The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I had a surprise offer from Athens based publisher POLIS last Friday. They want to buy A New Universal History of Infamy for translation into Greek and suggested an advance rather larger than the advances I'm usually offered. I accepted immediately. The translator will be Achilleas Kyriakides, main translator of Borges into Greek, so the end product should be very classy. I know very little about POLIS but a quick internet search reveals that someone called Jonathan Coe has just had his novel 'The Closed Circle' published by them... Whoever he is, he went to Athens for the launch: that's always a good sign!

Earlier that same day (Friday 20th) I had a photo shoot for the South Wales Evening Post. We wandered around the marina until a suitable spot was found -- an iron bridge that led nowhere -- and I was asked to "look more sinister", a request identical to that voiced by the photographer of Os Meus Livros in Lisbon last year... Does this mean that my writing is regarded as sinister? Or perhaps my normal expression is too cherubic to be photographed effectively? Whatever the case, I have been told to expect a feature on my work on Halloween, a date stunningly inappropriate to my literary aims... (My real literary aims are utterly transparent in the new novelette I am writing: a pirate story that takes place in a giant cup of tea...)

Meanwhile, At the Molehills of Madness has just reached #2 in the Shocklines bestseller list. Partly because of this, I have managed to persuade Pendragon Press to issue another collection, provisionally entitled Mirrors in the Deluge, that will follow the same format as the first book. But this probably won't appear until 2009... Plenty of time to decide on the contents and even to write new stories for it!