Sooo…. the UK and Commonwealth (except Canada) paperback of The Gone-Away World comes out in a month. It is nifty, shiny, special, gorgeous, black and red, and sexy. While it will not:
- make you tea
- make Theo Fennell create purely for you a set of diamond and ruby vampire dentures with a tungsten-kevlar woven substructure and built-in poison reservoir
… nor yet alas:
- make you irresistible to Hollywood crumpet
… nor even:
- unlock the hidden mysteries of the fighting arts of Ancient Mu
… it is all the same an important, even epochal moment. In the sense that it occurs during an epoch and is really important to me.
The thing is, this is a cold, cold winter. Not merely in the obvious sense that I just saw a yeti outside using a radioactive sheep as a woolly hat, but in the sense that we’re all feeling more than slightly chilled by the fact that the entire world appears to be fiscally doomed. Thus, it occurs to me to do something other than be photographed in front of a wall full of books wearing a chequered shirt.
Voilà.
I want, apart from anything else, to wake everyone’s sense of fun from hibernation, get you all out of bed. Unless bed is where you’re having fun, which I grant is not impossible.
I wondered if I should go and learn to drive a tank or something equally Gonzo-ish, or enlist the help of some of my genuine martial-arts mates to get some action shots of me getting my backside kicked. (Again.) Although those always look waaaaay less cool than one hopes they will. There’s an art to photographing action and martial arts, and much of it is in the lighting, and it’s hard. Very hard.
The point is, you lot are wise. You are monsterclever and überslick. You have the fu of selling and imagemaking buried like rivers of molten hawt in your Jungian collective headspace. You can, if you put your heads together, suggest something which is in the mood of the book, which captures it a bit, in a way which I’m not necessarily going to – one reason for that being that I’m working on a completely different story now. So I would really really welcome your most thoughtful, deranged, outlandish, practical notions. You can email them or, ideally, attach them as comments on this post.
Please try very hard to think of something which will not cause me to get arrested or die. (Mike, I’m talking to you in particular there.)
