Never Hush Hush

I imagine it feels great for a known author to take part in a Q&A session from fans. (The word fans here is used very sarcastically. When you hear a pop star use the word fans, you get the feeling you could easily substitute that word for lemmings. Take followers on Tweeter, for example. Sounds wrong, somehow. Supporters is a bit better.) You have to wonder, how genuine are all those blithering idiots? Of twenty-odd million followers, how many of them would stop their idol on the street to congratulate them on a job well done? It doesn't count if you are with your friends taking pictures and autographs. That's pack mentality. Take screaming tweens, for example. ATD always poses the question: If a young girl is alone, and she sees her hero, does she still scream, as if she is with all her friends? Wouldn't that be funny, and weird? ATD remembers once how he approached a Hollyoaks actress outside a coffee shop and told her how touching her TV relationship was with a pupil, how it kept his own school days in his thoughts. None of this can I have a picture crap so I can post it on MyFace. ATD prefers genuine one2ones. A quick word, and let them get on with it. Let them know, and that's it.

Ж

Any-old-way, about questions and answers from people who have read your work. IT FEELS GOOD. After half a life shelving manuscripts in secret, ATD has experienced just a teeny tiny tad of what it feels like. Not all of it good, granted, but it's kinda like publicity, in a way—no such thing as bad. When you hear one of your characters being mentioned as if they are a real person, you can't help but smile. It's like recalling with fondness the memory of an old friend. BUT YOU HAVE TO HAND YOUR STUFF OVER FIRST. And that can be hard, especially if it's an experimental effort full of issues and controversy. Your spirit is etched between the lines of whatever you write. Warts n all.

HUGH STODDART'S prison magazine Not Shut Up 

These things take time, and a hard part of the understanding is that you will probably never finish all you set out to do, because the work of an artist is never done. The aim must be then to simply finish what one can. Prioritising can be tricky though. Just like, say, if you are an athlete, you might work on your weaknesses first in your training routine. But what about your strengths? Do you let them slip? Do what you mean to do first. Like FIRST THING IN THE MORNING! Last thing at night is no good at all. Brushing teeth is a hard enough challenge last thing at night.

"George Wouldn't Bring a Pie."

What's you favourite line is this scene? To all the writers and performers, please take a bow. You just made the top of Piebald77's Special Inspiration list. British comical horror at it's finest. Never known so many witty one-liners in such a small space of time.

Changeover

 The fact that one is merely thinking about doing daily word count blog updates is a good thing, although not quite likely enough to promise. The grind of keying-up just a few more pages of small print is choking now. Would be easier with a pint of Pernod and Coca-Cola, but to the best of my knowledge, at the moment, that ain't about to happen. Alcohol loosens the tongue and fingertips, but very soon it clouds the mind, and the line between enriched carefree prose and misspelled fudge is a delicate one. To be honest, it is almost time to  work on SCHMOE now, fiction for weightlifters and gym goers. That comes quick and easy and is a laugh from the get go. It's for a community, it's a social endeavour, it's quirky and bombastic (what does bombastic mean?). It's Art Till Death's BEST CHANCE of being known. Oh yeah, you better believe. Many many others are writing novels (although not memorable masterpieces), but far far fewer are writing specialised non-pervy gym fiction. That, ladies and hippos, is ATD's meal ticket. And by meal ticket, he means publicity trick, not food. Nothing is for nothing, supposedly, but isn't the UNIVERSE the ultimate free lunch? Has anybody got any Snickers ice creams? Or Hubba-Bubba melted on Hot Cross Buns?

Play Jazz

Frankie Boyle said, Live at the Apollo, that he had recently become father to a little boy. Then, after a pause, he added, "I'm getting a bit sick of him to be honest." You know what, writing is the same from time to time. It becomes a bit of a drag. The thrill wears off after so many thousand words. It returns, okay, but while you're waiting, what do you do? The answer, as with most things, is this: Stick with it! Grind it out, paragraph by paragraph. This is possible when rewriting at the personal PC computer, but much harder by shorthand on the first draft. Typing is like a manual job; creating new worlds with a black pen, hunched over blank paper, sure ain't.

