Den in the Living Room

Movin’ Out

2010-03-02T13:06:00.002Z

I’ve had my blogger account here for long enough now that I feel I can be trusted with a blog. You know, clean its cage, take it for walks, feed it, take it to the vets when it’s not well...

So, I am now moving out of the Den in the Living Room, and over to Looking Up at the Sky, which is my very own dot-net (dylanfox.net).

I’ve been cross-posting to there from here for the past month or so, so it’s not empty. It’s also got a brand new post up there giving a special, sneak, advance look at the ToC for Steampunk Magazine #7.

Reset your RSS and go have a look!

The Ugly Truth About Wimmin

2010-02-27T07:25:00.003Z

I came across this article in The Times about the 'secret lives' of women. The lives they live in their heads that they never let their partners into. Everyone needs a personal psychological space, and I respect that. In fact, I wholly endorse it. I wanted to read the article, though, because talking to a reporter gives people an anonymity they would not have otherwise, and that gives them a chance to be honest in a way they simply couldn't be otherwise. I wanted to learn about these secret female spaces, so I could better respect them.

But boy... did I learn.

It turns out all those ugly stereotypes are true and women really are disingenuous, manipulative, emotionally vapid harpies with obsessions about sex, shoes, lying and... well, anything but their 'soul mates'.

Don't believe me? Here are some choice quotes... (Oh, and the article was written by a woman, so this is all straight from the horse's mouth)

If they’re looking to regain self-esteem, the first place they look is sex with someone new.

“It was brief and very intense. It filled a gap in my life, and what it highlighted for both of us [he was also married] was how terrified we were of losing what we had with our spouses. I am so glad that my husband never found out, because the damage would have been immense. But then I wonder sometimes whether he suspected and turned a blind eye, that he knew everything would be all right between us as long as I didn’t confess, that it was something transient.”

Some women would rather have affairs than tell their partners that they want more in bed, believes psychoanalytic psychotherapist Jenny Riddell.

Ruth, 43, deliberately initiated a one-night stand when she was abroad for work. “I had been married for ten years to my first boyfriend, and I think I just wanted to prove that I could. It made me feel wonderful, because I had never had that experience before.”

"And how terrific when the crush dissolves, as it inevitably does, to feel the innocence of one who has done nothing more than commit adultery in her heart."

Or take Susanna, 34, who works in human resources. She has been married for years, but is enjoying a series of erotic e-mails and texts with a man she would never consider actually having an affair with. “I have to turn my phone off at night; I can’t sleep because it is so exciting. I need this, because I know I met my husband too young. I love him and will be married to him for ever, but I need this kind of exciting distraction.”

Few men realise just how much their partners sigh inwardly at male stupidity – and then discuss it with their female friends.

Women tell blatant lies about any mishap that might reinforce female stereotypes – crashing the car, buying new clothes. “He has absolutely no idea how much I spend on my hair, and if he did, he would be horrified,” says Clara, 40, who works in publishing.

Many working women (myself included) keep a running-away account, often secret, a sensible precaution when experience shows that men cannot necessarily be relied upon to support us. I know how much money my husband doesn’t have, and he knows that I have money in a separate account. But he will never know how much, because we might need it for something far more important than his Arsenal season ticket one day.

“He gets cross when I buy organic apples. So I put £200 a month into this account so that I can buy all the little luxuries that I want – like strawberries out of season, or expensive make-up – without him noticing. I want that freedom to be able to spend money frivolously, but I also don’t want that to be a sticky aspect of our marriage.”

“Men are so simple. They think we are complicated and devious, but they don’t think to ask us what we want, and we don’t say,” says Clara.

I used to think all those love songs were about men and women,” a new mother told me for my book Life After Birth. “But it is only now that I understand how all those words are really meant for your child."

“If he were killed in a car crash, I’d be more worried about how it would upset the children. I could cope with my grief, but I am not sure I could cope with theirs.”

There is a big difference between hiding an ongoing affair, where you have fallen out of love with your partner but can’t bear to end the relationship, and the casual fling, which was unfortunate, but didn’t mean anything. Not every affair needs to be confessed, particularly if your prime motivation is to appease your own guilt.

And what about their sample?

Sarah, 35, Company manager;
Helen, early 50's, travels abroad regularly for work;
Evie, 45, married to her childhood sweetheart for 25 years, 2 children, finacial difficulties;
Ruth, 43, abroad for work;
Caroline, 45, an architect;
Susanna, 34, HR;
Pat, early fifties, local government;
Clara, 40, publishing;
Carmilla; earns a small fortune in the City of London;
Joanne, 40, lawyer;

Ah, I see the white, upper-middle class career-type is well represented. Which is good, because it's a known, proven-by-science fact that they can speak for every woman, everywhere. Such a representative sample also rules out the possibility that the similarities in their views and experiences might be down to similarities in their circumstances and lifestyles, rather than solely due to their sex.

I think the best bit has to be the quotes from actual, real women on pages 3 and 4.

Thank you, Murdoch press, for bringing the truth! I'm so glad that the truth, once again, panders to my insecurities and reinforces my sense of entitlement. I'm really grateful you're here to protect me from a world where I might have to think and challenge the assumptions I hold about people who aren't me!

We had to walk up hill both ways, too

2010-02-24T15:24:00.001Z

I remember, back when I was in class 7N (for those disinclined to maths, that would make me 12/13). As part of an exercise in... something, we had a grid of dots which he had to join up. The dots we used, and the order we joined them up in, were uncovered by means of some maths. The end result was supposed to be a polar bear. Half-an-hour into the class, everyone was joining up the dots and making their bears. I wasn’t. I’d been fighting and fighting and fighting and I just couldn’t get it. I had a round hole, and I was clutching a square peg in my hand. I put my head on the desk, and started to cry. It wasn’t the only time I’d cried in class 7N, just one of the first occasions that springs to mind.

The Daily Fail had an article about a new set of psychological conditions under consideration for inclusion in the ‘psychiatric bible’. I was initially sceptical of these new conditions because--as far as I understand the medical system in America--there’s a very cosy relationship between those who decide if something is a disease or not, and those who make drugs to treat the disease. Maybe that’s just hearsay, I’m really not in a position to judge.

Then I started thinking about Autism, ADHD, Aspger’s, and some of the things mentioned in the article like Intermittent Explosive Disorder. None of these terms were in the public consciousness when I was at school. You were a slow learner, or you were badly behaved. Either way, you were expected to take responsibility for your actions. Why this sudden rush to label all these things and throw drugs and treatments at them?

And what long-term good is sticking labels on these kids going to do, anyway...? What if people had been aware of these sorts of things back when I was a kid as they are now? Would I have been diagnosed with something?

Might I, possibly, have been given the help and support I needed to function in society? Would someone have sat me down, talked through these things with me, convinced me I wasn’t irreplaceably broken and given the tools for me to make a decent life for myself? Would someone had done all that for me when I was 12, instead of when I was 27 and there was an awful lot more damage to undo?

So maybe the doctors aren’t just stickling medical labels on bad parenting or excusing naughty children by giving them disorders. Maybe if a bit more of this sort of thing had been going on when I was a kid...

There’s no sense in wishing to change the past, of course. I don’t think these conditions are necessarily labels or pigeon holes. They’re just a way of saying, ‘ah, so that’s how your brain is working... that’s fine, this is the set of tools you need to deal with the world’. Call it ADHD, hyperactivity or possession by witches, it don’t matter. What matters is that someone sits down with you, tells you you’re not broken, gives you the tools you need and the support you need to learn how to use them.

