Naked Thighs and Cotton Frocks

My "Like A Good Boy" story appears in the anthology Naked Thighs and Cotton Frocks and Other Stories published by Leaf Books, Wales. It came out in December, but it seems the initial print run has already sold out, so I haven't had a chance to read the other stories yet. Leaf Books are innovative publishers of mini-books (20 for a tenner), and courageous concepts such as mixed poetry and story anthologies, science fiction, and micro-fiction. This anthology has eleven short stories from writers across the UK, and one from Ireland (myself).

When I lived in Germany every kiosk and knick-knack shop would have a small collection of micro books on sale close to the till. Tiny matchbox-sized books, for the handbag or pocket. Leaf Books are the only ones I know of on these islands who produce these sort of books. Who knows, the idea could catch on with our masters, the great public.

The glacier moves again

Crannog magazine accepted a piece and invited me to give a reading at their launch on 19th October. It's at the Crane Bar, Sea Rd, Galway at 6.30 pm, Oct 19.

Also at the beginning of October Arabesques accepted two pieces. They are due to appear in the next issue.

Reading in Donegal

I've been invited to give a reading as part of the CLE author editor tour. Haven't decided yet what piece to read.

Tuesday 23rd October 8pm
Letterkenny Library
featuring from The Stinging Fly Press
Authors Neil Hegarty and Aiden O'Reilly with Editor Declan Meade More information

I still occasionally read some mathematics, more rarely share their company. This list of 10 differences between mathematicans and writers is the kind of twitter I promised not to unload on my website. Next I'll be blogging like a sphincterly challenged gourmand about my recent controversial exchange with Penguin.

Italian translation

It looks like These Are Our Lives may appear in Italian next year. At least, I was asked to give permission for my story to be included. It would be great if Le Nostre Vite gets a second life in Italy.

3000

The homepage counter has passed the 3,000 mark. Even subtracting all the spiders, bots, and worms that's still quite a few visitors.

A better statistic might be the unique visitors per month. That averages about 400. As usual on websites, most visitors just view the homepage. The individual stories get 12 - 32 unique hits a month. That could well be more readers than they might get in paper form.

Yet I still feel like I am producing stories for nobody.

Tidal Wave of Bullshit

When I worked on the sites in London I used to shake my head in incredulity at the headlines in the tabloid press. The crass jingoism, chummy language, and the cunning commandeering of the man-in-the-street's opinion were obvious to every hod carrier, even the Mayo ones. Crap like that would never go down in Ireland. An English workmate explained that the Brits weren't stupid, they would just buy the paper for a laugh to see what stupidity was in it that day. Most would buy two papers - one for the news and one for the tits and a laugh.

More than a decade on, The Evening Herald doesn't have tits in it to identify it as a rag. And the humour is usually unintentional. This is the paper that once had the front-page headline Man Almost Run Over by Tram. (It was the first week of the Luas.)

I have lived in several countries since, and gone through years when I knew as much about Ireland as I did about Jamaica. When I returned to Ireland it was a shock to see how bad the papers had become. I begin to see that if a person reads them long enough he becomes the sort of person they are addressed to.

Yesterday the headline was Squatters Demand €2 million of Taxpayers Money to Move On. That was about a traveller family that has been living undisturbed on a plot of land for over twenty years, and so have acquired rights to that land under Irish law. The article confirms peoples' prejudices that travellers have plenty of money, and that the government hands out money freely to lazy wasters. That second opinion is not actually native to Ireland: one should understand that the journalists have gotten their notion of the common man's concerns not by talking to people in pubs, but by copying the style wholesale from the UK or USA models. That would explain the use of such words as "boffins" to mean scientists. I have never heard this word used in Ireland. Here is an analysis of Evening Herald of a few issues of the paper.

Today the headline is Hurricane Punches Charity Ref. I take this race to the bottom very seriously. Readers are being fed a diet of bullshit. I can't say there's any devious political motivation in the Evening Herald, not currently. But the populace is being led to a quagmire. There is no truth, just the opinions of different factions. The closest to truth is what the majority at a particular moment desire. The masses despise themselves yet exult in their own power. They become ready for harnassing by a tyrant.

Jedyna dobra strona gazety jest polski dodatek wydawany w srode.

I have no particular interest in journalism, but I bear witness here: this paper is SHIT.

When writing you are free

When I meet would-be writers - usually through the internet - I try to be helpful, proof-read their scripts, tell them when the plot holds together and when it gets too confusing. But I have nothing to say to them about getting published. I can never say "if you improve on this I'm sure it will get published." On the whole, I feel better not meeting them at all.

It's nicer to meet realistic people who have a chance.

In other areas of life I became accustomed to my work being valued for its skill and ingenuity. Only in writing do I feel that success or failure is beyond my control. A chance introduction, a photograph in a newspaper, a revealing bio - these are things that might be crucial.

Some people think this is great. It reassures them that the world works in a familiar way at all levels. "That's the way the world works," they tell me.

