December, 2006

Arriving into US immigration is a huge laugh when you're let's say just a little fried from an early morning transatlantic flight bundled in with a further twenty-four-hour delay courtesy of the wretched Continental Airlines. An immigration lady screamed at the man in front of me because he had his passport in his mouth as he tried to finesse his coat, bag, green card, blue card, customs declaration and whatever else in order to identify his destination address. "Spittle!" she bawled. "We don't wancha goddam spittle!" No, I thought, and we don't really want yours but we're getting it. Then another officer barked at the guy in front of me for stepping two inches over The Yellow Demarcation Line Of Doom-thing. "Doncha see that line? Doncha?" Mindful of the Yellow Line Of Doom-thing it was my turn to be roared at because I'd failed to enter the date on my arrival card. I asked the immigration officer for the loan of a pen to complete. "Do I look like the gift store?" he bellowed at me. Or something like that.

I did wonder whether we were being processed for lengthy prison service, rather than for a leisure stopover in the US. How does one answer? Wait til my writer friends in Austin hear about how you treat us! Right. My actual answer was one of those wonderful witty, apropos put-downs that come to you just once or twice in this life. Unfortunately so jet-lagged and sleep deprived was I that it came out as: Mazzingish gaffra obobuli. Our eyes met. He just sneered at me and slapped a pen on the counter.

That'll teach him.

Oh the utter crapness of flying. But then the internal flight. Shoes off again. Belt off. Drinking water confiscated. Willy patted by a zealous security guard. Nice job, thanks. Sweating, gamely clutching shoes, tickets, passports, laptop. I'm thinking: the terrorists have won, we can't keep travelling like this.

So I arrived in Texas like a whipped dog, no a whupped doggie; but Jo Fletcher from Gollancz spotted me checking in all cranky and wizened, and prescribing food and good company she whisked me away to join her and others for a sumptuous Chinese dinner. The world was quickly okay again. Guys are swimmin', guys are sailin' etc. And who cares about those fiends, those monsters at immigration when the REAL AMERICANS are all assembled in Austin and ready to party. World Fantasy Convention was unfortunately compressed for me this year thanks to the delays, but still fun. I was just recovering from the jet lag at the awards banquet when I heard my name clearly not announced as the winner of this year's Best Novel award.

The dazzling Howard Waldrop said that actually getting on to these short-lists is "a one-way ticket to Palookaville". (Note to Brit readers: a palooka is a punch-drunk boxer who had a fight too many). I can't really complain about losing the World Fantasy Award for Limits of Enchantment to the wonderful Haruki Murakami; and anyway on the same week-end in France The Facts Of Life won the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire for best foreign novel. My translator Melanie Fazi also picked up Best Translator award for the same work, so it was a double. I've said before that I suspect Melanie of secretly improving my novels and this confirms it.

Back home and the football seems to have become a regular thing. Well I bought some high-tech goalie gloves so it must be serious. This time we took on the Comedians X1 down at Crystal Palace. They were a rather serious lot I thought, not finding much to laugh at, whereas we couldn't stop chuckling. I was too far off my line for the first goal that flew in; but then again I'm passionately certain that you, reading this, don't give a stuff about my goalkeeping angst and I don't blame you. Punchline: Writers 5 Comedians 3.

The new novel: I'm an inch from finishing the first draft. No title yet. Well I did have one, but my quiz team-mates Spanton, Grant, Barclay and Roberts all pooh-poohed it. I read the opening pages at the convention in Austin and the response made me feel good about the book. It's a strange novel. (Oh, what a surprise.) Okay it's differently strange. I'm always haunted by the notion that musing about my work is of no more interest than chuntering about the correct line position of my goalkeeping. But I was talking with Peter and Susan Straub recently and we got onto the subject of W B Yeats and The Song of Wandering Aengus.

I went out to the Hazel Wood
Because a fire was in my head
And cut and peeled a Hazel wand
And hooked a berry to a thread.
And when white moths were on the wing
And moth-like stars were flickering out
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

This poem is about the mysterious process of writing. The alchemical formula of the poem is dazzling. The wood is the dark mind. The fire in the head is the spark of inspiration. The hazel wand is the wand of the magician, hazel being a magical tree. But the wand is here analogous to the pen of the writer. The moths and stars indicate that the time is dusk, which represents the crack between worlds, a transitional moment from one state of being to another. The stream in which the poet "drops the berry" is in turn the inkwell of the unconscious mind. The poet catches a fish, which turns into the muse he is condemned or blessed to chase for his entire life "through hollow lands and hilly lands".

And walk among long dappled grass,
And I will pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

That's it. That is the alchemical formula for writing. The meeting of the sun and the moon, which is to say the harmonious balance of light and shade between the conscious powers and the unconscious forces of the creative mind, represent a marriage, and are the groom and bridegroom of poetic fulfilment.

It's also why social realism doesn't cut it.

It's all very well being slightly mystical on this blog - perhaps it's the advent of the Middle Eastern Shepherd cult festival. I was up the ladder and on the roof hanging the fairy lights when I suddenly started thinking about this poem again. That's why you've been inflicted with the above. Anyway, the lights are hung and all the bulbs work fine.

This may be the last Christmas in which Santa visits true believers in our house. Flow my tears said the twilight God. Ella reported that none of the boys in her year at school believe any more, but that "all the girls probably do." Gender thing fascinates. The "probably" thing even more so.

Next year will be pretty busy. I've been invited to be on the film jury at the Gerardmer Fantastic Film Festival, from January the 31st to February the 4th. (http://www.gerardmer-fantasticart.com/) This Film Festival is the French equivalent to the BIFF in Belgium; it's the Cannes of the Fantastic in movies in France, and I really am looking forward to being a member of the jury. I will make cogent argument for my favoured movie in that flawless French I told you about.

At the beginning of the summer I will be teaching at the Arvon Foundation in Yorkshire. Then deeper into the summer I'll be an instructor at the Clarion West workshop in Seattle. http://clarionwest.org/website/index.html After that in November it's off to Australia to be GOH at the Oz convention Conflux 4. http://www.conflux.org.au/ I've never been to Australia before. I don't care how ragged they run our cricketers, I really am looking forward to this!

But that's a year away. Time in between for plenty more writing and plenty more football. Because as my footballing room-mate - the brilliant biographer Jed Novick - says. " It's one thing losing to Haruki Murakami, but losing to a bunch of comedians is another thing altogether. " Ha !

Season's greetings.

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