Before The Cat Said Not So Much

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Recently, Carl Slaughter asked me to make a few comments about all the collections I've published leading up to this year's highly-praised Not So Much, Said the Cat. The results are up on File 770.

To give you an idea of what the comments are like, here's some of what I had to say about my first collection, Gravity's Angels. Arkham House's editor, the late Jim Turner, used to call me up and say, “Listen, Swanwick, I don’t have time for any of your nonsense. I just need a question answered and that’s the end of it.”

And then:

“Hello, Jim. It’s good to hear from you,” I’d say. And with a harmless bit of gossip here and a comment about a hot new story there, I could keep him on the phone for hours. There aren’t many people I’d want to keep on the phone for hours, but he was right at the top of the list.

Jim’s original idea for the cover was to use Picasso’s Guernica as a wrap-around. But when he looked into it, the proportions were wrong. “I’d have to crop it to make it work,” he told me over the phone, “and you can’t cut up a great work of art!”

I will be grateful to my dying day that I resisted the urge to say, “Oh, go ahead, Jim.”

You can find the entire article here.

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