The Elephant in the Room

This just arrived for me. An illustrated collection of bizarre and darkly funny stories by Sławomir Mrożek, part of the Penguin 'Central European Classics' series, which includes work by Čapek, Krúdy, Škvorecký, Cioran, Miłosz, Ota Pavel and others. Mrożek is like a humorous Kafka.

This will be my first book of 2015. On the first day of January I also plan to start writing a new book of linked stories called Down Cerberus. I have been turning over ideas for this project in my mind for a long time. It is going to be a collection along the lines of the Mrożek and also Čapek's Apocryphal Tales. It always seems a good idea to commence a new venture on the first day of a new year.

Every year I try to write a minimum of 100,000 words of fiction. Some productive years have seen me achieve more than double this figure. But I have been rather lax in the year 2014 and at one point it was very doubtful I would meet my wordage quota. A late surge has got me to 98,500 words. Today is the day I hope to thwart failure!