Moved...

... and visibly so. Or actually something to the contrary.

In a fit of pique I decided to change this blog's url and name. I have my reasons. They're not particularly good ones, but they're mine nonetheless.

"...the edifice that yawned hugely at the city's vulgar heart,"

Perdido Street Station.


I suppose I'm blogging this a few months late but nevertheless it's blogworthy: one of my favourite novels has been (very kindly) released as a free eBook download. Marvellous.

It's available at Suvudu Free Book Library.

I'll sign off with a short extract from the prologue, a part of the book that always comes to mind when I think of it, the first sentence of which, after a thousand readings, I can pretty much recite from memory:

"Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first few tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river's edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark."

Enjoy.

Duck & Cover!

Discovered this in one of Charlie Brooker's tweets, a curio from an age that I was too young to remember, when the threat of utter nuclear annihilation was king of the bogeymen rather than terrorism or climate change.

There's a whole series of them. On one hand the matter-of-fact way they're delivered and the dated style make them funny, and on the other quite chilling.

No mention of Super Mutants though. A glaring omission.

'The Anubis Gates' by Tim Powers

'. . . They move in dark, old places of the world:
Like mariners, once healthy and clear-eyed,
Who, when their ship was holed, could not admit
Ruin and the necessity of flight,
But chose instead to ride their cherished wreck
Down into darkness; there not quite to drown,
But ever to continue plying sails
Against the midnight currents of the depths,
Moving from pit to pit to lightless crag
In hopeless search for some ascent to shore;
And who, in their decayed, slow voyaging
Do presently lose all desire for light
And air and living company - from here
Their search is only for the deepest groves,
Those farthest from the nigh-forgotten sun . . . '

- From 'The Twelve Hours of the Night' by William Ashbless. Extracted from...


I love this book. I bought it some time ago but have only just gotten around to reading it fairly recently. I should have read it right away, as I'll now urge you to: as soon as I got stuck in and realised how ludicrously enjoyable The Anubis Gates is, the thought that kept returning to me was 'Where the hell have you been all my life?!' That pretty much summarises the simple and heartfelt recommendation I'd like to make on the novel's behalf - books I've had this much fun reading have been few and far between.

Pleased

'A Poem is a City' by Charles Bukowski

A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,
filled with rain and thunder and periods of
drought, a poem is a city at war,
a poem is a clock asking why,
a poem is a city burning,
a poem is a city under guns
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides nakes
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter . . .
a poem is this city now,
50 miles from nowhere,
9.09 in the morning,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets
this poem, this city, closing its doors,
barricaded, almost empty,
mournful without tears, aging without pity,
the hardrock mountains,
the ocean like a lavender flame,
a moon destitute of greatness,
a small music from broken windows . . .

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world . . .
and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor's scrutiny,
and night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.

Labyrinths of the sleeping mind

Last night's sleep was an odyssey of fragments. Countless times I awoke hot and disoriented from one dream or nightmare to stumble to the kitchen, drain a cold glass of water in a matter of seconds, and then fall back down the rabbithole again. I don't remember everything but I'm trying, although I'm still a little sleepy, to gather up what little that hasn't slipped away in the morning light and write it down. At times it felt almost revelatory.

In the most vivid of them I met you for the first time in years. It was, for some reason known only to the dream and its logic, at the bottom of my mother's garden, on the slope under the apple trees and it was warm. The sun laid down a lattice of light and shade as it fell through the leaves, the same way that it does on one of my favourite streets to drive through in this place where I live now. The garden wasn't as it is now - there was no chicken coop for instance and that old shed, with its cobwebs and asbestos, was still standing there in its place. It was the garden from my childhood, the one I grew up in.

I was sitting with a friend, someone I have never known and someone who in all likelihood does not, has never, and will never exist. I'm not sure how I know that, but they don't seem like a composite drawn from memory but somehow external, as if they never came from my mind in the first place. I can't even remember their face. They're not really important. You came and sat next to us, not even noticing we were there. My friend was rude to you - I can't remember what she said - but as you made to leave I said something conciliatory and you stopped. I noticed then that you were almost blind (that was why you had not seen us) and I felt a strange protective urge - something that I knew you'd find very patronising and probably become indignant about if I expressed it. I don't know why you were blind, but it seemed as if you looked right at me even so, and your eyes were the same as they were. You looked older but also in a way the same as you did years ago. You looked good.

We talked. I can't remember most of it. You said you were to go to Miami or you had just come from there, doing something important for work or for university or something. I remember thinking that it might have had something to do with dolphins. I didn't ask, didn't want to betray my ignorance through some cringeworthy slip-up and make myself appear stupid but it didn't really matter. It was nice just to talk.

I don't really remember how it ended. I think you got up and walked away. All I recall is that pretty soon afterwards I was back in the framing narrative with a dry mouth and bleary eyes. Is waking life the story from which dreams spring tangentially or is it the other way around? Not sure. The latter seemed more lucid then than the former, sharper and clearer and more important anyway than trudging in the dark toward the fridge for the thousandth time that night.

I can only scrape together a little of what else I dreamed about. In one I was working at a law firm again, doing a familiar job involving boxes and files and stacks of paper, except the place was more like a castle or a school or a mansion or a prison and I didn't leave at the end of the day (which never occurred because it was always night) and nobody did and I stared out of the windows at floodlit fields far away and crept across wooden-floored corridors quietly so as not to disturb anyone and invite their wrath. I could not understand why I was there or what I was supposed to be doing but I knew that I had to be there. There was an oppressive stillness and I didn't like it.

In another I was in a gigantic department store and I had been instructed to buy a machine that attached to the kitchen sink and made icecream and desserts of many kinds but there was only the display model left and I didn't take it and I wandered around and saw many strange but on the other hand relatively mundane things.

At a different point in the night (I can't remember if it was part of another dream or discrete) I found myself at a number of airports but there was a war on or something and nobody would let me through. I don't remember anything but the departure gates, always departure gates, but they were the places at which I arrived. Each airport led to a different place, not the place or country in which it was based, perhaps not even the same reality. Finally my desperate band and I crashed through security in a hail of bullets and I think we escaped into the jungle but I'm not sure.

