realthog

I discovered by accident a couple of days ago that my story "Only One Ghost", which appeared in the 2010 Peter Crowther/Nick Gevers anthology The Company He Keeps, got a jolly friendly review at the time from none other than Locus's estimable reviewer Lois Tilton. Here's what she says:

Richard suddenly finds that all his books have his own signature written in them, in faded ink that is older than he is. The discovery seriously unnerves him. His wife Lynda minimizes the situation until she sees that her books now have her own signature in them as well.

Only old dip pens and fountain pens had those bifurcated nibs. Perhaps lawyers still used them. No ordinary human beings ever did — we used rollerballs and ballpoints and gels. Pens that had not been in widespread use, if invented at all, when Lynda’s books were signed, to judge by the fading of the ink…

Here is a bit of strangeness that remains unexplained, although the narrator proposes a number of possible theories. Seemingly a small thing, yet it shakes their sense of self and threatens to undermine their relationship with each other. It is a bibliophile’s story, and a large part of the enjoyment is in going through the bookshelves, full of nineteenth-century novels, that mean so much to these characters. Very nicely done.

I was, of course, completely calm about this -- no running around the house telling the long-suffering Pam that a reviewer had spotted exactly what the story was about. Instead I was just, you know, like, cool. Discovering good reviews you never knew you had is one of the great pleasures all those dumb self-help books never mention.

Today's my birthday; it's been declared a public holiday. And I got a good review. Pope Benny, Ross Douthat and various others have made idiots of themselves. A friend said I got an early birthday present a couple of weeks ago and shared it with the rest of the American people. My Thanksgiving blessings are counted.

Current Music: Spohr: Sonata Concertnte op 115

I've just learned that my novella The Lonely Hunter, due out from PS Publishing fairly soon, is going to have cover art by David Gentry.

If you go look at his site you'll see for yourself why there are big shouts of "Yahey!" going on here in Snarl Towers.

Current Music: Roddick & Nadal: Pock Pock Pock Pock Awwwww

The ebook of my Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi is now available from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, and jolly pleased I am about this!

The e-edition is incredibly cheap -- I'm cutting me own throat even telling yer about it, I am -- so hurry along and buy, BUY, BUY!!!

(If you would be interested in reviewing the book, please lemme know either in a comment or, if you have my e-address, by email.)

In other ebook news, PS Publishing is planning (no date as yet) to issue an e-edition of the novella of mine they published in 2008, The City in These Pages; the "value added" bonus feature is, I think, going to be my novelette "Always More Than You Know", which first appeared in the same year in Des Lewis's anthology Cone Zero.

There are also moves afoot to create ebook versions of my nonfiction books Discarded Science, Corrupted Science and Bogus Science. Exactly how this will be effected is not yet certain -- by the books' original publisher (AAPPL) either solo or in some sort of collaboration. I should know a bit more after the London International Book Fair.

Hm. It seems that I'm finally extracting a digital . . .

I've just heard from Peter Crowther that he and Nick Gevers would like to buy my dark urban fantasy novelette "Memoryville Blues" for The Anthology Series Formerly Known as Postscripts.

I am, of course, absolutely cock-a-hoop about this. So I'll shut up and stop irritating you.

Current Music: Strauss: Tod und Verklarung

PS Publishing has announced the Table of Contents for The Company He Keeps (aka Postscripts #22/#23), the bumper anthology (31 stories, 150,000 words) that's edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers and due out this summer:

THE COMPANY HE KEEPS -- Lucius Shepard
THE HUMAN ELEMENT -- Eric Brown
BULLY -- Jack Ketchum
MOVING DAY – Robert Edric
NE CADANT IN OBSCURUM -- David Hoing
THE HOLLOW FRAMEWORK FOR THE COTTON MAN -- Catherine J. Gardner
NEVER ALWAYS COMES -- Joel Lane
THE MAN WHO SCARED LOVECRAFT -- Don Webb
THE MEN AT THE MOUND -- Jonathan Thomas
HARVESTING THE MOON -- Ursula Pflug
ONE HUNDRED SENTENCES ABOUT THE CITY OF THE FUTURE: A JEREMIAD -- Alex Irvine
MARCO THE MAGNIFICENT -- P.D. Cacek
ALICE BLEEDING -- Rio Youers
DREAMSPACE -- Quentin S. Crisp
THE FISHES SPEAK -- Michaela Roessner
ONLY ONE GHOST -- John Grant
OSMOTIC PRESSURE -- Jack Deighton
THE RESCUE -- Holly Phillips
SIGNS ALONG THE ROAD -- Richard Parks
THE DESICCATED MAN -- Chris Beckett
THE FIGURE IN MOTION -- Steve Rasnic Tem
SINNERS, SAINTS, DRAGONS, AND HAINTS, IN THE CITY BENEATH THE STILL WATERS -- N.K. Jemisin
ARE YOU SANNATA3159? -- Vandana Singh
THE TIME TRAVELLER’S BREAKDOWN -- Gregory Norminton
THE FOREVER FOREST -- Rhys Hughes
PILLAR OF SALT -- Robert Swartwood
THE FARMER’S WIFE -- James Cooper
DRIVE-IN -- Peter Hardy
ADAM IN AMBER -- Gary Fry
PAGES FROM AN INVISIBLE BOOK -- Darrell Schweitzer
OF HEARTS AND MONKEYS -- Nick Wood