See, they return

I am back in Poland for a while. The dry air quickens my thought. The country has not changed as much as I expected. Perhaps because Ireland has changed so much recently I expect every country to become strange to me over the course of a couple of years. Or - like many Poles themselves - I had a kind of feeling that joining the EU would effect a transformation overnight.

Pozdrowienia dla moich wszystkich przyjacioł i czytelnikow w Polsce. Polska jest ojczyzną mojej tworczości. Pewnego dnia wrocę tam, żeby żyć i mieszkać. Brakuje mi elegancji i wdzięku Polski. W Polsce nauczyłem się, że człowiek sam decyduje o ty, kim jest a nie, że jest tym, za kogo inni go uważają. W Polsce rownież nauczyłem się co znaczy "walczyć".

Revamp

Over the next few days I am putting up my redesigned website. I've gone for a clean look called "transparentia" with little to detract from the writing.

Talking about me

They will say "Aiden is arrogant." How could I not be arrogant if I am to survive at all? If I were less arrogant you would never have heard from me. They will say: "Aiden is pretentious." I say: Who am I pretending to, when there is nobody listening?

But of course, they will not say these things.

They will say nothing at all.

Reverse Links

The following sites contain links to this site:
Searc's Webguide to Irish Writers
Laura Hird's Site
Irish Writers Online Philip Casey's site
The Stinging Fly
Google Directory
Reference.com Directory
Who Is Hot Now Celebrity Entertainment Directory (somebody hates me)
These are Our Lives short story collection

J.G. Ballard

I am still re-reading Ballard's novels since I completed a review of Kingdom Come for The Stinging Fly last week. Ballard was an early favourite of mine - each story seemed to have a hard jewel at its core. Eniwetok - the thermonuclear noon. The man who walked on the moon. The Terminal Beach. I didn't like Empire of the Sun much. It's appeal depends on its being real. In fact I didn't read it to the end until a couple of years ago. Now that the future is here Ballard had to move away from science fiction. His more recent novels are set in the terminal landscapes of the modern age - the suburbs or a Mediterranean holiday zone. These take the place of the deserts, nuclear test zones and abandoned airfields that feature in his earlier fiction.

We don't need science fiction any more. Now that the world is changing to be an alien place and we no longer know ourselves, we need fiction to tell us what the human is, what relationships are, how to live.

2000

The number of visitors to the site has passed two thousand. I'm not sure how many are by mistake, but it is still a significant number. I hope there are some real readers among them.

Say nothing Aiden. An unpublished writer has no right to speak.

New Stories

Three or four new stories have been added to my collections since June. My favourite is still This Is How It Is from the second collection.

Over the past six months I have come to believe that these stories will be published when they are good enough. This is a great boost. I never had this belief before, nor was there any reason to have such a belief.

The Winding Stair Bookshop, mentioned in one of my first posts below, is open for business again. This time round they occupy the ground floor only, but they have well-chosen stock including many from the smaller publishers.

Short Story Anthology

In early July The Stinging Fly Press will publish a collection of short fiction These Are Our Lives. It looks to be the definitive collection from Ireland this year. Lots of new names appear in it, including my own.

Guest page

I had to delete the guestpage. Spam was flooding up to 200 entries per day. The spam bots also discovered my email address (aidenoreilly@eircom.net) on this site. I knew that spam was inevitable once I made my email available. It was just a question of becoming popular enough.

1000

Some time in March the number of visitors passed the thousand mark. Not bad for a site just one year old. About 40 new visitors a week take a look. But I suppose a lot of them don't count as real. There are a lot of unreal people.

New Stories

Over the last week (since Feb 23) I have added two new stories. One is in The Stoneybatter Files, and the other has gone into Greetings, Hero.

Hey, you there in Korea

And you too in Australia, Turkey and Austria. Sign my guestbook! It would be great to have a few calling cards from different places around the world. I'm not that cool that I wouldn't appreciate them. In the website stats you can see the broad range of countries where people are looking at this site. It seems odd to me that I have more readers in the Czech Republic, South Korea, and Turkey than I do in Ireland.

SIGLA

An article of mine on artificial intelligence appeared in July's SIGLA. The second fiction collection Greetings, Hero has been off-line for three months now. Aiden is re-editing several of the stories. Another story of his appeared in SIGLA magazine last month.

Roman Empires appeared three months ago - see below.

NEWS

You can understand more about the extended present through these stories than you can by hooking up to the headlines. Watching the news every day puts you in danger of losing contact with reality, of becoming immersed in an eternal NOW where nothing ever changes.

The Latest

The latest news in my extanded time-perspective is that after 2000 years Christianity is coming to an end in the industrialised world. Churches are being redeveloped into apartments, the tattered remnants make a fundamentalist stand - in the USA of all places. Men have reached the moon and computers play chess better than grandmasters. The mass of knowledge has accumulated to such an extent that people can spend over twenty years being educated to understands the basics in any field. Our cultural inheritance has laid the foundations a world for which we do not have the intellectual capacity to grasp. In the exact sciences there is still a paradigm of progress to ever greater heights, but in political, educational and artistic life a new modesty is emerging.