The Spoons That Are My Ears!

My fitness has started to improve recently. I led such an indolent lifestyle over the winter that I became a veritable pomme-de-terre de chaise-longue (a more cultured version of the couch potato) and that appalling indolence coupled with an intense six weeks of sitting immobile while writing my Twisthorn Bellow novel meant I actually began to feel permanently weak, run down, unmanly. I even went to the doctor to learn if I had an illness. I didn't, I was just unfit. So I've got back into hiking, cycling and running. The running is the difficult part. I've worked my way back up to a comfortable 3K and my aim is to take part in next month's charity 5K along the Swansea seafront. Those distances might sound pathetically short to you, but for me they feel formidable. Mind you, the buzz that comes from running is better than cocaine, in my quasi-self-righteous view...

As for hiking, these photos show my most recent jaunt to the Gower with Adele. I did promise I would take my camera along next time, so I did...

Talking about pommes-de-terre and other French things, about six years ago I put together a collection for a French publisher that was duly translated into that gorgeous language. Whether it was actually published or not, I can't say for sure. I think not. Generally I don't remember which stories I included in that book, but I know that 'The Jam of Hypnos' was in there because that was the title story. If the book was published I imagine the collection as a whole was called something like La Confiture de Dormir...

Anyway, I have just put together a completely new collection in English called The Jam of Hypnos and submitted it to a publisher. If it's accepted, it will be my most serious and sober collection to date, as I mostly shunned parody, pastiche, wordplay, metafictional tricks and absurdist comedy when choosing which pieces to include. Some irony will be in there, of course, as I can hardly keep it out of anything I write, but it certainly won't be the central focus of any of the stories. The Jam of Hypnos is intended to be my (perhaps unwanted) gift to those readers who prefer more traditionalist supernatural fiction, not exactly a book of orthodox ghost tales but headed that way...

I'm writing furiously at the moment, my head bursting with ideas, the words flowing almost too smoothly from my overheated mind onto the page and I seem to be fuelled to herculean efforts by the awareness that I'm rapidly approaching the 500 story mark... In terms of wordage I'm on course to beat my yearly record of 167,580 words of fiction (achieved in the year 2000)

Yesterday I completed a new Castor Jenkins exploit called 'Home Suit Home' which was my 489th story, and I'm already halfway through my 490th, a piece about coulrophobia called 'Poorly Dawkins', and I'm simultaneously working on linked stories for a future collection entitled Implausible Planets that was originally intended to be a parallel of Calvino's Invisible Cities (with planets instead of cities) but now is just a set of short cosmicomic adventures, because I realised Calvino's book was its own parallel (as well as being profoundly itself). He was clever that way...

As we're on the subject of Calvino, why do so many of my favourite things end with the shamelessly circular letter 'o' ?
It's a mystery...

Favourite writer: Italo Calvino
Favourite musician: Brian Eno
Favourite painter: Remedios Varo
Favourite soup: Leek & Potato