Life goes on

No matter how sorrow-struck I'm at the moment, life goes on. Here are some things I'm working on or have finished.

I've been writing entries for the Mika Waltari book in a fury and still have some more books to read and couple of his unpublished plays. I should be writing about him here also, since I know he's had lots of international readers - and I will, you know, but it might take a little time.

At the moment I'm editing a collection of Finnish Western short stories, albeit this is only a collection of two writers, namely Joni Skiftesvik and Totti Karpela, both of whom are pretty well-known writers in here. Skiftesvik has been writing realistic mainstream fiction for 25 years now and Karpela has written three hardboiled crime novels and some other books in the last 30 years or so. Both dabbled in Westerns in the start of their careers, Karpela already in the early 1960s.

I've also been writing a lengthy introduction to the book, since there's no comprehensive history of the Finnish Western fiction, even though there's been plenty of it (just like there have been lots of European Westerns starting from de Chateaubriand's Atala (1802) and Mayne Reid and others and ending up in Tex Willer and spaghetti Westerns). You might want to check my earlier article on the subject in English on Pulprack.

I've forgotten to mention that I managed to get a short story in Usva, a web-based Finnish speculative fiction magazine. It's one of my more experimental stories, this time based really, really loosely on the story of Puss in boots (Saapasjalkakissa in Finnish, if the English phrase is not familiar to all). Check (and the other stories at Usva) it out here.

And today the mail man brought us our latest name book - it's an updated edition of Eemu, Ukri, Amelie which came out in 2005 (I think). We updated this and wrote a little under 200 new entries. Check it out at the publisher's website.