.

This morning I added it to a new collection that I have just put together for a renowned editor in the USA. The title of the collection is Bone Idle in the Charnel House and at the moment it contains 24 stories and has a total length of 100,000 words.

But even if it's accepted I think the contents may be adjusted before publication as I tried to sneak some logico-philosophical absurdist stories in among the more gothicky material, for this is essentially a 'weird fantasy' volume along the lines of Clark Ashton Smith, Thomas Ligotti, Géza Csáth, etc.

Apart from the good things that have been happening with my writing, the other reason I am happy is because I have got back into exercise at long last. Running, hiking, cycling, even swimming. And I am climbing again. Climbing is certainly the finest sport ever devised!

I am hugely delighted to announce that my novel The Young Dictator has been accepted for publication by a publisher based in Ireland. I wrote the first chapter of this novel back in 2010 and wrote the remainder of it last year. The story concerns Jenny Khan, a young girl who gets accidentally elected as a Member of Parliament and succeeds in dismantling the democratic institutions of Great Britain and assuming autocratic powers. Later, with the assistance of her Gran, she launches a campaign to take over the Milky Way galaxy, the infernal circles of Hell and all of cyberspace too...

The novel is a satire on politics, on fascism in particular but also on representative democracy. I wanted to write something in a more direct and simple style than my usual work. My desire was to create a book that could be enjoyed by young and old adults equally, a comedy that gets wilder as it progresses but also tries to raise some interesting questions about the strategies people use to cope with modern life. The publisher will be Pillar International Publishing and I have just been formally added to their roster of authors. Although I always enjoy having a book accepted for publication, I am especially pleased with this one...

Why wear a shirt on your torso when you can wear it on your head as a turban instead? This morning I went out with my pet to hunt Tories... The desert winds sang softly, the waters of the oases sparkled like similes... My pet is a trained miniature dragon. A trained miniature dragon is like a falcon with the solitary difference that it's not at all like a falcon... Nonetheless, hunting Tories is a noble pursuit. Some people fear that overhunting will lead to extinction but I really don't think there's any danger of that...

As for other sports, I have got back into climbing, cycling, swimming, etc. The weather has finally been good enough to permit such a lifestyle. I am very grateful to the sun for this! In my next blog entry (or the next but one) I will attempt to create a list of all the possible books of mine that may be published in the near future. I have sold a lot of work recently and if all goes to plan I should be having many books published in the next two or three years. We'll see. In the meantime, why not try hunting some Tories yourself?

One of the best writers of the past hundred years died last Sunday night, while I happened to be sleeping under the stars on Oxwich Beach. I felt oddly troubled the following day. I don't believe in telepathy, ghosts, supernatural events; on the other hand I don't not believe in them. It was as if I felt an important part falling off the engine of the world. It was Vance, of course, but I didn't find that out until yesterday.

If I hadn't discovered the works of Vance I probably wouldn't be a writer today. He kept me going by showing me that it was possible for fantasy and other genre works to be clever, witty, wise and sophisticated literature. He was a master of imagination, invention, colour, mythology and wry ironic humour, heir to the 'muscular baroque' comedies of Richard Garnett, Ernest Bramah and James Branch Cabell (though he more often cited P.G. Wodehouse as his biggest influence).

The first Vance story I ever read was 'The Last Castle', a novelette that impressed me with its epic qualities at an age when I was very Homeric in my tastes. But it was The Eyes of the Overworld that really turned me into a Vance devotee. I discovered this book when I was 19 years old and it has remained my favourite fantasy novel ever since: it's a collection of linked picaresque adventures featuring a rogue by the name of Cugel the Clever. Saturated with irony, the anti-jingo tone, quirky humour and 'Reynardine' aspects of the story perfectly appealed to me. The book also has one of the best circular plots I have encountered.

