Vita Brevis

Autumn has once again rolled out the carpet of leaves before I was ready and the jam is bottled and there is an edge to the wind.  I'm so bored with saying, "Where has the time gone" or "Tempis Fugit" (bit of Latin just to enrage the savages at home) so I've taken to short-handing it.  I just say: Sandy Denny.  She sang that haunting and beautiful song "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?"   I might shorten my remarks even further, given the brevity of life.  I might just say: Sandy.  At least you - you - will know what I'm on about.

This has become a habit in our household.  We also say Janet Roe.  When Ella was a baby we had a Health Visitor and when we asked her anything about babies or other darkly maternal subjects she would just say "Who knows?"   It might be: "Should the baby's puke look that colour?"  Or "Does that choking sound it's making right now indicate a problem?"  "Who knows?"  So now we say Janet Roe.  Will the economy collapse?  Is there a God?  Janet Roe.

We've got several of these.  I can't go into them all.

Since my last update there have been conventions and workshops in Stockholm, Seattle and San Jose and football and workshops in Budapest, Bolton and Birmingham.  Okay, you got me, there was nothing in Bolton but time does march on and it's no surrender.  Joe is in his last year of primary school.  I can't believe it.  The last of his milk teeth gone.  There's an arrow to the heart.   He started the new term with a fresh teacher called Mr Sultana and I've been further enraging him (in addition to the bits of Latin) by saying, rather too frequently, 'Well, let's hope she's raisin' the current standards.'

It's okay.  You're supposed to hate your father.  That's what fathers are for.

Hats off to Leslie Howell who organised my stay in Seattle plus workshop and reading.  I was lucky to have a lovely group for my full-day workshop and one of the writing exercises inexplicably made one of the participants weep silently, but I will say that her pen kept moving.  She wouldn't tell me why.  I don't blame her.  My reading in Seattle was scheduled at the same time as that of my old chum Jonathan Lethem, which was a drag cos I'd rather have listened to him than to myself.  But at least I caught up with him and Marc Laidlaw for a drink across town before our respective events.

In San Francisco I got to go on a Dash Hammet tour of the city led by the legendary guide Don Herron.  Dressed in a long mac and a fedora Herron took us to all the hotspots, and late in the tour pulled out a sucker-gun and shot me in the chest. I smiled manfully. I also got to see some old friends associated with Borderlands Bookstore and catch up with the fab Zinnia who was in my writing class in Nottingham but who know lives in considerable luxury on the left-hand coast.

If you can't stand the sound of intemperate, slightly drunken bragging, you'd better log off now, because that's what you're in for over the course of the next couple of paragraphs. After twenty years in the word mines, I must say that 2009 has earned itself a brass plaque.  In the virtual world at least, where it will never need polishing.  Which means posted here.

Back in the spring I won an O Henry award for my short story An Ordinary Soldier Of The Queen.  Then in September Memoirs Of A Master Forger won the British Fantasy Award for best novel (Titled How To Make Friends With Demons in the US).   In October I found out that my non-fiction book Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular had made it to the short-list of the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award.  Around that time I delivered my latest novel (a Graham Joyce book not a William Heaney one) called The Silent Land to my agents in the UK and the US, with the result that the film rights were bought by a Hollywood film studio.

There are extraordinary contours in a writing career.  I can't imagine it getting better than this, so please forgive me if while riding the dragon's back I'm jiggling the bells.

At a lull in the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose I found myself visiting the Rosicrucian Temple, a stunning and beautiful oasis of calm in silicone valley.  I was in the company of two great Australian writers Deb Biancotti and Cat Sparks, and we arrived just in time to be invited to join a ritual going on at the temple.  During this ritual we were invited to say Om a few times and to heal the world, which we did.  I haven't healed the world before but it was nice thing to do and I felt moderately pleased with myself.  Because Cat and Deb are Australians they went and bought a spirit-entity back from the temple, which then caused havoc at the convention, so that unpicked things a bit.  But there. That's Australians for you.

Then after all this good stuff a dear friend and great writer Rob Holdstock died, after contracting the E. Coli virus. Rob, as he was to everyone who called him a friend, was one of the first writers I ever met.  Oh I'd listened - as a member of an audience - to several writers speak, read or pontificate about writing, but he was the first writer with whom I ever rubbed up against a bar.  That was twenty years ago. I'd just had my first novel accepted for publication and I'd been encouraged by my editor to attend something she called a convention.  'You'll like it,' she said.

I went to the convention because I was looking for tips and cues from more experienced people: tips about being a writer.  Most of the writers I'd encountered were of the literary ilk: funny hats and permanent expressions etched on their faces of anger or constipation or both.  I suspected them of deep seriousness and I didn't want to be like them, so it was a giant relief to meet Rob Holdstock.  It was like being given permission to breathe normally.

He suggested that writing is the most fun thing you can do in life without laughing, and even then you should laugh quite often.

He was an established figure on the scene already, a World Fantasy Award winner for the extraordinary Mythago Wood.  I hadn't read it.  From the moment I was introduced to him he took an immediate interest in my work.  He asked me what I was writing about and he said he wanted to read my forthcoming book.  He had a very charming manner and I thought he was just being nice.  But over the years he kept up with my books, and I with his.

And the fact is he was like that with everyone.    He liked people, and he listened, and he generously made time for them.

I read Mythago Wood almost in a single sitting.  It hadn't occurred to me that people were producing work of this nature.  This was a species of Fantasy that was an exploration of the psyche, in a genre that was and still is overstocked with sub-Tolkien heroes thrashing around on horseback looking for jewel-encrusted chalices.  The Fantasy Rob Holdstock created was radically different: he was busy drawing a map of the mind.  I immediately read more of his work and took his books as a statement of permission that the genre was wide enough to go anywhere you wanted.

But apart from all that, from my first meeting he made me feel included in the genre family: bought me a drink, introduced me to one or two people and we stood at the bar laughing about goodness knows what.  Over the years we became good friends.  One time when he was visiting with Sarah, we tramped over the ancient earthworks of Leicestershire and ended up having lunch and drinking Real Ale in a country pub.  Back at my house he kicked off his shoes, sprawled on the sofa and closed his eyes.  Then he opened one eye and looked back at me.  'My sofa,' he said.

He had an enormous capacity and talent for friendship and he immediately made everyone he met feel valued, respected and included.  He loved company, food, drink and laughter.  He could light up a room just by walking into it.  We all feel diminished when someone we love dies.  The genre is diminished, too.  But we have his books, and he is everywhere in his books.

This fleeting life.  We keep being reminded but we keep conspiring to forget, don't we?  Have a truly celebratory Christmas with the ones you love.