The Rime of the Postmodern Mariner

More ramblings of Rhys Hughes.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Goodbye to WoW

The website WoW is about to close. WoW was something of a living fossil from a more innocent era, an online social club for amateur writers where genuine politeness was almost the general order of the day. The person who ran the site was known only by the single letter “D” and lived in Swindon, I have no idea why. WoW was a good place for beginners to dip a toe into the foetid swamps of the writing world.

WoW will end with a simultaneous bang and whimper, publishing the first five of my ‘Don Cosquillas’ tales. My Don Cosquillas sequence (aka The Tickle Wheel) is open-ended and may eventually include dozens of stories. Or it may not. Story cycles rarely turn out exactly as I anticipate. Often my more ambitious and carefully planned projected sequences falter at an early stage while the looser and more spontaneous cycles flourish.

Friday, February 08, 2008

My Top Ten Writers of All Time!

This blog post was originally intended to be a piece of maudlin self promotion. But it has turned out quite differently! Apart from a lovely publicity shot of my recent Sereia book – a lovely work of literature in every respects, authored by a lovely writer with lovely words – and a few announcements declaring my loveliness, there is very little about me or my achievements here. What a modest fellow I must be! Despite my arrogance, I verily believe there has never been such a modest creative genius in the entire history of the country Wales as myself!

The remainder of this blog entry is devoted to listing my ten favourite writers of all time. Constructing a definitive list of this nature wasn’t easy. There’s the danger that other candidates will occur to me after the list is posted. No matter! I am sorry to leave out John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, G.V. Desani, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cabrera Infante, John Sladek, Brian Aldiss, W.E. Bowman, Maurice Richardson, Samuel Beckett, Amin Maalouf, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Samuel Delany, Alasdair Gray and the Strugatsky Brothers. But it can’t be helped.

Here are the ten in question:
· Italo Calvino
· Jorge Luis Borges
· Milorad Pavic
· Stanislaw Lem
· Boris Vian
· Michael Moorcock
· Felipe Alfau
· Jack Vance
· Flann O’Brien
· Donald Barthelme