Hoping I sleep a bit better tonight.

Gustav Meryink - 'The Golem'

This was a bit of an impulse purchase but a good one. The novel focuses upon the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Prague during the late nineteenth century. As Borges put it, it's a story set in an Eastern Europe on "the other side of the mirror" where the central framing narrative - that of the unnamed narrator's dream in which he becomes another man some thirty years previous - is stacked with further dreams and dislocations relating to the eponymous Golem, a monster of Kabbalistic legend that appears every thirty-three years in a room with no door. The doppleganger theme and a general mirroring of characters and events are deeply woven into the text: the narrator inhabits the body of Pernath and at times also becomes the Golem (who at times takes on a resemblance to those it encounters) and this sense of labyrinthine interconnection lends the novel the surreal, hallucinatory air that something's not quite right even during the most lucid moments. The Golem is a strange dream.

Although at times the novel seems mired or perhaps slightly befogged in an odd mix of mysticism (according to the potted timeline of Meyrink's life included in the introduction, from 1893 to 1896 he investigated "Cabalism, freemasonry, yoga, alchemy and hashish") it is the meat of the story - the plots and counterplots hatched between the ghetto's inhabitants, Pernath's increasing delirium, and the way in which the cramped little enclave itself and the people within it are so vividly characterised - that maintains interest after the decidedly odd atmosphere has hooked it. Further to this, although I did at times find the alchemical content a little tiring (e.g. long sections on the concept of the fusion of male and female to create a perfect being) it reminded me slightly of similar content in Moorcock's The City of the Autumn Stars, another text that visits a Prague similar but quite different to the one of material reality. I also thought that I detected some reverse-echoes of Michael Cisco's The Divinity Student and, appropriately enough, The Golem in Meyrink's novel although at this point it's difficult to place exactly where. It's undoubtebly an influential text, if a relatively and undeservedly obscure one and I'm glad to have read it.

'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex'

Quite a challenging, unsettling film and one that forces the viewer to confront their attitudes toward the concept of terrorism - or at least, for my own part, insofar as it has been constructed in the consciousness of my generation in England. Some may find it an affront to their politics; I found that I had to watch it with a certain amount of detachment. Nonetheless it's a fine film in many ways, not an easy one however, and following on from the likes of 'The Lives of Others' and 'Downfall' it represents another step in the steady advance of German cinema which has impressed me greatly of late.

'1964' by Jorge Luis Borges

            I
It is not magic now, the world. Alone,
you will not share the clarity of moonlight
or the placid gardens. Now there will be no moon
that is not a reflection of the past,
mirror of solitude, a sun of sorrow.
Goodbye now to the touch of hands and bodies
that love brought close together. Now you have only
your loyal memories and the empty days.
We only lose (you vainly tell yourself)
what we do not have, what we have never had.
But, to learn the fine art of forgetting,
it is not enough to put on a brave face.
Some sign - a rose - can tear the heart from you
and a chord on a guitar can do you in.

            II
I will not be happy now. It may not matter.
There are so many more things in the world.
Any random instance is as crowded
and varied as the sea. A life is brief,
and though the hours seem long, there is another
dark mystery that lies in wait for us
- death, that other sea, that other arrow
that frees us from the sun, the moon, and love.
The happiness you gave me once and later
took back from me will be obliterated.
That which was everything must turn to nothing.
I only keep the taste of my own sadness
and a vain urge that turns me to the Southside,
to a certain corner there, a certain door.

Review: 'Nights of Villjamur' by Mark Charan Newton

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll probably know that my tastes can be quite specific. My relationship with Fantasy & Science Fiction has been a turbulent one: large scale booms and slumps in interest triggered by particular authors or movements lead me on to investigate contemporaries writing comparable material, earlier writers that influenced them, and so on. This is how I read: I rarely go for new works by new authors because I'm mostly too busy with books written twenty or thirty years ago whose echoes, I have been told, can be found in the works of authors I'm already a fan of. Miéville sent me in the direction of Moorcock and M. John Harrison (to name but two) who in turn brought me to Clark Ashton Smith. Vandermeer brought me to Borges and Italo Calvino, who then sent me off after the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. I tend to go backward in time more than forward. I don't often go out on a limb. I couldn't tell you who the top five best-selling Fantasy writers of the moment are - I don't have a clue.

We have a pact, new Fantasy fiction and I: I'll read you if you'll show me Something A Bit Different. To explain what I mean by "different" (although at times I'm not sure myself) I'll put it in context: the advent of the New Weird early this decade changed everything for me. I can't really read the George R.R. Martins of this world anymore, the Joe Abercrombies (even though I'm told he's quite good) and so on - my bearings and landmarks have now been irretrievably altered, and the appearance of words like Epic, High or Heroic beside Fantasy is more likely to make me put down a book than pick it up. After the New Weird, traditional Fantasy just doesn't really do it for me anymore - or rather I don't see it as a continuing, living genre in which I should invest my attention. "Show me something a bit different!" I cry. "Well, you know what I mean..." They shrug, as if to say "feudal intrigue and swordfights: what more could you want?" I reread 'Perdido Street Station' for the trillionth time instead.

This brings me to 'Nights of Villjamur'. I heard about Mark Charan Newton early this year and the Internet hype for his second novel (although the first from a major publisher) has been absolutely deafening. As I said, I tend to do a lot of my book buying via references and influences, and as such I read a few interviews, took a look at his blog and all seemed mighty promising. So, aside from slight misgivings about appearances of the word Epic in relation to the book, I went ahead and preordered with appetite whetted and expectations set.