The cover illustration is to be by J.K. Potter, a fave artist of mine; I'll aim to post it once it becomes available. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about being a part of this book.

Current Music: Joey Kneiser: The All-Night Bedroom Revival

I've sold my recently completed novella The Lonely Hunter (the one whose working title was The 5000 Spirits) to Pete Crowther and Nick Gevers at PS Publishing for standalone publication in 2011.

I'm absolutely hopping with delight about this, since I can't imagine there could ever be a better home for the piece -- which I love inordinately. It's a sort of slipstream/interstitial story, slightly displaced into the future although not science fiction, a fantasy-of-perception about literary creativity and loneliness and alienation and obsession, and maybe it's a murder mystery as well. Such items, especially when 25,000 words long, are, ahem, a hard sell to the genre magazines . . . It's an enormous credit to Pete and Nick that they've created somewhere that's as welcoming to the unclassifiable as it is to more obviously genre material. And they're a joy to work with.

At the same time, of course, there's always that sense of slight panic I have on making a sale to PS or The Anthology Once Named Postscripts. PS Publishing's standards are so goddam high, and their stable of authors so imposing and terrific, that I feel quite intimidated: come 2011, my humble offering is going to be judged by all the world in that context. Ulp. On the other hand, PS's publication last winter of The City in These Pages (see icon) didn't bring too many brickbats my way, so . . . yeah, maybe I'll survive the experience.

Current Music: Strauss - Also Sprach Zarathustra

I've just heard from

hutch0 that three of the stories I published last year have received Hon Menshes in Gardner Dozois's Best New Science Fiction 26. The three are

"Will the Real Veronica LeBarr Please Stand Down?", published in Postscripts #16 ed Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers

"All the Little Gods We Are", published in Clockwork Phoenix, ed Mike Allen (

time_shark)

The City in These Pages, published solo by PS Publishing

Since I think it's the case that I published only four stories last year, I feel I've achieved a fairly high batting average . . . especially since I'd been under the impression that The City in These Pages was published in January '09. (The copyright date reads '08, but I think the book may not have been physically published until '09.)

Also, to my very great delight, Gardner mentions my novel Leaving Fortusa, published by

norilanabooks, in his introductory Summation of the year's sf.

And we have no beer in the house . . .

The fourth story, by the way, was "Always More than You Know", published by Des Lewis in his anthology Cone Zero. I'm not sure whether or not Gardner would have seen this book, which could easily -- coming from an exceptionally small UK outlet (it's just taken me several minutes to track down an appropriate URL for the link) -- have flown below his radar. A pity if so, because it's an excellent antho . . . yes, even despite my presence.

Current Music: Kaski: Symphony in B minor

I discovered over the weekend that my novella The City in These Pages has made it to the British Fantasy Award longlist. There are 18 others on the longlist in this category so I'm not getting too excited at the moment; I am, nevertheless, extremely chuffed . . . and Pam's eyes are getting further exercise in rolling.

Numerous pals have likewise made it to the award's longlists; for fear of offending by omission (or could this be just stark laziness on my part?) I'll not recite all the names, although I should definitely mention that D.F. Lewis's Nemonymous 8: Cone Zero, which contains my story "Always More Than You Know", is there in the anthology section -- yay! -- while a couple of its stories are likewise recognized, including

neilhudson's excellent "The Point of Oswald Masters". (The other, by Kek-W, is every bit as excellent, but I don't think he's on LJ.)