A rather nebulous discussion

2010-02-22T09:07:00.002Z

ME:

So... what's up with these Nebula Awards I keep hearing people talk about?

MYSELF:

You mean people like Jason Sanford and Rachael Swirsky?

ME:

Yeah, well done on the name check. It's not like you know these people personally...

MYSELF:

I follow their blogs, okay? It's good enough. Anyway, the Nebula Awards. Their given out every year by the Science Fiction Writer's Association of America--

ME:

Hang on, who are they?

MYSELF:

An association of American science fiction writers.

ME:

Thanks, Captain Obvious. What do you have to do to become one?

MYSELF:

You've got to live in America and be a professionally published author.

ME:

Right. So about their award...

MYSELF:

Yeah, it's given out to the best science fiction or fantasy published in the United States during the previous year. There's five catagories: Novel; novella; novelette--

ME:

Novelette? What the crap?

MYSELF:

Longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella. You know how these Americans like to sub-categorize things. Anyway, shut up and stop interpreting me. So, novelette, short story and script.

(beat)

You can talk again now.

ME:

Fantastic. So, who get to decide who gets what?

MYSELF:

Rule 12 (f): Only Active members in good standing shall be eligible to vote.

(beat)

What's that look on your face for?

ME:

I'm just wondering why I should care. A bunch of Americans voting on which of a bunch of American fiction is best. I mean, power to them making a space for their own culture and all, but as an Englishman living in Wales, why should I support a cultural juggernaut which is stomping on everything in it's path?

MYSELF:

Okay, firstly, it's not just fiction by American authors. It's fiction published in America. The difference is important. Secondly, don't tar everything with the same brush. Sure, McDonalds and Hollywood are killing indigenous cultures like it's going out of fashion but you can't then turn around and say, 'everything American is bad'. Like you said, they're making a space for their own culture, they're not actively stomping on anyone else's, and they've got a lot to offer the world. Plus, what's the population of Wales?

ME:

According to Wikipedia, about 3 million.

MYSELF:

And the population of the UK is about 62 million. Know what the population of the US is? 308 million. So that's why an award voted for by a bunch of Americans is important. By head, they make up a huge proportion of the international community. It's like asking why anyone should care what the Conservative party think. Sure, they're just one party in Parliament, but they're a very big party. And it's not like those 308 million are all white, middle-class Christian Republicans. 79.8% self-identify as white compared to 92.1% in the UK, and that's just skin colour.

ME:

Okay okay, so I can't vote. I can't take part. But I should probably watch, right?

MYSELF:

You know, if I trot that line out, in that tone of voice, during the World Cup this summer you're going to smack me in the face.

ME:

Yeah... fair play.

MYSELF:

And when authors get nominated, they tend to put their stories up for free so people can read them. And by people, I don't just Americans, either. That's good for everyone.

Yeah...

MYSELF:

So, we're sorted?

ME:

(shrug)

MYSELF:

I'll take that as a yes. Or are we going to have an argument about this?

Fuck that, let's get pizza.

MYSELF and ME:

(together)

Shit yeah!

Erm... Parentsplaining?

2010-02-20T11:25:00.001Z

FWD/Forward has a very good, succinct discussion of 'splaining. I like it, because the discussion directly relates the concept to using your position of privilege to take away someone else's power of self-expression. In short, it's a man using his position of privilege to tell a woman her experiences of being a woman are less worthwhile than his opinions on what it's like to be a woman, or a temporally able-bodied person telling a disabled person that their opinions on disability are more valid that the disabled persons experiences. A classic example is a minority being told by people who aren't part of the minority, 'You've got no reason to be offended by that'.

I've seen it used in a more general way, to refer to when a person of privilege assumes their opinions on anything are of more value then the opinions of a person they are privileged over. The guy telling my friend how to start her motorbike, for example. It's a definition I have a few problems with, because it's a bit vague and woolly and open to interpretation. If I was speaking to a female writer, for example, and made suggestions on how she could improve her prose, she could accuse me of mansplaining. Until she knows that I dedicate a lot of my time to perfecting prose, she would probably have every right to think that. Conversely, a female who doesn't write could tell me how to improve my prose, and there would be no portmanteaux for that.

Something I've heard parents say a lot is, 'you don't have children, you don't understand, you have no right to tell me how to raise my children'. It really, really gets my back up. Underlying it seems to be an assumption that when you become a parent, you are automatically granted access to a special set of skills and knowledges that only fertilizing an egg or forcing a baby out of your vagina can give you access to. I mean, maybe that's true. When you decide to raise a child, maybe you're automatically granted a few levels in parenting. Evidence seems to suggest that you learn to raise children the same way humans learn everything else, though: Trail and error; and imitation.

If I were to tell a parent that they shouldn't treat their child like x, y or z, it seems that I would 'splaining to them. Me, with no personal experience, telling someone who does have personal experience how to do it better. To an extent, I totally agree with that. I wouldn't assume I could change a nappy or give a child a bath, much less tell a parent how to do it.

There's a line somewhere, though. If I saw a mother smacking the crap out of her child in a restaurant, I'd feel morally obliged to step in. I also think that raising children on a diet of deep-fried pizza and chips is wrong, and I wouldn't feel unjustified in telling parents they should introduce some fruit and veg into their children's diet. If parentsplaining can, in fact, exist, then only people who are parents themselves should be allowed to work in child protection services.

If parentsplaining can exist, and people without children can tell parents that drying your child with a cheese grater is wrong, then parentsplaining is qualified. Those without personal experience can tell those with personal experience they're doing it wrong under some circumstances.

Perhaps parentsplaining can't exist. Perhaps parentsplaining can't exist because parents are the socially accepted norm, and are therefore in the position of privilege over the childless. Perhaps the fact that demonstrable harm is being done to a child is a pretty clear and unambiguous line that doesn't exist in other instances of 'splaining. Perhaps the fact that children are a disempowered group themselves means parentsplaining isn't comparable to other instances. Perhaps it's the fact that being a parent is--a lot of the time--a choice, while being a woman, or disabled, or of colour isn't that makes the situation different.

Clearly, I don't understand 'splaining yet. Before I can understand and assimilate a concept, I need to boil it do to its quintessential essence and watch the vital parts twitch and move. Then I can slowly, carefully, put the variations back in. This is just me thinking aloud here, fiddling with my Bunsen burner, my test tubes and my Petri dishes. Why do I need to write a blog post about it? Because I need to write about things to examine them. Prose is my laboratory. And I'm posting it in public because, I dunno, maybe someone else will find it useful. Plus, of course, I've got a ego to placate...

My idea of Heaven

2010-02-17T12:40:00.002Z

It would be a roomy room with an open fire and bookshelves heaving under more books than I could read in a life time. There would be a rug, and a spiral staircase leading up to a balcony bedroom. There would be pens and paper.

The best part would be the bed. It would be large, covered in soft white sheets and soft white pillows. They would always be clean and fresh, and it would always be slightly cool when I climbed in. And, when I climbed in, I would feel tired enough to go to sleep.