When I finally read the novel I wasn't disappointed. One major factor in my enjoyment was the subgenre/tradition in which it is placed: the Dying Earth. There's something very cool about Newton's resurrection of this form of fiction, one that originates from the pulp Weird days where Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror were still all the contents of a great glorious melting pot rather than being neatly divided and subdivided into marketing categories. Mark has stated in interviews that he previously attempted to write New Weird but turned away from it because editors nowadays won't touch it with a barge pole. I have a suspicion, the same one that arose when reading 'Thunderer' and 'Gears of the City' by Felix Gilman, that the author's trying to smuggle in some of that inter-genre, New Weird, a bit different goodness on the sly. There's enough swashbuckling swords and sorcery, machiavellian machinations of powers and dominions, and so on here to keep the readers of the Fantasy mainstream on board, yet when you take a closer look you realise that the "magic" might well actually be salvaged high-tech of a ravaged future long past and that the characters and society of the novel are, below the surface, more akin in many ways to the inhabitants of a real-world modern city than those of days of yore. Indeed, this is no mere stale tale of the grand destinies of the great and the good, rather at times we see relatively ordinary people with their relatable worries about careers and relationships, working and living in what comes across as a real city rather than a hackneyed Fantasy backdrop. This is one of the things that I liked in Miéville's Bas Lag novels. It's one of the things that keep me reading in the genre at all.

This sense of Villjamur as a working city full of individuals and their lives as opposed to a broadly sketched stage for big events comes across in Newton's handling of its numerous non-human inhabitants. He takes their unique characteristics, with their advantages and drawbacks, and shows (with evident thought) exactly how they fit into society, for instance showing us why the rumel might be particularly suited to police work, why garuda are found in particular sections of the armed forces, or how a banshee might assist in a murder enquiry. They aren't just quasi-human monster-folk there for the sake of it. It is a coherent and expansively imagined world.

I'm quite glad I read 'Nights of Villjamur' shortly after finishing Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun'. I picked up a few things in the former that I'm pretty sure are references to the latter, for instance a certain token given by one character to another in exchange for a helping hand by chance (no spoilers here!) or the colour of a garment. It's nice to recognize these things, reinforcing as it does the sense that the author is drawing from such an excellent tradition and showing an endearing and infectious fondness for it. I would even venture to describe this as an updated Dying Earth, one for a new century in the wake of the New Weird event. Rather than greeting the sun's waning with fatalism or mysticism as in other works, the world of Newton's creation is characterised by a grounded pragmatism - the powers of Villjamur take calculated steps to prepare for the coming ice-age as opposed to treating it as an abstract doomsday that they are resigned to or hope to be saved from by higher powers. It is hard to imagine the inhabitants of Zothique stockpiling firewood.

The novel kicks along at a fair pace, never dawdling unnecessarily, with no temptation on my part to skip ahead at any point - a page turner certainly. Newton's is an assured tone, with solid and polished prose, but at times I felt as if it was perhaps a little too clipped and focused upon driving the plot forward, sometimes relishing more the quieter, thoughtful moments of introspection or description. There's a vein of good humour running throughout - the characters are forever exchanging snappy quips, making wry observations, and there are moments of touching humanity that brought smiles to my face or tugged at heart strings. An interesting thing to note is that I actually related the most, and felt the most attached to, one of the novel's non-human characters - although I never lost sight of the fact that the character wasn't human. In a way that's quite an achievement really.

In conclusion, I'd recommend 'Nights of Villjamur'. Mark Charan Newton's definitely doing Something A Bit Different. From whatever perspective you're approaching it and whatever your requirements from a Fantasy novel I think it'll tick a lot of boxes. It did for me.

'Afterwards' by Clark Ashton Smith

There is a silence in the world
Since we have said farewell;
And beauty with an alien speech
An alien tale would tell.

There is a silence in the world,
Which is not peace nor quiet:
Ever I seek to flee therefrom,
And walk the ways of riot.

But when I hear the music moan
In rooms of thronging laughter,
A tongueless demon drives me forth,
And silence follows after.

City of Darkness

Sometimes in the process of worldbuilding you come across a real-world place that resonates so thoroughly with the place that you're imagining/creating that it stops you right there in your tracks, stunned. This was the case when I recently discovered the Kowloon Walled City. It was one of those moments where you are reminded once again that reality really can be stranger than fiction and you have to step up your game a bit in turn to keep up. The goalposts (to use a metaphor from an albeit much loathed sport) are constantly shifting.



By all accounts it really was the most astounding place: Kowloon's dark other, a city within and also without a city - a scorned, renegade parasite metropolis with its own rules (or rather lack of them) existing as a society of its own on the very fringes of another. Without the attentions of architects and with utter disregard toward planning regulations, by the time of its demolition in the early 90s Hak Nam (its colloquial name meaning 'City of Darkness') had become almost one gigantic building that reached up to fifteen storeys high in places, a mass of homogenised ramshackle structures packed together so tightly that sunlight barely reached the lower levels and that could be (and sometimes was) traversed almost entirely via the rooftops.



The Walled City existed, at least during the earlier half of the twentieth century, in a state of harmonious anarchy. Generations upon generations were born, lived and died in Hak Nam, businesses flourished, and although the drug trade, vice, and other organised criminal activity did too, it was in many respects a place where people lived their lives like any other. To quote Jeff Goldblum in 'Jurassic Park' - "Life finds a way".


If you're interested in finding out more about the Kowloon Walled City, I vehemently recommend 'City of Darkness', a book by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot from which the images above originate. It's a wonderful piece of photojournalism and is probably the best way to explore the city for those of us who will now never get a chance to visit it.

'Concept Art' for novel

(In Which Our Hero Finds Another Excuse to Muck About in Photoshop)

All photos used here were taken during the recent trip to Barcelona.

I laugh at the stupidest things

I imagine a Catalan private dick named 'Oliver Detectius'. As Sara said, "his destiny was pretty much decided from birth". A long and proud line of private investigators...

Look, you don't have to find it funny. I do. That's enough.

More pictures from Barcelona soon. I'd write about it further but I'm feeling a little drained at the moment, oddly enough. Think it's the pressure of all the assignments and my dissertation hanging over my head, plus the thought of what the hell I'm going to do when the time comes to seek gainful employment. The funny thing about crossing bridges when you come to them: sometimes when you get close enough you realise that there isn't actually a bridge in the first place, and the water's running quite fast...

Miéville signing tomorrow in London

See here (cheers to Mark Newton for the tipoff: there'll also be a similar event for his own novel at the same place in June).

