From: "Nigel Price" 
Subject: RE: (urth) Wildside Press big book of Wolfe essays?
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 01:14:08 -0000

>>Nigel, I have no idea!  Even after looking
>>around, I still have no idea. Where did you
>>get the idea?  Please tell more!

Hello Michael. Good to see "Snake's Hands" prominently featured on the
Wildside Press website.

You ask about the Wolfe volume I mentioned. Well, the story goes as follows.

The project was originally mentioned in the Wildside Press forum. I was keen
to offer an article, so I entered a query in the forum, asking who was going
to edit the book of essays on Wolfe. I received no reply, so I then wrote to
John Betancourt, the owner of Wildside, and asked him. He wrote to tell me
that Darrell Schweitzer was going to edit the proposed collection, but that
publication was still a couple of years away.

I then wrote to Darrell Schweitzer, offering to write a Wolfe essay for him.
He wrote back to say that he wasn't sure that the Wolfe book was going to
happen or that he was going to edit it as he was currently in the middle of
compiling a book of essays on Neil Gaiman and it was proving difficult to
get adequate and sufficient material.

After a few more e-mails to and fro, which included offers from me to
Darrell to write something on Gaiman...

(...and which also included hurried appeals from me to Jonathan Laidlow, the
Gaiman expert, for guidance on what Gaiman to read - Jonathan sent me a
Sandman book last time I was in hospital, bless him - what a depressing book
to read when you're waiting for surgery!...)

...John Betancourt finally got onto Darrell Schweitzer and twisted his arm a
bit. Darrell now tells me that yes, he is definitely doing an anthology of
essays on Wolfe, and yes, Wildside will be printing it, but no, it won't be
for a while, because he's still working on the Gaiman project.

So: if I can get my story/stories finished for a certain member of this
list, and get my article on "Rimrunners" done for the Cherryh volume, I'll
maybe have a crack at a Gaiman piece and who knows, I might even get an
article on Wolfe finished at last. But, to end on a personal note, this has
been a difficult couple of months. I have lost two close friends over the
past six weeks, and having got those funerals out of the way, my father died
this weekend after a long and difficult illness. It was a relief and a
release for him, but what with the intermittent and unpredictable tides of
grief and the sheer grind of funeral arrangements, I'm really not getting
much work done at the moment.

We'll see how it goes.

Nigel


--