Schmoe Sequel

SCHMOE 2 is complete and done, ready for print. For so many years all Word documents have been double-spaced after each sentence, with enormous indentations via the TAB key and too much white space in the margins. Correcting the layout of a long piece of writing can take absolutely ages. It’s a basic level of formatting. You should try reducing each and every double-space after each and every sentence to a single space in a 50,000 word document using only the crappy square touch pad on a laptop. Wowcher. You’re talking the patience of a saint right there. It’s pretty much like writing the whole thing again. Good job there’s a little trick/cheat for it. Hint: Find and Replace.

Yeah, Schmoe 2 was started early 2012, on and off as is everything now, but flowed very smoothly otherwise. Often, if there was no ending to one flash story, it made sense to move onto the next, and then halfway through that one, an ending for the previous one would come to mind. There’s no reason to be hanging around thinking up what to happen i.e If you are stuck on chapter 2, go back and edit chapter 1 until something comes to you.

It’s more fictitious than the first one. There are less stories, but they are slightly longer. It’s more about the characters who go the gym rather than the gym itself. But it’s still comically educational and offhandedly slapstick. It’s been combined with Schmoe 1 for a longer read. They’ll be printed together. Schmoe 3 will be added on, and Schmoe 4, and so on. At some point they will be redrafted with perhaps a single character running throughout instead of many different ones.

When will Schmoe 3 come along? Dunno, but it’s the future, long term, so one a year is not too much too ask. They are only 10,000 words long remember, a blessing of a length to work with, so at least 4 are needed before novel length compilation, with 40,000 words being the magic qualifying gauge for so-called novel status.

Schmoe will do down a storm with certain people. There’s simply no doubt about it. It’s niche. It’s for someone. It’ll resonate. Need help from Dragon’s Den though. There’s enough shite on the market in the fitness industry. Surely there’s room for this. COMING TO A SHOP 3,000 MILES AWAY FROM YOU SOON.

An Author's Perspective

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Blogging is easy. Putting entries in a diary is easy. Describing anything enjoyable is easy, like adding jalepenos and a fried egg onto a beefburger, for example. That’s why chefs never shut up, because discussing a passion is easy. Soccer reviews, getting descriptive about music, all easy. Starting a new short story on the spot out of the blue with no mental planning beforehand, however, well, that’s a little trickier. And novel writing…now that’s a challenge.

The novel comes slow, like pulling teeth with an adjustable spanner. There’s no flow to it, no relaxed conversational tone. Here, blogging, one can take risks with dialect and spelling, because Google is essentially one swollen brain dump factory where you expose your soul to strangers so they can collect files of data about you for nothing in return.

Any hard ground-out novel worth its salt should be poetic in parts, with cadence and swagger. It’s all your eggs in the one basket. All your—or the best of—your styles. There’s a time and a place to sling lingo and cockney rhyming slang around, because in a hundred years time who knows where your novel might be and who might be reading it. It may be wise to save the geordie and scouse accents for Twitter and Facebook. Save the text message jargon for the phone company satellites. You wanna be up there among the penguin classics, if you are confident enough and super serious about your craft. That means being as boring and as technical as you can possibly be, judging by the evidence.

Not that super serious is anything to aspire to. The easy-going comic churn-em’-out colloquial popular novelist is more likely to have a longer queue at book signings and a bigger bank account. The bank account helps before you start. A billionaire could self-pub his or her books all over the world in dozens of languages. That in itself would be a heck of a test, even with the finances and power. Imagine how daunting it can seem if you have not even found a publisher yet. If you have not even finished the first draft of your first book. If you are on the breadline without a computer, or printer, or access to a library, because the local bus has been terminated due to cuts, or blown up.

Let’s take a second to be grateful for being able to blog, being able to share nick ideas, and being able to express ourselves. Imagine the bohemian having no voice, and choking on his or her own creativity. As the poet John Siddique says, imagine Thirst without Water.

