Best Characters Ever

1. MEDUSA

2. GHOST RIDER

3. PYRAMID HEAD 

A.J THE ANONYMOUS JOURNALIST SAYS: I was impressed with Iron Man. Overjoyed, in fact. Iron Man opens the mind. It reminds you of technological possibilities. Spiderman is cool, love the romance with Kirsten Dunst, she’s perfect, although any girl would find it hard not to look pretty in that role. Batman is a joke, especially when played by Christian Bale, you only have to watch the old TV series to know he and Robin are both goofs. Superman wears his pants outside of his trousers, less said about him the better, although to be honest he is probably the hardest of everybody and would nail all the rest hands down. All the X-Men are planks apart from Gambit because he’s a legend with cards and can probably deal himself full houses, straight flushes, and 4-of-a-kinds at will. Not forgetting the sexy one with blue skin. Wolverine? Hmm...doesn’t he get like totally owned by Freddy Kruegar? Freddy could invade Wolverine’s dreams as a big-ass snake and make him kill himself with his own claws. The first Wolverine would hear about it was when he woke up dead.

Not very clued up on comics. Haven’t seen Watchmen yet but they all look like gimps. Hellboy is a bell tip although credit where credit is due, Ron Pearlman is a class act. Jeepers Creepers is a fool. I'd hammer that swine all day. Computer games are where it’s at. When I first saw a trailer for the game Silent Hill, that was the point when I realised the computer game industry and the movie industry were moving closer together. The game was actually scary! Can you buh-leeve that sheet? A scary game? Then, when the film came out, I was like, wow, this is one serious flick, outstanding and unique, the only let-down was Sean Bean (pronounced Seen Been, as in have you seen Mr Bean, say it how you see it, there’s no way Sean = Shaun), who doesn’t do accents.

Pyramid Head in Silent Hill was a nasty piece of work, horrifyingly impressive. He pulled a woman’s skin off in one swoop with one hand while holding her in the air a-kicking and a-screaming in his other. And as for his knife, huh, forget Crocodile Dundee, that’s a toothpick compared to old Pyramid Head’s. Forget Pumpkin Head as well. And forget anyone or anything from Harry Trotter or Lord of the Geeks. All that sci-fi fantasy wizard and spells codswallop don’t count. Griffins and Gruffaloes and Centaurs and all that other shish is for kids man. Gremlins are OK however. Anything that gives you nightmares gets a tick of approval (can you think of a better reason to not let your feet hang out over the edge of the bed?). That includes the Hulk, bodybuilder style, as Lou Ferrigno in the hit TV shows, no expensive computer generated imagery (CGI) needed, thank you very much, just a lick of green body paint and we’re good to go.

Dracula? One swift elbow from any old cowboy or alien would knock them fangs down the back of his blood-lined throat and what’s he gunna do then, gum you to death? If he turns into a flock of bats, fair play to the mother. Werewolf? The ones in Dog Soldiers (2002) are truly-fooking-terrifying! Catwoman? No. Wonderwoman? No. Miho in Sin City (2005)? Yes. Angelina Jolie or Milla Jovovich? Yes and yes. Predator? Abso-bloody-lutely! Top design. Alien? Don’t need mentioning. The ghost in 100 Feet (2008)? Arrgggghhh! YES! YES! YES! 

H.R. Giger's Bar - Mine's a Bud

Steady Destiny 2+

DB TINK SAYS: Practising and then recording the same song for hours and hours gets the tune stuck in your head. You end up nodding along when you are outside. You carry it with you out of the house. This song has followed me from keyboard to keyboard over the last 5 years. You would think I'd be sick of listening to it, after the repetitive playing of it when I'm actually putting it together, but once it's done and finished, that's when you listen to it the most.

~

The basic structure is important. There are common rules to be followed. One, it must start off strong. Two, it mixes things up to apply the brakes at some point. This I picked up from a band called Rammstein, who often turn off their drums in the middle of a song and have a little peaceful moment before it all kicks off again. They call this HALF TIME. Three, you must finish stronger than how you started. No point running out of steam and fading away. I learned this from Progressive EuroTrance. The clue is in the title. Things should be coming in, not going out, or if they do go out, then returning. You'd be surprised how many professional musicians fail to follow these handy hints.

~

You're only as good as your influences. And, unfortunately, your microphone...

Embarrassing Absurdia

VOICES FROM THE OTHER SIDE is a ‘black writer’ anthology, and good. Read it a couple of years ago and it’s almost time to go back. Mainly to reacquaint myself with Ricky Windell George, author of the contribution Good ‘Nough To Eat, about the touching and hilarious insecurities of a male stripper hung like a horse. Truly mesmerising content! Probably in my top 3 fav short stories ever. Couldn’t put it down, devoured in one sitting, yadda-blah-blah-yadda and so on (as you would expect with all short stories, I suppose).