The Eyes of the Overworld is only one of four books in a grand sequence called Tales of the Dying Earth. I can think of no finer single volume in the entire history of fantasy writing. This is definitely one of my 'desert island' books; in fact it might well be THE desert island book for me (its only rival: Calvino's Our Ancestors). I found the cumulative effect of the separate parts of this masterwork to be utterly overwhelming: the beauty, wistfulness, cunning, bitterness, sweetness, everything richly but also sombrely coloured. There is something that connects deep with the human psyche (or at least with my psyche) in Vance's vision of a farflung future Earth that is home to the last gasp of humanity, where technology and real magic coexist and the exhortation carpe diem has never been more important and never made more futile by weariness and resignation.

Although Tales of the Dying Earth is my ultimate choice as a Vance classic, he wrote many other astounding works that I have enjoyed almost as much. Big Planet has lodged itself firmly in my memory; the Durdane sequence is equally wonderful; the Demon Princes series is superb too; to say nothing of The Blue World, Emphyrio, Maske: Thaery and the magnificent Showboat World... Next on my reading list are The Dragon Masters and the Alastor trilogy. I have never yet read a bad Vance work.

JACK VANCE (1916-2013)

Massive apologies to everyone for the enormous delay with the so-called 'Winter' edition of Sein und Werden free ebook, namely The Ironic Fantastic...

The fault is entirely mine and mine only. If you submitted a piece for this ebook and I accepted it, and if you are reading this right now, your options are as follows: (1) feel free to send your piece anywhere else or publish it on your own website/blog etc, (2) email it to me afresh at rhysaurus@yahoo.co.uk, (3) continue to wait until I get in contact with you...

There's no reason why your piece can't appear in the ebook and elsewhere at the same time; and if you manage to sell it somewhere else after it has already appeared in the ebook, I can always re-upload the ebook without your piece. Sorry again for this appalling delay. It will happen!!

My self-published ebooks have done OK in the 18 months or so since I started putting them up. Not brilliantly but not badly. I have twelve available at the moment but I am going to start taking some of them down.

Later this year I will be issuing an ebook that contains more than one million words of fiction (the longest single-author ebook collection ever?) called The Million World Storybook and it will contain most of the material in many of the existing ebooks.

I have also just submitted my fables and flash fictions to a publisher in the hope that they might appear as real books, so I'll also be withdrawing those ebooks.


However, for a limited time only, courtesy of Portuguese genius, Paulo Brito, six of the existing ebooks can be purchased as proper chapbooks. Paulo makes them by hand and he is going to mail a stack of them to me.

I can offer the following six titles as chapbooks:

* The Mermaid Variations
* Young Tales of the Old Cosmos
* Ten Tributes to Calvino
* The World Idiot
* Facets of Faraway
* The Sticky Situations of Zwicky Fingers

All will be priced at £2.99... I'll put some paypal buttons up in next blog so you can order them, if you so wish...

This blog post is for people who don't know what I do. Often (by 'often' I mean sometimes) I am asked what books are most representative of my work. In other words, what do you do? The answer to this question is now fairly simple. It wasn't so simple before. The neatest solution to the question of what I do is provided by two books, my two most recent. This is what I do.

My new book The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange is off to the printers very soon. Thanks to everyone for their patience! I conceived this novel at the end of 2009; wrote it in January 2010; sent it to my agent who sat on it for ages and did nothing with it; decided to seek out a publisher on my own and chanced upon the excellent Meteor House, who accepted it. Normally I find self-promotion a bit of a chore but promoting this book has been fun and a chance for some daft photographic experiments...

I could talk about the projects I am currently working on (there are several) or the sales I have made recently (there have been many) but I'll just leave you with an online story called 'Invisible Letters' that has appeared in a new online chapbook (you can order a print version if you prefer). Click on this link. Hope you enjoy!

Only SIX DAYS left to order The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange. After that, it will be impossible to order the signed limited-edition novel from Meteor House. So get your orders in now!

What They Have Said So Far...