Elsewhere in life, I (yet again!) read extremely late last night (must get round to doing another bukes roundup) so, so far this morning, everything's a bit . . . tentative. Perhaps a vigorous twenty minutes on the elliptical will clear away the cobwebs, and I will have side two of Bread Love & Dreams's The Strange Tale of Captain Shannon and the Hunchback from Ghiza to keep me company as I gasp and sweat (side one was yesterday's treat). Ever since I concluded, in perhaps mid-February or so, that I'd recovered sufficiently from the scissors-and-paste work of the fall to start getting serious about exercise, I've been rampaging through stacks of records/CDs in my collection that ordinarily I don't play often enough, plus some old favourites. I was thinking of perhaps a rafter-raising Cherubini Week sometime soon, because I've been discovering lately that he did more, much more than the D-minor Missa Solemnis and Requiem #2. A bit of Yer Klassical might raise the ton in the exercise room . . .

Current Music: Zazie - Totem

Over the past few weeks Rich Horton (

ecbatan) has been publishing on his The Elephant Forgets LJ blog his annual roundup reviews of short fiction. A couple of my own offerings have recently come under his eyeglass.

Of my Ed McBain-homage novella The City in These Pages (PS Publishing) he said:

John Grant's "The City in These Pages" is a sort of McBain style police procedural, with some fascinating main characters, that I thought got a bit out of hand with its philosophical conclusion, but that was fun to read on the way.

I'm very pleased with the "got a bit out of hand with its philosophical conclusion" remark because this was the general intention: that the final stages of the piece be (to use the technical term) a bit mind-buggering.

And my story in Mike Allen's (

time_shark) anthology Clockwork Phoenix (Norilana Books), "All the Little Gods We Are", got a nice mention too:

The best stories included Vandana Singh's "Oblivion: A Journey", which uses Indian mythology in service of a Science Fiction story of epic duration, as the protagonist pursues revenge against an AI; John Grant's "All the Little Gods We Are", about a man regretting his lost opportunity to be with the woman he truly loves; Catherynne M. Valente's "The City of Blind Delight", a wildly weird story about a mysterious train traveling to mysterious cities; and Leah Bobet's "Bell, Book, and Candle", about a trio of people summoned over time again and again for dark purposes. Other nice work came from Tanith Lee and Laird Barron.

All in all, then, it's another of those insufferability moments here at Snarl Towers, especially since Horton earlier -- on Christmas Day, no less! -- gave my "Will the Real Veronica LeBarr Please Stand Down?" (in Postscripts, Autumn 2008) a very kind thumbs-up.

pds_lit is doing her best to keep the derisive upchucking relatively quiet.

Current Music: F Scott & The Fitzgeralds: The Ego as Big as the Ritz

Here's the relevant entry on the HelpVera auction page:

===============

Shortly to be published by PS Publishing, the novella The City in These Pages is my homage to the late, great Ed McBain, taking the form of a police procedural that's also a piece of cosmological fantasy. (Yeah, and people pay me to do this stuff?)

PS Publishing's page for the book is here and the book's cover blurb reads like this:

City Hall is on Lewis-and-Clark Street, so it was the 14th Precinct that got the call, and very soon the 14th Precinct, in the persons of Detective Sergeants Moto and Pincus, was on the spot, bending down and looking into the car at the condom-shrouded figure of Ratty Scarlatti but not touching anything because the m.o. and the scene-of-crime crew hadn't gotten here yet, being stuck in the traffic jam on Eighth thanks to the burst sewer there...

It might seem like just another case for the gallant boys of the 14th but, as the days progress and Moto (look, just don't make any jokes about his name, okay?) and Pincus delve deeper, the body count rises inexorably, with each murder reaching a new height of ludicrous surrealism – if not downright impossibility. It seems there's an avenger on the loose in the enigmatic city.

Yet is the unknown perpetrator truly seeking vengeance? Is the motive instead to patch up this version of reality in the least implausible fashion possible before its inhabitants begin to suspect there's something fundamentally awry? Or are there operators moving at an even deeper level than reality?

John Grant has commented: "I've been a devotee of the works of Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) for decades – since puberty, perhaps longer – so that when the great man died in July 2005 it was almost like losing a family member. I wanted to write my own, very humble tribute to him by way of thanks for all the pleasure he'd given me, but it was some while before the right combination of ideas came along."

The result, The City in These Pages, is a McBain-style police procedural, full of crackling wit and sharp one-liners, that's also a multi-layered cosmological fantasy in whose shifting perspectives nothing is ever quite as it appears. You've never read anything like it.

The book's being published in two editions: an unjacketed hardcover (500 numbered copies signed by just me at £10.00 [$15.00] apiece) and a jacketed hardcover (200 numbered copies signed by both me and Foreword writer Dave Langford at £25.00 [$37.50] apiece). (There was in addition to be a lettered, slipcased edition signed also by cover artist Vincent Chong, but that seems to have been delayed.)