Like all the best efforts, they kind of change you. They challenge you. They almost intimidate you. But, importantly, you learn from them. Because it's an education. And you're better next time. Perhaps you're better than them. Creative practitioners are constantly leapfrogging each other. It's the name of the game, and not important, because it's all about personal progress (never compare yourself to other people!). This story in particular was like the Dumb and Dumber of literature, like a stupid movie in the text of a book, but serious, sad and horrifying at the same time, making it a real adult gem. (A chipped gem, it must be said.) Chuckling out loud while leafing through pages is a reserved form of humour, and different to other laughs. It takes a lot of knack to make people do that. Or a natural funny bone (some comics have funny material, and some have funny bones). A book has no visual power whatsoever. All print looks the same. Black on white blocks. Line after line. Uniform. But within it is the author’s psyche (if he or she is any good), delivered into your brainspace, and that particular author’s psyche may be very visual indeed. The reader may be a visual person too, and when they both interact in this way, then a splendid meeting of minds might just take place...

Is Ricky Windell George really writing about this?? I thought to myself. It was kind of unbelievable. Like watching a laugh out loud comedy with no television. Reading can very much be like watching telly, except you choose all the locations and actors. You’re in total control of interpreting the writer’s message. The farcicality of bold stories like Good ‘Nough To Eat actually rub off on you. The funniest laughs are those laughs when you shouldn’t really be laughing. Embarrassment has a lot to do with it, you know. As an author, how far are you prepared to go? How much of yourself are you prepared to reveal? How red must your face flush before you have to think twice about where you’re heading? I believe there are no boundaries. On the screen, there are. But on the page, no (not on that illimitable screen in your mind). Push them. Break them down. But you have to know yourself first. Or maybe not. Perhaps knowing others is enough. When you mix yourself and others you get a new character.

The most preposterous scene ich recall ever writing was a flash piece called Spell Pinocchio (1300 words). It took place on a plane. Among other strange goings on, a woman had kept the liposuction juice from her hospital operation and was squirting it from a water gun into the hair of other passengers, saving only enough to make pancakes for her husband.

It’s called absurdia, and it’s the future. Think of Jim Carey and Jasper Carrot in a script written by Harry Enfield and Lenny Henry. This is why the blog has a trick up its sleeve waiting for Mr. Ridiculous to come out. What’s the point in living without laughter? Soes anyway, well done Ricky, gunna read you again soon. Some things you just have to experience more than once. Like Michael Jackson’s Beat It video, and oriental sushi with coconut yogurt mashed together on a folded pineapple pizza...no other toppings, not even cheese and tom, just pineapple...like a Hawaiian without the ham. Spell Hawaiian. 

◊◊ right though aren’t I though ◊◊

Freaks

SUPER POWER:

The ability to make

oneself unseen to

the naked eye

INVISIBLE

If I stay totally still,

if I stand right tall,

with me back against the school wall,

close to the science room’s window,

with me feet together,

pointing straight,

aiming forward,

if I make me hands into tight fists,

make me arms dead straight,

if I push me arms into me sides,

if I squeeze me thighs,

stop me wee,

if me belly doesn’t shake,

if me boobs don’t wobble,

if I close me eyes tight,

so tight that it makes me whole face scrunch,

if I push me lips into me mouth,

if I make me teeth bite me lips together,

if I hardly breathe,

if I don’t say a word.

Then,

I’ll magic meself invisible,

and them lasses will leave me alone.

I found Nik Perring by accident on the web when I first started searching for suitable people to follow on Tweeter. You gotta start off by following somebody, right? Similar like-minded people and all that? Well here was a guy much like myself (just another writer on the web) trying to get ahead with his craft. To his credit Nik was already in print with Roast Books, but unusually it was with a collection of short-short stories. Now I gotta tell ya, I’m all for backing flash fiction ever since I fell into it myself back in 06-07, and will happily champion anybody who not only practices the endless possibilities of this gloriously dynamic format but manages to get published with it, because that’s good news for every fan and participant. Don’t forget, there’s absolutely no shortage of flash material on this blog. Sounds good, dunnit, saying ‘flash material’? Better than saying ‘manuscript copy’.

Any-old-hoo-hoo, the extract above is a short-short story from Nik Perring’s latest published paperback, FREAKS, co-written by Caroline Smailes and illustrated by Darren Craske. Check the usual places, like Amazon, for very competitive rates. Ebook there too of course. I like this sample because it kind of treads into poem territory, and reminds me of a scary broad daylight shape-shifting changing sequence in a horror flick…plus any book with a comic cover this impressive has gotta be good, hasn’t it? 

