The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I went to London on Friday. My first visit for more than a year. I was surprised to see pelicans in St James's Park, but apparently they have been there since at least 1665, presumably not the same ones. I went to the Tate Modern, as I always do when I'm in London, where I watched an interesting experimental film, Meshes of the Afternoon, made in 1943 by Maya Deren. A sort of proto-David Lynch short, it also reminded me of Bioy Casares' short novel The Invention of Morel. Good bewildering stuff.

In London I was interviewed by the Wordia project in aid of Remembrance Week. I stood in front of the Australian War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner and tried to define the word "honour" with my awkward mouth. In other words I am 'Word of the Day' just for today (10th November). The video below should speak for itself. This project is sponsored by The Independent, a British newspaper I have a particular fondness for because it was the place where my very first publication was printed -- a chess problem (white to move and mate in two) back in 1988.




Back to Swansea and back to writing... I have recently broken my record for words of fiction produced in one year. So far, my total wordcount for 2009 stands at 180,780 words. My previous record was in the year 2000 when I produced 167,877 words. Will I get to 200,000 words before the end of this year? It's possible, but I'm not banking on it. More importantly, I'm only 2988 words short of reaching the magic two million! I passed the one million mark during the writing of a story called 'The Crab' in 2001 (subsequently published in Stories From a Lost Anthology in 2002).

So much for statistics that are only interesting to me... Now I need to talk about my chapbooks. Neil Jackson of The Penny Dreadful Company has decided to give every chapbook he publishes a colour cover, hence the delay with the release of Plutonian Parodies. This also means that The Fanny Fables will be reissued with a colour cover; and because I've had ideas for new two Fanny tales, the new colour Fanny will contain eight fables, not six. Anyone who bought the non-colour six tale chapbook will receive a free copy of the updated version. Just email me and let me know...

Other writing news. I am very close to finishing one of my grandest projects to date. I began the Tallest Stories cycle back in 1994 and actually thought I had completed it in 2006. But I was deceived. It wasn't quite right. Now I have finally got round to examining it, cutting out the bits that didn't work and replacing them with better bits, and fixing the whole intricate machine. I finished the last part yesterday. I just need to write an afterword and proof the entire book and then it can go to a publisher. I have a publisher in mind. The publisher I have in mind seems interested. Tallest Stories is a sort of microcosm of my ultimate Grand Wheel of stories. Sixty linked tales and three broad, nested framing devices, with the tales frequently turning into framing devices of their own, and vice versa. Complex.