There are lots of necessities I don’t like being shackled to in life. Eating, for instance. If I could never eat again, that would be fantastic. I could just have a meal once in a while, just for the pleasure of eating. But having to do it so damned much? It just isn’t worth it for the pleasure I get out of it. I look forwards to the day of food pills and protein injections. Washing is another thing. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I keep myself clean. It’s just a process I have to go through every couple of days. Scrub the dirt off and get on with the day. It’d be great if I could get rid of that, too.

But sleeping... There are times when I think I could quite happily spend my whole life asleep. Actually being asleep is great, but so is falling asleep. That bit where your mind wanders randomly and you’re not to sure what’s real and what isn’t.

I’ll tell you what it feels like: When I’m dozing, or falling asleep, or sleeping, it feels like my mind is free. Free from society, free from what other people expect of it, free from my body, free from my own expectations and desires and hang-ups.

Maybe sleep is like everything else. Maybe it’s the scarcity of it that makes is so valuable, and if you have an unlimited supply of it then it becomes worthless. But in my trans-humanist future where you can free yourself from the shackles of physical necessity, I’m going to be keeping hold of sleep.

A Question of Ethics

2010-02-13T10:16:00.001Z

It must surely be a bizarre and twisted world where 'No Win, No Fee' solicitors are a force for good in the world. While the intention of the laws they exploit may have been intended for the benefit of mankind, they are cultivating the greed and lack of personal responsibility which is the cancer of our age.

And then there's The Bastards. Everyone, I'm sure, has at least one in their lives. They are people who seem to operate without any moral compass, any sense of empathy for their fellow human beings, any poetry in their soul, any sense of wonder. They are small, petty people, frustrated with their own powerlessness who stamp on anyone around them as hard as they can in compensation. People with tight, closed, scared minds, the sort of people who say, 'I'm not being racist/sexist/homophobic, but...' They may change, because everyone can change. But it would probably take a night-time visit from three ghosts, a meeting with a messiah, and surviving a major, world-changing disaster to crack that shell of theirs. And possibly the most frustrating thing with these people is that you are never, ever going to be in a position to hand out some just deserts.

(In my life, the majority of Bastards can be found in middle-management.)

Now, for the ethical question of the day.

Can you see what it is yet?

Lets say a Bastard deals you personal injury. It's painful, and means you lose money because you have to stay off work. And that's not to mention the hospital visits, costs of prescriptions, taxis, social isolation, intense itchiness.

Now, is it ethically viable to use a No Win, No Fee company to wring as much money out of them as possible?

The best ideas always seem obvious afterwards

2010-02-06T19:34:00.001Z

I've been trying not to mention things like this, but then I just stopped and thought... why?

I don't like blogs which seem to pimp other blogs in some kind of blog circle-jerk--which is an horrific image and I'm sorry to inflict it on you (erm, but apparently not sorry enough to go back an delete it)--but hey, when you've got a great resource, why keep it to yourself?

I'll just let the title and byline speak for itself:
How To Kill Your Imaginary Friends--a writer's guide to diseases and injuries, and how to use them effectively in fiction.

It's run by Dr Grasshopper, who is an actual real-life doctor earning his money saving lives. That means he's got an amazingly hectic life and if you ask him a question, you might not get an answer before your deadline. But hey, if it's a good question, you'll get an answer.

As someone with an unhealthy addiction to research, I have to be careful: His posts tend to be to me what crack is to crack addicts.

I mean, look at this:

Heme has a good affinity for oxygen for the purposes of oxygen transport: It binds oxygen tightly enough to carry it around, but loosely enough to let it go when it arrives at its proper destination. (This “oxygen + hemoglobin” combination is called “oxyhemoglobin.)

Enter carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is made up of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom. (The name tells you that, if you break it down.) Carbon monoxide also likes to bind to heme, in the same spot where oxygen likes to bind, right in the “pocket”.

Problem is, it binds WAY TOO TIGHTLY to the pocket, and is very difficult to release.

And that's why people die of carbon monoxide poisoning. The molecules which make up our blood are able to hold onto oxygen just lose enough for us to exist. And they hold onto other molecules far tighter. Is there a more efficient system? Could you use blood cells to transport tiny packets of molecules which hold data? What would that feel like? Why are our bodies seemingly looking for a chance to kill us? Could you kill someone with carbon monoxide poisoning, and then oxygenate their blood to remove all traces of it? What's so great about oxygen anyway--I mean, why do we need oxygen and not, I dunno, nitrogen?

One day, I'm just going to take a month of his posts and turn them into a story. You know, just to get it out my system.

So, where's my food pills?

2010-02-04T07:58:00.001Z

This is significantly interesting: People in vegetative states are alive and well, thinking and reasoning.

It's not hard to imagine a future where we're looked on as savages for turning off life-support for these sorts of people. It's murder.

Maybe we should just give these people in-brain wi-fi chips and let them roam the net. We'd just have to make sure the wi-fi didn't interfere with the medical equipment...

Another day, another sci-fi trope becomes a little bit more plausible.

There's always a bigger fish

2010-02-02T19:20:00.002Z

I was sad to read about Kraft buying Cadbury. When I was young, my dad used to go down the Off-Licence and bring us back bars of chocolate. There was always something special about Cadbury's. It was like there was chocolate, and then there was Cadbury's chocolate and Cadbury's was real chocolate.

I've been through this too many times to genuinely mourn. My childhood was twenty years ago and the things which made it special are dying. That's just what happens.

What really made me think was a line in the BBC report:

Earlier, Cadbury workers had staged protests in London calling for government support to guarantee jobs.

There are two things wrong with that. The first I'll get to, but the second is that there's nothing unusual about that.

I have a friend who believes--passionately--in a version of free-market economics. He's never read a damned thing about the theory or history, but when he talks it's enough to convince almost anyone short of Karl Marx. His idea is of hundreds of businesses all competing for the same buck. The companies are small, dynamic and cut-throat. They form and disappear like bubbles in a glass of Pepsi. They respond to changing consumer and worker tastes like salmon swimming upstream.

It's a model which means you can't get too attached to your business because you may wake up one day and realise you need to change it beyond recognition. That means it's got to be cheap and easy to set up a business. It also means someone can go from being a CEO to a stock boy and back again in a week.

There's no fear keeping people in their jobs, so if you want to keep your employees you have to keep them happy. There's plenty of other places for customers to go, so you've got to keep them happy, too.

Who loses in this model? Prices will be higher, because bulk production suddenly becomes impossible. There'll be no more chain stores and each town with have it's own set of shops, so you'll have to learn each town's shopping ecosystem individually: There's none of that comfort which comes from being able to walk into a strange town and get a cup of your favourite coffee.

The big losers are the shareholders and the CEO's. Those guys who don't do any real work and get all the rewards. Those guys who decide to pay their workers the bare legal minimum and fire them for independent thinking. Everybody, everybody, will have to work for a living.

That's the way my friend talks about it, anyway.

The trouble we have with the system at the moment is that the power is in the hands of those shareholders and CEO's. Those people who never have to look their workers in the face and never have to watch the consequences of their actions, much less live through them.

Western history is a bloody, gruesome place. A lot of that blood and gore was splattered in attempts to give people some power in their lives. Free the serfs. Free the slaves. Establish a parliament accountable to its people. Give every man and woman--regardless of income--a vote. Now look what we've done with our hard-worn inheritance... The shareholders decide to sell, and thousands of peoples' lives are destroyed. Jobs are scraps flicked off the CEO's tables to keep their precious machines oiled. They'll flick them somewhere else, if they prefer. And there's nothing anyone can do to stop them.

