Apparently, if you click on the above j-peg twice, it comes up in a separate window,
then click on it again and it becomes legible.
WRITING: SOMETIMES YOU LOSE, SOMETIMES YOU WIN.
Well, anyone trying to read this will have to zoom in somehow, but after all these years chasing the literary dragon, my irrepressible conceit can't be subdued this month. The above is the Fortean Times (whaddya mean, you've 'never heard of it!?) review on page 61 of my latest opus, The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena (596 pages, paperback, Constable & Robinson, London, price £7.99 and available as an e-book, all at Amazon and elsewhere).
When you occupy the literary equivalent of football's Sunday League, no-one notices if you score the odd goal here and there. For me, however, having the leading magazine in the field of strange anomalies, the Fortean Times, say such nice things about my efforts is a hat trick. So allow me, for these few short days, to feel like David Beckham (without having to share his skeletal, miserable bedmate...)
Will the damn thing begin to sell more than three copies per week now? Watch this space. That said, I hit 70 on Easter Monday, and if I could have looked down a time tunnel 20 years ago and been able to read this review, I would have suffocated in my own ego. Thankfully, I'm older and wiser, but these fine words have certainly buttered all my parsnips for the time being. They even say I'm a 'good writer'. Oh ... stop it, chaps ... I blush so easily...