One more thing: The “Manchester Titan”, novelist Nicholas Royle, got caught up in a kind of smack-slam-slanging match with Nik on Tweeter a few months ago, arguing the toss over the literary credibility of novels and longer works and suchlike  over shorter bite-sized flash works. Now, Nicholas once judged a story of mine 1^st place in a comp, so understand that I’ll never say a bad word about him, but this public social network brawl was unequivocally enthralling for the casual observer, probably the best Tweeter moment ever in my book, with each stating worthy points of merit for either argument. I found myself agreeing with both, and would love to encourage ‘Round 2’, if both gentlemen are up for it! Not to stir things up, but I did enjoy some interesting banter for a change! C’mon guys, gloves off…

Then again, I also seem to recall Nicholas locking horns with a poet. Maybe he picks fights with anyone who doesn’t write novels. Or isn’t from Manchester…

Plans...and Da Jungle

Here’s an old hard copy title cover of the rewrite giving your host with the most such a headache at the moment, along with its predecessor, Glimpses Gone. Rewriting something old which is embarrassing in places can really test your patience, but you have to stand by it and see it through, cutting and chopping without changing the body into something altogether new, and resisting the temptation to put it in the bin. It’s fair enough being willing to simply check for spelling mistakes and leave it at that, but when almost every seven year old sentence needs reconstructing it's far easier to kick back and think about something else. Maybe watch something intellectual, or dip into a book, or think about some collages.

Schmoe 2 needs to be done, which is a totally fun release from normality. Schmoe is different because it has a niche audience, so it will get written with a purpose unlike anything else. It can get reeled off. Each instalment of the series will be about 10,000 words, in mini-anthology style, like the first.

Schmoe and Mr. Ridiculous, along with Escaping Hazel, are bound for print. The ultimate idea of a book signing is to have a spread of the entire works laid there for browsers or buyers or whatever to pick and choose, rather than hinge every hope on one title. That’s a lot of work away however, at the moment, but achievable within one or two years. Or five.

But you know, writers get sick of sitting at screens. Especially if that screen is in your home. Clocking in has its advantages. Office premises have their advantages. A woodland retreat has its advantages. Tight busy schedules have their advantages. The future is rising early to write first thing in the morning, when your creativity is peaking within the throes of dream hangover, or napping late to stay up and write in the night, with quiet nocturnal energy.

Be posting a feature about selected writing from prisons and secure hospitals soon, so please call again. 

SAW SOMETHING STRANGE ON A WILDLIFE DOCUMENTARY THE OTHER DAY AND FELT COMPELLED TO WRITE THIS SHORT RHYME ABOUT IT. JUST ABOUT SUMS UP THE JUNGLE, IF YOU ASK MOI, AND MAYBE JUST ABOUT SUMS UP LIFE!

Weird Jungle

A snake ate a Leopard’s cub

So the Leopard bit the Snake

Until it spewed the cub back up

The Snake slithered away

To fight another day

Then the Leopard ate her cub

Happy Anniversary

2 Today!

It’s 2 years to the day since I got started writing a novel. I’ve only just found out so I decided that this statistic, especially since it just turned midnight, warranted a blog post. Seriously, I gotta talk to someone about this. 2 whole years. It's been a year since I was bragging about how fast I was gunna storm through it right here on the Art Till Death art and writing blog. Huh! Don’t think so sunshine! My outline got scrapped. I made a new one. By outline I mean a 5 minute spider graph. I stopped for months at a time. I’ve just had over 2 months off now. 67 days to be exact. It feels like 3 weeks. It’s still fresh in my mind, and I haven’t thought about it since. Apart from the word SINKHOLE. There will be a sinkhole in the plot.

The idea started as a short story to be honest, originally titled MUDDY ANGEL: DARK DOMAIN. I always start with a title. The title is the first thing down. The conception. The first day writing was in MacDonalds, I think, which felt weird, and most of it has taken place in a cafe ever since, in the library a couple of times, a couple of times in bed, and once on a table outside my patio. Always with a black biro pen in tiny non-slanting joined-up letters. I type up chapter by chapter. 3 chapters are typed up in hard copy, Estrangelo Edessa font, size 10 or 11 maybe. It’s a big clear font. Headers are in...oh let’s not go there (although it is very interesting). I start from the back of the notebook and go backwards like a reverse clock...I don’t cross words out because it looks messy...I don’t use indents or any other blank space on the page...

2 years. 730 days. And you know what? I’ve had 694 non-writing days in all that time. Yes, you read correctly. 694 non-writing days. Only 36 days on the novel in 2 whole years today. What’s more, most of those days have consisted of nothing more than an hour sat in the cafe. Theoretically, I could have done my current amount in just over 1 month. I am now on the edge of the 4^th chapter (soon to be the edge of the sinkhole), and knocking on Mister Twenty Five Thousand Word’s door. 36 divided by 25? I’ll leave that one to you (it’s over 500 words a session). Not bad on a daily basis, but not so great on a fortnightly basis.

Is there an advantage to getting it all done sharpish, in 36 days consecutively, compared to 36 days spread over 24 months? You betcha. Your continuity will be better. Tighter. And you’ll be less likely to repeat words. But the longer stretch wins in my opinion, because you grow and change with time, as does the book. Then again, having said that, getting something down and finished while you are still the same person is quite awesome too, because the completed product will be like a snapshot of you as that one person, rather than an album of you in evolution. Hmm...it’s a tough one.