Here's the info cut&pasted:

"China Mieville - The City & The City: EXCLUSIVE pre-release event!
Thursday 30, April, 6:00PM - 7:00PM
Forbidden Planet London Megastore,
179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR

RRP: £17.99

Our Price: £15.99

Forbidden Planet is pleased to announce an exclusive pre-release event for China Miéville’s The City & The City. Join China for a signing and reading at the Forbidden Planet Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR, on Thursday 30th April 6 – 7pm. "

Will I be there? YEP! Amongst other things I thought I'd have to wait until the middle of next month to read this one, so it's a pleasant surprise that I'll hopefully be able to bag a copy in time to read on the plane and on the beach.

My experiences of these events are fairly limited: I haven't been to one in years although I vaguely remember being taken to a Dr Who related book signing by a friend in my early teen years and so I'm not sure about the etiquette: is it OK or severely cheeky if I bring along all my other hardbacks to be signed? It's not as if I'm intending to flog them on Ebay to the highest bidder - perish the thought! Not sure what's worse: being a nuisance or coming across as a total geek/fanboy. Wondering if I've got space in my bag for 'Perdido Street Station', 'The Scar', 'Iron Council', 'Looking for Jake' and 'Un Lun Dun' anyway to be honest.

Life continues regardless

Well...

Recently handed in my submission: 'The Man Who Lived in a House of Mirrors'. I love Metafiction. Stories about stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories within stories...

Still smoking too many cigarettes. Still enjoying the weekends perhaps a little too much. Still breathing and so on.

Going to start work again on a short story with the working title 'Bottling Sunlight'. Bouncing ideas around my head during the idle moments, trying to form a narrative from them. Now comes the writing.

Also got another idea: 'Unwritten Letters' / 'People I Used To Know'. Stay tuned.

Yep.

Plots summarised a little differently...

I've been lolling at this on and off all day. Here's one in particular that grabbed me:

"NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: Authorities contain terrorist threat."

Pitch black, utterly fitting, and very funny.

I've been thinking of some ones related to Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, for example:

CHINA MIEVILLE - 'PERDIDO STREET STATION': A purportedly Liberal academic wreaks havoc through irresponsible animal testing, resulting in many deaths and much work for beleaguered authorities.

BORGES - 'THE SOUTH': Medical and social services fail a mentally ill old man who is a danger to himself and those around him.

JEFF VANDERMEER - 'VENISS UNDERGROUND': A man who can't get over his ex girlfriend does her douchebag brother a favour and loses his job because of it.

MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI - 'HOUSE OF LEAVES': A couple buy a home but neglect to hire a surveyor first. They realise their new property is structurally unsound and the resultant strain is too much for their marriage to bear.

ITALO CALVINO: 'IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER': "You" eventually come to realise that quality control in Italian publishing/printing during the 1970s must have been shockingly bad.

H.P. LOVECRAFT: 'THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP': The protagonist and a friend drift apart after the latter marries ("bros before hoes, dude!") and finds that his father in law becomes increasingly controlling.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH: 'THE DARK EIDOLON': Animosity flares up between new neighbours. Property values plummet.

PHILIP K. DICK: 'THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH': A philanthropic entrepreneur returns from a lengthy sabbatical with fresh thinking that could really make a difference. His contemporaries are ungrateful and unenthusiastic.

WILLIAM GIBSON: 'COUNT ZERO': A wayward lad spends too much time on the Internet, resulting in his mother's house burning down and a lot of problems for everyone.

NEIL GAIMAN: 'NEVERWHERE': London's street people take time out from their busy schedule of Special Brew drinking to take a man on a sightseeing tour.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK: 'DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME': A woman plays hard to get and spends all her time worrying about 'what her friends would say'.

The man who lived in a house of mirrors

An old photo I've been messing around with in Photoshop lately. Tentatively entitled 'Another Life'

Well, I've been doing little recently except reading, working out, and watching movies. A bit of writing too. The deadline for this year's uni Creative Writing Competition & Anthology approaches and so far I've got one poem I need to finish up and edit, one rather short prose piece that I'm considerably less confident about than when I wrote it, and a rather longer one (it'll be around 2000 words I think) that I started today and quite like so far. The working title is 'The Man Who Lived in a House of Mirrors' and it has a sort of parable-ish vibe to it. It's all about how we use art to reflect the cluttered junkyards that are our inner selves, which can be cathartic and can also be like wandering purposefully into a maze from which we may never really return. It's been fun to write and I think it'll probably be the one I submit

Sci-Fi London Festival - 2nd to the 4th of May

I was made aware of this event today by a post on Mark Newton's blog. It looks interesting from what I can see on the website and I really wish I could make it - problem is, I'll be out of the country during that period. Since I doubt I'll be able to perfect the mystical art of Astral Travelling during the next month and will therefore have no way of being in two places at the same time, I guess I'll just have to write this one off as Lady Fortune Having It In For Me. I'm very much looking forward to my pre-existing commitment though, so this is both bah and yay at the same time. Maybe next year...

Bike For Three! - 'More Heart Than Brains' LP - release date announced!

"The album has been announced officially. "More Heart Than Brains" will finally see the light of day on the 18th of May on Anticon Records.

Vinyl and compact disc.

These tracks:

Beginning
All There Is To Say About Love
Lazarus Phenomenon
Nightdriving
There Is Only One Of Us
No Idea How
Always I Will Miss You. Always You.
The Departure
First Embrace
Can Feel Love (Anymore)
One More Time Forever
MC Space
Let's Never Meet
More Heart Than Brains
Ending"

Can't wait!

More info here.

Writing tips from Clark Ashton Smith

"The main objective of the short story is to stir the reader's emotions. How you stir them or what emotion you stir is not so important as the fact that to hold the reader's interest you must stir his emotions. You must be able to create various emotional effects thru your characters, action, description, setting, etc.

Constant practice is the key to success. You cannot learn music without practicing it, neither can you learn to write without writing. I suggest that, for your own benefit, you write a few hundred words depicting an emotional experience. Write up one of your own experiences or invent one. But remember that you are writing it with the purpose of stirring an emotion in the person who reads it. The sketch is not to be a story but merely an incident-no opening explanations are necessary.

When you are reading a story watch for the passages in which the author is relating an emotional experience and inducing the emotional feeling in you. By studying how that particular author is doing it you will be better able to do it in your own work."

Full text here.

