December, 2004

Oh, wear flour in your hair

Well San Francisco was a blast. But before I got there I attended the World Fantasy Convention in Tempe, Arizona. That was Fun with a capital FFFfff. Especially to find I was programmed to give a reading at 9.30 pm on the evening of my arrival, while my body was still free-floating on GMT. That meant that it was actually 5.30 am. Thus I was experiencing auditory hallucinations as denied dreams start to hammer on the membranous wall, wanting to get out. After several gins, too. (Gin? Gin??? What started that off? Dunno. Tried one. Liked it. Carried on for the week.) Anyway, the challenge was not to fall asleep half-way through my own reading, and though unseen and impish fingers dragged at my cheeks and pinched my lips to produce the occasional skidding, slaloming, slurring syllable: "No, he shed, a thin shimile purshing hish devilish tongue." Sounded like Sean Connery reading from Finnegan's Wake with a mouthful of aniseed balls. I pretty much got to The End without actually dropping clean through the fourth level of consciousness.

Then of course I retired for the evening. Ha! Just kidding, fat chance, etc. Stayed up until 3am which was now really 1.00 pm the following afternoon. Which was folly in any chronologically ordered world, but I seemed to find one of those theoretical space-time wormholes to crawl through, enabling me to study the social effects of my own sleep deprivation. And even though I was pretty sober I heard myself asking the goodly Lou Anders, Editorial Director of Pyr, if he thought that "mesh wash a parrat ob true gewinsh." I took the raised-eyebrow-and-tilting-of-the-shaved-head response to this fascinating linguistic compression to be final proof of the non-existence of time-space wormholes. Time for bed, said Zebidee. Really this time.

Lou's going to be a Dad. Way to go, Lou!

Awake, and let me tell you have to be when Sharyn November is around - I met with Sharyn, editor at Viking Books and lots more beside and I let her cajole, seduce, flatter, bully and twist my arm into letting her publish my YA novel TWOC. Taking Without Owner's Consent. It was a fine meeting. I sat there potty-faced, making out like I might consider it, when the fact is who wouldn't want Sharyn November to publish their book?! Sharyn has read everything. She claims to be able to read a thousand words a minute and I don't doubt it for a nano-second. She's a spitfire enthusiast and a wonderful editor and I'm thrilled she's going to be publishing TWOC.

Later on I did a panel with Kij Johnson, Ruth Nestvold, and Stephen R. Donaldson. It was a riot, brilliantly steered by immoderator Jay Lake. It was about something to do with books. But it was good.

I'd fallen asleep and was dreaming I was back on that panel when the plane touched down in San Francisco. Now this is a city I've long wanted to visit, because when I was a kid, San Francisco ruined my life. While I was growing up in the British industrial midlands there was this weird cultural earthquake and its epicentre was faraway San Francisco. Since I'm always just a beat behind hip, I was still clinging to the burned out embers of the hippie movement, only dimly aware of the punk explosion in London. (Well, let's get this straight: me and the kids I hung round with were all full-on for the promise of drugs, free sex and rock 'n' roll but we didn't never wear no pesky stupid flowers in our hair no never). But there certainly was a fascination with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and with Jefferson Airplane & The Grateful Dead, and with the Berkley campus politics. Plus there was all the antecedent Beat literature to get into if you could get it together to take a joint out of your mouth long enough to read a book.

So it was with a sense of well - can you have vicarious nostalgia? - that I descended on SF, and what a >groovy< trip it turned out to be. Actually it was a people trip. I hooked up with so many folk I wanted to see that I wore myself out running round and having a great time. Yeh, beautiful people! Far out!

It all started when Maddy, a striking broken-winged ballerina and mediaevalist scholar, collected me at the airport . Cary, who has a great laugh, you loaned me your phone for the week! Bob Duskis, who runs the amazing Six Degrees world music record company (http://www.sixdegreesrecords.com/) took me for a great dinner and showed me round. Bob, the Coying Drolma/Steve Tibbetts CD is playing right now. Cool!

More groovy people. Film-maker Christopher Beaver drove me round the Haight-Ashbury and Panhandle districts looking for acid casualties. We saw 'em. Chris, I'm wearing my Haight Ashbury Peace & Love t-shirt as I type this. Chloe, the Zam-Zam bar unleashed more stories than you could have guessed! Beth Lisick I finished your book on the plane: send more! Kit Duane, who included me in one of her anthologies, I won't tell anyone why your son refused to meet me in Castro!

But one of the highlights of the trip was to meet, gosh yes! For it was SHE! My webmistress, who must be obeyed! Brig Eaton, the very hidden power who conjures these glittering pages before your eyes! After four years of manipulating my irregularly-updated ramblings (okay, new year's resolution coming on) I finally got to meet her! And get this - she wasn't who she should have been! Brig doesn't give much away about herself and I'd invented a character in my mind who bore very little resemblance to the web-goddess who turned up to have lunch with me. There she was, six months pregnant and bursting with wonderful last-trimester hormones. (Brig's going to be a Mum, way to go Brig!) Okay, Brig is quite a retiring person, so she may or not paste up a picture of both of us >here<. But if you see no link, don't blame me and just take my word for it that she is a beautiful and sexy adventuress with sensational tattoos. And the biggest revelation of all? She's a Brit!! Moved to the US when she was a kid.

I also got to share some great Japanese food with Jeremy Lassen, my groovy Nightshade publisher who is based in SF. Then Rick Kleffel conducted an audio-taped interview with me at the radio station. You can read Rick's review of the forthcoming The Limits Of Enchantment, and see images of both the UK and US covers at: (http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2004/joyce-limits_enchantment.htm). Rick has also posted the interview online. If you want to hear me talking about the new novel - and about previous ones, cos it's quite an in-depth interview - you can get the Real Audio link at: (http://trashotron.com/agony).

But absolute chops-busting thanks for extreme hospitality goes to Alan Beatts (hell, after four years he asked me if I wouldn't mind not calling him Al) and Jude Feldman at Borderlands Bookstore, who not only set up a fantastic reading at surely one of the finest bookstores in the world, but also accommodated me with my own apartment for the week. And drove me round endlessly. And showed me the sights. Jude in particular showed me the North Beach bars favoured by Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas and the famous City Lights bookstore. You can see a picture of me giving Jude a hug as she offers the camera a smile of toleration at (http://www.borderlands-books.com/photos/pages/Jude_and_Graham.htm) But City Lights actually stocked my books, which was wonderful (I know, I know: how sad & easy I am). Who cares, this was City Lights. It could have been Camelot, and is almost as fine a bookstore as Borderlands. But Alan, you are a pistol, as you fun American says. Big thanks, too, to everyone who came along to make the reading such a fun and pleasurable thing to do.

San Francsico. All I can say to you is: Tony Whatsisname. Thingy. Bennett. Yeh.

Other stuff. The Guardian published my account of writing The Facts Of Life in their paperback writer column. You can read it here: (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1343765,00.html)

Meanwhile Tooth Fairy the movie. Things may be in the saddle. Watch this space!

Happy Christmas, happy holidays

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