I just think it's sad.

How wise we are in the full blush of ignorance

2010-01-28T07:19:00.003Z

I think I'm going to have to come clean about Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's Steampunk. I'm more of a lifestyler than a fan of the literary side of things, and there's an increasing gap between the British and US scenes. I need--no, I want to get into the literary and aesthetic side of Steampunk. I at least want to understand the mainstream literary Steampunk. I'm a writer, I'm a Steampunk, and it's foolish to be in ignorance of what else is happening around me.

The problem with a lot of the things which seem to be coming out the US of late is that they somehow don't seem to 'get' my idea of Steampunk. Look at Abney Park: They're selling pre-made, leather 'high-altitude masks' on their website. Captain Robert, their lead singer, is winning a popularity poll for Steampunks for, 'making Steampunk sexy'. In short, it's all steam and no punk.

I thought the VanderMeer's anthology would be more of the same.

Ha!

Let me quote a bit from Jess Nevin's wonderful introduction (which I read while sitting in Speaker's Corner on a Sunday morning):

“Steampunk, like all good punk, rebels against the system it portrays (Victorian London or something quiet like it), critiquing its treatment of the underclass, its validation of the privileged at the cost of everyone else, its lack of mercy, its cutthroat capitalism. Like the punks streampunk rarely offers a solution to the problems is decries--for steampunk, there is no solution...”

Maybe one day, I'll learn to control my expectations before I judge. I'm about half-way through, and already I've got an awful lot of food for thought. I've been made to pause at least once and think, 'what's that doing in here? That's not Steampunk', only to go away, think about it, and realise it's probably the most Steampunk story of the collection so far.

I've mentioned Jeste der Vries' Shine Anthology before. I love the fact he's going out of his way to find positive SF. The tendency for SF these days is to be all doom and gloom, and it gets on my wick. I don't want to read stories about how climate change is going to kill us all and it's all our own fault, no matter how well-written they are. 'Humanity is going to kill itself through its own arrogance, short-sightedness and greed' is a tired old sci-fi trope, and I much prefer it explored through the Cold War.

He's made me go away, and look at the things I'm writing. Am I wallowing, or am I trying to do something positive? When critiquing someone's writing or ideas, I don't like to point out problems without offering solutions.

Let me quote a little more from Jess Nevin:

“But most second generation steampunk is not true steampunk--there is little to nothing 'punk' about it. The politics of the punk position have largely disappeared from second generation steampunk, and most of it is more accurately described as 'steam sci-fi' or, following John Clute, 'gaslight romance'.”

So let me introduce third generation Steampunk: Steampunk with solutions. Steampunk written by people of China, India, Tieland, Mexico and everywhere else in the world that deals with the issues they have to fight with a thousand miles geographically, culturally and socially from Victorian London as well as we British with our issues. And Steampunk that sees hope on the horizon. We're not just writers; we're environmentalists, activists, anarchists, makers and a dozen-and-a-half other things. Our solutions runneth over. Us writers, we've got to stress-test them, try and break them and then try to fix them.

February Reading

2010-01-21T12:45:00.002Z

Around the end of December, I realised that January was going to be a hectic month. By the 31st, I had to:

Finish planning and write Symphonie Magnifique;
Finish researching, plan and write The Man Who Ate Germany, a piece on German unification under Bismark for SPM;
Work with Allegra to plan and write a piece on being a Steampunk every day instead of just for gatherings and conventions for SPM;
Think about, plan and write my story for an anthology being published through Vagrants Among Ruins;
Read and review Hartman the Anarchist for SPM;
And I’ve just found out about a Big Finish competition to pitch an idea for an audio drama featuring the Fifth Doctor (the best Doctor) and Nyssa.

In most realities, any one of the above would take a whole month.

I impressed myself and submitted Symphonie Magnifique to Crossed Genres on the 13th. I’ve since been working with Bismark, the mad Junker. I’m in London for the Steampunk Spectacular this weekend, but I still have confidence that it will all be done on time.

The anthology story has had to be pushed back due to factors outside my control. Partly, I’m relieved. I’m also partly annoyed, because I had a nascent, half-formed idea which I was beginning to nurture when I found I’d have to somehow keep the embryo warm but in status.

All this unfortunately means that I don’t have time for reading this month. Well, I do, but only reading which serves the Greater Good. That’s annoying, because I got some books for Christmas and spent the few pence I had left from my wages this month on more books. So, February I’m going to read. And no one can stop me!

As well as all the magazines and 'zines, we have:

The Judge Dredd/Batman Files and Vendetta in Gotham. Seriously, Dredd vs. Batman? The first scene, the first scene, has Batman squaring off against Judge Death.
Grandville. Written by Bryan Talbot and inspired by the work of nineteenth-century French illustrator Gerand, who worked under the pseudonym Grandville and frequently drew anthropomorphic animals. When it was claimed by both the furry scene and Steampunk scene, I decided I had to get it. It arrived on Tuesday, and it’s a beautiful book. It’s hard-backed and the covers are textured like those volumes from the 60’s which still lurk on my parent’s bookshelves, and the inside covers have an almost marbled design which echoes those same books. The binding is solid… in short, it’s turned all the shortcomings of graphic novel production into things to be proud of.
Steampunk. Steampunk short stories collected and edited Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. I’d be a fool to walk away. Especially because I submitted Of Mice and Journeymen to the follow-up anthology, Steampunk Reloaded.
The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Difficult though it’s been for me to accept, the world of SF/F has tended to be dominated by white, western, able-bodied men. The strange new worlds and brave new civilisations imagined have, a lot of times, had WWAM values at their core no matter the fantastical creatures which populate them, and the colonies and cities of the future are images of our western metropolises. It takes delicacy and skill to open up new cultures to old minds like mine, and I trust Lavie’s judgement to collect stories which, above any sort of agenda, are stories. They entertain, create and are driven by ideas and characters first and foremost. I brought this book because I need to read it and because the publishers need to be supported for producing it. Also, the publishers need to be supported!
Crimea, by Trevor Royle. The Crimean war is, in my opinion, the Steampunk European war. In the comfortable houses of those in charge, it was a cluster-fuck of diplomatic and military blunders with each side only being saved by the disasters of the other. In the tents of the soldiers, it was filled with breath-taking acts of humanity and bravery by both sides which have become part of our treasured history. It was also the first ‘media war’, the battlefield ending up on the breakfast tables of London the same way the Vietnam war was beamed live into the living rooms of a generation.

There are probably enough straight reviews out there already, but I may write something about the Apex book on it’s Amazon page as @apexjason would like some good reviews there (even if he wouldn’t send me a review copy :P). I’m sure I’ll be inspired to write something here by all my reading. And I’m expecting to reap bountiful harvests of fiction-fertilizer, especially for The Colossus Engine, my Crimea war story about a plucky group of rag-tag soldiers and their attempts to destroy Britain’s ‘ultimate weapon’ before it can be used.

And it looks like I’ll have a chance to put some of those fiction-flowers to good use: I’ve just got an email from Absent Willows about a new fiction contest they’re running. The universe may or may not be trying to tell me something, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and act like it is. After all, of all the things you could piss off the universe is probably one to avoid.

Can I be cool and be myself, please?

2010-01-15T14:22:00.001Z

This post over at Apex Books’ blog got me thinking. And by thinking, I mean ranting.

