Just got back from the British Fantasycon in Birmingham. Great convention, good company, lots of laughs, too many drinks. At 2 am I looked around the table at the fabulously talented and creative people sitting around me, and I thought that the quality of the conversation just doesn't get better than this, swinging as it did from analytical genre-based discourse to hilarious and raucous gossip about other people. All at volume. It was the best of all possible worlds. Then at 4.30 am I looked at the same crowd of people and all I could see was wasted drunks rambling incoherently about Fred Flintstone. Time for bed.
On the Sunday I was up for two awards. Indigo in the best novel category and Leningrad Nights in the short fiction box. At the awards banquet I sat between Pete Crowther and Tim Lebbon, (crucified between two thorns, as they say in all good prose) both of who pulled in awards, Pete for his collection Lonesome Roads and Tim for his story White. I got the award for Indigo. It was a happy table. I was particularly pleased for Pete, because I'd written the introduction to his collection; and though Tim knocked Leningrad Nights off the perch, I have to say he thoroughly deserved to carry off the award with a great story.
Smoking Poppy, my new novel, is in the can and at the publishers both in the UK and in the US. Orion in the UK is looking for publication September 2001. I don't know if Simon & Schuster will race 'em to get it out - it's slightly more of an issue these days with net marketing. Anyway, all I care about
right now is that it's done and I feel good about it.
I've also turned in a new short story, Black Dust, to Subterranean Press. Set in a milieu similar to that of The Tooth Fairy, Black Dust will come out as a chapbook publication along with a reprint of an older story, The Apprentice. Meanwhile I'm roughing out a further short story for Bill Sheehan and Bill Schafer. Bills, a brace of. It's for an anthology inspired by the artwork of JK Potter. I'm working on a story tricked up by an image of a half-naked Poppy Z Brite. The bit that's not half-naked, the lower half, is all scorpion. Not that it's at all unusual for a scorpion to be nude. I wonder if JK Potter has the inverse image lying around somewhere. God knows what's going to come out of this.
Contract with Trimark Pictures on the film option for Dark Sister is now signed and sealed. I like the job they did with Cube.
I've confirmed my booking for the World Fantasy Convention. So barring an earthquake or a fuel shortage, I'll be in Corpus Christi in October. My American chum Peter Owen has been coaching me to drawl "Giddyup Cowboy" in a voice, which I will describe as reedy and undignified, though I've been resisting for obvious reasons. I can't see that it would come in useful in Corpus Christi. I don't expect to see cowboys at a Fantasy convention, but then I'm often surprised by what I find in America.