What I'm offering is a rare unnumbered copy of the more expensive, jacketed version from my extremely limited personal stash of just three author copies of this edition. It's signed by both Dave and myself, and I will additionally personalize it to you (or to whomever you buy it as a gift for).

It will definitely remain one of a kind, because I'm damned if I'm giving away any more copies of the jacketed edition: the rest of them are mine to cuddle and adore, okay?

Minimum bid: $25.00
Shipping: on me

===============

If you want to bid on this (or on any of the many other fine items being auctioned for the fund), don't do so here but follow this link.

I'm planning/hoping to put up further items in due course. Would anyone be interested, for example, in a copy of my 1992 novel The World . . . ?

Current Music: Dido: Safe Trip Home

Further exploration reveals that Vinnie Chong has done a back-cover illustration for the book as well:

I feel very privileged!

Current Mood: doubly lucky
Current Music: Yanoska - Yanoska

Thanks to the patience and kindness shown by

al_zorra in explaining the technique to this humble cyber-simpleton, I am now able to bring to you the cover image I was talking about last night:

The book is, once more, called The City in These Pages (well, you guessed that part, didn't you?) and the publisher is PS Publishing. There's more info at http://store.pspublishing.co.uk/acatalog/the_city_in_these_pages_hc.html.

Current Mood: gasping
Current Music: Bob Carpenter: Silent Passage

My server, optonline.net, appears to have taken it into its head to block e-mail from the great PS Publishing, who're releasing my Ed McBain homage, The City in These Pages, soonish. I'll be making another onslaught on the optonline bozoes on Tuesday (a first attempt, on Friday, got exactly nowhere -- someone ought to bring a class action against these dimwits for the time they waste) . . . [256-page rant omitted by popular request]

Anyway:

Tonight, while trying to work out a way of getting in touch with my publisher, I saw for the first time the cover artwork for The City in These Pages . . . and it's wonderful!

My LJ account doesn't allow me to upload the picture here (it's because I'm a cheapskate, you see), but you can gaze in awe at it at http://news.pspublishing.co.uk/2007/12/14/finished-cover-the-city-in-these-pages-by-john-grant/.

A huge thankyou to Vincent Chong for the fab artwork . . . and of course to the folk at PS for commissioning him!

Current Mood: fatigued
Current Music: Bob Carpenter: Silent Passage

I picked up Loving Soren by Caroline Coleman O'Neill on the basis that it had never occurred to me anyone might ever write a novel about Soren Kierkegaard's love life -- and, too, because Kierkegaard is one of those philosophers about whose philosophy I know embarrassingly little. By the time I got to page 103 of Loving Soren I still knew embarrassingly little about Kierkegaard's philosophy and was bored to the point where I no longer cared. Presumably the book does develop a plot at some later stage, but, by the place where I gave up, essentially all that had happened was that Regina Olsen and Soren Kierkegaard had met, exchanged a few adolescent-style smart-aleck comments, and fancied each other. Then they did it all over again in the next chapter. I did not keep a count of how often this basic template was repeated, but it was more times than I could tolerate. The lack of plot wouldn't have bothered me had the exchanges between the enamoured pair been interesting, but they weren't. I guess I'm going to have to glean info about Kierkegaard's philosophy somewhere else . . .

It's unlike me to abandon two books in such a short period of time. In fact, I discarded this one some days ago, so will soon have a newly completed book to chatter about.

In other news, I've got to put my monicker on -- oh jeez -- eleven hundred "signing sheets" over the next day or two. Aargh! A big package of them arrived today from the excellent UK press PS Publishing. These sheets, once signed, will be bound into the fronts of the relevant books. PS are releasing my own novella The City in These Pages sometime soon, so I have to sign 800 sheets for it -- 500 for the limited edition and 300 for the Really Posh limited edition. Also, however, I wrote a Foreword for Zoran Zivkovic's novel The Last Book, which PS are to publish around the same time; so I have to sign 300 sheets for the Really Posh limited edition of that, too.

Once I've finished, I may refuse to go out for a while. I'm not sure I can face all the obvious jokes there'll be about why my wrist is so tired . . .

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Entries tagged with ps publishing

a nice surprise

The Lonely Hunter -- cover

see - Qin!

sold: "Memoryville Blues"

ToC for The Company He Keeps

Sold: The Lonely Hunter

the ego has landed

"The City in These Pages" noticed

egotwo

auction item for the HelpVera fund

and there's more!

The City in These Pages

The City in These Pages cover a/w - wow!

abandoned book #2