As far as story goes though, and sheer investment, the long haul reaps the harvest of your experiences. That’s why this novel is changing. I’m about to twist it off on a tangent (curveball!), and fly in this new direction for as far as it's sails will carry me. The main characters are sat around a camp fire and about to tell a story. A story within a story is a legitimate excuse to propel a novel. This is the beautiful thing about a novel, it's possibilities. 40k+ words is a helluva spread of playground to explore, and you know what, I don’t care if these main characters fail to feature much from here on in, because they may have already served their purpose by introducing the story they are about to share with each other. The story may even be longer than the preceding 25k words (although I doubt it). But if it was, why not?

One thing that genuinely impresses me is a novel or a movie that transforms into something different to how it started out. Ones that become something else (think chrysalis, think eureka moment, think cross-genre). And over 2 dozen lunar cycles is bound to alter your work. So. Now. I’m ready to take this thing into the unknown. The vaguely known unknown. Ethel Franklyn, a limping 6 foot tall (maybe more) left-handed woman who is addicted to lynching people; then a chase out of a church tower, across a canal, and into a sinkhole. A holographic female entity is doing the chasing by the way, and to avoid the HOW TO, I’m afraid it will have to be a dream. Then it’s back to reality, which might involve a twin on horseback fresh on a gun-toting rampage thru rehab. And that’s it, essentially. That’s my 3^rd outline summarised. But it’s all the filling in between that takes time. The padding tends to expand and bear fruit of its own. Ethel’s history, for one thing: She was stolen as a baby, survived a stoning and other execution attempts for multiple witch accusations, befriended a land owner...oh who knows what...

A CHASE SCENE WITH A HOLOGRAM: CHALLENGING TO EXECUTE

Just trust and believe that this is the last time I talk the talk about it until I make some good ground up. I feel the ink about to flow again sometime this week. The predominant feeling is relief. Somewhere I can go. Somewhere other than the restricted realms of my environment. In order to flourish in this world I have to investigate hers.

And how does a writer flourish? By sales? By numbers? By pats on the back? By signings and talks and leather-clad notebooks? By over-emphasising their bohemian aspect with a disastrous fashion sense? Or by writing? Or by writing. A writer writes, goddamn it. A writer goddamn writes.

Escaping Hazel

Coming, uh, soonish  

A Keyboard Song Remix

Das Truth

I remember one of the first CDs ever purchased (progressive Euro-Trance) had a track called 'The Truth' on one of it's four disks lasting about nine minutes long. It was a memorable tune but the disk unfortunately snapped so naming the keyboard upload above by the same name is my way of saying 'I Remember You'. I've twisted one word into German as a mark of respect to the influential Neue Deutsche Harte scene, which literally translates as New German Hardness. Many people hear foreign lyrics and switch off, but this particular branch of music has more female backing vocals than any other. By music I mean keyboards/synths, drums and guitars. Think of how many songs you have heard in your life, on the radio, on the stereo, in work, at the weekend and so on...then add them all up, and now single out the ones which have a man and a woman singing together at the same time. It's not a large proportion, is it? It's hardly a fraction. Usually, it's either or. Hardly ever together. Why is that? You never hear Latin male choirs backed by cockney teenage rap, for example. Maybe the perfect music doesn't and will never exist, it's just that some bands strive closer to your idea of it than others.
There's definitely an essay here somewhere. Isn't it great to discuss music? To talk about what makes you tick. 

DB Tink

Staying Creative

Staying creative can be hard with the tossernet, phone, TV and radio always out to distract you. Sometimes all you wanna do is cuddle up in front of the gas fire with Hugh Jackman on the box, or have a duvet day with the curtains drawn, or catapult some dogshit walkers with ice cubes, or whatever floats your boat, and that’s dandy. You may dry up like a prune and take up to a whole year off from any innovative production at all, but you know you’ll return to your craft, your calling, eventually, don’t cha? Don't cha though...?

Fulltime writers have my utterest most respect. To be immersed in words even part time, four hours a day, is enviable. That’s a goal of mine, e-vent-u-ally, to be a part time writer. Perhaps more than a goal. Perhaps a salvation. There are dudes out there doing a lot more too, for laughs. Any more than 8 hours and you are basically tapping into a collective subconscious with a pen in your hand. Remote viewing is the psychic term. There’s no disputing the most prolific author in the world, however. That has to be Richard Laymon. He’s so practised at churning out books, he’s been doing it even after his death. Now that’s what I call prolific.

Imagination is one thing, but work ethic is another entirely. A good case of the  latter is rarer. Together, they forge a formidable combination. Authors like Jeffrey Deaver and John Grisham who have had previous careers in law have took to the novel business like ducks to water. Our Jeffers stands at the island in his kitchen and works through his 8 month outlines on his feet! Is it 8 months he spends on an outline? Don’t hold me to it, but I can’t be too far off ya know.

