Welcome to Bordertown: What Would Eilonwy Do?
This morning on my walk to work, I spotted a man crossing a lawn. His arms were very full. Of garden gnomes.
You know, gnomes? With the blue coats and the red hats? The Rien Poortvliet kind?
“Morning!” I said.
“Morning,” he said. “I got a delivery. Gnome delivery.”
After we’d passed each other, and I’d spent a good while grinning, I thought to myself, “I know why that just happened. That happened because I started reading Welcome to Bordertown on the train today.”
(Hey! Heads up! If you follow the above link to the Bordertown website, then click through the fancy links there to Amazon to purchase any of the new books on that page, then Terri Windling’s Endicott Studio gets a small kick-back from Amazon.com. And all of that money is donated to a shelter for homeless kids. More info here.)
Now, I’m only half a story in — the first one. But half a story in means I’ve already read the two introductions, by Terri Windling and Holly Black respectively, and also the “Bordertown Basics” which is sort of like a mix of the Not for Tourists Guide to Chicago, and Wolfe and Gaiman’s wicked little chapbook, A Walking Tour of the Shambles. It includes a weekly advisory about gang movement, monster sightings, pickpockets and missing gargoyles.
This bit made me chortle:
“The Mock Avenue street association would like to apologize to everyone for fixing the church tower clock last week, which caused widespread confusion. It has now been restored to its usual wrong time.”
But let me back up a little. Reading the introductions, I started to get a strange feeling. Gene Wolfe described a poem once as giving him “that fairy tale feeling.” He may have been quoting someone famous, like Dunsany or something. He does that. This was like that feeling, but it was also another feeling mixed in. …
I can’t help it! I must speak, and I must speak now, for I just found out about it. John O’Neill will probably glare at me, because once he hears, he’ll immediately want to post about it, and then he’ll discovered that I already have!!!
Traveling around the world in eighty days is not only quite possible, but a leisurely journey. One could, on this trip, stop to smell the roses, perhaps do a little sight-seeing on an island or two, and pursue adventure in remote locations. Really, if one were pressed for time, anyone with a passport and a few plane tickets could circumnavigate the globe in about a week or two, depending on the flight paths of the planes.
I have been asked to write a few words on how the Johannes Cabal novels came to be published with a particular view to explaining some of the intricacies of the publishing trade. Because I am nothing if not didactic (“Didactic” means, among other things, to speak in a lecturely manner. I hope you’re taking notes – there will be a test afterwards), I have also added a few notes of advice at the end for folk who want to get into the professional novel writing gig.