The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I'm not trying to sell anything this week. Next week I'll probably plug my Plutonian Parodies chapbook, but right now I'll desist from encouraging you to spend money on the productions of my brain. Are you grateful for the reprieve? Bet you're not... Adele and I have lately been entertaining ourselves with the old Surrealist game called 'exquisite corpse'. The rules are simple. Here they are, if you're interested. The method works for prose, poems and drawings. This pair of grotesque characters are typical samples of what can result from the game. Although utterly unrealistic, they somehow capture an essential truth about Swansea and its nocturnal inhabitants.

I am still working on my 500th story, but it's in the final phase at last! I'm very pleased because it's turning out to be exactly the sort of thing I enjoy writing (and reading) most: a seamless blend of the serious and absurd, the eccentric and profound, the extravagant and mannered, the relentlessly logical and the unpredictable... I think it might end up being one of my best short stories, perhaps the best. Mind you it's more of a novelette than a short story. 22,000 words so far, and rising... What else? Oh yes, I'm slowly reducing the number of books I'm reading simultaneously. I've added some new titles since the last photo I took of all my current reading material herded together, but the numbers are coming down. One day I'll be back to reading one book at a time!