There seems to be a lot of these sorts of feelings going around… The idea that, now we have big budge computer-generated special effects, the sci-fi/fantasy/spec-fic genre can finally be a popular, freed from the shackles of dodgy plot, dodgy sets and even dodgier ‘aliens’.

I mean, I’m not going to argue that SF/F/SF doesn’t have a reputation for those things. Ask someone to draw a sci-fi fan, and you’ll get a picture of an over-weight, white guy in his thirties still living with his mother and a picture of the NCC-1701 on his wall.

What I don’t like is what people seem to be saying. There seems to be an attitude of trying to reach out to the normal people and saying, ‘hey, you know all those shitty films with their shitty ‘aliens’? Yeah, they were shitty, weren’t they? Ha ha! But look, we’re cool now! Come play with us!’

I have a special place in my heart for bad sci-fi and less-than-great special effects. It’s what I grew up with. Those skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts? Pure awesome. But I’m not going to try and sell anyone on the idea they’re going to get new people into the genres.

But it wasn’t all that bad. You remember Alien? How about Blade Runner? 2001. Predator. Videodrome. A Clockwork Orange. Westworld.

There were fistfuls of excellent movies (hey, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure!) made before The Matrix. These aren’t just movies which deserve to be remembered, they are our heritage. They are our childhood. They are why we love the genre. Hell, they are what made us fall in love with it in a lot of cases. Why the sudden rush to disown it? Why is everyone changing their clothes, getting their hair cut and disowning their old friends to get in with the cool kids? Why is everyone remembering The Queen of Outer Space and forgetting the original Terminator?

What we should be saying is, ‘hey, you liked Avatar? Yeah, pretty cool film, isn’t it? You know, we’ve been doing shit like that for years. Hell, would you share Pandora if you didn’t have to? Well, we didn’t want to either. But as you’re here, let me show you a few things…’

Profession dysphoria? Pur-lease…

2010-01-11T10:40:00.001Z

Wait, work with me on this one.

Gender dysphoria--your body is the wrong gender. Species dysphoria--your body is the wrong species. Profession dysphoria--your body is wired for the wrong profession.

See, I’m a writer. That’s a fundamental, basic fact of my existence I can do no more to change than I could to change my sexuality or skin colour. But like a man who’ll try on his girlfriend’s underwear while she’s at work and insists on being a ‘she’ when he’s online, I’m not sure that’s who I’m meant to be.

I think… I think I’m actually an engineer.

It feels kind of good to say it at last, but also very scary.

I’m no good with engineering-type things, though. All those equations about pressure and torque and voltage make my head go squishy. It’s like being a surgeon but being perplexed by the offal. I want to be good at them, I want to understand and be fascinated by all those numbers and Greek letters, but they just don’t fit into my brain. There’s no holes for them to go into.

I love listening to engineers talk, though. I love the discussions they have about, say, whether a USB cable plugged into a laptop electrocute a toddler. I love those bits in Freefall where Ambrose explains why the ship isn’t working and in xkcd where the punchline is a string of computer code. I love the way engineers take a problem, break it down into parts and argue about how to solve each part while entirely losing track of the bigger picture.

I want to be able to take a bunch of shafts, gears and equations and make a windmill out of them. I want to be able to boost the power on my TV remote control so it becomes a deadly weapon. I want to turn my work chair into an orbital observation platform using only items I can find around the office.

Well, I want to be able to spend my time scribbling on Post-It notes, working out just how impossible those things are and how I can make them possible. I have a yearning.

But I’m a writer. My equations are grammar and my gears are adverbs. I can pull apart a paragraph and make it five times more efficient, but re-wiring a plug is a foreign land full of language sounds I can’t make. The only poetry in motion I’m likely to produce is when a screwed up scrap of paper that used to be a first draft sails through the air and into the bin.

Sigh. I’m a fox engineer in a human writer’s body. Maybe I should form my own support group…

Open brain and tip the words out

2010-01-09T16:45:00.001Z

ABC News has an article from the Adult Entertainment Expo, with a report on the world's most advanced AI 'Sexbot'. According to the maker's site, she "can carry on a discussion and expresses her love to you and be your loving friend. She can talk to you, listen to you and feel your touch." All important things in a lover.

When I read about it, my thoughts went a bit like this:

“The most advanced AI and we make a sexbot with it? Sheesh, my species sucks at being intelligent.”

“But then... the only times we really excel and push ourselves is for sex and war. At least it isn't killing people.”

“Huh, huh-huh... Sexbot... huh-huh...”

And that's when I tweeted about it. Yeah... I'm guilty of bringing down the tone on Twitter. Sorry about that.

It raises an awful lot of interesting questions, the sexbot. If men and women don't feel the need to have sex with each other, will they feel the need to interact at all?

If a man wants sex, is it so bad to give it to him? If we remove this primal drive we're always fighting with to get our end away, will men start to see woman as people first instead of sex objects? Will that mean an end to the culture of exploiting women's sexuality to make a buck?

If sex becomes like a Burger King burger--your way, when you want it--will sex between human beings become better? Freed from the burden of basic satisfaction, will people start to treat sex like the art form it should be? I mean, I've said for a while that if you remove the necessity of something, you'll rediscover the art. Just look at what gourmet chiefs have produced now we don't have to worry about where our next meal is coming from.

Or will this just perpetuate and entrench the 'my way, my terms, fuck you' culture that's consuming us as a society at the moment?

Would I buy one, if I could afford it? How long before they can make ones for those that like men? Would my partner and myself end up with our own sexbots that we used whenever we felt a bit horny, and spend our evenings intellectual discourse with each other? Or would we just never talk to each other again? And, if we did never talk to each other again, then that kind of means the only reason we're in a relationship is for the sex... that can't be a good thing, can it?

You know, maybe I should buy half-a-dozen and open up a brothel. It would mean there's less demand for human prostitutes, which has got to be a good thing, right? Mind you, imagine being a species that evolved from sex toys. Going to church to sing hymns to the Great Pimp in the Sky...

In my own image

2010-01-08T13:25:00.002Z

I just wanted to share two, very different, maps with you.

The first is from the BBC and does a good job of explaining why I've been finding it so hard to get out of bed recently:

It's from this page on the BBC, but was also on the front of the Indepedent and the Telegraph this morning. I really, really hate the fact that, the moment weather deviates from the norm in this country (too hot, too cold, too windy etc) the entire infastructure falls apart. It makes me want to move to France. It's not that pictures like this make me any more forgiving, but it's something of a shock to see our green and pleasant land covered in Tip-Ex.

The other picture was this, very different, one:

All about family values, eh? You know, keeping things in the family...

In other news, the BBC reports that we should be getting a whole load of new wind farms here in the UK. Wonderful news. Of course, people will protest. 'It spoils the view', they'll say. Now, that's talking from a position of privilege. Words don't describe how stupid, arrogant and selfish those people are. They should be made to live in a world of their own creating. What really gets me is that wind farms are far, far less intrusive on the landscape then over-ground electricity pylons. Do these people campaign to have them taken down? Do these people rename their towns, 'a-quiet-and-beautiful-little-Welsh-village-where-those-bastard-English-are-endangering-some-wildlife-I've-found-I-can-hang-my-NIMBYism-on'? No. That would mean them giving up their electricity. Can't even contemplate that. Can't fathom the idea of giving up their entitled privilege for their principles. Far, far better that other people--people they don't know--suffer so they can maintain their cosy, selfish little worlds.

