The Spoons That Are My Ears!

finished at last (1)

I have just completed a story that I started writing in Turkey in 1994. I don’t mean that I’ve been writing it for 12 years. What happened is that I wrote a page of a tale called ‘Fable with Turkish Coffee’ and then abandoned it, but recently I went back to it and finished it. The completed piece is rather different from what I originally planned, but this is often the way I work and I have a great many half finished stories (and novels) lying around in boxes. Some of these fragments date back to 1992 and the beginning of my publishing career!

One thing that stood out in ‘Fable with Turkish Coffee’ when I first unearthed it was how well it evoked Patara, the town in Turkey where it is set. Certainly, it is always better to use places you have really visited as backgrounds than those you haven’t, but it’s not just a question of conscious description. Details about local buildings, customs and cuisine don’t really do the trick, rather there seems to be something unintentional going on, almost an accidental ambience that gets into a story when the writer is actually writing on location, little things that often don’t have much to do with descriptive writing.

Anyway, ‘Fable with Turkish Coffee’ now forms part of a new project I am currently working on, a book of linked stories set partly on Earth and partly on an adjacent world called Happenstance. When this book is ready I intend to give it the overall title of The Less Lonely Planet. In fact it is nearly done already!

finished at last (2)

Although I have written stories set in places I have never visited as well as places I have, I generally prefer the latter kind. Therefore it is unlikely I will write a story set in Finland in the near future. I can’t afford to travel to a country as expensive as that. However it seems that my work has no such qualms. Some of it is going to be performed at the Cafe Engel in Helsinki in the coming weeks. The program of events can be found on this website.

The Finn-Brit Players are apparently a bunch of people who do stuff like this regularly... My contact among them is Zoë Chandler, who is the person performing my work. She is also (I point this out smugly and inappropriately) the best looking one among the group... As evidenced by these photos among others...

# posted by Rhys Hughes @ 12:10 PM