Take Ian McEwan. He doesn’t hit us with two books a year. He takes his time. There are lengthy gaps between his novels. So you know he thought about it. They come to him, he doesn’t reel them off.

Then there are the fast writers. The word-count obsessives. The commercially-driven touch-typists who keep office hours. They write so many books, even all their titles sound the same.

Credit to both kinds of novelists, but there’s only one kind of book in my book (the hybrid). The commercial thrillers tend to be he jumped over the hill and then he shot his gun and then he jumped over the hill again to do more shooting with his gun, while the others tend to be page after page of thought processes and emotions with nothing much going on.

Clive Barker needs a holla here. When he burst onto the scene, he published three different books of blood on the same day. Massive props to him for that. What a gentleman, giving customers a choice. Or a headache.

Choice is very important. A nice wide range of titles is attractive. But what about those one-hit wonders? You tend to remember their books more. Partly because they are only banging on about one, shoving it into your face every time you turn around. Their hard-sell tactics lodge in your noggin and give you a migraine. Is that the whole point? Is the product almost worthless, apart from its price tag? My name’s this I wrote this it costs this so why aren’t you on Amazon and buying it now. So much in modern day life is forgettable. The trick is having something snag in people’s heads for reasons of merit.

Resident Evil:Retribution

MOVIE ZONE Let’s start from the finish: The Resident Evil movies tend to end with the survivor’s back against the wall, tons of enemies crowding in from every angle, and ace symbolic music. That alone is enough for a certain amount of points from ten, for memorability. The music creeps in like Lucifer’s talons on the icy keys of a piano made from frozen tears. I think it started off on an Alice Cooper CD.

For once I can tolerate hundreds of gunshots and cars being flipped Michael Bay-style because this is a franchise of merit with something going for it on a philosophical level. Raccoon City and The Hive and The Umbrella Corporation have an iconic historical feel by now. Milla Jovovich is for this what Sigourney Weaver is for the Alien series. And that ladies and gents is all that’s required for a franchise to stay true to itself—have the same star simply show up for the next one. The instant you get a different person in, the whole thing goes Pete Tong.

Usually, generic Matrix-like fight scenes are embarrassing, but when it’s rubber-clad Milla in computer-generated environments then they're drop-jaw impressive. The punch and pomp and panache are popping off the screen. There were too many flying bullets, far too many, even for a series you have a fondness for, and like usual the first one is always the best. After one or two forgettable ones though, number 5 (is this really the fifth one?) is back on the up.

It’s so macho at times, like many other flicks out there, that it might seem laughable. But Scarlet or Kate or Charlize couldn’t pull this off, and what it does well, it does like nothing else does. Probably because this is a computer game movie, like Silent Hill. They have something about them. Visually stunning.

The Hobbit

A recent project of mine contains a heroic kinda guy from the past known only, so far, as the Dwarf Knight. I had this image, see, of a Dwarf in gladiatorial armour leading the front line into battle. I got this image when listening to a certain song, a helluva thumping stylish song I might add, and developed the imagery whenever I donned the headphones to listen again.

Perhaps you see stories to certain songs as well. My advice is to play your favourite songs sparingly, because you never know when you might need them. They have the power to access a special part of your brain. Depending upon your taste in music, of course…

At the time of writing I is not seen any of the previous movies related to The Hobbit. We all know what I’m talking about. The Geek of the Rings. The Lord of the Geeks. That famous trilogy. Beowulf was enuff for me. Beowulf reinforced mystical notions of castles and queens. Whatever good action sequences were in The Lord of the Rings, I always thought it was a bum deal having to spend three hours in an armchair to view them. A nine hour trilogy? No.

