Graham Joyce

I found out that one of my favourite authors, Graham Joyce, died this afternoon. Not only was he a favourite and one I was constantly pushing people to read, he was also likely the best this country has had in an extremely long time.

He was also criminally under-rated, under-valued and under-read. 

I don't usually do sad as an emotion when somebody I don't personally know dies, but today I do. He connected with me on a huge scale as both a reader and as a creative. I sent him an email some time ago to tell him so and I'm pleased that I did.

In an odd chain of events, very early this afternoon I told a friend about him, sent over a list of his books to track down and insisted she read them immediately. She had never heard of him and wandered off to drop his name into google - at which point, this news had not been announced but practically unfolded in front of her face during the search - and then she called me. That was just the kind of thing he would have dropped into a story.

So... thank you Sir, for shaking my book tree really fucking hard. To the readers among you, go and read something - try Some Kind Of Fairy Tale, The Tooth Fairy or Year of the Ladybird. There are others, but he was bang on the money with all three of those. Trust me. 

And if you really like what somebody does, you should tell them. Probably right now.

Whatever it is they do. 

Life is short. Trust me on that too.

Don't Try This At Home

After all this time, I finally witnessed it with my own eyes. The kid must have been all of 10 or 11 and figured that he could go from a standing position to standing on top of the iron bars around the trolley park. C.M. Punk in the making perhaps? No. It doesn't take but a second to go from hero to zero as you slip and land face first on the concrete, smashing your mouth open and breaking your specs. Less time than that even.

Don't say they didn't warn you.

•••

Work continues on The Family Of Noise. I don't get along so well with this kind of weather we're having, I guess I'm built for a more 'wet' climate which means I am wandering around like a dog, notebook under arm, looking for the coolest place in the house to bed down and write. File under: not very constructive.

Also not very constructive is getting hooked on a book that you know your own will never be as good as.

I know this for a fact and am quite accepting of it. If it's even almost as good, that will be good enough for me. This guy held the number one spot for me last year with a book he had written some years previously but it was so 'huge' in its delivery, it stomped all over some literary greats. The man is Graham Joyce. Last year's book was Some Kind Of Fairy Tale and his latest that I'm ploughing through right now is The Year Of The Ladybird. Somebody at the publishing house needs to get some traction behind this because Joyce deserves to be much more widely read than he is at the moment. To kick back and say 'I really wish I had written that' is not something I say very often - and it's normally about a song when I do.

Maybe I should say it to nobody but myself? Follow it with some warlike cry of "Joyce, I'm coming to get you!" Yeah... that's what I'll do - but only to myself.

So while you wait for me to finish The Family Of Noise, go read Fairy Tale and Ladybird. Not necessarily in that order. This is what Ladybird looks like. Go find it:

So good, if you think you might have a book in you, it will make you think twice about putting pen to paper.

That's probably not the greatest blurb quote you can say about something, but you get the picture.

•••

..and now back to work.