The Spoons That Are My Ears!

My excellent and lovely Turkish friend Filiz came to visit me for five days. We travelled to Segovia and Toledo and I managed to get her lost on both outings. I imagine she now considers me to be a very poor guide, undeserving of the three large bags of Bombay Mix she brought me. It was wonderful to see her again and I hope to visit her in Turkey next year. She is a gentle person with a kind heart and a beautiful soul. We also visited the Prado and Reina Sofia art galleries in Madrid and I was happy to show her 'The Garden of Earthly Delights’ for real, one of the strangest and most astounding paintings ever. This photo shows her outside the Palacio Real (or perhaps the cathedral, I can’t remember which.)

I also met up with Fabio, an Italian student I first met in Lisbon during my Sereia readings, an extremely interesting and erudite man. We sat in one of Madrid’s many Irish pubs and discussed literature like old time intellectuals: he interviewed me with a set of astute and thought provoking questions. My literary life has been quite busy recently. I have sold many stories to many anthologies, including one to Mike Ashley for the forthcoming Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy. ‘The Old House Under the Snow Where Nobody Goes Except You and Me Tonight’ (which originally appeared in Serbian courtesy of Zoran Zivkovic and then in English as the cover story for Postscripts #2) is the second longest of all my story titles. It will also appear in French very soon, in Ficcion, the French equivalent of F&SF.

As for other writing news, I have just put together a new book for Pendragon... Mirrors in the Deluge follows a similar pattern to my earlier Molehills of Madness, being a selection of horror oriented tales from 1990 to the present, but right now it’s only a provisional collection, as the book isn’t scheduled for publication until 2009 or 2010 and I might modify its contents before then.