February, 2004

I'm not being funny but.

I promised last time, didn't I, to give you a full account of adventures and scattered a-happenings in New York after Washington DC, but now it all seems so long ago, and an effective sluicing of seasonal cheer seems to have obliterated most of the fun things I planned to report. Inter alia, the winter solstice came and went. I tried to get the savages interested in lighting a small candle at the foot of the tree in the garden, three days ahead of the annual scary and violent orgy of divesting Xmas wrapping paper that occurs in our house every December 25th. An alternative, I thought. A gentle and modest exhibition of non-materialistic spirituality. A little bit of eco-spook. Good for the soul.

Well, the kids looked at my little candle. Then they looked at me. Then they looked searchingly at each other before retreating indoors and kicking off their boots. Right.

Then Christmas itself, which in our house generated the usual mountain of extruded plastic. Plus you could power an avenue full of street lamps on the battery requirements alone. Then there's the endless Christmas morning assembling of stuff as you try to interpret instructions written half by Einstein and half by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake mode. Really, I'm not against Christmas but I think there's a case for it being biennial. Parents everywhere are supine. Worst of all is this computer-generated practice of enclosing, along with the Christmas Card, a round-robin three-page summary of the unexceptional family year. I don't know what it is but every time I read one of these I feel my eyebrows meshing nastily.

But before all that, when these improvised and rejected rituals were but a dream on the breath of an unseasonably November night in New York, I spent a couple of evenings in the splendid company of writers Peter Straub and Dallas Mayr (Jack Ketchum, of course, though his real name Dallas sounds so much cooler to a Brit) lashed to the bar of The Aegean, Dallas's fave Manhattan hang-out. In fact Dallas was kind enough to invite all kinds of friends down for an evening that turned out, for me at any rate, to be a celebration of my World Fantasy Award. I was still in convention hangover/sleep-deprivation/jetlag mode, but given that we were in a Greek joint I did my best to dash down yon Samian cup or whatever that old soak Byron said. I even tried to show off and speak a bit of Greek to the staff, but they were all Russian or Turkish, and they twisted their faces at me a bit like my kids would a couple of weeks later over the above-mentioned candle thing.

I had a fun night, too, when fabulously talented avant-garde poet Jane LeCroy took me to see a friend of hers performing in a band at the Mercury Lounge, a very nice grungy rock venue. The name of the band was Bonfire Madigan, uh, from the left-hand side of America. San Francisco, that's it. If you get a chance to see them, and live is the thing, you really should. I had a bizarre moment when the walls seemed to be moving in: Madigan plays this sensational hybrid punk-classical (and you know I love those who violate the quarantine laws) bent over that emblem of classical dignity and restraint the cello. But. She was dressed like someone incredibly familiar to me. Theatrical wings, yes, torn nylons, yes and industrial boots. And she was tormenting the cello with demented energy. Yes, the Tooth Fairy, alive and well and performing in New York! I almost would have suspected Jane of setting me up. But it was a great night, thank you Jane.

Meanwhile that piece about mater's idiosyncratic language generated a fair few emails containing winning phrases, and it occurred to me I hadn't included her stonewall favourite. She has an endearing habit, Mum does, of prefacing much of what she says with the phrase I'm not being funny but... This is a coded warning that you are in for a bit of the old-style maternal criticism. I'm not being funny but those trousers hang all odd at the back. I'm not being funny but who cut your hair this time? I'm not being funny but do we have to have so much bad language in your books? There's no effective riposte to all of this. Just more eyebrow-meshing.

I'm not being funny but let's get this doctor thing cleared up, since it has come up in the press. The Nottingham Trent University conferred a PhD upon me last month. But as I've always been slightly contemptuous of pompous academics who wear the title like a hat with a big feather, I want it on record that I will not accept chirpy emails or other jocular material addressed to Doc Joyce and the like; nor will I use it on airlines - with an eye to an upgrade - in the hope of deceiving check-in staff into thinking I'm a medical doctor. Fact is I wrote a somewhat academic analysis of the creative issues involved in the writing of Smoking Poppy and the Leningrad Nights novella. I'd made notes at the time and I finally pulled them together in the form of an essay entitled Ambiguity & Resolution (altogether now: there's posh!). I do apologise for the title of the thing, but academic convention does insist that you employ language as if someone has deftly deposited a large angry hornet inside your mouth. Anyway, the publication of the essay is in hand for those with distressingly little to otherwise occupy their time.

I've delivered my next novel, The Limits Of Enchantment, but it will be almost a year before publication. The UK Gollancz edition has been deferred until January 05 and the US Atria edition will be March 05. In the meantime the UK paperback edition of The Facts Of Life has been switched to Orion's somewhat more literary imprint, Phoenix, and with a new cover. In fact this new UK image was originally going to be the US cover, but it was an archive image that appeared by coincidence on another author's non-fiction book in the US only a couple of months before the release date. Anyway, so compelling is the image - of a boy sitting on an unexploded WW2 mine - that we're using it for the UK paperback. That's clear then.

Tooth Fairy report. There is now a British children's movie out, starring Harry Enfield, called Tooth, but everyone seems to be referring to it as The Tooth Fairy and asking if it's anything to do with me. No it bloody well isn't. And by all accounts it's a dog. Just like that Darkness Falls. Meanwhile the option time for my deal with Radar is up and I have renewed interest from exciting new quarters. More of this later.

This is good: chief of Borderlands Books the gorgeous Elizabeth Monteleone, wife of writer and good-guy the magnificent Tom Monteleone, is producing a calendar called Twelve Scary Guys. And guess who she wants to feature on it? No, come on, guess properly. Right. There you are. It doesn't matter how old I get, nor how much I am turning into a hairy-eared troll, somebody wants me for a moonbeam. Elizabeth says I'm "kinda cute" and she's twenty-twenty. Though I'm not sure about this. I mean who are the other eleven? One of the Uruk-Hai front-runners in The Two Towers? Sauron? Michael Jackson? Donald Rumsfeld licking his lips?

I'm not being funny Elizabeth but this might be a set-up.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net