About jjhudsson
And does Finland have a Space Programme?
Apart from refunds, the single most common question we get at The Tricky Genre Press is this one: who is jjhudsson?
Keen-eyed followers of the Tricky Genre Press website (well, it was Robin’s mother, actually) have noted that there is no jjhudsson on the ‘About Us’ page. And if you are the lucky owner of one of our competitively priced epubs - for example, The Angel of Pessane or one of our poetry e-booklets - you will also know that there is no ‘Author’s Profile’ in any of these works.
There are two reasons for this.
In the first case, jjhudsson doesn’t work at The Tricky Genre Press (Ed. apart from Robin, very few of the staff do). The man we at the Press know as simply ‘The Storyteller’ pops into the Press now and then to deliver a box of papers and sometimes parts of a story, but apart from that we don’t see him. Even these deliveries are done clandestinely. He’s already here when the dynamic staff of The Tricky Genre Press pass through its doors around 10.30 in the morning, and he disappears as soon as the pubs open, when the staff are still discussing the day’s work in the kitchen.
In the second case,jjhudsson is a recluse. Tulip says she once saw him climbing out of Nigel’s window to avoid going back out through the Press. When the Press held a launch in honour of the e-publication of his first novella - The Angel of Pessane- he didn’t turn up. But there was that guy in the sunglasses …
_(8376478112).jpg)
The Invisible Man. Image credits see Notes.
The person who has got closest to getting an answer about who jjhudsson really is, is Pieter our web designer. To him fell the unenviable task of obtaining a few lines of bio for the website. After several months of negotiations (read: missives from Pieter asking, asking politely, requesting, requesting formally, demanding, requiring and NEEDING URGENTLY) we came into the Press one afternoon to find the following scribbled in pencil across pages torn out of The Magic Mountain:
“The egg bearing JJHudson hatched in the mid century.
He had parents.
A precocious child, he soon taught himself to breath, eat and sleep.
He read philosophy at university, but was asked to leave after turning to the last page to find out what happened.
After a brief spell as a shipping magnet, where he attracted his life-long partner, Cathode, he enrolled in the Finnish Space Programme, almost two decades before it was formed, performing ground-based missions, including assembling a flat-pack bicycle in 1G conditions (with untethered dog).
When he was no longer young, but not quite old, jjhudsson founded the first internet hermitage, becoming an e-hermit on a small island in cyberspace. It was here, disillusioned by endless Ones and Zeros, that he began to write words, eventually stringing entire sentences together, some of which even made sense.
In 2011, jjhudsson nominated himself for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has not heard back.
Retiring from the e-hermit business in the early millennium, jjhudsson now lives alone and speaks to no one.
He is survived [sic] by eating berries and drinking his own urine.”
Make of that what you will. At the Press we have taken it as ‘No Comment’ from the Storyteller.
Notes
Image ‘The Invisible Man’: shando. from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, originally published in German in 1924; our version in English, Vintage (1996).