The same went for Beowulf, actually. I would never have gone near it but eventually watched it by accident. And similarly for The Hobbit—accident only. And it’s for certain now—accidents spring up the best surprises. When you’re bored by fancy dress silliness, and a class ending comes rocking in, then hands up, well done, respect. You realise, maybe, at a point, luckily, that emotionally, the material on the screen is primed personally for you. The material ties in with your writing, with the imaginary fantasies in your head. With your favourite music. With its own music. In slow-mo.

Nay spoilers here, but the word I’m looking for is RESONATION. It took its time, because after ninety minutes I was becoming almost deeply gutted for not watching Tom Cruise is Jack Reacher instead (is that the name of the movie, by the way, Tom Cruise is Jack Reacher? Judging by the weight of the font on the posters, it wouldn’t take a total buffoon to guess that it was). But then, when Andy Serkis came into it as that skinny cute ugly disturbing creature known as Gollum, things perked up a bit. By the finale, things had perked up a lot.

But let’s not discuss Andy Serkis or this’ll drag on and on and it’s getting late. We’ll skip over the lovable Martin Freeman from The Office, too. At one point I remembered oh yeah this movie is Peter Jackson’s doing and then, just moments later, he hit me with a signature shot I recognised from Braindead (1992) and King Kong (2005). Uncanny, I tell thee. Will try to describe Peter Jackson’s signature shot in another post sometime, maybe. Like I just got done impressing upon you, time’s a-tickin’.

Could go on forever here, but think it’s time to wrap up and catch Kermode’s opinion on the movie. The main thing I wanted to say is that I learned something important from The Hobbit, something I think I already knew but something it always helps to be reminded of. To sum it up would be this:

IT’S ALL ABOUT THROWING 

YOURSELF IN THE MIX

Too many folks get hung up about winning, losing, and drawing, when really, it’s not about that at all. Oh, you won again did you? One-nil? So bleedin’ what. THROWING YOURSELF IN THE MIX is about courage and honour and dignity, the sheer undeniable inspiration of combat and rivalry, not winning or losing or drawing.

I never got my Dwarf Knight from The Hobbit, although it will look like I did. I think the origin may be an old computer game called Ghosts n Goblins. Yup, that would make more sense.

Sand In My Face - An Extract

I never had a face to pin my anger on. Just a barn door back and calves like upside down pyramids. The next day I bought myself some plastic weights and a bench from Argos. Then I bought a copy of The Beef magazine. At first, putting weight on and getting big seemed like an impossible dream, something only to be achieved with drugs, but one night I studied myself in the mirror after a workout and had a revelation. I was staring at my chest, my shoulders, and my biceps. I wondered to myself what could be so darn hard about increasing the size of these three muscle groups? There’s no exam to pass. There’s no secret or mystery. The evidence is in front of my eyes. I can see the tools I'll be working with. And suddenly it all seemed so simple.

from Schmoe 2

Termite Stalagmite

Sick and tired of handling fairly big lumps of clay and trying to batter some shape into them so something small of more manageable size was attempted instead. It’s more interesting to make more fragile shapes, like a leaf for instance, but the risk increases and how do you transport it? With this one, the clay had begun to go off by the time windows were pressed in, so that means you have to grab it a little harder. Not very desirable when a fingersmith’s touch is the order of the day. Simply picking a piece of clay up from the table leaves an impression. That's why they say, “Clay has a memory.”

quite often things look a little wonky but if it comes to the push then a spot of blu-tack can level the base any time after final firing

Best Verse Ever

There’s an exhibition of doors in Merseyside Museum. Basically a collection of real doors unhinged from their original frames, wherever they might have been, and erected together as a group after some serious artful intervention. They are painted and decorated and peppered with thoughtful jokes and poetry. One in particular has some of the best verse on it ever created by man. It is only four lines, which is not a lot when you think about how many words you could fit on a whole door if you tried, but sometimes less really is more, and especially in this case. Honestly, this post cannot speak highly enough of the text you are about to read. Unfortunately there is no name attached to the master wordsmith responsible, but wherever he or she is, here’s to them taking a well-deserved bow. Forget Shakespeare’s sonnets, or any other famous names you might associate with the craft of writing. This below is the real deal. No messing. No nonsense. Just straight-up layman literature, John Smith’s style. Here it goes:

