Kalokeri

My forthcoming novel The Silent Land will be published by Gollancz on October 21^st, which according to my mother is my birthday, and she should know.  But the nurse recorded me as arriving three minutes after midnight on the 22^nd  instead of three minutes before.  'She was wrong.  I looked at the clock,' says Ma.  Why she didn't fix that, I just don't know.  Leaves me with the sneaking feeling I've been celebrating my birthday on the wrong date these past fifty years.  No wonder I have ambiguity in my life.

Anyway the novel will also be coming out, with the same title this time, in the US in the spring of 2011.

Focus Features in Hollywood continue to develop the movie of The Silent Land, but as is usual with these things I haven't anything to report.  Just like with the Dreamside movie in France, which has gone to full purchase but about which I know even less.  Meanwhile I'm also working on a screenplay for Do The Creepy Thing for a UK production company, so I know everything about that but, astonishingly, have little to report except to say I'm doing the script.

I've heard that some of these things do get made.  Eventually.  Possibly.

Beyond all that I have almost completed the next novel, which I reported in the Quarantine Project (an 80,000 word first draft in 40 days: see the archives if you want to know about that).  I'll deliver that to my publishers after summer.  August is to publishing what that unfinished dinner was to the Marie Celeste.  Me too.  I'll be in hibernation.  No, that's wrong, since the word comes from the French word hiver for winter.  What I mean is, it's kalokeri, meaning summer, and translated exactly from the Greek means "good-time".  And as every good Greek knows, the kaolkeri ain't for workin'.

Have a great summer!