"Dive into this deliciously daft dose of dastardly doings and dire dangers of doom, detailing the daring deeds of a demi-gorilla Dan Dare of 1930s (d)aeronautics, danged delightful and diverting. For the deaf: describes some detonations. Rhys Hughes outDoes himself. As surreal as Roberto Quaglia´s Paradoxine!! says Dan Datsun, I mean Ian Watson..." -- Ian Watson

"The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange adroitly moves in and out of the shadows of the absurd while shedding light on human nature, the perverse constraints of reason -- and literature! There's a lot to appreciate in this work, which is like a hot air balloon (or, truer yet, zeppelin) that lifts the reader above the tumultuous wilderness of the human condition the better to survey where we are. Though tongue firmly in cheek, this work affirms old Freud's dictum, 'There's nothing more serious than a joke.'" -- A.A. Attanasio

"Harry Stephen Keeler. Lester Dent. Ray Cummings. Neil R. Jones. Jeff Lint. In his latest neuron-warping metanovel, Rhys Hughes has surpassed all these illustrious predecessors in that noble lineage of wall-eyed, demented, scoop-brained scientifiction. Or rather, he has become all these men. And perhaps several women, cats, robots and apes ...as well. I can't say for sure, since I am still respooling my altered DNA after being swept up in the time-leaping, space-annihilating adventures of hybrid hero "Stringy" Strange and cyborg'd Professor Crinkle. Together, they succeed in making Alan Moore's Tom Strong look like Doc Savage in a tutu attempting to mime the theft of Philip K. Dick's android head. And you just can't beat that!" -- Paul Di Filippo  

Sorry for the delay to everyone who has pre-ordered this book! Various things conspired to keep pushing the launch date back; but now there's definite news. Pre-orders will cease to be taken on the last day of this month.

In other words there are exactly fifteen days left to buy this book. Needless to say, the first print run will be a signed limited edition and the total number of copies will be less than 100. Thereafter there will be a trade paperback.

To pre-order this book (and automatically appear as a spectator in the crucial gladiatorial scene) please visit the website of the publisher, Meteor House, and utilise the order buttons you will find there.

METEOR HOUSE WEBSITE

The signed limited edition is sure to accrue in value and be a good investment. And as if that's not sufficient reason to pre-order it... I think it's my funniest novel to date!

Thanks! And sorry again for the delay!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Thatcher is dead! The tyrant is dead!
Time to party, time to dance!
I have been awaiting this event for a long time. I am delighted...

Nine years ago I wrote an article that accurately predicted the death of Thatcher. In order to celebrate the real event, here's the piece I wrote... Bouffant Terrible.

I wrote this especially for the first Forum Fantastico in Lisbon in 2004 and read it aloud to a room of people including Safaa Dib, Luís Rodrigues, Pedro Piedade Marques and various other fine and excellent individuals.

Yes, it may be a little childish to celebrate the death of Thatcher. But the genuinely mature person knows that it's healthy and necessary to be childish at certain times. To insist on permanent maturity is a very juvenile attitude.

Besides, different responses suit different personalities. I am a hotheaded red blooded male, so to have a contemplatative and gentle response to this event would be unnatural and wrong and probably unhealthy for me; whereas if I was a more subudued individual then sitting in a chair with a big chin and being philosophical might be the right response for me. We are all different and when it comes to an emotional response one size does not fit all. I plan to paste her face onto a melon later today and use an old Italian épée to give it some juicy punishment. This isn't something I recommend to everyone, but I certainly recommend it to myself. Others might just prefer to have a cup of tea.

The fact that we all have different temperaments is something that 'maturity wankers' like Claire Rayner never understood and something that her pop-psychology epigones will never understand. They think that because they have "reasonable" (timid) souls, everyone should have "reasonable" (timid) souls and thus "reasonable" (timid) emotional responses. But sometimes the knife blade in the ribs is the correct response. Ask any ancient Corsican...

Another thing... You don't have to be left-wing or even a liberal to hate Thatcher. One thing that is rarely talked about is how she destroyed the old original values of the Tory Party. Before Thatcher the Conservatives also believed in social justice (Disraeli was responsible for more progressive reforms than Gladstone ever was) but they wanted change to be slower -- and thus less disruptive -- than the Socialists did. Evolution rather than Revolution... Thatcher spat on the One-Nation ideals of Disraeli and changed the party for the worse and ultimately gave us the bunch of bastards we have now...

You have a 'mature' response to her death if you want to. This fellow's not for maturing...

