The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I have two pieces of great news. The first is that I have already finished writing The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange. Although 57,000 words is rather short for a novel, the story doesn't need to be any longer than that; I guess I can refer to TAoSS as a 'short novel'. When I began work on it last month I only intended to write a novella anyway! My book is a comedy stew of many themes and situations found in the SF pulp magazines of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and I tried to make it as weird, goofy and unpredictable as possible. For some reason it also contains many references to the Canadian prog-rock combo Rush, who were among the favourite bands of my youth!

My other piece of great news is the acceptance of my Tallest Stories book. That's the one I worked on for 15 or 16 years. I don't mean that I worked on it solidly for all that time; but that was the time period that had to elapse before it came together properly. The book is a collection of linked tales. The linkages are very intricate; a minor character in one tale may be the narrator of the next, and so on, until the circle (or Möbius strip) is closed. There is one over-arching framing device that contains three smaller framing devices and these smaller frames contain stories that sometimes frame other stories or even other framing devices!

There's a lot of fluid motion in Tallest Stories but there are several constant factors too. The main one is the pub where the tales are told: the Tall Story. Unlike most normal pubs, the Tall Story is capable of external (as well as internal) movement. It can tour the universe easily enough; and indeed at one point it becomes the universe. This photo shows it rolling across a desert landscape at night on special wheels. Unseen inside is a full crew of regular patrons, including Napoleon Bonaparte, the main narrator of the book (who ended up here after escaping from Saint Helena -- a hitherto unknown chapter of his life!)