News on my fiction

As everyone reading these knows, I'm also a wanna-be fiction writer. Today there was some stuff on my fiction, so here's an update:

Tapani didn't want my story for the anthology he's editing. (At first the ideas of revenge kept crawling in my head, but then I remembered that I've rejected a story he was offering to Isku.) I was thinking that maybe I'll rewrite the story, but then again I think there's no use - unless I want another opinion from Tapani.

I noticed that a deadline for a SF/fantasy contest was almost at hand and hurried to make some revisions for my story I was going to send them. Today I sent it, but only after printing the story twice and making last-minute corrections. Fuck! I thought I could send a polished story for the contest.

I also thought about another story for a pulpy SF fanzine we are going to edit for the Helsinki university SF club with Jukkahoo. We just heard it should come out this year! Eegah!

But now I must hurry to the train station: my five minutes in Tampere is approaching.

The world's only Cthulhu sand pail

We found this with Elina couple weeks back from the Hämeenlinna recycling center. I think it's supposed to look like an octopus, but I also fear that the Ancient Gods have their hands in this. The designer at the toy factory must be a worshipper, sneaking this in the production line. Should I be afraid of the consequences of having bought this one and brought it to our home..?

An imaginary cover for my Joe Novak novel

On my death bed, I toddled with Photoshop and Pagemaker and made a cover for The Dostoyevsky Reel, the Joe Novak P.I. novel I've written. I've been toying with the idea of putting up a small press publishing house and making this one of the first books in the line. I can't tell if that's pathetic or not, but it wouldn't be technically a self-publication, would it? (Other books would of course be new hardboiled and noir from the US and UK, with some classics and Finnish reprints thrown in.) The publishing house has already a name, Blood Hound Press (and it has a logo, too; you can see it in the right corner, in Finnish, that is: Verikoirakirjat).

I'm not much of an AD, but I kinda like this. It's supposed to be a very small paperback and printed on cheap paper (although with digital printing you can't really use cheap pulpy paper, but some recycled paper might resemble what I'm after, but we'll see). And it *is* supposed to be black & white.

Blood Hound Press *has* a book coming out next Fall, even though I wouldn't be legitimately putting the house up. I'm publishing a small booklet with three or four old crime stories by veteran Robert Silverberg, under the title See You In Hell. I found those stories in Seikkailujen Maailma and Bob gave me a permission to put them out. The stories are pretty grim early sixties noir, very straight-forward and violent. I don't think any of Silverberg's crime stories have ever been reprinted. I think some of them should merit being reprinted in English.

I'm oozing

Now the fucking scar from the appendix removal is oozing. Some green lime coming out of it. I hate this! I just hate this. It's not my idea of fun to be a walking monster. (I do have the medication.)

***

Read Jon A. Jackson's The Diehard the other day. My first Jackson. Very good, even though the action drags a bit just before the climax. The climax itself was very well written and gripping. Now I'm reading Jason Starr's Hard Feelings. It has the basic ingredients of the typical Starr nightmare about the anonymoys city dwellers. Does anyone else write about the misery of the white-collar folk? Does Jeffrey Eugenides write about them? Does William Kennedy? Carol Shields? Starr should be given more due for being one of the most realistic writers of his generation.

And how come neither of these guys is in Finnish?

***

My trip to Helsinki: not much. I talked about White Heat for twenty minutes to people who didn't seem very interested. I was told that this happens in the book store meetings very often and I don't have to pay any attention to it. (I signed two books.) Well, I got a free dinner (which wasn't very good, though). On Tuesday, I'm going to Tampere to talk about the book for five minutes and I was promised that this time they would listen. They'd better, or else...

On sick leave

It's actually quite a luxury to be on sick leave. I haven't read so much in weeks or even months. I even have time to watch movies!

What I've read: I read Kari Nenonen's other books under his own name, the SF novel Messias (1989) and the short story collection Noitarovio (1989). Both showed considerable talent that Nenonen seems to have not taken care of. Messias is a very good thriller up to the middle, then it starts to drag. In the end it almost stops. I heard from a reliable source that Nenonen wrote the first part and got his money and fled somewhere to spend the dough. When he came back, the publisher demanded Nenonen finish the novel. He did it in a hurry - and it shows. One of the characters has suddenly a new name and there are many themes that aren't dealt with at all. Someone could rewrite the whole thing, take out the stupid SF themes, and voila! you have a new Da Vinci Code in your hands! (If some late-comer wants to know what I thought of Brown's book, check it here.)

