I'm not very good at thinking up ideas for a story. But it turns out that I am quite good at thinking up a story when I'm told what it has to be about. The ideas we were given to work with were always very vague (write about a gift... write about loneliness, write about a flood...) but that very vagueness was their strength. I was forced to think hard about what the idea might really mean. How could I avoid the obvious and find out what was hiding just beneath the surface of the theme? So of course, now that I had a theme, all that I had to do was put on my thinking cap and come up with something appropriate that would fit. Easy! Well... easy ish! at any rate. For small values of ish...
The group stopped meeting at the end of 2020 when the convenor became too ill to continue. And a few months later she died. I've dedicated this collection of stories to her memory. Without her, none of them would ever have been written.
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Triffid Tales 1998-2021 contains all those earlier triffid tales (though I have slightly revised a few of them to bring them up to date) together with a lot of new material which would have been in Triffid Tales 7 if I had carried on with the tradition.
Because this book includes all the triffid anecdotes that I wrote between 1998 and 2021 it's quite a hefty tome. If it was printed and bound, it would be far too unwieldy -- you'd never be able to read it in bed without suffering terminal arm strain, and that would never do. But ebooks have the advantage that, no matter how large they are, they never make your e-reading device any heavier.
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Jane Lindskold and I have been having conversations about the linguistic and cultural differences that define American and British/Antipodean life. We've talked about toilets and underwear, beer and birthdays, Christmas celebrations, the subtleties of meal times and just what distinguishes yoghurt from yogurt. Jane is an author of science fiction and fantasy novels. I'm a reviewer and a fan of science fiction and fantasy. So sometimes our conversations turn to that area to illustrate whatever subject is currently occupying our minds...
Originally these conversations were published on Jane's blog under the generic title Thursday Tangents (because we published one conversation every Thursday, and we explored all kinds of odd tangents as ideas popped into our heads). There are links to the original blog postings here. We have also collected the conversations together in an e-book.
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Note that the Mobi format does not handle pictures very well...