Steve King [I keep mentioning this guy’s name! Does he need all this free advertising? Not in the slightest. Does he deserve it? Abso-bloody-lutely], says he would shoot himself if he had to write full time. It would be overkill. And in the words of Lorenzo Quinn, the best sculptor in the world, for me, “It is the sum of one’s talents that makes the artist.” Did you know Steve King plays guitar in a band? I’d be very surprised if all writers were not good at something else as well. Everyone is good at something, but no one is good at everything.

Stagnation in one area of your creative wellspring can easily be solved with some diversifying flirtations with another of your passions. Clive Barker, originally of Liverpool, says that he finds the world of paint a glorious polar opposite after toiling with the grammatical rigidities of the alphabet. To cast aside those troublesome 26 letters and pick up a paintbrush, while still remaining in your creative element, is indeed a universe apart. Like a sportsman, in a way, leaving the field for the pool, or the decathlete, swapping one event for another. Like those Jacks of all Trades you may have met in your working life at one point; we all know that kind of guy who has built his own house...the one whose van looks like a D.I.Y store exploded in the back of it? That's right, the one with the leather tool belt and Gore Tex work boots! We are 'remote viewing' together here now see, a ha! I picture one called Barry, who does renovations, and pays double on Bank Holiday weekends. See ya.

Remember, a change is like a rest.

unfurl like cards in freefall

Pottery, Ceramics or Sculpting?

Pottery, or ceramics, can't half be boring at times. When your hands are sore from rubbing a rolling pin up and down like a pastry chef, and you're stood there in your apron, you might even start to feel like a pastry chef, minus the wage packet and free food. You're constantly dirty, you're constantly washing your hands, your work goes into a hot oven, and there's always a big clean up at the end. But with pottery, or ceramics shall I say, there's the added danger of breathing in dust and dangerous chemicals. If you're lucky, while another old vase is drying, you might have something already fired, just sat there waiting to be painted. Aren't you ever so lucky now? Feel free to spend x amount of hours faffing around with paint brushes, pots of water, mixing pallets, and toilet roll. Don't forget to breathe in those leady fumes from the open ends of half a dozen different poisonous glazes too. And don't forget those three coats.

There's quite a lot to be done in pottery. I mean ceramics. But truthfully, the very best part about all of it, besides maybe positioning the finished article on top of the telly, is sculpting something irregular like the Catacomb Heart, pictured top and bottom. Stick your plant pots, with all the best due respect in the world, understand, and your bronze-cast animal busts. Throw all your teapots in "the biggest bloody dustbin you can find" [Brian Clough, The Damned United (2009), played by Michael Sheen, in reference to what the Leed's players should do with their previous season's trophy haul]. Sorry, have I been saying pottery and ceramics? Actually, I should have been saying sculpting. Sculpting is the best part about pottery and ceramics. Using your hands. Not a cookery implement. The cookery implement parts tend to be much harder.

It's surprising how little sculpting you can do in pottery and ceramics though. Honestly. There are so many tools and trays and boxes and bits and bottles...who the frig needs to handle any sticky wet clay? Why not skip that part, as I did for so long, and jump straight into the bit where you paint a nice pre-made cup, or nice pre-made plate, or nice pre-made xmas tree, or nice already-made just about anything else? Above is a rolled slab with aztec markings repeatedly pressed all over it, with texture, in my booky-wook, being the name of the game. What do you call that? Pressing? Stamping? Dotting? Dabbing? Indenting? Making marks? Don't ask me. I Dunno with a capital D.

Above is a Graveyard Plot. If you see differently, answers on the usual postcards. Who the fluff knows what this thing is? Hands were used, okay, but I'd be hesitant to call it sculpture. I'd call it a Pizza Clock decorated with roly-poly worms from the extruder machine, that's what I'd call it. All good fun, when it's not tedious, monotonous, frustrating and boring, mind. Passes a few hours. But it's nothing like making something unusual with your bare hands, shaping it as you go along. Nothing like making a lump of something like the Catacomb Heart which will end up like nobody knows what. Just grab a lump, make some grooves and stuff, and that's it. Simples.

Above: 

BOULEVARD THRONE 77

Here is where I conceived the Alien Planet this morning, on my front lawn, due to a caffeine buzz and a nicotine rush. This portal, when constructed (plinths seen here were borrowed from tutor, although I am halfway through making my own), will allow the passage of myself and two yoga-practising virgin  Mermaids on a hyperbolic trajectory through Mintakas's orbit into the left empty eyeball socket of the Skull of Golgotha, densest black hole in western Andromeda, but only if we each have tickets stamped and approved by Ramsbottom's Presbyterian County Cricket and Hopscotch Association. To create a 3-D representational model of the Alien Planet, I will need only egg boxes, lego, and circuit boards. Next time, padres, next time...
any mistakes are not mine 

Image Dump

Multiverse, Millenia, Movies, etc

...When the Writing gets tough, the Photoshop gets going... 