My second recorded story is now available on YouTube. It is called 'The Six Sentinels' and also comes from my latest book, Tallest Stories. It was partly inspired by some of the more playfully ironic stories of Lord Dunsany (who got more ironic as he got older).

Here it is, if you care to give it a listen...

The Six Sentinels

And if you don't care to give it a listen, then don't click on the link!

More recorded readings will be available soon, at least one more also from the same book (why not buy it and get all 60 tales ready to be read in your own voice?)

Good news. Tallest Stories is now available as a paperback. The hardback is selling quite well (much to my relief; I always worry about this) but any reader who wants a cheaper version can now obtain the paperback from various outlets. David Rix of Eibonvale Press, the publisher, has pointed out that it's better for everyone if readers order directly from him. Cuts out the middleman...

To order the paperback directly from the publisher, click on the relevant Eibonvale webpage and use the 'select binding' button to specify a paperback. The price of the paperback is £9.50.

As an addendum to the previous post, here is another one of my songs. This one is called 'Very Tall Hats' and took me a lot longer to put together than the other two. Click on the link to hear it:

Very Tall Hats

I only learned recently that the very tall hat beloved of ancient damsels is called a 'hennin'. So now you know too, if you didn't know before...

Swansea Central Library has acquired two more of my books, this time without prompting... Out of a choice of 23 books they have picked the two darkest and most perverse ones: the only books I have written with excessive sexual content... Nice choice, O librarians! This is certainly going to give the reading public of my hometown a good twisted idea of what I do...

But anyway, I recommend to any writer that they order their own books from their local libraries. My personal experience has shown that this works. Being read by readers is the whole point of being a writer!

Let's see if I can get more of my books into more libraries. I especially owe this to Chomu Press, who deserve to be more widely known than they are...

Now then... for many many years I have wanted to dabble in music. I don't think I'll ever be any good at music; but that's not the point. For me it's just a way of relaxing, experimenting and having fun. When I write, I have the responsibility to try my best but when I mess round with other artforms I don't. The responsibility to be talented simply doesn't exist. So it's enjoyable for its own sake.

Anyway, since the beginning of 2013 I have been playing with an audio program on my computer and I have decided to attempt the composition of exactly 1000 "songs". Not songs in the normal sense of the word but Dada/Absurdist pieces of improvised and/or chance music. I have composed eight so far and am currently working on several others. Two have gone up on YouTube, one last week and the other just now... If you care to give them a listen, here they are (best listened to through headphones, but that's not saying much)...

Spaghetti and Marshmallow Towers
The Emperor's Joke

There will be more, many more, in due course...

The first film I've ever made for YouTube was uploaded yesterday. It's me reading one of my stories, so now you can not only hear my voice but laugh at me doing a really bad Scottish accent, plus really bad English and Turkish accents; plus my attempt to talk like a woman...

I did something desperate recently and ordered two of my own books from my local library. I picked the first one up a week ago and the second one yesterday.

Swansea Central is one of the largest lending libraries in the UK but it didn't have any of my books on its shelves. So I'm ordering as many as I can to get them into the system. In other words, they will be available come Hell or High Water; but you might have to ask for them...

The first two to turn up were Nowhere Near Milk Wood and The Truth Spinner. So if you live in Swansea and want to to read my fiction without having to pay for it, you now know where to go and what to do...

A fine fellow and Grand Knight of the Order of Whimsy by the name of Paulo Brito has used some sort of alchemy to turn no less than eleven of my ebooks into real chapbooks that don't require electricity in order to be read! Here they are, all together, on the same bed...

They are as follows: Tucked Away in Aragon (cover by me); Fables of Rhysop (covered designed by me in collusion with Adele Whittle); Flash in the Pantheon (cover by a bonafide weirdo); The World Idiot (cover by Kendal Obermeyer); Rhysop's Return (cover by me); The Sticky Situations of Zwicky Fingers (cover by Chris Harrendence); The Further Fangs of Suet Pudding (cover by Gonzalo Canedo); Young Tales of the Old Cosmos (cover also by Gonzalo); Ten Tributes to Calvino (cover by Brankica Bozinovska); The Mermaid Variations (cover by Adele Whittle); Facets of Faraway (cover arranged from various of Adele's artworks).