More bits & bobs:

Atmosphere in Weird Fiction
Fragment of an Essay
On Fantasy

Further nonfiction by C.A.S. may be found here.

Felix Gilman - 'Thunderer' & 'Gears of the City'

Just finished the latter. Good stuff.

The former has been pegged as 'High Fantasy' - more a marketing manoeuvre than anything else I suspect. I didn't read it as anything so simply defined - there are elements here comparable to Borges and also That Genre/Movement That Everyone Keeps Saying Is 'Dead'. In other words, there are many things about these books that mark them out as something a lot more interesting than straight Fantasy.

'Gears of the City' is also refereshingly different from most of the fare you might find on the Fantasy shelves in Waterstones - gritty, gloomy secondary-world Steampunk with, it seemed to me, also a nod to WWII Britain and The Blitz. At times the pace flags a little, at least in comparison with the first book, but that's really quite a minor quibble - the level of imagination and quality of storytelling here is at times astonishing.

Felix Gilman is definately a writer I'll be following with interest in future.

'The Dark Eidolon' by Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith

Full text here.

Reading 'The Dark Eidolon' again recently reminded me why it's one of my favourite Ashton Smith stories ('The Last Incantation' being another). There are no heroes, no happy ending, no redemption, no hope. The characters are inexorably dragged onward and downward by their own obsessions, weaknesses and mistakes, culminating in a great big fucked up mess. Nobody wins. It is a relentlessly bleak tale of stupid, petty, and very human vengeance.

There are some wonderful images, ideas, and phrases here: "a dark liquid full of star-cold lights" and the sudden appearance of Namirrha's "house" (not a palace, a sinister citadel, or anything so clichéd) to name but two examples. There's a fundamental dreamlike weirdness at work here that I can't quite place but find utterly compelling.

M. John Harrison is quoted (in my edition of 'The Emperor of Dreams') as saying that C.A.S. "helped point the way to the hard-edged British fantasy of the 1960s and '70s". Having read the likes of Harrison's 'Viriconium' stories and also the works of Michael Moorcock (who I would also count as a huge influence) I can definately see the truth in this statement, but I think Ashton Smith's stories are also very worthy of the attentions of current day readers and writers. He deserves to be read and rated a lot more highly than he is.

People keep telling me that the New Weird is "dead", whatever the hell that means - well, I think that if that's the case then now is a more appropriate time than ever to embrace all that the "old" Weird has to offer.

The ever-amiable Mr Papaya

I like 'Fringe' a lot. OK, so it's can be a little formulaic, and the actor playing Broyles is really just playing the same character he played in 'The Wire', and maybe the show's open to accusations of being an 'X-Files' ripoff - a similarity I noticed immediately, as someone who never missed an episode of the show at the time. I prefer to think of it as a post-millennial take on paranormal investigation, with J.J. Abrams bringing in the kind of things that make 'Lost' such damn good TV.

I particularly like the way that Dunham possesses fragments of Agent Scott's memories and the way that this is used - emails, phonecalls, meetings with the dead(?) man that only actually happen in her head, her mind's way of translating the shreds of his consciousness. I really like the isolation-tank sequences as well, where Dunham finds herself present within scenes of Scott's memories but can't actually hear everything that is said, for instance, because he wasn't within earshot himself at the time. Great stuff.

This aspect of the show is particularly relevant to me because memory and our relationship to the past are pretty central themes in my own writing. It's nice that I can actually engage with a mainstream US TV show in that way, it restores a little of my faith in big broadcasters.

When looked at in an overview maybe 'Fringe' doesn't seem that impressive, but it's the little things like that, or Walter Bishop's hilarious utterances (every time I watch an episode I end up talking in a "Walter Bishop voice" for a while afterwards - sad, yes, and annoying for others) that keep me watching.

HalfLife 2 - 'Escape From City 17' and 'Black Mesa' Mod

A short film based on one of the finest computer games ever made.



The trailer for an upcoming HL2 modification that's basically a remake of the first game. Looks marvellous: it's a pity that it doesn't look like it'll ever be available for the XBOX 360 though, which is my format of choice seeing as I gave up on the PC as a gaming platform years ago - I just don't want to get into the tedious cycle of upgrades or buying new machines. This is one instance where it'd be great if Valve got involved, bought it up, started selling it for a fiver or a tenner, and released it via the Game Marketplace on Live. PC gamers will probably hate that idea because as it stands they'll just be able to download it as a free mod. Nobody likes paying for things if they don't have to...

I'm not hugely into videogames these days, haven't been since my teens, but there are a few games and franchises that inspire real enthusiasm. HalfLife is probably top of that pile.

On a related note by the way, if they ever make a HalfLife movie I think Bill Murray (pictured here with flowers in his beard) would be perfect for Dr Breen:

I reckon good old Bill could nail the role. We rarely see him play the badguy, and he'd bring just the right kind of dry humour to a big screen version of the (not so good) doctor. Incidently he also bears a resemblance to one of my university lecturers!

'What's in the box?'

http://www.whatsinthebox.nl/

Very cool. Cinema meets FPS shooter, embraces its tropes, and takes the whole Cloverfield POV/camcorder thing to another level. Makes me want to play through HalfLife 2 again.

It's quite strange/interesting to see the HUD used in film, from a semiotics point of view: we're used to seeing such a barrage of condensed information in videogames but in this context it's something relatively new I think.

Ridiculous Pulp Paperback Covers - 'Where Were You Last Pluterday?" by Paul Van Herck

I came across this today and sort of wish I'd bought it. It looks bonkers.

The title itself is amazing, utterly Lintian. "Pluterday" LOL.

Hope it's still there next time I visit.

I heart Photoshop. A lot.

Just wish I had a faster PC on which to run it. Grrr...

(Looks better full size)

Fantasy Centre, Holloway Rd

I was introduced to this remarkable place today by a friend. I don't know how I missed it.

According to the website it's "the only shop in Europe specialising in science fiction publications of all eras" and, established in 1971, it may even be "the oldest surviving specialist SF bookshop in the world".

