Sunday, February 05, 2023

 

Mountains and Goa


January turned out to be a busy and spectacular month, and February has started off the same way. But let me talk about January. I went to Sri Lanka and climbed Sri Pada, something I have been planning to do since I first saw the mountain back in December 2021.

Sri Pada is 2243 metres high, which makes it almost exactly twice as tall as the highest mountain in Wales. At the top there is a 'sacred footprint' that some say belongs to the Buddha and others say belongs to Shiva. The idea is to climb it at night and witness the sunrise from the summit, at which time a Brocken Spectre effect takes place.

Marco Polo mentioned the mountain; Ibn Battua climbed it in 1344; and the first known ascent by a British climber was in 1815, by Lieutenant William Malcolm of the 1st Ceylon Regiment. It is a very promiment peak, which probably explains the fascination it has had on people throughout the ages.

This photo shows my first view of Sri Pada from the place where I stayed, in Maskeliya, a village near Hatton, where the famous and remarkable climber Eric Shipton was born.  

After I returned to India, I had a few days of rest before I flew off to Goa as a guest of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) 2023. I constantly seem to be going to airports, taking a flight somewhere. I was given a chance to talk about my work over the past 30 years, the five million words of fiction I have written in that time, including 1000+ short stories.

The event went extremely well. I relished the chance to talk about my own work but also about writing in general: fantasy, metafiction, OuLiPo, Borges, Calvino, short-stories, poems, inspiration and other bookish things.

It is the first time I have given a public talk on literature since I did a talk about Cortazar and the Latin American 'Boom' in Portugal back in 2014.

This photo shows me waffling on about something while being incisively questioned by the rather magnificent Maithreyi Karnoor.

So much else has happened that I scarcely know where to begin. I sold a novella I wrote last year called Robot Love Story that I am very fond of. I have sold many stories to numerous anthologies, including a tribute story to J.G. Ballard that includes contributions from Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair and Will Self. I have sent my recently-completed novel, The Hippy Quixote, to a very highly respected agent, who has agreed to read it. I am forging ahead with the writing of my new novel, Average Assassins. And I am working on a collection of short stories and essays called Poppadum and Circumstance for an Indian publisher.

Also, to celebrate the fact that my novel, Nowhere Near Milk Wood, is now twenty years old, and bearing in mind that it's actually a fixup of three novellas, the individual novellas are being issued separately as ebooks. The Long Chin of the Law has been available for a while; but now Martye to Music and Taller Stories are also available. I also have a new book due out soon, which I will talk about in my next blog post, which should be very soon for a change :-)

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