Work news

I visited my publisher on Thursday, with a full new manuscript and an idea about another one. The good news was that the full manuscript will get made next Spring and the bad news is that the other one won't happen at least for a year, maybe never.

The first one is a new book on first names, this time it's about ones that have never been used in Finland, but have been suggested by name authorities and self-taught name connoisseurs or are fictional or foreign names. Some pretty weird Finnish names some people have thought up. What about Kyyhkö, for instance? The book was written with Elina and Rea Lehtonen, who is our friend and a name buff.

The other one was the how-to-style-according-to-president-Kekkonen book. The publisher wants the book to be more serious than my original intention was - I wanted to do a very light and jokey book, with lots of pictures. I was told that printing pictures costs too much nowadays, because the rights are so expensive. It is true that the photographers get more money more easily than writers - that's not to say I don't think their profession is not hard.

I'm now seriously doing the so-called Mammoth Book of Finnish Pulp Fiction and been reading old magazines at the university library. It's thrilling to realize that I may be opening up a Pandora's Box or something to that effect, since these things haven't been done properly here, as they have elsewhere. I hope this will come out already next Spring, not alone because we need the money...

I also started heavy on my hopefully to be private novel set in the present-day Finland, with a right wing bully as the "hero", who gets mixed up in scams of his fellows and tries to fight his way out. I'll be sending this to a crime novel contest.

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Glad to hear Bill Crider survived the flood of Texas. And all his paperbacks!