Paulo has agreed to make and sell these for anyone who is interested. He is currently working out prices, taking into account materials and postage; and when he gets back to me with this information I will blog about it here... Please note that I am going to try to sell two (or maybe three) of them to publishers and if I'm successful in this endeavour then they won't be available as chapbooks. Also note that The Tellmenow Isitsöornot is far too long to be turned into a chapbook; it's possible that Paulo might turn it into a hardback book instead, but whether it will be available in this form to the reading public is currently unknown...

My ebooks are all available as ebooks (rather than chapbooks) on Amazon or from Smashwords...

Prologue Books in the USA are bringing back into print some of my early out-of-print books. Two have just been released for the Kindle. Written in 1996 and published two years later, Rawhead and Bloody Bones, a novella about two ghost comedians and their tour of Europe, is available on Amazon here and probably elsewhere too.

Also written in 1996 and published two years later, Elusive Plato is perhaps my most transgressive and darkest work, so much so that I'm a bit reluctant to plug it on my blog, where there are so many nice and gentle people watching, but hey... it's just literature, right? You wouldn't avoid George Bataille, Samuel Delany or Pauline Reage on the street just because they had written twisted works of depraved perversion, would you? Oh, you would! Oops!

I don't write "transgressive" fiction any more. I find books that involve intense sexual perversion very disturbing; but important because they are disturbing and thus help to illuminate (or less helpfully: to propogate) the darker aspects of the human condition. Personally, whenever I read a bondage scene in a book or see one in a film, the main urge it awakens in me is to jump in, bash the man and free the woman, like some sort of unwanted Don Quixote...

Each to their own, of course; but what I find baffling is how off-kilter sexual weirdness has become 'mainstream', so that in my local library on Valentine's Day a temporary special section was set up devoted to amorous fiction; and most of the books on display weren't normal love stories but BDSM kinky stuff. How and when did the marginal become the centre? I find that troubling.

I used to think that I could make a valid contribution via my fiction to an understanding of the dark drives of the human condition; but I no longer think that. The only thing I think I can make a true contribution to is the examination of the idea that logic isn't necessarily connected with empirical reality... Anyway, Elusive Plato is available from Amazon here and probably elsewhere too...

I have sent out more than half of the lettered copies of Tallest Stories to those kind people who bought them; but clearly I am still taking more time with this task than I should. I apologise and will attempt to speed up my parcel-making activities next week. I did all the easiest orders first; so those readers who also bought The Smell of Telescopes have had to wait longer because making a double parcel is harder and I need to send those orders in boxes rather than envelopes. I agree that this is an unfair way to proceed and apologise for the delay.

While talking about this book, I would like to mention that the magnificent Des Lewis is currently conducting a 'real time review' of Tallest Stories; and I am delighted by this. It is unfolding right here, day by day. Des is an authentic hero of literature; there really is no other word adequate to describe him.

More necessary apologies: this time for the delay in getting the ebook of the Winter Issue of Sein und Werden ready. I have been very busy lately and quite disorganised. Needless to say, this project is still going ahead. I just need to shift up a gear. The print issue is already available and all contributors should be getting their copies soon, if they haven't received them already (some have).

After a slow start to 2013 in terms of writing new fiction, I seem to have got back into the swing of things; and my rate of production has returned to a reasonable and useful level. I am currently writing stories intended for various anthologies and a possible new 'gothicky' collection to be released at the end of 2015 (yes, it pays to plan ahead).

An amusing and talented Portuguese gentleman by the name of Paulo Brito has recently been engaged in some interesting and entertaining capers involving my twelve self-published ebooks. More about this in a future blog post; but in the meantime here are some paintings that he has manipulated. They say that "a picture is worth a thousand words". Following such logic, this blog post is 3300 words long.

Paulo has produced other playful visuals in this vein and claims to want to create more. I look forward to seeing what his quirky (and slightly sinister) imagination comes up with...

Sometimes I wait weeks for a parcel, then suddenly two come at once. But it doesn't logically follow that parcels are buses or any other kind of vehicle. Two days ago I picked up a big box that contained a heap of books from the remarkable Centipede Press in the USA, chief among them being this Michael Cisco box-set of five novels. The set is worth $250 and I was given it gratis in return for writing the introduction to The Tyrant. Seems like a good deal to me!

