something very late (for FRANK'S) and very shabby (for reasons), from Dave (who else?) Langford, 94 London Road, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 5AU. You are advised to handle this only behind glass in a bacteriologically sealed cabinet of approved Ministry design, prior to immersing the paper in a 40% formalin solution and using standard bagging-and-removal procedure to convey the sterilized result directly to a furnace pre-heated to a minimal 1000°C; in which your copy of CC28 should be permitted to remain for ... oh. Too late, is it? You've already read this far? In this case isolate yourself at once from other personnel and take two aspirins immediately (Advised Emergency Contamination Procedure 23), since ...
... since I've got a cold. Rats, rats, rats. One of those foul streaming colds that mist up the glasses and cause a steady drip onto my groin as I sit here trying to type, not to mention provoking more typos in this thing so far than I made in the whole of the last Ansible. The last six of the things, probably. I planned to bash this out on the evening before Mexicon, and you would all have been amazed at the wit and wisdom, the subtle encapsulation, the sparkling quintessence of ... something or other. Instead, there entered the PERSON FROM PORLOCK in the form of Chris Hughes mercilessly demanding that I run off his latest Fantasmagoria, hundreds of stencils of it, thousands and thousands of sheets, and of course the duplicator will not respond to his rough hands, so I get to do all the work, taking revenge only by (a) sending him out to buy cider and (b) pointing out all the typos and misspellings with my usual tact. The mention that 'similies' is not spelt that way merely causes him to run to the nearest dictionary and subsequently attempt to give himself a haircut with his own bare hands; later, though, when the last sheet has been run off, we notice that on the back cover the date reads 24 April not 24 May, implying superfannish completion of the thing mere hours after Seacon. "We must redo the entire back page," Chris shrieks, beating his head obsessively against the ceiling until he sees the feral glint. in my eyes and compromises on the notion of merely running that page through again to add an Eratum note. A further compromise, proposed and carried through by yours truly, is to leave the thing as it stands, to be a fiendish test of fans' observational powers....
I'm tired of that paragraph. Snivelling seems to be on the increase. Magic pills afford brief relief, say two hours' worth, But skull-and-crossboned warnings on pack say I mustn't take more than 4 doses daily. This does not compute.
The journey to Mexicon was chiefly marked by my reading of the Asprin-edited Thieves' World (I thought the phrase 'the very fabric of space' was restricted to lousy sf, but it appears in fantasy here, in a Poul Anderson story yet) and Valentine Pontifex (jot down note for coming review: 'A powerful plot thread is the struggle in Valentine's something-or-other concerning whether he should let himself be booted upstairs as Pontifex of Majipoor, or booted downstairs since the position requires that you live in a hole in the ground. Readers will be in an agony of suspense as to his eventual decision, unless of course they have cheated by reading the book's title.' Is this too cruel? Will Malcolm hit me? Who'd be a reviewer? Am I still in these brackets?) At Mexicon I have fun, fun, desperate fun, and – presumably – catch the aforementioned cold: ALL RIGHT. OWN UP. WHICH OF YOU WAS IT? THE ENTIRE APA WILL BE KEPT IN AFTER SCHOOL UNLESS....
The journey back from Mexicon was chiefly marked by my reading of Geta (caused me no pain since, following Roz's advice, I equipped myself with a bulky notebook, a powerful torch and a lengthy ball of string before venturing into the labyrinth of plot and nomenclature) and Deadeye Dick (Granada send some funny things for review. This one irritates because although Vonnegut knows neutron-bombs don't cleanly kill people and leave all houses intact – he admits as much in his intro – he still can't resist the cheap, facile image for his plot. Elsewhere there is something about someone dying in the electric chair, 'in a microsecond'. Good grief). Sore throat blazing up to approx. Fahrenheit 451 during the journey. Don't remember very much about the evening, or the next day except that I must have finished Lyonesse and Lies, Inc. because here after all are my superbly cogent notes on them both, from which I appear just to have written the review column, and just in time for my deadline too. Is it time I gave this up? Am still too groggy to decide whether the enormous chunk of new material in the Dick book [formerly published in much shorter form as The Unteleported Man] does actually make any objective plot sense – it seems triffic in a hallucinatory way, but am I just being slightly delirious? My fever-dreams or his?
(Pause for prolonged coughing attack. Think of this sheet as being spattered with tiny flecks of blood. The stencil looks that way, though thankfully it's chiefly corflu.)
Before getting off this subject I must admit one happy outbreak of Filthy Prodom. Remember my tasteful talk at Seacon? (What d'you mean, I've given you no chance to forget it....) Had a brainwave after kindly Dave Wood ran it in Xyster, and sent the carbon to a magazine which has been known to feature me ... Knave, in fact. (The rude one....) Upshot: they're grabbing an edited version (eg. reference to 'nukes, the 'sort John Brunner knows and loves' becomes 'nukes, the sort Mrs Thatcher uses for personal stimulation' – point being to de-fannish it rather than to make it 'naughty') and paying enough to cover my and Hazel's entire convention fun at Seacon and Mexicon ... gosh, fandom is a way of life after all.
(Pause for a Good Cry, occasioned neither by the wonderfulness of fandom nor by a rush of Mills & Boon to the forebrain, but by the fact that my sinuses have just decided to imitate a squeezed sponge. I tell you one thing, and you mark my words – after this, the foulest cold I've had in ten years, I'm damned if I waste it – you just wait for the pandemic of streaming red eyes and dripping noses that's going rage unchecked through the very next novel.)
Abrupt and merciful change of subject. There is something about reading and writing, both of them, which mundane folk seem to think is irresistibly funny and weird. One point is the hilarity with which I occasionally get asked, in my local pub, whether I've written another book yet, or sold anything lately. Stock answer: 'Lots of things, of course.' More (though muted) hilarity; blank stares one night when I asked the landlord if he'd sold any drinks lately. Well, maybe this could be because I'm.so obviously eccentric and weird, but the other thing is a mite disconcerting: I often wander round Reading reading a book, you see, thus catching up on a bit of reviewing time between A and B. Since peripheral vision is perfectly adequate for stopping at roadsides etc, and since I haven't so much as had something whiz dangerously close since 1976 (hit by motorbike – was not reading a book at the time), and since I always stick the book under my arm when actually crossing a road,. I'd thought I must be fairly safe. Not so when I get to the Pheasant, where every week or so I'm told in great and hilarious circumstantial detail that there I was in the middle of a three-lane clearway (or the M4, or something) dead to the world, eyes deep in a book, and 'believe you me you wouldn't be standing here tonight I tell you if I hadn't swerved like lightning, menace to traffic you are, half an inch we was away from clipping you....' What an exciting life I must lead when I'm not looking. Funny people, people. I may have to threaten again to write them all into books ... nothing like that for producing alarmed silence and white faces....
Status report as at the end of May. Novel not finished. Collaboration with B. Stableford not finished. Promised computer article and short story not started. Cold emphatically not finished. Self-pity back in the saddle; and somewhere downstairs a bottle of Glensomething cough mixture is calling, calling. Over & out.