The novel’s on hold. Been shelved for a month. But there’s absolutely no problemos, because the path and plot are kinda set, and the outlook is special. So let’s not get our frilly pink Asda knickers in a knot about that. More worrying is Mr. Ridiculous, a side project that is only 10,000 words in after over a year. The average must be a paragraph a week! Half a page every now and then is good going. It was always going to be slow because it’s unique, and relies on notes. You can’t make notes up. They arrive every now and again. Sometimes 3 a day. Sometimes none for 4 days. I text myself notes, on my portable mobile telephone. But still, progress at the moment, in all written endeavours, is snail-like. 

Even editing the backlist, which was like a breeze for the first 2 books, has run into a wall. Exhausturbation is proving to be as much a headache to sift through as it was to write a draft. As Michael Douglas says, in the writing film Wonderboys (2001), starring Robert Downey Junior of Iron Man, Katie Holmes of Batman, and Toby Maguire of Spiderman...phew...much of it was written ‘under the influence’, meaning a tipple of premium Dutch lager by the way, not Valium crushed and snorted through a blunt. His unfinished script in that film takes up a couple of boxes, and in loose pages to boot. And like the Constant Writer Steve King says about his doorstop tome The Tommyknockers, “It wasn’t so much written, but gutted out.”

In Exhausturbation, at a part where the story goes into the main characters mind, describing the makeup of his psyche as an actual physical place, very much like in The Cell (2000), guess who was shatted on by a dollop of writer’s block, regarding this particular work, that lasted 3 whole years? Yup, yours truly, who else! And alas, at the same place during editing, guess who has been stuck again for several weeks? The passage is about a metaphysical dome called THE LOBBY OF HIS PERSONAL HELL, an enormous cathedral-like structure of bio-mechanic matter like that godforsaken sludge pit where the robots feed off humans in The Matrix (1999). Basically, it has just dawned that the book fleeces (rips off) movies from around the millennium...although of course it is ten times well better than all of them combined.

Exhausturbation is so far the most difficult story to ‘make work’. And in a way, the most exciting. It went on such a tangent that the only way to wrap things up was to include a black hole/multi-verse/parallel reality. This abstract diversion would give way to the kind of dreamscape prose that would rise in The Violent Arsonist, 2 years later, although because of the long gap, I came back to Exhausturbation after The Violent Arsonist was finished and did the 36,000 word flash fiction collection Kixter in between (the titles Exhausturbation and Kixter are words of my own making...voila). And that’s how the themes of books interlink, see? Because at times you juggle and flip from one to another, taking with you what you learn in each...

At times even I, the dude who wrote it, thinks wowsers, gracious me, what the frig is going on in this man!? I can’t believe or remember what I’m reading. It's a pwopa (proper) mental journey. I killed a main character for no good reason and introduced a giant child in a force field as big as the Marshmellow Man in Ghostbusters (1984). All good zany fun, if nothing else! The plot literally fell apart at the seams and had to be stitched up with alternative drink thinking. Martin Rees, eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist, has been discussing dark matter and multi-verse theories just this morning on BBC Radio 4, which is doubly-fitting after the meteor on Friday night, which, for dangsakes, I missed. There was a new programme called Orbit aired on Sunday night too, and the skies have been clear over here in Northern England, so inklings of space are in the old grey matter, like – cliché alert – distant jewels. Or sequestered sequins.

Does space conflict with faith? Why is there a black hole in the middle of our galaxy? What is the universe expanding into? Are the aliens already among us? And most bafflingly of all, joking aside, just who the flying fook IS Carmen Sandiago? Answers in an email with the subject heading WHOCARES please. Danka.   

Dave Talbot: Audio Analysis

SCHMOE

“I’m in the gym 5 o’clock every morning, training for 2 anarf hours, home, breakfast, little boy to school, back to the gym, and again the same again, another 2 anarf hours, I consume 7 8 9 10 thousand calories a day, for breakfast I’ll have like sorta like 200 grams of oats, twenny scrambled eggs, 2 hours later 2 chicken breasts and rice, then I’ll have another protein shake, then I’ll train, another protein shake, then I’ll have some steak an potatoes, then I’ll have another tuna pasta, then I’ll have another 15 eggs before I wenna bed, early to bed every night, religious dieting, 24/7, seven days a week.” Dave Talbot

So let me get this right...you train for 2 and a half hours? What the hell's bells are you doing in there Dave, arms and legs? Your whole friggin body? Does that include shower time as well? Surely it does. Surely it has to. I imagine it’s a hardcore metal den, so there’ll be no sauna or Jacuzzi to eat into what many would consider enough time for 3 training sessions. And I presume you're not standing around texting between sets.

Home, brekkie, little boy to school...but then YOU GO BACK TO THE GYM FOR ANOTHER TWO AND A HALF HOURS. What!? Are you having a laff!? 5 hours training before noon!? That’s not over-training, Dave, that’s overKILL! But I guess you are always mixing it up right, to keep things fresh and interesting, eh? What, you do the same again?...and again the same again... Wow, you even sound bored saying it, so I can't imagine how long and downright monotonous the physical graft is! 5 hours! And again the same again...

