Step aboard the magic bus…
Confirmation today from the publisher that copies of Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus start shipping by the end of this very week.
For anyone who has missed previous posts about it, it contains my story Sovereign. I honestly think it’s the sort of story that, when I first started writing, I imagined would flow freely and easily. After two decades of discovering how naïve that was, I did at last write the sort of story I wanted to write. The whole experience was a lot harder – and a lot colder – than I expected but is logged in all its pettiness here. Could it be better? Of course. Every writer looks at a piece once it’s been frozen in print and comes up with a hundred tiny tweaks that they would have made if only they’d seen them earlier.
You can order the collection via the publisher’s website, and it contains many other fabulous stories such as Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta. ¡Ay, Carmela! Hopefully at some point over the summer I’ll detail the references in Sovereign – every name has a meaning in it.
29 May 2009 at 5:48 pm
It’s a very beautiful story Mags. Would it make you blush too much if I remind you of my fellow editor’s comparison of your writing in it to Susan Cooper?
30 May 2009 at 10:46 am
It still amazes me me, that comparision. Cooper – along with Alan Garner – is one of my favourite writers. She produced novels that hummed with resonance. They wrote very British fantasy, rooted in the real world of emotional truth but exploring the rich fantasies of the past. There’s some horrific behaviour by the adults in ‘The Grey King’, for example.
Now, obviously, I think of them as 70s books, but I can remember the thrill of realising that the Drew family arrived in Cornwall at the start of ‘Over Sea, Under Stone’ on a diesel train instead of a steam one and thus recognising it as my world.