Review, and gloomy stuff

There's a review of the Datlow/Link/Grant "Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" up at Tangent, which has nice things to say about my story "Going the Jerusalem Mile". If I don't often point you at reviews from here, it's not modesty, rather that I don't often see 'em; if people are talking about my work out there, it is beyond my fu to find them. (Of course, I choose to believe that there is in fact not so much a conspiracy as an apathy of silence; nobody cares. Sob.)

Talking of which, I have done a lot of walking in the rain today, to small effect; all it's really done is hammer into me that actually I expect to walk in the rain, to small effect. I expect, consistently, to fail. My vision of the future is and always has been of my sitting hunched in the corner of a rank bedsit, a hospital ward, maybe a prison cell, a large man utterly broken, hugging my knees and whispering "oh, dear" at intervals. Quite why I expect to be incarcerated I'm not clear, except for a general sense that my sins will find me out, either physically or otherwise; but the complete collapse of the mental framework, that construct that I call a world that I can function in, oh yes. It'll be triggered, I expect, by financial failure, a simple inability to earn a living any more; then they'll take my toys away from me, and I will just fall apart.

The constant postponing of this prognostication is as much a surprise to me as to everyone else. Its most common manifestation is that baffled anxiety with which I greet every sale: "My God, I fooled them again! How can this be? It'll never last..." Actually it always has lasted thus far, but I grow less confident with every year. I think the book trade and I are moving on divergent tracks, and I'm barely hanging on as it is; sooner or later something has to give, and it's almost certainly going to be my fingernails.

There, now. That's made you feel better, hasn't it? Sorry; I think it's the rain.