Germany

Since there's no email notification if one answers anonymous postings (you should sign up for an account!) I'm responding here in the main journal:

Hallo Olaf! Und wilkommen in meinem LJ! Mein Deutsch ist sehr sehr slecht, warum ich wirde auf Englisch schriebe.

I have seen postings by you in various MZB-related listservs, and am glad you've enjoyed some of my stories. Am surprised you went and found GUT BESTUECKT, though, which are not very like my S&S stories. (My book THE DRAG QUEEN OF ELFLAND reprints many of my S&S stories, and other fantasy tales as well.)

There are a handful of stories that have only appeared in Germany; next month, there is an anthology titled IM SCHRANK with an illustrated fairy tale of mine in it that will be published by Knaur Verlag. Knaur also published non-fantasy stories of mine in the German anthologies HERZSCHMERZ und HOT 'n' HOLY: EIN EROTISCHES ADVENTKALENDAR. The HERZSHMERZ story is unpublished in English, although the HOT 'N' HOLY story is included in the English edition of GUT BESTUECKT titled HIS TONGUE (that book was published in Germany a year before it was published in English, and in Spain and Brazil the year before it was published in German!).

Also, I wrote some Gedichte auf Deutsch--one of which is an erotic fairytale--which will be published this September in the next volume of MEIN HEIMLISCHES AUGE: DAS JAHRBUCH DER EROTIK, where I've also published various erotic stories and essays over the years. I'm also published in MEIN SCHWULES AUGE und MEIN LESBISCHES AUGE. I guess I'm very versatile! :-)

(Of course, the German edition of my book SEXPERIMENTE: LESBISCH-SCHWUL SEXGESCHICHTE, where lesbians write gay male erotica and gay men write lesbian erotica, won the Book of the Year Award from Siegesseule Magazin in Berlin.)

Where in Germany do you live, by the way?

In terms of Tad Williams, he is an absolutely sweet man. I used to know him when I dropped out of University and was living in California, a little over a decade ago.

Unfortunately, every time I am reading a book by him I am robbed and they steal the backpack/bag/whatever that holds the book! So I am afraid to try reading him again. The last time I was reading him, in Amsterdam, they stole my passport, all my identification, and the book, but luckily I still had my clothes, my plane ticket, and my turtles. (I had bought two small turtles while I was learning to dance flamenco in Granda that summer, and then took them with me when I made my first interrail trip.)

Publishing

I really don't understand publishing, I think.

Today, Sara and I went over the galley proofs of our next picture book, NO HAY NADA COMO EL ORIGINAL, forthcoming in hardcover in April from Destino, part of the Planeta group. The galleys we went over today, however, are for the paperback that Oxford University Press is bringing out next month in a coedition with Planeta.

Yes, it doesn't make much sense to me either to publish the paperback before the hardcover, although in theory the paperback is for the school-library market (although it will also be available in stores) whereas the hardcover is for trade.

The paperback will also only be in Spanish, whereas the hardcover will appear in both Spanish and Catalan.

However, the book was both written and drawn to be a picture book, and the job of squishing everything to make it an early reader involved quite a bit of butchery. Sigh. (In general, lately the designers at our publishers have also consistently mangled the artwork, so that heads or arms get cut off in the bleed in the center of the spread, or text overlaps image where it doesn't need to, etc. More sigh.)

Also, while on the picture book Sara and I will have equal billing, the way the early reader collection works, they had only put my name on the spine, as the authors, and on the cover have my name in a larger typeface than hers, which we're not happy with, since the project is very much an integral text-illustration package, both parts are vital and integral to the book.

Sigh.