I never really considered that anything like this existed, certainly not in this day and age. Rows upon rows of old pulpy paperbacks with garish covers, signed first editions, Sci-Fi & Fantasy as far as the eye can see. I walked around with a big gleeful childlike grin all over my face. If I had the money I'd have bought the entire place.

For the last few years I've done all my book buying online, simply because it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier. I'm rethinking that now, feeling slightly bad that perhaps it's that kind of thing that contributes toward the hard times currently facing many an independant bookshop. I doubt I'll change my habits entirely overnight but it's made me think.

'The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft'

Many thanks to my good friend and fellow Apocrypharium contributor Ad Zu for making me aware of this potential monstrocity:


"Universal and Imagine Entertainment are gearing up for "The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft."

The studio has bought the film rights to Image Comics’ graphic novel, with the project a potential directing vehicle for Ron Howard. The book bows April 8.

U sparked to "Lovecraft" because its take on classic horror fits in well with the studio’s library of monster fare featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man, the last of which is being brought back to the bigscreen later this year.

Created by Mac Carter and Jeff Blitz, book borrows elements from Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.

Lovecraft, who died in 1937, is considered one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century.

Carter, a commercial director, will pen the script and serve as executive producer alongside Blitz.

Carter and Blitz both helmed commercials for Anonymous Content, working on spots for such clients as McDonald’s, Yahoo, Coca-Cola and Toyota. Carter has since gone solo and has helmed more than 100 ads for clients.

Imagine’s Brian Grazer and Howard are producers. David Bernardi, shingle’s senior VP, and director of development, Chris Wade, will serve as co-producers.

Image Comics also publishes the popular "Spawn" books, as well as "Witchblade," "WildC.A.T.s," "The Walking Dead" and "Youngblood.""


To say I'm unenthusiastic about this would be an understatement. A "directing vehicle" (what a great choice of words!) for Richie from 'Happy Days' whose previous pictures include Most Boring Film EVAR 'Apollo 13'. Scripted and produced by people notable for doing Coca Cola commercials. That isn't even the worst part though.

It's not as if the big screen's seen much in the way of HPL adaptations in the first place, certainly very little that's been any good. In the face of that, then, I'm not exactly greeting this news of what looks to be some kind of comedy biopic with much hope. Would Lovecraft approve? Probably not, he was a bit of a dour sod by all accounts. I don't either.

I doubt this typo would have pleased the author...

A couple of quotes showing that Hodgson's attitude toward the porcine might not have been particularly favourable:

"As the sounds ceased I saw something was rising up through the middle of the "defense". It rose with a slow steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the swaying, whirling funnel of cloud - a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss.... It rose higher like a huge pale mound. Through a thinning of the cloud curtain I saw one small eye.... I shall never see a pig's eye again without feeling something of what I felt then. A pig's eye with a sort of hell-light of vile understanding shining at the back of it." - The Hog

"It was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine." - The House on the Borderland

Full texts of 'The House on the Borderland', 'The Night Land', the Carnacki stories, and more of Hodgson's fiction is available to read online via places such as Project Gutenberg.

Hodgson was a writer ahead of his time in many ways and although reading him is sometimes pretty tough going (the cod-archaic style of 'The Night Land' a case in point) I believe he made a lasting contribution to Weird fiction. China Miéville's excellent introduction to this collection, now unfortunately out of print (I bagged a copy before the prices shot up) is well worth reading for anyone interested in the author and his works.

Spring cleaning

I've taken out all the music posts on this blog and put them into another one. I decided they were cluttering this one up. It's probably part of a slippery slope which will end in me pidgeonholing every single post and eventually every single thought into a separate category and blog. Let's hope not.

Also I've bitten the bullet and started "Twittering" or whatever the damnsilly verb is. Yes, I can even be a curmudgeon about technology. The URL's http://twitter.com/alexcarnegie in any case.

The hightop sneakers of Monkey Island

See here.

WANT.

I was a huge fan of the Monkey Island series and Lucasarts adventure games in general when I was a kid.

Goodfellas VS Peanuts

Movie Roundup - 'What Just Happened?', 'Timecrimes', 'Fears of the Dark'

Keeping it brief because I'm a bit busy...


'What Just Happened?' is a bit of an odd one. Tries to be a quirky exposé of the Hollywood shark-pool, comes across as a bit of a smug Hollywood in-joke. Bruce Willis typifies this, and reminds me of Charlie Sheen in 'Being John Malkovich': yeah, we know, you can laugh at yourself. What a good sport.

Another phoned-in performance by DeNiro who's shown us of late that, like Al Pacino, he'd play a ham sandwich if someone paid him enough and would still give the impression that he wasn't really trying.

When the film ended I didn't feel like I'd gained much from the experience really, or indeed been on much of a journey during it.

The soundtrack's nice though. Buck 65 and Nick Drake feature among others.



'Timecrimes' (or 'Los Cronocrímenes') is, without wanting to sound patronising, actually a fairly good achievement for what appears to be quite a low budget film - especially seeing as it's Science Fiction of a sort, dealing with time travel. You'll have to suspend your disbelief a bit here, as the characters do not react in a particularly natural way to a lot of the events, and sometimes the time-travel is used as a quite clumsy narrative device that at times becomes predictable - you're meant to think "ah, so that happened because he did x when he went back" but it's no great stunning revelation. All in all, there are worse ways of spending the hour and a half-ish that it takes to watch this movie.

'Fears of the Dark' ('Peurs du Noir') is a collection of black and white animated shorts of a Horror pursuasion that's not too bad at all. The first and last segments are definately the strongest, the latter in particular using the format's sense of light and dark most effectively. It was also nice to see (although not throughout) what looked like traditional, rather than CGI, animation. Of the three films I'd say this is the one I'd most recommend.

FIN.

Charlie Brooker on Literature: "Apparently 65% of us have lied about reading the great works of literature. We needn't have bothered"

"The other irony is that while people lie about having read highbrow novels in order to impress each other, a massive percentage of highbrow novels aren't worth reading anyway because the authors are too busy trying to impress the reader (who, we now know, probably hasn't bothered turning up). That's why so many contemporary novels seem to largely consist of a thinly veiled version of the author discussing politics and art and quantum theory over a carefully selected bottle of wine with the devastatingly beautiful mixed-race wife of an impotent international statesman and/or gangster (delete where applicable) before whisking her off to a swish hotel room to have expert animal sex with her all weekend until a pigeon symbolising the unions or something crashes into the window and blah blah blah blah BLAH. I mean, really, who cares? Mr Tickle had 20 times the raw entertainment value - and it came with pictures - so if you can't beat that, don't bother."