Dave, you consume between 7, 8, 9 and 10 thousand calories a day, but the way you reel off these numbers, it sounds like a single word, like SEVENEIGHTNINETEN thousand calories a day. Then you say you have TWENNY EGGS for breakfast like it’s the most normal thing in the world, like it’s a couple of pop tarts. Ha. Awesome.

2 hours later you have 2 chicken breasts and rice, which is fair enough, but then you say you have ANOTHER protein shake, without mentioning protein shakes up until this point, as if you have failed to mention a prior protein shake you had earlier. Or maybe 2 prior protein shakes you had earlier, because is it unreasonable for me to assume that a phenomenon like yourself who trains for 5 hours before noon and eats twenny eggs for brekkie forgets the odd protein shake? I don’t think it is.

~

Here’s the kicker though. Because then YOU TRAIN AGAIN (or maybe I misunderstand?). Maybe you train so many times a day that you forget your training sessions as well as your protein shakes. Yet ANOTHER protein shake follows (shake-train-shake), then some steak and potatoes, and then ANOTHER tuna pasta. Again you fail to mention any earlier tuna pastas you may have consumed, but I am logical in deducting, because you say ANOTHER, that there was at least one.

Finally you have another 15 eggs before going to bed. That’s 35 eggs a day.

Dave Talbot, BodyBuilder. R.I.P

From the documentary “The Man Whose Arms Exploded.”

Glimpses Gone...and Editing

So let’s talk about some writing. I’ve said before that it’s much easier to write about writing than it is to just write, and probably more interesting to read about too. There is always method behind the madness. Glimpses Gone was written between March and June 2003, two months after the completion of Banishment Pictures. 2003 was a golden year. To pen 64,000 words within four months was probably my most prolific spell (that’s over 500 words a day, every day, which is t’riffic, considering I had a 3 year gap in Exhausturbation, upcoming e-book). I think it was one of three books on the go that year. Applaud now. Danka.

Ban Pic was not my first book, but it was the first book which wasn’t novice work (in my opinion). I’d kind of been learning how to write beforehand and this was the one when I sat down knowing exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it, full of confidence and determination. I remember starting the first sentence sat on a stool in my kitchen very distinctly. Once finished, and starting Glimpses Gone, I was well in my pomp. Killing it. Smashing it. All over it. 

Some have been known to say that GG is my finest work (and also that I devour Big Macs in 3 bites). Granted, it has a very soft spot in my heart. I remember wanting not just to write but to write well, a feeling that has not returned until Escaping Hazel. They are both alike also in the way that their openings are very laboured, and if I’m honest, even a little repetitive. Okay, very repetitive – or thorough, as I prefer. GG has no real dialogue interaction until about 10,000 words or so. I am well aware that an editor would recommend cutting all the extraneous stuff unless it is essential to the plot, but I have never understood all that revamp, redraft, rehash, rewrite philosophy: 

 “An artist never finishes a painting – he just stops working on it.” Columbiana (2011) Know what I'm saying? It’s the same for stories. You’d be there until Doomsday. I say: “Lay the egg and move on.”

They reckon you need a tough skin. Correctomundo. A single offhand comment can pierce your armour like a dart. Going back thru a long-ass book and removing a bunch of characters, for example, or cutting it beyond recognition, because somebody else says so? I tell you what, why don’t you do it, seen as you’re so smart, and save me the hassle?

It’s like somebody taking the mick out of your baby, and it’s hard to draw the line between 10 proofreads with a yellow highlighter or doing a quick spell-check and calling it good to go. I’ve never read one of those How To Write books (although I’ve had some given to and bought for me...what does that tell you), because if you think too much about doing something then it becomes a hindrance. Did I mishear, or was the name of this game CREATIVE writing? That means my way, not yours. Your way is technical, like in school. My way is doing what the bejesus I feel like and then self-pubbing the living daylights out of it to make dollars for Bieber CDs...eventually. They do say it's important to know the rules before you break them, however. Fair point.

No but yeah but seriously, creative covers, expensive editing and fancy formatting don’t make a hardcore genuine story, although a hardcore story deserves all that and more. The main thing, in all of this, is love and coping. You love it, and it helps you cope. Everything else is incidental. F**k writing begging notes to agents, which you can’t even do without first reading a book of How To Write Begging Notes To Agents. I’d rather cope in love with the odd typo, up to my knees in grammar traps. I doubt the reader even notices anyway. This is, after all, as bestselling author Dr Loomis says  – played by Malcolm McDowell – in Halloween (2007): “Spoon-feeding drivel to the masses.” And I thought Steve King was patronising his supporters by calling them Constant Readers. "Fan is a dirty word." Gregg Valentino

Read the preview of Glimpses Gone on Amazon. It’s so flippin long you don’t need me to brief you about it here. Why such a long preview Amazon? FFS. It’s like going into a car dealership and the dude on the forecourt offering you a test drive for a whole chuffin month.