Woke Up

Had Shave

Did Crossword

Had Another Shave

Must Have Been Designed

Medusa Fight

The Termite Family

Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage came onto my radar on The Review Show, as did Tom Paulin and other critics. I picked his book up in the library one time and read an impressive abstract paragraph or so. Just a few lines, but they told me more than enough. I thought two things: who the hell is this guy and where the hell has he been, because so many poets are penning verse which for me takes itself too seriously, tries too hard to be clever clogs literature, and worst of all commits the cardinal sin of not even rhyming. I swear, poetry can be an excuse for just making mad bull crap up with zero regard for the rules we learned at school. Since then I’ve read one of his poetry books whole. One standout poem in particular, Horses, M62, about horses on the M62, was a fave.

When you hear someone speaking/reading, all keen and eager on the first or second row, you are usually distracted by their physical presence (not to mention surroundings). It can be like meeting a celebrity. You take in their posture, their clothing, their jewellery, everything down to their cotton socks. You don’t mean to, but it’s natural. You kind of focus on the lips especially, because they are always moving.

And in doing this, the message can be sidetracked by said distractions. There’s really no need for any of this with Simon. I recommend, if you get to hear him read, to close your eyes. You should close your eyes for him if you close your eyes for anyone. You want to clearly hear every word. Not just with your ears, but with your mind. Listening to Armitage recite with your eyes closed is like being in a very funny abstract movie. Honestly, it is. What a blessing there is a poet out there who can let the words do all the work for him. All the personal image and public persona thingy is a hindrance, to be frank. The words are all it is ever about and if they are magical and hysterical then the mouth behind their stylish cadence becomes almost irrelevant. The person is merely the vessel.

What a privilege to hear undiluted talent spill out from someone so effortlessly. As he said himself, it is all about exposure to people better than yourself so you can raise your own bar to or above their standards. Amen to that amigos.

Ceramic Comeback

It’s been a long six months without making anything. The simple reason is that the idea of clay dust in the kitchen doesn’t exactly push my buttons (sometimes the thought of clay is like the thought of secondhand cigarette smoke*—don’t want to be anywhere near it). Not exactly got a studio in the basement with excellent ventilation either. There’s still half a bag of clay underneath the sink that has been there since the cows came home, untouched, but because it is well wrapped up, and sellotaped in places where the bag has torn, it’s surprisingly still soft and ready when I am.

Finally something was jammed together this week in a couple of hours. Don’t think anything more than three hours has ever been spent on the construction of one piece (painting can take longer). It was not going very well and that familiar urge to suddenly splat it on the floor and start again appeared, but then it found itself and became something just as suddenly. Part of the process is accidental, working with whatever grooves come to light while you are forging a general shape. One thing for sure is that these curvy groovy hand-builds really are unique, as attempts to recreate them exactly the same have failed miserably. A cast would be needed for that, and the idea of plaster anywhere about my person is even worse than clay, and almost as bad as cigarette smoke.

The designs continue to evolve naturally without ever having any real planning. Sculpture is about fingers and clay, not architectural drawings and steel frames. Alien objects by working class hands.

*no offense, smokers, been there.

As you can see in the 2nd picture down, forget fancy glazes...

THE BEST FINISH IS WET CLAY

Hannibal The Cannibal in AA

RARE FOOTAGE

Simon Bestwick

Simon Bestwick’s story Dermot features in a Black Static magazine from last year, #24. It concludes with an encounter in a police cell which for personal reasons struck a tender nerve. You think you have these fears, born and bred along with you, and then you hear another writer talk or you read another writer write, and they bump it all on up to higher levels of fret, certifying your concerns. You walk away thinking well thanks a lot for scaring the pants off me, how much do I owe you for the privilege? In the past it’s been said on here that horror is the mother genre because it can have everything, lightness shines brighter in the dark and all that sweet n sour stuff, but when the horror sticks to horror and that horror is a credible horror, only hinted at beyond local shadows instead of being thrust down your throat behind a cheap mask and fake blood (cue teenage screaming), then sometimes you question what the hell kind of a genre you have your face buried in. Perhaps the Holy Bible would be better—a form of prescription reading, for healing, perhaps. Any Jehovah's Witness pamphlets knocking about? A copy of The Watchtower? Anything?