Personally I regard Cisco as one of the finest weird writers currently working in the world today. In terms of imagination and invention he's in the stratosphere, way above most of his contemporaries. Someone coined the term "dark jazz" to describe his work. As a jazz fan myself, I think this comparison is accurate and apt. In my introduction to The Tyrant, I draw a comparison between Cisco's prose and the music of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, in the sense that Cisco often seems to be telling more than one story simultaneously and Nancarrow created player-piano rolls that played 'impossible' music that were beyond the abilities of any human player and mixed many tunes at once, utilising many different time signatures for each one.

Here's a typical Nancarrow piece. At first it sounds like over-enthusiastic early jazz, then the madness starts to set in, then the feeling of being horribly overwhelmed. But listen to it a few times and the individual elements become discernible and then the way they mesh together becomes enthralling. Most of his music functions in this manner. And I believe that Cisco's prose does too...

The other parcel I received on the same day contained this anthology of ghost stories for a good cause. Published by Tartarus Press, all profits from sales of Dark World will go to the Amala Children's Home. I have a story in it, which is why I was sent two free copies. My story is far more conventional than the majority of my work (parts of it were written as long ago as 1988 and then lost until last year, when I decided to finish the piece.)

In 2013 I have decided to write the occasional 'orthodox' weird story in similar style to this one and when I have written enough of them I hope to maybe issue a collection in the future that is relatively 'normal'...

I have started mailing out the lettered copies of Tallest Stories to those kind and gracious readers who ordered them. I'm rather bad at making parcels, so it might take a while before all 26 are dispatched, but I'll do my best.

I have problems using sticky tape, wrapping paper and bubblewrap. I can't seem to stop the tape twisting around in mid-air so the sticky side is on the outside and held in place by crisscrosses of other sticky tape; and I can't do straight lines.

Also the tape rips when it's being unwound and one side unwinds faster than the other side and laps it and somehow gets stuck with it and then the thicker half nudges the thinner half off the edge of the tape reel, so there's a length of useless tape with a rat's tail waving in mid air getting stuck to anything in range... Ah well! Maybe I'll get better!

David Rix of Eibonvale Press (who took this photo) reports that the proof copy of Tallest Stories arrived at his house the other day; so all that remains is for him to go through it looking for any errors we haven't already spotted, and if he doesn't find any he can give the go-ahead to the printers, and then it won't be long before copies are available and I can announce that the book has finally been published!

I'm still searching for extra manuscripts to add to the list of freebies to be given away with the first 26 'lettered' copies. When I have dug up enough material to add at least one item to every letter, I'll post a list of the additional items on this blog. It shouldn't take more than a few more days to find enough stuff. Several of the manuscripts I have recently found date from the early 1990s and include the manuscript of my first published story!

It snowed the day before yesterday, the first snowfall of winter, and a ‘red alert’ was issued by the Met Office for Wales. Red alerts are rare. When they are cooked they tend to be brown. People have been panic buying as consequence and the supermarkets are almost out of cartons of panic. However, a perfectly acceptable substitute for panic can be achieved simply by heightening some apprehension. Try this in the comfort of your own home!

Here is a wintry picture of the most recent BFS (British Fantasy Society) journal that slid through my letterflap last week. It’s the autumn issue, a complimentary copy despatched to me about four months late. I had to email five or six reminders to the official stockholder to receive it. The BFS seem to be damned incompetent at doing some simple things but because I have resolved not to get involved in spats this year I won’t say anything more along those lines. I’ll just remark that the organisation has been a bit tardy sending out copies of the journal to contributors.

The contents of this one include an interview with me that was conducted by ‘Old Peculiar’ himself, Mr Stephen Theaker, a wise and genial fellow. I enjoyed being lightly grilled by him. One of his questions is about how prolific I am, but the fact is that I’m not prolific really, not compared to many other writers out there. My annual rate of production did double in the past four years, but I feel sure it’s going to drop back again. So far this year I’ve only written two short-stories and both are less than 2000 words.