The Overseer, by Albert E. Cowdrey

When watching the likes of Conrad Williams, Nicholas Royle and Paul Finch perform readings at Waterstones in Liverpool last year, each member of the audience was automatically entered into a free raffle. My number came out the hat and I won a choice of brand new anthologies. I picked the first one on the pile because I was blushing, but after having time to browse the index, I noticed that Tanith Lee was not listed, so I swapped titles at the end and took home Best New Horror 20, in which she was (plus 20 had a better cover).

I often borrowed titles in this range, but had never got around to buying one. Indeed, it's a case of picking the best short stories from the bunch, never really needing to consume the whole book. Some of the stories are too long and off-putting, as I like to consume shorts in single sittings, maximum 20 pages or so. But since having my own copy (thanks Twisted Tales), and not bouncing between 3-week library lending periods, I’ve had time (12 months) to get around to reading one of these lengthy off-putting long short stories I don’t usually bother with. A novella, you might call it, at around 20,000 words.

It was 12am last night/this morning, and I fancied burning some midnight oil, but by 1am, after 1 hour’s editing, I turned into bed. A spot of reading is in order, I thought, and started The Overseer, thoroughly expecting it to be so gash (rubbish) that I would be asleep after 3 or 4 pages. Not so. After just 1 or 2 pages, I already had an idea that this was probably gunna be the best thing I have ever read.

For a month I’ve been poised at a juncture balls-deep in my novel (I can go balls-in at a push) where the next thing due to take place is some kind of traumatic hanging scene from the slavery days a hundred years ago. I wanted to start a short story called Lynch Mob Addicto about an evil woman called Ethel Franklyn who did it for fun, but thought what the hell, I’ll bung it into the novel as a camp fire story and kill 2 birds with one stone (no more short stories, ever!). Only thing stalling me has been editing older bodies of work for delivery into the public domain.

Then last night, in The Overseer, I unexpectedly hit head-on all the stuff I’ve been contemplating in the back motor rooms of me brain recently: themes of persecution, masters, slaves, the Deep South, etc. Executed very, very professionally, of a standard never before met. These same themes are where I am up to, after 16 years on the job, after much rigorous, spiritual, emotionally-instinctive soul searching. I directly addressed this area in a poem 10 years ago called Karma 1882, and now I’m ready to explore the frig out of it with a tall gaunty woman called Ethel. Sheesh, I might even have to dedicate an entire chapter of Escaping Hazel to it.

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During my, cough, career, between repeating myself far more than I realised and branching out experimentally with unpredictably dodgy results, I understand that virtually none of it matters, because everything you ever do as a scribbler is only an ambling prologue for your forthcoming definitive masterpiece; it's only value is that it was necessary for you to go through it to get to where you teeter, to arrive ready and able with the goods to produce, and if you don’t believe what you next do might be the best thing you have ever done, then you may as well sack it and do nothing but gloat over your former glories for the rest of your days, banging on about previous successes like a one-book washed-up has-been.

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I stayed up for 3 hrs and 40 mins last night, until near 5 in the morning, to finish The Overseer, stopping halfway through for cornflakes and yogurt. I’m well aware the expression “I couldn’t put it down” is an overused fancy blurb, but sometimes it’s true. This stuff was right up my street at a time in my life when I was absolutely primed for it. It stayed on my mind afterwards, like, but many times better than, a resonant movie. It was factual, educational, informative...but most of all utterly entertaining/thrilling every twist/turn of the way.  I hold my hands up and say this guy, this Albert E. Cowdrey, is much better than me! I can’t do that! No sir, never!

And where now? Coz I still have to write my own take on these themes. Has he spoiled it for me, or inspired me? His story alone could provide all the research I need. Although I do my own. I don’t pilfer. I don’t steal. I pick up on what others miss, and travel with it. It’s where you take something. What you do with it. How you make things evolve into better places with the added benefit of your own skilled signature. No one ever knocked a genuine homage. I already have ideas of my own, lest I forget in my salivating worship of this, and might I can’t formulate them into a story in the way this genius can, I can damn well try-try-try. What a coincidence! I must remember, I had already arrived, before him, on my personal journey, at this subject matter. 

The greatest compliment a story can get is someone else saying they wish they had written it themselves. I understand that totally now, because I feel a case of that envy. I wish I had pledged a novella to this topic, not to mention Albert’s staggeringly impressive historical insight, of which I am incapable of (it was even nearly all written in italics, a splendid trick!) I feel sheer joy too, of course. Reading is awesome, these Best New Horror Books are class, and The Overseer, by Albert E. Cowdrey, IS THE BEST PIECE OF FICTION I HAVE EVER READ.

Even better than the red satin bed scene in James Herbert’s Others when Constance Bell is about to be molested by a genetically-engineered mutant on camera in the basement of the nursing home called Perfect Rest at the hands of evil doctor Leonard K. Wisbeech as her newfound love Nicholas Dismas watches helplessly on? Even better than that, you say.......