Sale! In translation! In Mexican!

Adriana says it was seven years ago; if you'd asked me, I'd have guessed it was longer, but my sense of time is irrevocably screwed*, so I depend on other people's.

Anyway: long and long ago, Adriana asked if she could translate my story "Going the Jerusalem Mile" into Spanish and include it in an anthology to be published in Mexico. Why yes, I said, that would be fine.

And time passed, and obstacles occurred, and funding vanished; but Adriana is nothing if not persistent, and now it's a done deal. Sombra del árbol de la noche: Nueva narrativa británica de fantasmas y portentos will be published by Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de Mexico, and distributed for free at a book fair in Mexico City and through a government programme. And it will contain my story. I couldn't be more pleased.


*It is five years and seven months since my life changed; it seems much less than that. Conversely, everything that happened before that seems much, much further away.

Lammy!

Hey, people, here's a thing. I just won a Lambda Award for my collection Bitter Waters. Ain't that cool?

Lammy, redux (the more considered post)

I couldn't actually fly to New York for the Lambda ceremony, on the off-chance that I'd win*. (Actually, I was tolerably certain that Max Gladstone would win; he's the guy getting the buzz on my social media, and I did a gig with him in SF and his book is outstandingly good. Also, it was his tweet that alerted me that I had won instead, which is kinda cool.) Which being true, the Lammy admin is oddly restrictive: I couldn't ask someone else to accept the award for me, and I couldn't send in an acceptance note to be read in my absence.

Which-all being true, here is the speech I would've given if I'd been there, kept down to the one minute they ask for:

The real reasons I'm getting this award tonight are Steve Berman, my publisher at Lethe Press, who waited literally years for me to get around to sorting out the stories for this collection; and m'wife Karen, who finally sorted out the stories for this collection when it became abundantly clear that I was never ever going to get around to it; and our genius cover artist Elizabeth Leggett, who produced a piece more evocative than it is lovely, more lovely than it is powerful, more powerful than I had any right to hope. Properly, they each get a quarter of this; shamefully, I am keeping the whole thing for myself. (Well, except that I do live with one of the above, so she gets to keep the whole thing too.)

*bows, waltzes off to rapturous applause*

And in case you've forgotten, here is that cover:



and here's what the Lambda reviewer said about the book inside.


*I have long, long experience of coming second, never being quite good enough. Ian Rankin and I used to have an agreement, back when I was a crime writer, whereby whenever we were on a shortlist together, he'd win. We stuck to that for years.

Jesus fuckin' wept

I am playing a game of Scrabble, online; and I have just been told that "precision" is not a valid word. What the fuck?