The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I have edited a book called Wuxing Lyrical and it has now been published in both paperback and ebook editions. I am pleased with the way it has turned out, which is even better than I was hoping it would be. An article on why I wrote it can be found at Borderless Journal. The book is an anthology of verse themed around Chinese astrology but done in a specific manner.

I often use social media for telling jokes. When I was younger I used to wonder who the people were who invented new jokes, never suspecting that one day I would be one of them. These days, when I see one of my old jokes, I tend to turn it into a poem. In some ways a poem has greater reach than a joke: it is an art object. This doesn't mean that the poem is necessarily better than the joke, but that's a different question. Anyway, I turned one of my old jokes about a fire horse into a poem. Another writer saw it and responded with a poem of his own about a water rat.

The idea for the anthology instantly came into being! There are sixty combinations of animals and elements in Chinese astrology. Why not a poem for each of those combinations? I asked for poets to consider submitting material for the book; they did so; the book was created. The end result is funny, witty, silly, musical, occasionally even profound. I believe it is a good example of how light verse can be just as serious an artform as heavy poetry.

Contributors include prize-winning poets such as Mustansir Dalvi and Maithreyi Karnoor, but also poets who are published here for the first time, and many others in the zone between these two extremes. The book was put together in less than a month. It has made me think that other anthologies should follow. I don't have any plans to regard myself as an editor but I do have several ideas for viable projects. I shall give details about them, if they ever happen, here.

Wuxing Lyrical is available from Amazon (is there anything that isn't?)

Back in 1994 I began writing The Darktree Wheel, a series of stories about Robin Darktree, a highwayman, but I didn't know it was going to be a series when I wrote the first tale, 'Flintlock Jaw'. There ended up being five tales in the series at first, but things became more complicated because in 1995, between the writing of the second and third tale in the series, I also wrote a Darktree novella called Eyelidiad that was published as a separate book. Then I returned to the original series and finished it in 1997. The five stories combined made a novella.

So now I had two Darktree novellas and I put them together and decided to write a third novella called Ghoulysses. All together, the three novellas would make a fairly substantial novel. But I never finished that third part and still haven't, though I absolutely intend to do so one day (maybe this year). That big novel will be called The Clown of the New Eternities.

Anyway, The Darktree Wheel was published in an anthology called Leviathan 2 in 1998 and there it languished for two decades before it was resurrected to appear in a very prestigious book, the Big Book of Modern Fantasy, published by Vintage.

But in fact only part of the novella appeared in that Vintage anthology and so I have decided to reissue The Darktree Wheel in its entirety. Then it occurred to me that it might sit well with another pair of my favourite novellas, The Impossible Inferno and The Swine Taster, both of which I had considered at stages in my writing career to be my best works. The end result is a collection called THREE NOVELLAS and it has been published by my own Gibbon Moon Books press.

I would say that this book is absolutely representative of my best work as a whole. In other words, if you don't like this book I can confidently state that you probably won't like any of my others.

The book is available as a paperback and an ebook. Earlier this year I paid for ten proper ISBNs for my small press and I will be issuing ten of my own books to form a set. This book is perhaps the most vital part of this set.