The Spoons That Are My Ears!

As I kept the winegums I used to create the cover for Mister Gum, it seemed mean not to give them another outing; and as I changed my official 'book signature' a few months ago, it seemed churlish not to write my name in winegums on the beach. So that's what I did. This signature has replaced my old signature (the one with the dragons' tails). So far just a few copies of Engelbrecht Again! have been graced with this new signature, but all future books will also be signed this way, making the dating of signed copies of my works easier. If it was signed prior to 2009 it'll be the dragons' tails; if 2009 or later then the swirly version... Changing one's signature mid-career can't be considered bad form because Philip José Farmer did it and he always set noble precedents...

In terms of total number of stories written, I really am close to being exactly 'mid-career'. I've just completed my 486th story and I might even get to the 500 mark before the end of this year. My latest tale, 'The Underwear Shop', is one of the weirdest I've done. Superficially about robots who wear lingerie, it was written for a forthcoming Futurist anthology and I used a new working method: seeding the plot with unconnected ideas taken randomly from my notebooks and forcing them to work together (and amplify each other) by writing appropriate linking passages. What might have been a list of non-sequiturs actually turned into something coherently stranger than anything I could have deliberately planned.

I'm desperate to get into that Futurist anthology! I've already submitted more than a discreet handful of stories to its editor. Futurism is so gloriously, ironically retro... People who compare the BNP with the Fascists seem to forget that among the Fascists were some talented writers and artists, the Futurists foremost among them; whereas the BNP are a bunch of uncultured ooze-fools. Could any BNP supporter ever produce something as sublime as this Dottori painting? I doubt it.