From yesterday.. which is about Sunday... which I forgot to post:
Well that was a long hard weekend of 2 x 18 hour days amongst a few thousand people. I met up with Fiumix who tattooed me back in November in Florence, got interviewed by some nice people for Alexandra Palace TV which I'll try and find later in the week when it goes live and post a link, talked myself into writing a pilot for a TV comedy idea (long story), made arrangements for half a dozen good interviews including one with Noon which makes me more than happy, met a whole bunch of friends I haven't seen since Christmas, lost my Uber virginity and somehow, made it through the whole of today without one scrap of food passing my lips.
I am, officially, starving and right now, am heading home. When I get there, after I have scruffed the dog and been a normal person for ten minutes, I shall stuff biscuits into my face in front of Doctor Who in the scruffiest clothes I can find.
I also found this from Plazma Lab which I love. Whenever I think of Tel Aviv - which is where they're based - I don't think of work like this coming out of there, but here it is:
There's stacks of great original work for sale there - go see.
(Fade to grey...)
(Back in the present:)
And while I was gone, Denis Johnson died. The New York Times pegged him like this:
Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67.
...which sounds about right to me. I fell in love with his work when I picked up Train Dreams at an airport one day. A slim looking novel on the surface - something you would probably call a novella if you were in marketing - Train Dreams confirmed to me what I had always believed but had never actually seen. A novel is as long as it needs to be. If you jettison all of the words you don't need, a slim book can work just as hard as a thick one, sometimes more so.
Thick books for the sake of being thick are more about commerce than the story. I like a book you can batter an intruder to death with as much as the next person but the times all of those words are necessary are few and far between.
Denis Johnson was a class act. He will be missed here if not amongst anybody else I know who reads a lot... then again, everybody loves you when you're dead, right?
Meanwhile, back at my own desk - day job aside - tonight is earmarked for sifting through a mighty batch of short stories I've accumulated and a list of literary mags they're going to be pitched at over the next week or so. There's some fine specimens out there and the great ones are always in print rather than online which pleases me no end.
Talking of which, my buddy Wayne Simmons has a story in the latest edition of Interzone (270) which you can find right here.