Rhys Hughes

[Mr. Veech]

40 books?! That's incredible. It took me a little over a year to write 45,000 words (140-50 pages).

How many words per day are you writing on average?

[rhysaurus]

My target is 100,000 words every year, which is only twice as much as yours, so it's not so much really.

I have been writing and publishing for a long time, so I am not really as prolific as it might seem. It's just that I have been writing 100,000 words a year without a break since 1992, and it accumulates.

[rhysaurus]

My new novel Cloud Farming in Wales is coming out soon. As well as the paperback there will be a limited hardback edition, limited in fact to only 60 copies, and this will be available to be ordered separately within the next few weeks. This novel is rather different from most of my work.



In the meantime, both the paperback and limited edition hardback can be pre-ordered as part of a Snuggly Books bundle. There are two bundle offers, because all the books available as bundles come in the two different editions. More information will be posted here in the coming weeks...

[rhysaurus]

I am delighted to report that my new novel has been published by Snuggly Books and is available both as a regular paperback and a very limited hardback. It can be obtained directly from the publisher (see link above) or from Amazon or many other online stores, and possibly in some real bookstores too (I don't know which ones yet, but maybe the legendary City Lights in San Francisco. The publisher mentioned that there was a chance that bookshop would stock copies).

My novel is a fantastical comedy set in Wales, and it is also a tribute to the writer Richard Brautigan whose Trout Fishing in America enthused me and taught me an approach to fiction that struck me as -- if not exactly new -- then differently accentuated, and it is an approach that appealed enormously to me. I wanted to write a book similar to his. Cloud Farming is my Trout Fishing. That's the idea anyway!



The excellent Des Lewis has already completed one of his 'real time' reviews of this novel and it can be found by clicking on this link. I am extremely delighted with the way the book has turned out!

[rhysaurus]

My new book has just been published, courtesy of Storm Constantine of Immanion Press. I am absolutely delighted with it, so delighted indeed that I have written this article to explain why I believe it's my best collection so far. It is a collection of my fantastical love stories, 22 tales in total that were written over a period of 15 years. Two of the stories are novellas and one is a novelette, so the total wordage of the collection is just over 100,000 words.



The style of these stories is mostly what one might term 'magic realist' and I am happy with this definition, despite the vagueness of the term and the fact that not all the stories in the book are quite that way. They were inspired by real feelings and people, moods, circumstances, dreams and daydreams, music from tropical lands, writers such as Amado, Couto, Vian and Calvino (always Calvino) and a curious yearning for a different kind of life, and generally speaking they highlight my urge to break free from the narrative restrictions of the conventionally told anglophone story, whether it be mainstream or genre.

I feel that with this book I have reached a milestone on the admittedly lonely path of my writing career. I am not especially successful financially. It has been a struggle. But this book exists. I feel that something important has been validated...

The book is available at amazon and other online stores, and the magnificent Des Lewis has already begun one of his real time reviews of the stories within.

Thanks for listening!

[rhysaurus]

Lots of talk about Lovecraft in the air at the moment, so....

I have written many Lovecraft-inspired stories in my time. Most of them have a strong whimsical or ironic element and a few are downright parodies. Two of them, 'The Bicycle Centaur' and 'How Gangrene was my Sally', appeared in the recent Cthulhu Cymraeg anthologies. I am currently planning a new one called 'The Whisperer in Darkness Bangs his Head on an Unseen Projection' and I am also toying with the idea of writing another called 'The People of Colour Out of Space'.

The parodist and whimsical experimenter contributes to the genre of the weird by taking the hidden logical absurdities that are already in the structures of the texts of the key authors and playing with them to reveal them for what they are, and then extrapolating from them to produce a wild flight of fancy. The ideal is to simultaneously push the form forward and make much mischief with it. One of my older Lovecraft-inspired experiments that appeared in one of my collections many years ago is available to be read online here:

A Languid Elagabalus of the Tombs

Parodies are not disrespectful. What is disrespectful is to ignore an author and take no inspiration from that author. Parodies are indicative simply of a playful nature.

[rhysaurus]

Yule Do Nicely has just been published.

This little book has been assembled in its present form in order to celebrate the festive season. It includes work from the span of the past quarter century. The first twenty-four tales form a weird advent calendar from December 1st to 24th. Then it is Christmas Day and time for the stocking and the twenty-eight little strange tales inside it. Merry Xmas!

This book is available as paperback and as an ebook from Amazon and elsewhere. It is priced very low. £2.99 for the print edition and 99p for the ebook. This is as it should be at this time of year...
I have added the title to the blog where I keep track of all my published books to date, where there is also information about the contents of each volume. This blog is called Aardvark Caesar and goes right back to my first published book, Worming the Harpy, more than twenty years ago.
http://aardvarkcaesar.blogspot.co.uk/
Thanks for listening!

[rhysaurus]

This just arrived for me in the mail. It's a new magazine that seeks to recreate the ambience of the American pulp SF and Weird mags of the 1930s. Issue #2 here includes my novelette 'Swallowing the Amazon' which is an adventure with dinosaurs set in Africa.

The next issue will be themed around 'body snatching'.



It's available on Amazon and elsewhere. The publisher, Tom English, has produced some great books in his time!

[rhysaurus]

My new book has just been published and this one is a little different from all the others, even though all the others are already rather different from each other. It is different because it's a collection of experimental OuLiPo fictions. I have talked about OuLiPo many times over the past thirty years. It is a type of writing that is still relatively unknown in the English writing world.

My book contains a selection of OuLiPo works that are divided into categories. In the first section, there are stories in which I applied simple arithmetical rules to the creation of the texts. These are stories that consist of x sections, each section with x paragraphs, each paragraph having x sentences, each sentence made up of x words. The value of 'x' increases from one to seven, therefore the lengths of the texts rapidly increases too. The texts are individual pieces, yet they also work together to create a sum greater than the parts.

The second section features stories with a much more complex structure. OuLiPo is about the application of logical constraints that must be adhered to strictly in order to stimulate the imagination and push the creative impulse in unexpected directions. There are many official logical constraints and in the past I have applied several of these to various tales. But I also wanted to invent my own constraint and thus I devised one that I call "greater or equal to 2n plus one" because it consists of story grids that can be read coherently across each row, down every column and along the main diagonals, but it is also possible that other unplanned stories exist on other diagonals or in meandering courses through the grids. Some of the more advanced grids are asymmetrical and present even greater opportunities for readings paths.

The third section is a logico-erotic story in which the workings of progressively more intricate logic gates control the action of the sexual partners who are the objects of the study. I wanted to combine two seemingly irreconcilable functions, namely sensuality and logic. The boolean algebra that determines the outcome of each encounter therefore acquires a physicality that is surely quite new and unexpected.



My book can be ordered directly from the publisher (Eibonvale Press) or from Amazon and other online bookshops.

[Kernel23]

Thisp sounds so interesting, i always thought that it would be great to apply mathematical structure to fiction, ive known of people who have experimented similarly in music but had never heard of this type of fiction style before. Just ordered the hc and will look for more of these type of texts..