Thursday, April 30, 2009
Dodgy Analogy
This is the plant I'm hoping will one day provide lots of extremely spicy chillies for the delight of my tastebuds. I planted the seeds a month ago but only one germinated. It's a Himalayan variety that promises to be truly mindblowing. Whether this little shoot survives much longer and develops into a proper chilli bush is a very uncertain question. Unlike Adele, who is already harvesting tasty salad vegetables on her allotment and is cultivating a vast array of herbs, beans, peas and root crops, I've never been very successful at growing things, and in fact I have the opposite of the proverbial "green fingers" (I hestitate to claim ownership of "red toes" in case it exhibits a lack of understanding of the concept 'opposite').
Growing plants is probably nothing like writing stories. That analogy is almost certainly dodgy. When it comes to writing I'm on firmer and more fertile ground... I'm currently (and perhaps somewhat foolishly) working on a dozen projects simultaneously, writing short stories for several anthologies (including Exotic Gothic III and Strange Tales III) and for three new collections I'm slowly putting together: (a) Salty Kiss Island, (b) Ditto & Likewise, and (c) Implausible Planets. That's surely too many collections. Having said that, I have just pitched another to a publisher who seems enthusiastic, a selection of my more 'serious' gothicky work from the past 15 years or so, slanted heavily towards ghost stories. In fact I might plug it as my 'Ghost Story Book' even though it contains some pieces that don't feature those wispy rascals. But it's the ambience that counts.
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