Simon has interesting thoughts on what may lurk inside the woodshed, so to speak, although when it comes down to far-out beliefs, even he chuckles at the idea of certain individuals ‘morphing into velociraptors’. He has, aside from unsettling imaginings about the inner workings of fictional police stations, some keen related observations on conspiracy theories. He brought to light something along the lines of this: It is more debilitating for the human mind to see no pattern where there is one rather than create a pattern where there isn’t.

Horror IS NOT the best genre...didn't you know? 
CROSS-GENRE is the best genre.

Ramsey Campbell - Coincidence

Ramsey 'The Master' Campbell's Recenty Used story is also in Black Static #24. In it his central character ambles along hazy hospital corridors containing fog. Ramsey is a keen advocator of coincidence, so he won’t bat an eyelid when he hears that this incurred a similarity regarding one of my own stories from 2006, Emergency Servery, in which a hospital corridor is also described as a kind of ghostly spectral pipeline between one world and another. No doubt it’s been done umpteen and a half times before. In fact, a number of years ago, he admits to having wrote the exact same story as someone else without ever being aware of it beforehand. My own teenage opus was about three people who wrote the exact same books. An almost identical chunk of my novel Slithering Lake from nearly ten years ago now ended up in a movie called Slither (would you stop banging on about it?). But where do plagiarism and coincidence divide?

Never underestimate the frequency of coincidences. Ramsey has brought to bear the sheer overpowering odds of the collective consciousness. We are all getting our ideas from the same places. We are all tapping into the same emotions. And there are so, so many of us. Connections are bound to appear abundantly. It’s all about levels of consciousness. Ramsey has been published since he was 16 and had a lifetime in books, so nobody should know much better about it than him. He sent his first book to a publisher when he was 11 or so, his only copy, written in crayon—and they sent it back, bless ‘em! In a portion of his latest work, which read like an episode of Big Brother gone absolutely barking mad, a car alarm goes off whenever a certain character gets an erection—is that genius or what? Don't you wish you'd thought of that? 

P.S Ramsey has never read a single line of Dan Brown’s books. Nor me.

~ ALWAYS REMEMBER ~ 

THE STORY BELONGS TO WHOEVER WRITES IT BEST

Black Gloves...and Asylum

 Ever since reading City in Aspic by Conrad Williams in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13, abandoned black gloves have been popping up all over the place, and now that you've read this, they more than likely will do for you too, if not already. Must be some kinda curse thing. Don't freak out about it, just make sure you take a snap of the more interesting ones. It is always wise to check if there is an actual hand inside, though. If there is, dial 999. If it moves, run.  

~ ~ ~

There's a movie called ASYLUM (1972) consisting of several shorts. The first one is called Frozen Fear and in it a man is confronted by what just may well be a severed hand wrapped in paper. The severed hand belonged to a dismembered body in his freezer; his wife, if remembered correctly. He killed her to be with his mistress. He is calming his nerves with a nice warm whiskey while waiting for his mistress to pick him up from the crime scene and depart for a better life, when all of a sudden this body part is there disturbing his peace, having rolled on up from the basement like something out of Evil Dead 2 (1987). What follows is quite possibly the best reaction to anything in any horror movie ever: He doesn't scream, he doesn't squeal, he doesn't scram. What he does is...well, skip the vid to 6 minutes and 30 seconds to find out. Check the eyebrow as well.