The Mountains of Instead

From  A Year’sDreams  (2008):   August 9 I was a younger man – poor – single – in the city.  I needed a car, and found a large ancient rusted and battered van for sale very cheap.  It even had a toilet in the back.  I knew my parents would find this purchase odd but I thought it was a great deal (maybe it was free). A couple of young women near me were also enjoying it. Then, out with it on the streets of a big daytime sunlit city.  The van became a small bus, and I’d got a job as a sort of free-lance bus driver (my bus was the van, still shabby and rusted). I picked up people at corners, got stuck in various ways and places, people called out in annoyance or gave advice. I didn’t know the city, or at least this part of it.  At last stopped and let out my disgusted passengers.  One who’d been kind, a young tourist, stayed with me.  He and two friends (one in a black velvet cutaway coat) were out to see religious shrines connected to their faith.  “If I could find the Shrine of Our Lady

  For Martin Crookall, An Apologia (2015) Martin --  Of course I can’t change your mind about things in the book you actively disliked, such as the transformation of Bruno or the character of Roo: these things will have to remain a matter of taste.   All I can do is describe how I intended it to work, and give some reasons why (therefore) it is what it is.  First of all, though the book may give to you an air of falling-off or failure of imagination, it is in fact the ending which in my own view was being prepared for throughout the book or at least throughout the third volume.   (I had actually planned an even shorter final volume than now exists, and perhaps if I had been braver it would have been very short, eliminating (for instance) the majority of Pierce’s travels in a non-magical Europe.)   Even Harold Bloom, a great champion of the book, felt on a first reading that something had gone very wrong and all the promises of the earlier parts hadn’t been fulfilled.   I am guessin