Production go-ahead for the film of Dark Sister has just been announced. Hollywood company Sobini Films has attached Lawrence O'Neil (who amongst his credits has scripted for John Woo) to adapt and direct the picture and it will be produced by Sobini principal Mark Amin and production president Robin Schorr. Sobini is a new company set up by Amin, who until recently was Chief Executive Oficer of Trimark Films. A start target of early 2002 has been announced. Right then, which redhead is going to play Maggie? If Nicole Kidman is prepared to call me, I'll certainly listen to what she's got to say. (Yes, yes, I know that as the original writer of the thing I don't even get to choose the brand of coffee the actors drink on set, but I can have my fantasies can't I? Well, can't I? And you can too.)
Meanwhile the Tooth Fairy came to our house the other night. We were all over in Derby partying with some of my oldest and dearest friends from college days (oh youth, wither hast thou flown?) when my daughter Ella shed her first milk tooth. Everyone had to step carefully aside until our hostess Anne Williams found the unfeasibly tiny tooth. Then Ella lost it again. Then it was found again. Then Ella lost it again. Then found. Give it here, I said, because after everything I owe the Tooth Fairy he's damned well going to get this little peg, and I wrapped it in silver foil and stuck it in that little jeans hip pocket, you know, the one you used to use for foil-wrapped herb when you were young and at college. Then I lost it. Then found it. God was I glad to get that home and under the pillow. The contract has become so, well, personal. And I know what the Tooth Fairy can do to you if you welch on the deal. And in the night he/she came and made the trade.
But of course we persuaded the Tooth Fairy to leave a replica, which leads me to speculate on all these parents who keep the things. And it turns out that a lot of them do. Thousands and thousands of parents hanging on to these tiny, tiny pegs. What, all of them? You kept all of them? Where? In tiny ceramic jars, glass pots, little carved boxes, silk sachets, velvet pouches.
Mad and sentimental and beautiful.
The new book Smoking Poppy is out in the UK in just a couple of weeks. First notices have been exciting and Jonathan Strahan's review in the October edition of Locus magazine describes it as the finest work of my career. It's a great review and I'm not complaining for one second, but I really do hope the finest work of my career is in front of me. You always like to think you are steadily improving as a writer, that each novel is a refinement or that skills are honing with every publication. The evidence for this in the case of many writers, though, is not always there.
I'm not even going to think about that, because I've been closing in on completion of the first draft of the >next< book (the one the title of which I am deliberately withholding from you, remember?) and it is keeping me awake at night. The reason it is keeping me awake at night is that I have a slightly larger cast than usual, and I keep waking up thinking I may have neglected character E, F or G and they need to be pulled into the final frame. I didn't expect when creating this large family of passionate, marginally unhinged sisters that they would all command a starring role, or at least a major supporting role. As with the children, you do want to treat them all fairly and equitably. These seven sisters are very noisy women I can tell you. I can't think who in my own family they resemble. (If ever in these columns I make a mark thus # it indicates to those who have not encountered my extended family that I am trading in irony at this point.)
#
Judging for the World Fantasy Awards is over. I'm thrilled with the nominations we came up with though I'm mightily relieved to have got to the end of the process. As usual there were some casualties, some bad behaviour from one of the judges, some cranky stuff. How, I ask you, can a judge make almost no contribution to the discussions and then resign on the basis that the rest of us picked the wrong winners? That's got to be a first. But some laughs too, along the way. Fellow judges, I salute you. And I plan to be in Montreal for the World Fantasy Convention - all things being equal (in my Mother's truly immortal phrase) - to defend the decisions with a little song and dance routine. And should anyone dispute the choice of winners I shall only respond with the gnomic utterance: Agincourt.*
And anyway I do claim to know a hawk from a handsaw. One of my students on the MA Creative Writing programme on which I teach, Clare Littleford, has just won a two-novel contract with Simon and Schuster UK for a hefty advance, which pleases me no end. In my dark moments I do wonder if the things I try to teach about writing are complete rubbish, and this sort of thing at least suggests I'm not turning good writers into unpublishable ones.
Hawk from a handsaw. Shakespeare, yes, but I haven't got a bald-headed, baggy-arsed clue about what it means.
But my son Joe, just three, is also enjoying testing the possibilities of language these days. Yesterday he said, 'You didn't mean to shout at Ella, did you?' Puzzled by this I responded with, 'But Joe, I didn't shout at Ella.' 'No,' he agreed, 'but you didn't mean to.' This sort of got to me, and even though he's only three I answered with the clipped precision of a logician, 'But I neither meant to shout at her, nor did I shout at her.' He accepted this, fumbled about inside his nose with a chubby little finger and said, 'No, but you still didn't mean to.' I've had it with trying to talk to them as though they're adults. It's a stupid idea.
I was asked to review the new Surrealism exhibition at the Tate Modern, for Salon.com. More than anything I was struck by how the poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot. Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as media industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny -- or not so tiny -- leap of the imagination is made. And what does it better than sex? We've been educated out of the shock of surrealism, and as for the sexual frisson so central to this art movement, it sometimes seems that there isn't a lot left to surface. Unless it runs to the dark, which is something of what I try to do in my own books. Anyway, if you want to read the article in full you will need to go to Salon.com and become a subscriber.
Some other publishing information before I close. Subterranean Press will publish my first short-story collection, Partial Eclipse and Other Stories in the summer of 2002. And my story inspired by a picture of the semi-nude semi-scorpion Poppy Z Brite will be in the next edition of The Brutarian and the Sub Press anthology Embrace The Mutation, both of which are coming out in the month known in the trade as Real Soon Now.
*Agincourt. Said to be the origin of the uniquely British two-fingered vulgar gesture, where soldiers during the hundred-years-war taunted their French enemies with a reminder of the vast superiority of English archery. Not sure if I believe this, but it is strangely cheering to be able to mix vulgarity with historicity.