Get some out the way, that's ATD's motto. It might only be a few lines, but hey, nobody's perfect, apart The Hoff and The Hump (David Hasselhoff and Englebert Humperdinck). Then, whenever you get a moment, and this is vital...play jazz. Yup, you read it correctly, go play jazz. Hoover up, put a wash on, straighten your hair, and go play jazz man. It works for Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. Can you believe Tom Cruise is playing Jack Reacher in the Jack Reacher movie? Can anybody believe that? Me bets even Lee Child cannae believe that. I know I can't. Maybe I was dreaming. It was a YouTube advert after all. But hey, if you are after instructions on what to do in life, don't listen to me. Just watch the video...

Snapshots

ALIEN OBJECTS

by

WORKING CLASS HANDS

When the Moon is Fat

Not a productive week at all, compared to last, but still better than nothing at all. The difference between nothing and something is more crucial than something and a lot. Had to get a little something down after three nights away from the tale. Am about to get cracking on it now for one or two hours, after dropping by here to warm the fingers up. Listening to Tonight, Tonight by the Smashing Pumpkins, a memorable video from back in the teenage day. Actually, as a consequence, it has just spun-off a memory of The Judder Man advert from a similar time. A good base for a character to take further. He makes you think about how your villains should move.

.

Everything is a consequence of something else. Cause and effect. Life has a beat. Can you hear it thrum in your veins? Hear it crackle in the rustling leaves? Whoooosh, goes the wind. Watch the yellow moon sink.

.

Top British horror author Conrad Williams had a similar character in his novel Decay Inevitable; a surgeon who kind of jerkily flickers around, removing organs from people. The first ideas I ever had about movement must have been the skeleton fight in Jason and The Argonauts, 1963. That was scary as a kid. There was something about the mix of live-action/animation. Many foes in later years would move in a patchy hyper-real manner. The technique has been hammered now, in the wake of epileptic seizure pop videos. Even the Queen's corgis twitched down the steps in last night's opening Olympics ceremony...

Summer Nights

Sat down to write and found nothing was coming. Distracted by music as usual, because music is a big enemy of writing, but there was another thing, too---I was waiting for nightfall to arrive. The atmosphere of the current piece almost requires it. The summer does strange things to you. Currently, I'm describing the early life of a young woman. So many times in the past the writing has been caught up in short and sweet situations, but I recently read THE DEAD ZONE by Stephen King (that guy again), and although I wasn't overly impressed, the darn thing kept getting better the longer it went on. And by the end he was telling the life of a character called GREG STILLSON, a fascinating individual, from start to finish. That is storytelling proper, I realised, when you begin to summarise whole lives from beginning to end. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. I'm in a pure fantasy land. This section of the book is a result of a song (see how I've gone back to the music thing here). A song from a band I discovered a year ago. What it made me think of, the imagery I got in my mind, has become part of the tale.


It made me think of combat. Skilled combat. Between two opposing rulers. And I'll leave it there for now. Don't want to give too much away. But what I will say is this part of the first draft written in biro pen, when being typed up, is expanding wildly. Maybe up to five times longer. There's really no equal to writing like the masters did, with ink, and then keying it up six months later, filling in the blanks, veering off on a tangent, then coming back to tackle the next line.


Okay. Keep writing, and writing will keep you. Or doing whatever it is you do.

Novel Update

About to start typing up Chapter 5. It’s about 80% complete. Chapters are 6000 words long. If this is to be only 7 chapters, that would carry it above the magic 40,000 word barrier, and make it novel length. 40k is a nice tight package. It can be read in a day. Never liked calling books of these lengths novels, but if people are calling their 10k books novellas it doesn’t leave you much choice does it. What can you do eh, call yourself a short novelist? People will think you are under five feet.

Once the fifth chapter is done and printed off in hardcopy, concentration will turn to another project for a while. 6 and 7 will be hot, a double dose of action-packed finale, but there will probably have be another chapter, in all fairness. You know, to round things up. Then there are the notes, and checking stuff, like trying to be consistent with the names of things you don’t really know the names of, and shish like that.

Becoming Petronella

The outline came easy, filled in with coloured pencil as I went along: a bare voluptuous woman framed by the tousled plumage of black feathery wings against a backdrop of twilight sky. Her torso was suited in a finespun filament of protective armour, like a new-age knight of the royal order. Her hair was neatly and practically bobbed, face dominated by a seductively dangerous smile of bright pink lips ringing dazzlingly white teeth. I exaggerated the mouth, but not to monstrous proportions. And those were the main ingredients: the armour, the wings, the gaping rictus. The sky I rendered in hues of wildfire orange and violet scarlet.