I’m rather glad about that. I fancy a more relaxed pace after the hectic flurry. I’ve just put all my completed fiction into a single massive document and done a word-count and the total is 2,662,990 words. Less than two years’ work for someone like Max Brand or Frank Richards! Extrapolating from this data, I have worked out that the average length of a Rhys Hughes story is 3893 words; and that Pandora’s Bluff (my integrated 1000 story cycle) will end up being exactly 3,893,260 words long. If I do ever finish it, I bet it won’t, though!

The weather here has been generally pretty terrible, but it cleared up sufficiently last week to enable my first climb of the year. I'm a bit stiff and clumsy after the Christmas break (in which I did virtually no exercise at all) but I'm sure I'll loosen up again soon enough. I rarely make New Year's Resolutions, but I did so this time, and one of those resolutions is to climb higher and harder than I ever have before. I'm becoming acutely aware of passing time. One day I won't be able to do stuff like this, so I have to grasp the yeti by the nettle, or whatever the saying is...

I would note down my other resolutions here, but I seem to have lost the list I made. Typical! I know that when it comes to writing, I made a pledge to myself to finish at least some of those projects that have been hanging about for years or decades... In the meantime I'm just concentrating on getting the Winter Issue of Sein und Werden out of the way. I have learned from this project that I'm not naturally cut out to be an editor. I found it hard work. Never again will I regard editing as a cushy nothingy job!

Thanks to everyone who ordered one of the 'lettered' copies of Tallest Stories. They sold out very quickly. More than half were ordered in the first fifteen minutes, then the speed of sales slowed dramatically, but they all went in a few hours. So now it's just a case of checking the final galley and the book will be off to the printers and then I'll have to sign it when it's ready and after that copies can be mailed to those who bought them, together with the manuscripts and paintings, etc.

I found a few handwritten stories dating from the early 1990s this morning in an old notebook, so I'm going to rummage through my boxes tonight for more manuscripts and if I find enough of them, I'll be adding at least one 'item' to the materials associated with each lettered copy of the book. So with luck, if you ordered a copy, you'll get more for your 'letter' than what was already on the list of items.

Don't forget... Orders for the first 26 'lettered' copies of Tallest Stories will be taken today starting at 6 PM... That's British time, by the way... Free manuscripts, paintings, drawings, etc, with every copy ordered... It's an investment of some sort (not sure what sort yet)! Check out the Eibonvale website for details.

This photo shows the notebook of handwritten stories that will be given away free with letter 'A'. This notebook contains 26 short-stories, including one that appears in Tallest Stories itself and also six out of seven of the 'Hogwash & Bum Note' tales (the same six that appear online here, as it happens).

Nineteen years from original conception to finished book... Don't miss out on this great promotional offer!

Tallest Stories is going to the printers very soon. It will be published later this month. The first 26 books sold will be 'lettered copies' and will be accompanied by a selection of items that may accumulate in value from 'worthless' to 'priceless', depending on what happens to me and my reputation in years to come; or they may remain worthless. Only time will tell!


A short pre-order period will open on January 5th (tomorrow) at 6:00 PM London time. Click on this link to check out the publisher's webpage relevant to this. Here is a full list of what items will accompany each lettered copy...

(A) Red hardback notebook containing the following 26 stories (title of story followed by title of book they appear in, or will appear in):
* The Mistake (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Violation (Tallest Stories)
* Trenchfoot (not yet placed)
* The Ugliest Idol in Christendom (The Just Not So Stories)
* Moonchaser (not yet placed)
* Discrepancy (Link Arms With Toads!)
* My Biological Prism (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Censor (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Porcelain Pig (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Blue Jewel Fruit (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Tale That Never Got Told (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Integers (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Great Bicycle Migration (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Esplanade (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Rotten Otter (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Ducks of Hazard (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Cheeky Monkey (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Melody Tree (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Notorious Unclemuncher (The Lunar Tickle)
* Read All About It (The Lunar Tickle)
* Putting Things Off (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Canapés of Wrath (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Plug (The Lunar Tickle)
* Fossils (The Lunar Tickle)
* The Tools (Better the Devil: Revised Edition)
* The Locksmith (written especially for the owner of the ‘A’ copy of Tallest Stories)