Full article here.

LOL.

Cue dullards calling him 'anti-intellectual'. There's nothing particularly 'intellectual' or worthy about stuck-up, elitist bullshit. I think Brooker's seen through the Emperor's New Clothes..

Terminator - Salvation

Looks good. Hopefully there won't be too much superfast, ultra-shiny CGI à la Transformers.

I've always liked the Terminator movies, especially the first. It'll be good to see the future in that universe, after The Machines have 'smashed the world' (to use a Lintian phrase).

Meanwhile, here's a Drum&Bass tune that's essentially a remix of the original Terminator theme:

You are -> here <- and there is no way back

"Lewin reflected upon the ones that we leave behind when we follow our path through life, that their lives continue unseen regardless, and of all that we might have seen and done had things occurred differently. Would he have been happier with these people still in his life, any more so than he was with his current lot? Would they be happier with him in their lives? It was impossible to know. Futile to contemplate. He certainly knew that he wished not to have stayed for a lifetime but for at least a little more time – one always wishes this when there is no more time left or opportunity to spend it."

The Life of the Mind

Watching 'Barton Fink' when you're blocked, feeling nihilistic, and undergoing a crisis of confidence in your abilities and the choices you've made in your life: good idea or bad?

Well, a Coen film is never a bad choice. It hasn't cheered me up any though.

Oh well. Mañana...

'Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline' - Time Magazine Photo Essay

Click here to see it.

I was struck by the Gothic beauty of these images, the aura of loneliness and potential long since buried that seems to radiate from the decaying, abandoned landscape. In particular image #5, the United Artists Theatre, is redolent of bygone opulence and decadence - it looks like a place abandoned in the middle of something, as if some great catastrophe event swallowed all the inhabitants rather than the more mundane and ultimately sadder reality. I have a feeling some of this imagery's going to work its way into my writing...

Canon? Balls.

I've an abiding hatred of being told what to like, what is supposed to have worth and what is not. The prescription of canon, of taste, of such a nebulous thing as quality - it has always struck me as parochial at best and elitist and fascistic at worst. We're all guilty of making value judgments, but those that have the weight of an establishment behind them seem to me the worst by far - they have the most influence and can do the most damage.

As a student of English Literature I've had to keep my natural instict to rail against the supposedly high-minded and gentil tyranny of the literary establishment at bay. It's meant that I've broadened my horizons somewhat: instead of remaining predisposed against certain writers and movements (e.g. the Modernists) simply because they are so critically acclaimed amongst the makers of canons, these sneering self-styled arbiters of worth and genre (or "chutney and jam" as Graham Joyce so aptly puts it in his editorial piece in 'Postscripts 13') I've decided to dismiss both this reaction against and also any pushes in their favour and merely judge them on their merits according to my own reading. I enjoyed and learned from these works not because they belonged to some bullshit 'official reading list' of high literature but according to my own judgment. I really do find the glorified herd mentality quite sickening: I thought that was something you only got in low culture, eh chaps?

I suppose in this post I'm announcing my own hostile intent toward canons. Add another 'n' and you get what I realise is a truly bad pun, but hear me out: canons are created to defend/maintain the status quo. Canons are destructive - but they create walls and barriers rather than breaking them. Canons are used by those within against those outside.

The only canons I believe in are the ones we create for ourselves and are only relevant to ourselves. Don't tell me what's "of high value" or "important": tell me what you like. Don't preach, recommend. I'll make up my own mind.

Charlie Brooker on 'Heston Blumenthal's Victorian Feast'

"This really is one of the most creative shows I've seen in quite a while; not in the construction of the programme itself (which takes the familiar "mission" format to provide a fairly spurious narrative), but in Blumenthal's inventive craziness. It's basically a bloke deliberately dicking around to extreme effect for an hour, dabbling in a weird form of art, seeing how far he can go. Halfway through, I realised why this was so refreshing: you very rarely see such genuinely ingenious and imaginative processes being followed this clearly on TV. Each course Blumenthal serves is like an edible Python sketch: meticulously constructed and very, very silly."

The full article from The Guardian can be found here.

Brooker's great - always funny, frequently (and deservedly) scathing, and absolutely one hundred percent on the money most of the time. For all the apparent grumpiness he seems like One Of The Good Guys.

I watched the programme last night and I have to say I agree. It was good fun. I'm looking forward to the next installment which I fervently hope is called 'Heston's Jurassic Feast' and in which he clones a velociraptor and uses it to make a very fine consomme.

'The Crisis'

Have you ever seen stone rot away in seconds or dissolve like sugarlumps in boiling water? That was on the day the ceiling collapsed and the shadows of airships fell through the building’s cracked ribcage. I recall them drifting corpulently like boats seen from below the water. It seemed like we ran for hours after that, never fully escaping the shade.

The start of a short new piece (click here to read more) that I'm working on and thinking of submitting for this year's Creative Writing Competition/Anthology at London Met.

Defaced

"He was never entirely sure whether the thing he did next - the thing he always did next, the thing he had to do - was because the woman before him was not the one he had become fixated with or because in a way she was, whether she bore too striking a similarity or not quite enough. He knew that when the deed was done (heart beating so hard that he thought he was dying) she was neither, and her face could no longer taunt him frustratingly with what was different and what was the same, what he had and what he had not, because it was no longer there. He watched her bleed out in the morning light, noting the final slow and steady breath as he cleaned his equipment."

Aldous Huxley - 'Brave New World'

I'm midway through reading this for, I am thoroughly ashamed to say, the first time (full text here) and had to stop and blog. It's marvellous stuff.

The most striking and chilling of Dystopias, I think, are the ones that go under the guise of Utopias. Huxley, like Orwell, understood this all too well. There's something missing in today's Sci-Fi that can be found in works such as these. We, who in the Postmodern era have become so blasé in our discrediting and dismissal of all and sundry, our aloof alignment to non-alignment, do not and cannot really appreciate the terrible power of all-consuming, unbending ideology.