Privilege and I

2009-12-29T13:56:00.001Z

I’ve been learning a lot about the idea of privilege over the last few months, both as an increasing member of the SF/F community, and the Steampunk community.

The argument goes that, being part of the dominant culture, I’m in a position of privilege. I’m part of the dominate culture because I’m white, male, able-bodied and Western. I can expect the cultural values I hold to be reflected in the society around me, and I can expect ‘my’ people to be extremely visible--i.e. white, able-bodied Western men on T.V., billboards, adverts etc. Because of the visibility of WWAM, people in my society will take my opinions more seriously, offer me more respect and more doors will be open for me. I’ll be recognised as part of the ‘norm’, you see. The physical and psychological world I live in will be designed more around me than people not of the dominant culture.

I can’t deny that it’s true. Imagine you’re, say, eight-foot tall. You’d have to stoop to go through any shop door, you wouldn’t be able to buy clothes easily, you’d only be able to drive larger cars etc etc. Next time you’re walking around town, have a look at the amount of steps you need to navigate and imagine you were in a wheelchair, and couldn’t do it.

As a WWAM, the theory says, I’m also not subject to generalisations that other groups are. You know, like ‘black people are good at dancing’, or ‘women are good cooks’, or ‘Indians like curry’. People aren’t going to look at me and assume they know things about me based on my skin colour/gender/number of limbs, the way they might look at an Indian-looking person and assume they’re from Banglatown, or look at a Middle-Eastern looking person and assume they’re a Muslim.

To an extent, I’ve been a victim of it too. I gave up eating meat a few years ago, and I am so frikking sick of egg or cheese sandwiches. If I want to have something to eat that I don’t make myself, those are pretty much my only options. Especially in motorway service stations, although the ‘vegetarian option’ offered by most restaurants is normally little better. When I give up dairy this year, my options when eating out are petty much reduced to zero, even in restaurants.

The trouble I find with this notion of privilege is that it lumps all white, English-speaking people together. Everyone from Scotland, Shetland Isle, Ireland, Wales, England, North American, Canada, parts of the Mediterranean, South Africa and probably a whole bunch of places I’m not too aware off, all in one great big homogenised lump, all sharing the same cultural values and goals.

I’m told this is the sort of thing people who aren’t part of the dominant culture have to put with all the time--e.g. all black people--from every part of the world--can dance. As an example, a friend of mine drives a very old, very beautiful, very temperamental motorbike. She had just filled up with petrol and the bike was refusing to start, as is its want. A man from one of the other pumps came over and told her that he would help. The problem is that she owns the bike and is very used to dealing with it, knows its moods and how to deal with it, but the man who came to help thought he knew more about it than her because ‘women aren’t good with cars or bikes’, that unspoken assumption he probably hadn’t even realised he held.

This is a problem in the SF/F community (and by association the Steampunk community), as Jeste de Vries points out in a kind of related post on the Shine! blog:

“On the one hand, it is extremely hard to deny that the majority of both SF writers *and* SF protagonists are white males….

That none of the 57 Hugo Awards for Best Novel have been won by people of colour (and 15 by women), is not a good sign. That all of the SFWA Grand Masters are white, and that only 3 of the 27 SFWA Grand Masters are women doesn’t help matters, either. Compare this with a literary prize like the Man Booker Prize (where 8 people of colour, and 15 women have been awarded among the total of 43 recipients), or the Nobel Prize for Literature (where 9 people of colour, and, admittedly, only 9 women have been awarded among the total of 106 recipients), then one can clearly see that SF still has way to go in that respect. OK: one could also say that the whole of western literature has quite a way to go in that respect, but I do note that the number of ethnic and women recipients of both literature and SF prizes has been going up since, say 1960 or so. If looked from that perspective, SF has much more catching up to do than literature.”

Now, Jeste de Vries’s point is that SF needs to reach out to new markets in order to survive. It needs to engage with people beyond its WWAM fanbase. What people don’t seem to mention in posts like the above is that this is SF/F written in English. How does the distribution of SF/F output relate to the distribution of the English speaking audience?

According to the Internets, there are about 375 million people in the world who have English as their native language. The top two countries--the USA and UK--account for 275,922,205 people, or 73.58%. In the USA, 75.05% of people identify as white, and in the UK 92.10% of people do. So, of those 375 million people, about 60% identify as White. Okay, so that’s very rough. Very, very rough. But according to that, in order to be representative about 60% of SF/F stories should feature white protagonists.

The thing that worries me is the skew in the numbers. As someone who’s white, I get to be part of the worldwide 60%, not part of the UK 92.1%. I worry people are going to say, ‘he’s white and is contributing to the WWAM bias’, and not, ‘he’s from the UK and its fine for him to be a white SF writer because 9 out of 10 people in that country are white’. I worry that I’m only ever going to be seen as a WWAM writer.

I think the answer is that I’m getting butt-hurt over the fact I’m losing my privilege. Up until now, I’ve been able to ignore the bias--that’s been my privilege. Now I’ve lost that privilege and I’m just like everyone else. Like anybody who loses something they haven’t earned, I feel hard done by.

Or maybe it’s that I’m losing the assumptions I’ve been brought up with, the world I thought I’ve been living in all these years is dissipating, and I’m scared. Strange New Worlds scare the crap out of me. People, you see, in Strange New Worlds will hate me, taunt me and keep me ostracised. (Yes, I do have issues. I’m working on them, I promise.)

Either way, this is where I find myself…

My Arbitrary Numbering System is Better than Yours

2009-12-29T06:16:00.002Z

(I actually wrote this on Boxing Day, but didn't have access to the Internet to post it today...)

Jeff VanderMeer and his wife Ann are putting together an anthology of Steampunk short stories called Steampunk Reloaded. The catch is that all the stories have to have been previously published, which is kind of handy for me: The only 'Steampunk' story I have presentable is Of Mice and Journeymen. So, I sent it off for consideration. It'd be nice to be accepted, but my hopes aren't high. They say they want things outside of the of normal Victorian Gentlemen in steam-powered spaceships thing, but I think Journeymen is a bit too far out.

It's not long now before it's exactly a year before the decade of the noughties closes. Apart from three major terrorist attacks in the West, two wars, a world banking crises and a global recession, what the hell has happened this decade?

When I was growing up, my family didn't talk much about the past, about who they were or where they'd come from. There was this set of rules that our extended family worked within, which they never really explained and I never really picked up. (My brother managed to pick them up perfectly though, so I must have been doing something wrong.) Now we're all older, they're a bit more open and I'm a bit more emotionally sensitive.

I spent Christmas Day with my parents, my brother and his finance, and my aunt and uncle. Everyone apart from me, my mother and my aunt (her sister) went to see where my dad works (I'd seen it already), and my aunt started talking.

When they were young, both my maternal grandparents worked. Their children--my mum, my aunt and my uncle--were looked after by a friend a few doors down who had four kids of about the same ages. I'm reliably informed that chaos--and in a few cases, bloodshed--ensued. The children grew up, my mum became a party girl, my aunt became the party girl's older sister and my uncle got into cars. The kids down the road grew up, one joining the army at fifteen, one moving to Australia, the others going their own way too.

The one who joined the army had six weeks leave, and came to see his childhood playmates. Knowing what was what, my aunt kept making excuses and leaving the strapping young lad and my mother the party girl in the room, alone together. Boys, you see, always came around to see her.