Noitarovio is much better and I hope Nenonen would've written more short stories than he apparently did. He did nothing for the Finnish SF fanzines, for example (unless you want to count an erotic story in a one-off mag). He seems to have had a knack for being able to find outrageous horror in the midst of Finnish landscape. His two SF stories in the collection are not much, though.

I also read two stories from a new collection, The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, who seem to pull these out of their sleeves like other people eat bread. I read Dr. Sweetkill (1965) by John Jakes and a story by Edward D. Hoch (forgot the title, sorry, but it was from the same year accidentally). Both were good spy stories. Jakes's was full of action and hardboiled sentiment, Hoch's (with one of his series characters, Captain Leopold) was pretty nice one about a retired Eastern bloc spy living in New York. Very easy-going and readable, while Jakes was so intense you had to fight hard to see what's coming.

If these stories were written now, they would've been blown up to 500-page thrillers with lots of boring nonsense about relationships between the hero and his mother and his and his wife's and ex-wife's hobbies, which include gardening, coffee-making and vintage cars. Both stories had originally appeared in magazines - Jakes's in Intrigue - and they couldn't be published today as such, unless in an anthology.

I also read Osmo Ilmari's SF novel, Siriuksen Lähettiläs/The Sirius Ambassador (from 1958 or so). It was a fast-moving story, but Ilmari's satire is heavy. In all of his SF novels (I've yet to read only one) there's a strong anti-Communist sentiment, which for some reason or another I always find a bit anti-intellectual, even though Ilmari was surely earnest and he doesn't strike as low as some other writers. Ilmari's best SF novel, with satire and adventure in balance, is Planeetta Logos that is also reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian and Venutian novels. Maybe I'll put some covers of his novels here in some time.

What I've watched: I started to watch Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur which I hadn't seen earlier (!). It's a very strong, very bleak and noirish Western with James Stewart acting like a homicidal maniac all the time, even though he's supposed to be a hero. For some reason, I find Mann much more interesting Western director than, say, John Ford, who might be a great lyricist, but, man, who needs great lyrics when you got Stewart shouting at Robert Ryan with a gun in his hand?

For several reasons, I haven't yet watched the whole film, but last night there was Summer of Sam by Spike Lee on the telly. Very interesting, but a bit uncoherent and too sprawling. Lee was stepping on Martin Scorsese's lot in this, which is no surprise since it was written and produced by Michael Imperioli with whom Scorsese worked in GoodFellas.

Now, is that it? I thought I'd seen more films. This hasn't been only holiday for me, though. I've read some stories that have been sent to be published in Isku (the crime fiction mag I publish and edit, for those who don't know) and sent comments on them to the writers. It's something I don't seem to find the time for otherwise - it's good to be sick!

I'll have to go rest now, since I have work to do later tonight: after 2 p.m. there will be an interviewer to talk about Western fiction and after that I'm going to Helsinki to talk about White Heat. We'll see what comes out of that. Maybe I'll collapse and die somewhere between Karjaa and Salo, but at least I did what I had to do, dammit!

Just listen to this

A great, haunting, beatiful tune from the Finnish band Paavoharju:

http://www.fonal.com/audio/paavoharju_yha_hamaraa/paavoharju_valo_tihkuu.mp3

Thanks to pHinn for pointing this out!

***

And thanks everyone for kind words about my appendix! (Pun intended.) (I was actually thinking if they would've kept the removed thing in the box for me, if I'd asked.)

Appendix

In my home town, Pori, there was a punk rock band in the early eighties called Appendix. Their hit album was called Money Is Not My Currency.

Now the band's name plays in my head, because I went to hospital late last Friday having felt severe pain in my stomach for almost 24 hours. They removed my appendix and I spent two days in the hospital. The first day went almost by sleeping, but in the afternoon I was able to read and I almost finished the Finnish horror/paperback writer Kari Nenonen's late hardback, Ken kuolleita kutsuu/Who Calles Upon the Dead (1991) which was quite good, even with some implausibility and occasional bad writing.