Love & War

Last weekend I was very kindly invited to an event at the Institute Of Education that took place as part of Jewish Book Week - a talk/Q&A session with "emotional/moral philosopher" Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev entitled 'In The Name Of Love'. It was in part a promotion for his book 'In The Name Of Love - Romantic Ideology & Its Victims' which I have since begun reading.

The book examines romantic love from a curious perspective: on one hand it examines its changing nature and impact upon our lives in the modern day, and on the other it examines statements made by a people who have committed murder "in the name of love" - more specifically the killing of a partner or former partner. Each chapter begins with quotes from songs, poems, and the like regarding love but also those taken from interviews with murderers - and of course the interesting part of this is how utterly alike the sentiments expressed are.

As I'm currently grappling with a fictional character who is impelled toward terrible acts by the loss of love, this is all very interesting and useful stuff - all food for thought and the creative process. The canapes and miniature duck wraps at the reception afterwards (courtesy of the British Friends Of The University Of Haifa) were very tasty as well.

Tonight I finally got around to watching 'Waltz With Bashir'.

It has that odd look of a lot of today's computer assisted animation where everything's perhaps a little too fluid. That's not really a criticism, just an observation really.

I'll say what you're probably expecting me to say, because it's true: in visual terms it's beautifully done. I did feel however that for a film so concerned with the trauma of war it didn't entirely go as deep as it could have done into that theme/issue but instead preferred to skirt it with images, little allusory remarks, and so on. I'd tentatively suggest that it may be a case of 'style over substance' to an extent. I think I also miss a lot of nuance and feeling through watching it in subtitled form - but then I don't speak Hebrew and my co-viewer wasn't fluent either. All this aside, as a series of vivid snapshots of war though it definately succeeds.

The film's climax is shocking and extremely sobering, one of those times when everything goes a bit quiet in the room for a while afterwards. The abrupt switch (I won't go into specifics, you'll know if/when you watch it) brought to mind Theodor Adorno's dictum that there can be "no poetry after Auschwitz" - in the face of such horror, artifice is meaningless.

Things that have made me LOL today

* I love internet memes. I like to think that within the dog's yoyo is a smaller you, and that you also has an even smaller yoyo with a dog inside that... Would Borges approve? No, he'd say it was silly.

* This South Park clip always has me in stitches. "Artemis Clyde Frog" is great. I now can't take 'Wild Wild West' at all seriously when it's repeated on TV - although whether I took it particularly seriously in the first place is another matter...

* Earlier in Paddington I witnessed a two tourists trying to pay for their KFC with Euros. The man at the til looked at them like they'd just turned up with wheelbarrowfull of Zimbabwean Dollars.

* We've noticed that 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares' seems to have fallen back on an utter reliance upon it's conventions. Now we've got to the stage where we can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what'll happen: he'll turn up, call the waitress 'my darling', completely diss the crap out of all the food he's given, argue constantly with the boisterous owner/chef (who will likely be Italian-American and live somewhere on the East Coast - usually New Jersey) - then he'll say that they've "lost their passion". He'll bang on about 'fresh local produce', revamp and slash the menu, make the portions smaller (this is, after all, America), then his team will "work through the night" and completely reinvent the restaurant's interior - which the staff and by now abashed and humbled owner will love, especially the photos of their family which he's had put up around the place in a schmaltzy appeal to sentimentality. There'll be one highly problematic night to show how much of a mess the place is, then a successful one after Ramsay's changes. He always comes up with a signiture dish for the place (Italian cuisine? Meatballs then!) which debuts in a P.R. event for the local community. By the end of the show Ramsay has mended both the restaurant and the relationships between the people working in it and their families - hugs and learning all round. Then he disappears in his black coat like David Carradine in 'Kung Fu' or Banner at the end of an episode of 'The Incredible Hulk' - his work is never done and he must move on. In so many ways it's a perfect example of how shockingly bad US TV can be, but we're addicted. It's just too easy to take the mick.

* I find a lot of humour in the idea that Emilio Estevez bears a secret jealousy of Charlie Sheen and spends his days watching 'Mighty Ducks' on repeat, muttering "I could have been the big star with the sitcom, I wouldn't have become a f*cking sex addict..." I also like the idea of him as a Gormenghast/Farseer-Trilogyesque black-sheep of the Sheen dynasty, unable to bear the family name (although Estevez actually is the family name) and working clandestine plots to regain his rightful throne. Yep, that's a bit of a weird one.

* I've also been deriving much amusement from pissing Sara off with my Jackie Mason impressions. What, you want I should stop?

The making of a hero

I discovered the 'Hero Factory' via Mark Newton's blog and decided to have a go, seeing as I'm feeling 'tired' and it's probably the most creative thing I'm capable of at the moment.

Here are the results:

Not sure about the name, I think it's a little too functional - hardly going to strike fear into evildoers' hearts is it? I prefer...

UNPUBLISHEDWRITERMAN!

Watch him battle the evil forces of procrastination and writer's block! See him drink beer and consume epic amounts of KFC and chinese food with his mighty spork! Remark upon the fact that he needs a shave at your peril! Listen to him talk endlessly about 'the novel' which hasn't even reached the first 100,000 words yet, let alone a first draft!

Marvel have yet to call me back. Bastards.

Progress

Yeah!

Don't bother telling me that's unreadable...

My problem is...

...I can't write padding. Well, it's one of my problems.

I don't know how on earth this novel's going to reach 15000 words - I'm barely at 15K and I've already given away too much, moving on too quickly, and so on.

Hopefully by the time I hit 50K I'll have developed a better sense of how to pace it, and will have bulked up the chapters I've written so far. Once again I'm reminded just how big an undertaking this actually is.

When satire transforms into sincerity

I'm so taken with an idea for a nonexistant book that I posted on one of my other blogs that I'm actually considering writing it as a proper story. It started off as a sort of generic Magic Realist pisstake but I've grown increasingly fond of the title and basic plot idea that I came up with. It's funny how these things turn out.

Holler at ya President!

Shouts out to all my presidents