The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I was recently interviewed by the Italian ebook publisher 40K. It wasn't a proper interview as such: I was given five 'keywords' to respond to. My answers can be found here... The moment the interview appeared online, someone pointed out that I had misspelled the word 'indispensable', and so I had. I sometimes get my vowels in a twost -- I mean twist -- I don't know why. Is it because I'm Welsh? No, it's because I sometimes can't be bothered to consult a dictionary. Mind you, I'm not the only one guilty of misspellings. Editors have sometimes got the titles of my stories wrong. Believe it or not, even my name has been given wrongly by publishers, who have variously announced me as Ryhs Hughes, Rhys Hugues and even Rhys Davies!

Anyway, all this a premable to the declaration that 40K have just released my new ebook. The Phantom Festival is a story about a music festival for ghosts, a sort of spooky WOMAD, where all the great dead musicians of former times are free to play on a variety of different levels deep under the ground. The deeper the level, the further back in time the performance. So if you want to listen to the troubadours of the 12th century (Guilhèm de Peitieus, for example) you have to go rather deep; in the story, the narrator decides to go right to the bottom to attend the very first musical performance ever. That's the main conceit of the tale. Obviously things don't go quite to plan; the operative word here being things.

The Phantom Festival is available in Italian as well as in English (Il Festival dei Fantasmi) at the grand price of $0.99 (or £0.71). Yes, that's right. Seventy one pence. More details can be found by clicking here.