It wasn't until my mother cornered her sister in the kitchen and told her that the strapping young army lad hadn't come all this way to be left in the room with the sister of the girl he was in love with that something clicked.

And the best part is that they were married and lived happily ever after, the army lad and my aunt.

Childhood playmates becoming life-long partners. Isn't that the kind of wonderful thing you don't expect to see outside of cheap TV shows? Apparently it happens in my family, too.

(My uncle's career in the army was far from life-long and happy. It's a bit of a shame I can't talk in depth with him about it because it could be a real light on my opinions on armed forces, but I'm not going to poke old, open wounds.)

I'm not going to use that story in anything I write, because I don't want to write cheap TV shows. It's a lovely story, though, perhaps all the better because I'm not going to annex it. It can just stay as it is, a little slice of my family history.

Getting paid to work

2009-12-16T14:41:00.001Z

Ever since I was about six years old, I've wanted to be 'a writer'. On my eighteenth birthday, I brought myself a bottle of Champaign which I planned to open and drink when I got my first book deal.

What it means to be 'a writer' is a question that's kept me tossing and turning in my sleep for the past twenty years or so. Is it when I get my first book published? When I earn the majority of my income from writing? When other people start calling me a writer?

By the time I was nineteen, I'd written two novels. They were high fantasy and probably not great, but it took dedication and inspiration. Those are the two things that have keep me plugging away at this whole 'writer' thing and kept me convinced this was the path I'm at home on.

I started writing short stories because that's where people like Asimov and Bradbury started (at least, that was my understanding at the time). In the last few years, I've realised that science-fiction and fantasy short stories are not just an art to themselves but a whole world to themselves.

Always with an eye on that bottle of Champaign (when I can call myself 'a writer'), I've been following this whole, 'pay rates fail' thing which has been blowing around the blogs at the moment. How much should writers been paid, and when a writer can call themselves a professional?

The Steampunk Soiree was, financially, a bit of a disaster. Everybody who attended had a great time and would love to come again, but everybody who attended isn't going to come close to paying for all the bands. Less professional, and more farce. A very fun farce, but a farce non-the-less. We're yet to do the sums, but if we can pay people's expenses it's going to be a miracle of some description (hey, we have our hopes up--it's Christmas, after all!) Effectively, the artists had to pay to work.

Issue #6 of Steampunk Magazine was, financially, a bit of a disaster too. It was a lot longer than normal and there wasn't enough money in the kitty to cover expenses. It was supposed to be my first ever payment for something I'd written, but I waived it and have already happily foregone any payment for anything I write for Issue #7. And, of course, SPM is released under Creative Commons non-profit accreditation licence, so someone can take Of Mice and Journeymen, reprint it and re-write it as much as they like.

So, let's say a reasonable pro pay rate for a short story is 5 cents a word. £1 is $1.1211 at the moment, so 1p is 1.1211c. So, for every word I'd get 4.4599p. I need about £900 a month to survive. That means I'd have to sell 20,180 words (or there abouts). Assuming an average story of mine is 7,000 words, that's three pro-sales a month. That's also assuming there's no cap on pay and magazines don't mind paying me $350 for a story. (Of course, this doesn't take into account charges for changing currency which is something that's yet to come up in the Great Pay Debate.)

There's three immediate problems I can see with this:
1) If I quit my day job, I could probably rely on writing one 'as good as I can write' story a month. A good month could produce three, if it was a really good month;
2) Selling three pro-rate stories a month would mean an awful lot of socialising and networking for me, and people scare me;
3) After 36 stories in the first year, people are going to get pretty damned sick of me.

There's non-fiction--which is apparently even harder than short story writing to make money out of--and workshops--which runs into 2)--which could top up my earnings. Maybe there's other avenues I'm not aware of at the moment. For the moment, though, I've not really got any qualms about ruling out making a living from my writing.

As a result of the pay debate, I've decided to start sending my work to pro- and semi-pro markets. Maybe I'm not good enough yet, but I'll keep striving to get better. Am I doing it for the money? Well, a couple hundred quid would be more than welcome but the short answer is, 'no'. I'm doing it because the slush pile at those magazines is huge and you've got to really shine to be picked out. And, probably more importantly, because the people whose work I love reading sometimes read those magazines.

When one of my stories appears in Interzone along side Jason Sanford, maybe then I'll crack open that bottle. Or maybe I'll wait until John Reppion says, 'hey Foxie, loved the story--it gave me an amazing idea!'. Of course, my snarky side wants to wait until one of my stories triggers its own xyz-fail shit storm.

The money=good thing is something deeply embedded in my psyche by a middle-class upbringing (I gave my Dad a copy of 'Mind Games' to read, because I thought he might like to see what his son was doing with his life, and his first question was, 'how much money did this make you then?'). Hanging around with Steampunks is really making me challenge and question that, and more and more I'm convinced that's wrong. Is playing to a crowd of 40 at a loss better than playing to a crowd of 200 with a nice paycheck? You can't make a habit out of it, but if those 40 people are inspired and those 200 are just drunk then, well, it probably is.

If I wanted to make money, I'd have followed my brother's lead and become an accountant. If I want to make money from writing, I'll follow James Patterson and top my bank balance up writing whargarble for the Murdoch press. I'm not saying these things are easy, but that's where the money is.

If I get myself in the pro markets, maybe in twenty years time someone will offer me a T.V. show. Maybe by the time we've gone through the sixth Soiree, we'll be able to make a profit, I'll enjoy socialising and people will be saying, 'talk to Foxie, he'll make it happen for you'. Perhaps people will be thinking, 'I need an opinion on this, what's Foxie thinking?'. Five years down the line, yeah I'll probably still be in the day job. Ten years, maybe. Twenty years? Thirty years? I don't know. Money is nice, but transitory. Reputation is permanent, and it takes decades to build up one of those. I've been at this twenty-five years already and maybe I won't be opening that bottle for another twenty-five. I'm okay with that. I'm a writer. As sure as some people are homosexual or Olympic athletes, that's who I am. That's who I'm going to be until the day I die, so I'm okay going slow and steady because I've got the time. Hell, that's really all I've got to do with my life.

Writers should be paid a fair wage for their work, but that's never going to happen when there's so many of us. Unless your name comes out the cosmic lottery machine, you're never going to make a living from just writing fiction. (Oh, people win every week but you'd be daft to count on paying your mortgage with a lottery ticket.) The underlying problem which no amount of e-ink can change is that there is not the audience to support SF/F writers. Even with the success of Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: Reboot, the general public don't particularly want to read thought-provoking, innovative SF/F short stories. They want Opera and Will Smith. They want to give their money to franchises they can trust, actors they know and authors who entertain without challenging. It takes a degree of imagination and intelligence to gain something from the SF/F short story world as it is at the moment, and the general public are increasingly wanting to just dumbly consume.

So if you're arguing that writers should be able to make a living from their work, you've lost before you've begun. There's not enough interest to generate enough money to make that position viable. It's not the fault of the magazines or the writers or the advertisers. What we produce simply isn't what the masses--the paying public--wants.

We publish to talk to each other, to inspire each other. A story in a pro magazine means that an editor with a towering slush pile has decided this piece has something to say. That's why I'll read and think about everything in Interzone, regardless of how much I personally enjoy the story. I don't think I'm the only one who thinks like that, either. 5c a word is the honey which brings in the bees, and the editors need to fulfil their end of the bargain by picking the diamonds out the slush. That's their reputation and track record. The currency itself becomes a value, a number in part of a larger equation and independent of what goods and services it can be exchanged for.