The above paragraph was originally cut from the end of Chapter 3 (Escaping Hazel). Sadler (main character) is sat in his rehab room drawing a picture. The only reason he was drawing a picture because there was nothing else happening in the story (in other words, I couldn't think of anything better to happen). I was simply filling in the lines, writing for the word count, and so that's why it had to go.

But now, oh now, there's an unexpected female character called PETRONELLA who has come into the story at the end of Chapter 4, and her description just accidentally matched the picture above (weird), so if I REINSERT the cut paragraph, it looks like Sadler will have been drawing her in a kind of psychic vision to come. And that's handy, seen us though she has been dead over two centuries.

At the time I thought 'why is he drawing this'? But now it works.

These are my characters. This is my world.

Fifty

Alteration: Making the NAME and TITLE larger on above version. 
Despite whatever else you hear, dust jackets are all about name and title.
Anything else is optional. Go check out the bestsellers on the shelves
if you don't believe. That's the best place to learn to do a cover, surely. 

46 days off the novel ESCAPING HAZEL, and then straight back into the story with only a glass of liqueur as the catalyst. Done half a page, then a paragraph the next day, and today starting typing up Chapter 4 in Microsoft Word XP. So the writing cap is back on, which is pleasant. I sincerely believe that this one, when complete, will be one of the finest classics in the history of books. No irony. Honestly. You HAVE to think along these lines, otherwise what's the point? I'm not here to write just 'another book' again. Those 'other books' are done.

After long speculation, the next ebook release has been decided. It will be 50% Rude (I always do the percentage sign on the wrong side because it looks better). Now is the best time for this title to swoop along in the slipstream of 50 Shades of Shite Grey. Half of 50% Rude is erotic, as you may have guessed by the title, and written long before anyone to my knowledge had even heard of 50 Shades of Shite Grey. This is one of Zombie Publications' latest offerings. It would have been nice to upload in chronological order, but the iron is hot and now's the time for striking.

It's a good way to think. It's all about VIRAL POTENTIAL. Below is a man on a mock cover done for fun who I met on two occasions as a kid. He is a a myth and a legend of sorts among local folk who has attracted media attention over a number of years in the Merseyside basin especially (more about him later for sure). Something along these lines could have mass appeal. A fictional book about PURPLE AKI? I'd buy it! (Or at least rent it from the library, and remember, reading is better than buying folks). The key is fitting something of equal interest together with your personal work. It's a digital global network we inhabit now. It can sometimes feel like it's all about 'likes' and 'shares'. How oh so very sad. But still, the novel Escaping Hazel will only be available in print. I don't want it to be seen by a thousand, but rather cherished and inspirational to ten. Thousand.

ATD

Whales...Barker Style

When something is 'Barker Style', it is instinctive and improvised, because Clive Barker, rather than being a technical inker like some all-rendering comic artist who can depict cathedrals tottering on ankles from the viewpoint of a manga girl ninja's bootlaces, simply draws 'whatever comes into his head'. Some of it, sometimes, looks simple and easy, and yet, simultaneously, inexplicably, indivisibly (indivisible as in, like, pain and pleasure...), it's kinda awesome because it's brave and bold and like nothing else. It's its own thing, if you catch me. It's its own style. Like one or two other professions in this world, he can just make it up as he goes along. And here's the good news -- any schmuck with a 10p pencil can do their version of the same. Risk it. Trust it. Don't let us hear you can't draw! That's like saying you can't swim! 

Last Piece...

This is Darren Hodgkin's farewell parting gift before he sadly decided to willfully exit this world. A day or two after witnessing him craft this, he was gone. It was startling how quickly he knocked it up. It seemed to take him only seconds. It's surprising how fast some people can appear to work when you have little idea of what you are doing. It's because they have a plan of action laid out and they are making headway on it while you twiddle your thumbs. Shipshape now chop chop quick sharp! All hail ex-classmates! Amen and drinks up! Long live the creatives! And God bless the working stiffs, lest we forget, economically viable or not!

Stuff of the Month

Who cares what the movie is like when
the cover is this good? Stick it on.

