Well the big news here concerns the Hollywood deal over The Tooth Fairy. Though the option has been pending for some time now, the major development is that I get to script. The deal has been struck with Hollywood studio Radar Pictures. One of their more recent pictures was the SF movie Pitch Black. Tom Engelman and Scott Kroopf will produce.
So this will be my debut screenplay. I guess I'm about to learn that, unlike with novels where I get to be the tiny creative vortex and where >Everything Comes Through Me, Pal, And Nobody Gets In Or Out This Book Without My Say So< I'm going to have to fit in with hundreds of other creative people, who, unlike the characters in my novels might want to argue back. Plus everyone I know who has gone from a novel-writing background to writing a screenplay says it's a nightmare. I mean, I've read William Goldman and Raymond Chandler on the subject. Well, I'm rolling up the sleeves and I'm looking forward to the nightmare enormously. Watch this space as I report progress.
The initial difficulty starts with the title. Turns out some other skanky (God, I adore that word!) outfit in Hollywood is currently in post-production of a nasty film called... The Tooth Fairy. It seems it's about a Tooth Fairy who is not a sweet little lady with an acorn cup for a hat, but a lout who terrorises a boy throughout his childhood and adolescence. Well let me scratch the dermatitis on my scalp as I figure out where they got an idea like that. Anyway, this means we have to come up with an alternative title. And that, as anyone knows who has filled two sides of A4 paper with crappy suggestions for alternative cognomens for anything is another kind of nightmare. I kind of like The Banishing, but the curious lack of response from my friends in Hollywood makes me oddly prescient about my place and power in the scheme of things in this fabulous project.
Maybe they'll let me make the tea for the Assistant Chief Grip. Crikey, maybe I'd better find out what Assistant Chief Grips actually do before I make jokes about them.
Meanwhile, as in the glamorous world of Hollywood as deals are struck and I got to work on my tearful Hollywood Oscar Best Screenplay acceptance speech (Friend, Romans, this is for all the sons and daughters of humble coal miners in the English Midlands - boohoohoo - who were made to count the sacks of coal - boohoohoo - as they were delivered when worn-out Mum was busy scrubbing my Dad's stooped, coal-black shoulders - boohoohoo - in case that bastard coal merchant tried to drop one sack short which was his usual trick - boohoohoo.) Oh you get the idea, but while I'm working up my Oscar speech life goes on and my mind turns from the sparkling assembly of Hollywood talent applauding my glycerine tears to the subject of Dangerous Blue.
I'm thinking of starting a campaign against the blue coloured dye they put in children's drinks, ice-lollies and sweeties. Blue is mad. Blue is wild, and before you think I've gone mad let me say I understand your position. As you are now, once was I. You see I have this friend, a mother of two little savages like mine. One day I found her counting out Smarties and eliminating all the blue ones. She had that angry look of harassed Mothers everywhere, trying to get through a day littered with tiny unnecessary obstacles put there by doubtless male authorities just to make her day >that bit harder< you know? Naturally I gently enquired as to her apparently eccentric activity. What a mouthful of venom I received for my pains! Blue apparently was the enemy. Blue made her children, as we say affectionately in this country, wappy.
Just another woman coping with PMT I thought, in my Sensitive New Age Guy kind of way. But, dear reader, I must report I am a recent convert to the anti-Blue movement. (Women, please close your eyes as I make a brief aside to the guys - You see, the thing is guys, it isn't always about PMT!!!!) OK you can look again now. So on a recent out of season break on the >bracing< (c.f. fucking freezing) East Coast I had an insight into the shocking depravity of this hidden world when one evening my boy Joe demanded I buy a disgusting drink called a Slush Puppy. This is a kind of sugared water in a turgid - well, slush - of ice, and it comes in either a traffic-stopping Cadmium Red or in a blue of such glittering intensity you will never see it any place other than in the dewy contact lens of a Hollywood starlet. It's the kind of blue that could melt your retina. The kind that reminds you of acid trips best forgotten, or probably the way the way the sky looks the first time you ever blink at it in your life.
Joe is three years old you will recall. We were in a kind of bar where a children's entertainment of unspeakable quality was being staged. (Is there anybody here from Yorkshire etc etc.) Meanwhile Joe glugged happily from his cup of Blue. Two minutes later he was up on the dance floor flinging himself about with the hopeless lack of co-ordination he must have inherited from me. Then he followed a girl at least two years his senior around the dance floor, trying to kiss her, not even taking no for an answer when she turned her back on him for the third time. Finally he gave up on her and got into a punch-up with another boy. Cheered by this little scrap there was a bout of further energetic dancing, punctuated by him trying to climb on the stage while shouting insults at the performers. As a reasonable parent I decided it was time to put my foot down with a firm hand, so to speak. Not at all wanting to be picked up he took a swing at me, said something revolting and promptly fell asleep in my arms.
A quarter-pint of the stuff. That's all he'd had. I had to sniff it to make sure it hadn't been laced with Irish Pochine. He woke twenty minutes later, smacking his lips and looking for more of the wretched Blue. He even offered me a sip of this dangerous stuff from his paper cup. "No thanks son," I said, "I've got enough problems of my own."
Just say no, Joe.
New York meanwhile was great fun to visit and thank you to those who came to the book reading and signing, and indeed to Daryl Mattson at Borders who organised it. While in New York I had a gorgeous sushi lunch with my editor George Lucas (remember the challenge is not to think Star Wars - ack! failed again!) George is about to become father to his second child and wanted to know if it was much more difficult than just having the one. Well, I guffawed into my sashimi at that. Look, I explained, it's really tricky but it gets easier after a while. He brightened and asked how long a while might be. Markedly easier after eighteen months, I offered. George wilted visibly and stared into his Miso soup like a man contemplating sewing mailbags in a high-walled place.
I did promise to report, from New York, any behaviour which though probably normal to your average souped up New Yorker, may be deemed a tad irrational to the untutored visitor from lesser-known pockets of the UK. It was while strolling through sunnily-aspected Central Park with a friend that your possibly standard-or-garden NY incident occurred. I noticed a man with an over-worked physique and an absurdly small T-shirt (no doubt to advertise said physique). He was sitting on a park bench and I saw him clock me as I approached. Next to him on the bench was a banana, about which I had reason to be nervous. As we drew abreast he snatched up his banana and proceeded to treat it like a cellphone, berating someone called Frankie for bothering his mother.
I know what you're thinking: so what, it's just your average Central Park lunatic with a banana. But I resist that. Something stranger was going on. I think what we had here was a Central Park lunatic >pretending< to be a Central Park lunatic. A Post-modernist chappie you might say. It was all so staged and theatrical that I began to wonder if maybe he had a grant or commission from the NY Arts Council, to commit nine irrational acts per day in the environs of Central Park just so that tourists like me might not be disappointed.
So anyway, as I rattle between the outlandishness of Blue in Great Yarmouth and the dislocations of Central Park I can report that my agent Chris Lotts finalised a deal with Simon and Schuster to take The Facts of Life and the next one.
Other stuff: Gollancz have republished The Tooth Fairy in a much more attractive format than the original UK edition. My stories Black Dust, First Catch Your Demon and Pinkland have all wormed their way into Years Best Of anthologies. Meanwhile the next novel (after The Facts of Life) is already broiling in the over-heated back-brain. In fact I've started and of course it's the usual inchoate mess. Ask me what it's about and I'll make abusive calls to your mother on my banana.
