The Spoons That Are My Ears!

My latest chapbook, Plutonian Parodies, has just been published by the Penny Dreadful Company. Things are being restructured over there, so the situation is now as follows: it seems I will eventually have a total of five chapbooks available from them and all will have colour covers. There will be no more non-colour chapbooks. So in order of publication, the full list of my expected chapbooks is as follows: Madonna Park, Plutonian Parodies, The Fanny Fables, To Err is Divine and Flash in the Pantheon. A non-colour version of Fanny Fables has already been issued. That chapbook will now be discontinued. I am currently writing two new Fanny tales for the updated edition. Anyone who bought the six-story non-colour copy should feel free to email me and I'll do something to make sure they don't miss out. My email address can be found on my blog profile.

To help promote Plutonian Parodies, I thought it might be nice to run a small competition. So that's what I'm going to do. The winner will receive all five colour chapbooks, a copy of the six-story Fanny and an ultra rare copy of the original five-story Fanny, plus an actual handwritten manuscript of one of my stories (I occasionally write longhand). If I ever become as famous as I believe I deserve to be, then this handwritten mansucript will eventually be worth loads. If I don't become that famous, you can always use it to wipe your arse. Now then! Here's the competition! Behold a photo containing numerous references to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. There are thirteen references in total and if anyone gets all thirteen, I'll be amazed! Please email me your answers. Anyone who tries to guess more than thirteen will be disqualified. I want to say "Good Luck!" but I can't say that to everyone: it would confuse fate and/or chance.

Writing... I still haven't broken the 2,000,000 word barrier, but I'm very close. I have just written a tale about the workman who repairs the Yellow Brick Road and I have somehow tricked Nebula Award winning writer Michael Bishop into contributing to the story. I am just waiting for his segment to be completed; then I'll be over the two million mark! What else? I've been invited to Romania for a book signing. I accepted at once, of course! This should hopefully happen next year. I might make a meal of it and travel first to Istanbul so I can cross European Turkey and Bulgaria before reaching Bucharest. After that I can wander down into Serbia, Macedonia, Albania and Greece maybe, visiting literary and/or creative types on the way! What else? As I mentioned in my last post I was pleased to note a reference to myself in the Rough Guide to Cult Fiction as a writer influenced by the genius Alasdair Gray. Here's a photo I took to prove it to myself. The print is small, hence the magnifying glass.