Saw this female gaze in a shop window in town for 150 bucks. 

Sure enough it stopped me in my tracks.

Robert Harrop of Edge Sculpture really outdone
 himself when fashioning this Venus. What a cracker.
Now gimme a kiss. Lip against lip, flesh against stone. Window licking.

Pauline Parsons

Introducing Pauline Parsons. I was lucky enough to visit her at home some time ago when she opened her doors to the public. It was a chilly wintry evening in the Macclesfield area and we were invited around a bushy drive towards her shed. She and her partner welcomed us inside. In hindsight, I’m glad I took the photos you can see beneath. It’s always nice to have professionals rub off on you in any walk of life. I remember her saying that she didn’t use any glazes whatsoever. At the time, I thought she was mad, but after many unsuccessful trials and tribulations, I can now fully understand why. Clay, like wood, can be nice enough on its own. You don’t need to go and ruin it by slopping paint around all over the shop. Paint can conceal and disguise all the fine details. 

Gaul

 TIME: 2-3 hours

CLAY: White St Thomas

TYPE: Hand build

STAGE: Not fired 

PROJECTED COLOUR: Undecided

White St Thomas is a soft white clay. Gone are the days of darker clays like Terracotta, which soak up all the lighter glazes. Whiter clays offer a pale base, a clear slate if you like, for the colours of your paints to show up on. The colour of the clay can radically affect the end result after administering your glaze. So wise up.

Zack 'King' Khan

The first I heard of Zack Khan, it was another British bodybuilder in an interview with Giles Thomas of MDTV calling him a “big horrible monster”. It was said in the voice of a hater, but received with interest, curiosity, and excitement. If somebody is hanging out in the pro ranks looking like a big horrible monster, then I for one wanna see him. In the sport of professional bodybuilding, it’s perfectly acceptable to look like a freak. It’s envied, called for, and loved. 

The first I saw of him was on the Bodypower Expo poster on the door in a local gym. He could barely fit on the poster. We’re talking mass to spare here, you know what I mean?

Then I heard his endearing accent when I hit on his YouTube video blogs, documenting his road to recovery after an extremely serious injury to both his legs, ripping his quads on squats. Just that alone tells you something, doesn’t it? It’s hardly your typical everyday niggle. It’s not catching your pinkie on the dumbbell rack as you lift the 25 pounders off to do a set of seated hammer curls. Ripping both your quads means you must be really going for it, really pushing the limits.

What I see in this man is the best breath of fresh air since Gregg Valentino. The bodybuilding scene was getting boring. All these new Everyday Joe pros get you down. They are getting shorter and shorter and they look like barrels. Worse, they have zero personality. There are only so many Shawn Ray “back in the day” videos you can watch. I mean, Shawn’s a consummate professional with the microphone, but he’s no comedian. There’s not enough talking smack these days, if you ask me. The golden age, with the likes of Ronnie and Jay and Flex and Kevin and Chris, are gone. But all is not lost.

Because here we have Zack ‘King’ Khan, a British heavyweight of epic proportions who has the balls to reveal his life to the cameras and inspire people like me to write blog posts like this. Rather than go through the motions of buttering him up, I’ll get straight to the point and say that he makes us smile. He makes us laugh. And that’s all we really ask for in a pro, you know. That’s more than enough. Great physique, strict ethic, size to burn and a gritty condition are dozen to a penny (sort of), but someone who puts smiles on faces, amid the usual sour bunch? Priceless.

I’d have quite happily gone through all of Zack’s video blogs in order, from 1 to 97 onwards. He tells it straight, he cooks, he goes shopping, he gets around on crutches inside his house, he wears face paint, he smiles when he’s doing heavy seated rows, he’s down to earth. What comes over predominantly is that he’s a really nice fellow, all in all, a really brave nice fellow.

It’s thoroughly entertaining witnessing Zack churn out his innuendoes and lingo while cooking pasta in the microwave, or thinking on the spot while doing seminars, but don’t be fooled into thinking he’s nothing but a big softie with his cheeky smiles and playful attitude. The proof is in the pudding of any pro by their training sessions, and Zack leaves the fancy stuff at the door when he shifts some insanely intense weight. By golly, the size of him! A YouTube commenter said that he cares about nothing except being huge. Well, I seriously doubt that's true, but even if it is, amen to it!