Smoke And Mirrors

Reading the Entrails: A Rondel

Editors who ask me for stories about "…anything you want. Honest. Anything at all. Just write the story you always wanted to write" rarely get anything at all.

In this case, Lawrence Schimel wrote asking for a poem to introduce his anthology of stories about foretelling the future. He wanted one of the verse forms with repeating lines, like a villanelle or a pantoum, to echo the way we inevitably arrive at our future.

So I wrote him a rondel about the pleasures and perils of fortune-telling and prefaced it with the bleakest joke in Through the Looking-Glass. Somehow it seemed a fine starting point for this book.

I'd been having a bad week. The script I was meant to be writing just wasn't happening, and I'd spent days staring at a blank screen, occasionally writing a word like the and staring at it for an hour or so and then, slowly, letter by letter, I'd delete it and write and or but instead. Then I'd exit without saving. Ed Kramer phoned and reminded me that I owed him a story for an anthology of stories about the Holy Grail which he was editing with the ubiquitous Marty Greenberg. And seeing nothing else was happening and that this story was living in the back of my mind, I said sure.

I wrote it in a weekend, a gift from the gods, easy and sweet as anything. Suddenly I was a writer transformed: I laughed in the face of danger and spat on the shoes of writer's block. Then I sat and stared glumly at a blank screen for another week, because the gods have a sense of humour.

Several years ago, on a signing tour, someone gave me a copy of an academic paper on feminist language theory that compared and contrasted "Chivalry", Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott", and a Madonna song. I hope one day to write a story called "Mrs Whitaker's Werewolf" and wonder what sort of papers that might provoke.

When I do live readings, I tend to start with this story. It's a very friendly story and I enjoy reading it aloud.