Over the weekend I picked up an issue of NFG Magazine, published in Toronto, showcasing Edgy Writing. A lot of small, independent magazines (and a great many literary journals) tend to be full of writers who miss the forest for the trees, writing technically proficient but boring stories. NFGs stories seem to suffer less from this trend than most, perhaps partly because they have a section called 69 which contains dozens of 69-word stories, aimed at readers with “attention spans of less than 22 seconds”, and partly because, well, the Writing tends to be Edgy.

A writer would have to be amazingly accomplished to become boring in 69 words.

Normally this is the kind of thing I would read in the bookstore, spill coffee on it, and put it back in the magazine rack. I bought this one because it contained an interview with an author whose work I started reading over twenty years ago: Michael Moorcock . When I joined the Science Fiction Book Club back in 1984 the collected Elric Saga was the first book on my list, sight unseen and words unread. I devoured the entire thing in a long July weekend of adolescent obsessive/compulsive behavior, and spent the rest of the summer wishing I was a thin, red-eyed albino with a vampiric sword.

From there I moved on to the chronicles of Corum, and a few random stories about the Eternal Champion. All in all, probably about a dozen of Moorcocks’ 60-plus books.

Now I see that he has a website: Moorcock’s Weekly Miscellany . It is not updated all that often, but it is well-done and contains a wealth of information on a writer who doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves.