Tuesday, December 11, 2007

One Good Nocturnes Deserves Another

John Connolly’s collection of short stories, NOCTURNES, is being re-released with an additional tale tucked inside, and to celebrate he’s been maundering on about being an honorary woman and interesting stuff in locker-rooms over at his interweb thingy. Quoth John:
“To coincide with the publication of the new edition of NOCTURNES in the UK next month, with its lovely Rob Ryan-designed cover, we’ve added a new short story, “The Cycle”, to the ghost stories section of the website, as that’s one of the new additions to the collection, and we don’t want to gouge money from those who bought NOCTURNES when “The Cycle” wasn’t included. “The Cycle” was originally written for a collection entitled MOMENTS, which was published in Ireland to aid tsunami relief. The brief was that all of the stories should be written by women, but the editor asked if I’d like to sneak one in and see if anyone noticed, and then my story could be used to help with publicity. As it happened, the collection sold out, so they didn’t need to reveal the fact that I was one of the authors. Thus I ended up an honorary woman, but without any of the interesting locker-room stuff that my brief deception might otherwise have permitted. Sigh.”
Ladies? Any idea of what kind of ‘interesting’ locker-room ‘stuff’ John might be talking about? We can only presume he means towel-snapping and suchlike …

1 comment:

Declan Burke has published a number of novels, the most recent of which is ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. As a journalist and critic, he writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent. He has an unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person. All views expressed here are his own and are very likely to be contrary.