(B) Slim orange exercise book containing the following 5 stories:
* Climbing the Tallest Tree in the World (Tallest Stories)
* Islands in the Bathtub (Tallest Stories)
* The Television (The Lunar Tickle)
* Butterbrow (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Lock of Love (The Lunar Tickle)

(C) Four loose manuscripts, namely:
* Anton Arctic and the Conquest of the Scottish Pole (Tallest Stories)
* The Mirror in the Looking Glass (Tallest Stories)
* Wood for the Trees (Tallest Stories)
* Gaspar Jangle’s Séance (Tallest Stories)

(D) Three loose manuscripts, namely:
* Encore (Tallest Stories)
* The Crab (Stories From a Lost Anthology)
* Finding the Book of Sand (A New Universal History of Infamy)

(E) Three loose manuscripts, namely:
* The West Pole (Tallest Stories)
* The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart (Link Arms With Toads!)
* The Mice Will Play (The Less Lonely Planet)

(F) Three loose manuscripts, namely:
* All Shapes Are Cretans (Link Arms With Toads!)
* Robin Hood’s New Mother (Stories From a Lost Anthology)
* The Unsubtle Cages (A New Universal History of Infamy)

(G) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* The Marsh Callow (Stories From a Lost Anthology)
* Accordion Beach (The Less Lonely Planet)

(H) Four drawings, namely:
* The Pizza Demon
* Kojakalhu
* Twisthorn Bellow (with his sword)
* Janrel MacScabbard

(I) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* The Lake of Flavours
* The Inflatable Stadium

(J) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* Bitter in Sour
* Shipyards on Saturn

(K) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* The Lute and the Lamp (Stories From a Lost Anthology)
* All for Nothing

(L) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* The Gunfight (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Dwarf Shortage (The Just Not So Stories)

(M) Three drawings, namely:
* Petrified Monsters
* Entangled Monsters
* Chimney Monsters

(N) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* 333 and a Third (Link Arms With Toads!)
* The Apple of My Sky

(O) Green exercise book containing:
* Below the Carnival (The Less Lonely Planet)
* The Cargo Cults of Salty Kiss Island
also: the beginning of *The Silver Necks (Tallest Stories)
and two poems (Monkey From a Cannon and Acrophobia in Acre)
plus the start of one other poem.

(P) Small blue notebook containing:
* The Leveller of Neptune (The Just Not So Stories)

(Q) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* The Queue (The Lunar Tickle)
* Vanity of Vanities

(R) Two loose manuscripts, namely:
* The Armchair Generals
* The Sweetheart Rosary

(S) One loose manuscript:
* Poorly Dawkins (retitled as Hangfire Bubbler for The Truth Spinner)
plus: very rare limited edition chapbook containing *Cat O’Nine Tales (opening story in Worming the Harpy)

(T) Slim notebook containing:
* Ictus Purr (A New Universal History of Infamy)
plus the openings of *Jellydammerung and *Tin in the Soul (both in Stories From a Lost Anthology)

(U) Three loose manuscripts, namely:
* On the Shoulders of Pipsqueaks
* Buffoons of the Moon
* The Curdling of the Milky Way
(These stories are all linked and appear in Young Tales of the Old Cosmos)

(V) Three loose manuscripts, namely:
* Personification (The Just Not So Stories)
* The Maze (The Lunar Tickle)
* Hatstands on Zanzibar (The Lunar Tickle)

(W) The Advanced Uncorrected Galley of:
Link Arms With Toads!

(X) Two paintings:
* Boris Lovetrap
* Tallest Stories background

(Y) Two paintings:
* Hairless Yeti Bedtime
* Giant Percolator

(Z) One painting: *The Writer
One drawing: *Possible Lives
Last known copy of chapbook The Skeleton of Contention
Last known copy of chapbook The Fanny Fables
plus three handwritten manuscripts:
* Doom it Heavenwards (my 666th story)
* The Days of the Turbans
* The Pig Iron Mouse Dooms the Moon

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