Now there's a scar in my belly. I move rather slowly and can't really lift Kauto up. It was a small operation and there seems to be no after-effects, but I still got scared when I first heard from the doctor that it might be the appendix that's causing the problem and if spread wide, it might kill you. I burst out crying waiting for the results of the blood test. They showed nada at first, but then the pain got worse and I got the fever and I was sent to the hospital and other tests were done. It was a big relief when the operation began - I got to fall asleep decently after trying to sip all through the day.

The other guys in the hospital room were a scary bunch. One hadn't eaten for a week because of an infection in his stomach somewhere and he was belching all the time, other was yellow all over for problems in his liver, one had a cancer and mumbled something to himself all the time (he tried to get out of the bed late last night saying he's going to deliver the post). I couldn't help thinking: what am I doing here in the midst of this death?

***

When I came back and read the e-mails, I noticed that Dennis Lynds AKA Michael Collins AKA William Arden AKA many other names is dead. He was a great writer. I was going to interview him and it was already settled, but I never found the time. Now the opportunity is gone forever. He was a guest of the month in the Rara-Avis e-mail group only some months ago and wrote long, eloquent essays about his writing and the state of publishing and writing. I hear that he lived long enough to finish proof-reading his Slot-Machine Kelly collection that's coming from Crippen & Landru.

Pics from Tampere and Nokia

I've been having a holiday of sorts and been largely with Kauto, so that Elina could start her own work going on after her nine-months maternity leave (and two months of self-employed unemployment). We are going to start both work very hard next week or week after that and watch Kauto at turns (I get the 0800-1200 turn for work and Elina the 1300-1700 for her work, 1200-1300 is naturally for lunch and taking a shower).

So I thought I'd only post some pictures taken from the trip, instead of writing a full travelogue. Nothing very interesting really happened. Except that I found the books I was talking about earlier - The Dog of the South by Charles Portis and the fishing book by Martin M. Goldsmith. Must post the covers here, too. But here goes.

Kauto at Nokia

Kauto examining his own hands at my dad's place. This is one of his most typical expressions.

Art

Too much cake, eh? This is from my father's place. They still had some old birthday cake left from the week earlier. I experimented with the camera. I rather like this myself.

The Fantastic Four

Kauto, Elina, Ottilia and my dad in Särkänniemi. This seems to be a bit blurred, too. Damn, when do I learn to take photos?

Kauto in Särkänniemi

Kauto and me riding a carousel. (The pic is taken by me.) Kauto didn't like the things in the entertainment park and he tried always to get away from the devices, at one time with almost risking his own life.
(Sorry, the pic seems to be upside down again. Or sideways. Damn, what's the word?)

Ottilia and me in the bus. The pic is a bit blurred.

Pics from Tampere

I took some "art" photos from the bus that we used to get to Särkänniemi, the entertainment park. Here's the first one. It's Ottilia in the pic.

Wise, wise men

My friend Tosikko said today (in Finnish) that after reading several blogs, she felt that everyone was very wise and on the meta level. She was being ironical, of course, but I got to thinking that there's no real need to be wise while you're keeping a blog.

I keep remembering what Roland Barthes said after reading Henri Amiel's diary: the supposedly wise things where Amiel was trying to philosophize were not interesting in the least, but when he wrote about weather, he suddenly became interesting. This is my point of view exactly: philosophy is boring (especially in blogs), but telling about what happens in the world, be it small or big, is interesting. (I must admit to having philosophized here every now and then, but God forbid I won't do it on a regular basis. Or even a fairly semi-regular basis, as they say in Twin Peaks.)

This has nothing to do with pHinn's great blog here.

This one is for Sauli

Here's a pic of my sister's legs and Kauto attacking her. He doesn't yet know how to behave and the animal instincts arise.

Alvar Aalto pics

Here are some pics we took in our Alvar Aalto trip. This one is taken by Elina - it's Kauto and me by the lake near the Muuratsalo experimental house.

Graphic experiments with different kinds of tiles and bricks in the Muuratsalo experimental house. I like red bricks very much and would like to live in a house made of them. The texture is warm and very alive.

The smoke sauna of the Muuratsalo experimental house.

Kauto and the beautiful red brick floor of the city council's room. The space was too difficult for me to photograph.