But that's just me. If the majority of writers in the SF/F world agreed, John Scalzi and everyone else wouldn't have batted at eyelid at Black Matrix, instead just deciding that the number the equation came out with was too low and passing on to other things.

A Bridge's Tale

2009-12-09T13:27:00.004Z

Let me tell you a story.

Like many people who write, I keep a note book. I use it both to note down ideas, and to develop them.

(^my notebook^)

Yes, this story has pictures. That’s the kind of story it is. (They were taken on my camera phone, though, so the quality isn't great. Sorry about that...)

Angeline of the Woods started off as a doodle I made at the Asylum while waiting for other people to show up for the creative writing workshop. A couple weeks after getting back, I put the few ideas I’d had into my notebook and began to poke them to see how they’d grow. After a couple of pages of thought-association, I hit a wall. So, I doodled a picture of the town the story is set in:

I drew the river. Then the town and the woods the titular Angeline would be Of. Towards the top of the woods, I marked an area ‘fuel allotments’ because I grew up within walking distance of a fair few acres of fuel allotments, and they were very special to me when I was young. I drew in some trees, some houses, some roads, a little picture of Angeline…

And you see that bridge? I put that in last, because I figured that the people in town would need a way to get to the fuel allotments. Then I noticed that the river flowed from north to south, and the bridge was north of the town. That meant that the ships would have to be able to fit under the bridge. As the town was just above sea level, that meant the bridge would have to be pretty large, and significantly raised above the level of the town. People would still have to be able to get over the bridge--how else would they get their fuel from the allotments?--so that meant there would have to be ramps of some sort leading up to it.

Hey… I was beginning to think, this bridge is going to pretty much dominate the town. The town was built around the docks so the bridge couldn’t be an expansion of an older bridge (otherwise the ships wouldn’t be able to get in). Huge projects like that are prestige projects, built to make a statement more than anything else. Who would do that, I wondered?

I got distracted before I could figure that out. Would a bridge--with two huge arches like in my doodle--even be able to support itself or would physics be against it? Well, three hours of Google and Wikipedia later, I was satisfied physics would be kind to the bridge.

So, back to the question of who built it, and why. The ships coming into the town are the lost and deserted ships of all time and space. Those ships which disappear without a trace, those who end up in Davey Jones’ locker, those who sail into the mist and reappear years later… those are the ships which come through. Maybe one of these ships was carrying a Brunel-esque engineer, someone with the knowledge, vision and determination to see through a project of such magnitude.

He must, I decided, have done it to free the people of the town. To free them from whom? Well… before the bridge was built, the townspeople must have moved from one side to the other. The County Road is on the other side of the river, and that sounds like an important road. So, whoever controls travel across the river controls who gets fuel and when, and who gets through to the County Road and when. Our Brunelian engineer was enraged by this evil cartel of ferry operators and the absolute power they wielded, so he decided to free the town! Yay!

Obviously, he couldn’t rely on the ferry operators ferrying his stone from the County Road to his building site and he couldn’t just wait around and hope a ship would come in with the vast amount of stone he would need. So the stone would have to be local. From my previous time with Wikipedia and Google, I had discovered that a bridge of such magnitude would probably have to be built from granite if it was going to last.

But what the hell kind of forest would grow on a bedrock of granite, especially where there was enough at hand to blast out the ground and built a bridge of? Wikipedia failed me. I dropped all other quests, and focused. Search term after search term found themselves in my search bar to be sent scurrying across the web. Eventually, I gained enough XP to level up my Google-fu and found an answer.

(The Granite-Forest quest lead to another one about the sort of undergrowth which would grow in such a forest, but that’s another story.)

Armed with my notes

I started writing.

The bridge was only built two generations ago, so as well as dominating the town physically it’s also going to be pretty dominate psychologically. Everyone living in the town would have had a part to play in its story.

Nigel, the kind-hearted local lad Feathers recruits to help him, tells Feathers of his grandfather’s part:
“Grandfather helped to build the bridge,” Nigel said. “Happiest damned day of his life was when he took his family and walked across to t'other side…pushed his wife off the side, see. They hanged him from the scaffolding over the second arch. Told my girl he's ghost stays there, guards the county road as penance. Makes her proud, that. Great-grandfather guarding the whole town an' all.”

He’s proud of his grandfather, in an odd sort of way.

The bridge does restrict the traffic which can get to the town docks. Anything taller than a clipper would have trouble, for example. Luckily, Nigel knew the town’s ingenious solution:
“The bridgemen used to run this town,” Nigel said. “Grandfather used to say about these big platforms what used to float from one side of the river to t'other. Four bridgeman to move it, two to steer. Only way to get to the county road over the water was on the platform, so if you wanted anything--food, horses, wood, anything--you'd have to take a platform and pay the bridgemen. Then a man came along. On a big iron ship that moved God only knows how. Took one look at the bridgemen, and stood in the town square and told everyone he was going to build us a bridge. So he did. Everyone watched as he built up them banks on each side and as this thing slowly came to be. When it was finished, bridgemen went broke in a month. He was walking along the riverside, passed by a gang of bridgemen, fell in the water and drowned.”

Nigel shrugged as if that was all there was to the story. Feathers took his hands off the windowsill and linked them behind his back.

“What happened to the bridgemen?” he asked.

“One of the workers from the boat who'd built the bridge, he brought all the platforms and made them into the Grossanlegen. Everyone winds up happy.”

That’s all from the first draft. (Grossanlegen is a crude German translation for ‘Big Docks’.)

When editing, I strive to remove any ounce of fat I can find. You know how much of the bridge’s story has survived to the third draft?

Yep. None.

I mean, it was great fun to explore the bridge’s history, to literally build it up and watch as it grew and the history of the town grew with it. It was gratifying to listen as Nigel made the bridge a real, tangible thing with its own past, memories and legends. But it didn’t add anything to the story of Angeline of the Woods. So it had to go.

There are no scared cows in the editing room. Editor Foxie is a cruel, cruel man.

A bit about writing

2009-12-08T13:12:00.002Z

You know you’re in a bad place when the thought of reading through your own story fills you with a sense of dread. I’ve been getting that a lot recently, but writing is supposed to be a release, isn’t it?

Angeline of the Woods is now into a third draft and I had a moment this morning where it felt like everything came together. I dropped a few inconsequential words onto the page, there was a click, and suddenly the machine started to work. It needs a bit of tinkering, but it’s turning over and doing what it’s supposed to do.

The ‘sense of dread’ is something that’s been lingering over me since the car died. Every time I try and do something, there it is, blocking the way like some vast Internet slob, his Dorito-dusted gut lolloping over his keyboard.

Maybe I’m experiencing a temporary reprieve, or maybe it’s starting to pass. Either way, the Steampunk Soiree is this weekend and then Christmas shortly after. The Soiree, I’m reminding myself, is going to be fantastic--people I like, music I love, dancing, museums, markets… what else could I want? Christmas, well. I’m sure I saw tinsel in shops in August, but it’s almost over now. Just more three weeks of hated Christmas music in every single damned shop. I’m spending it with family this year, who at least have central heating. They’re lovely people and I’ve got no real complaints about them, I’m just not really a ‘Christmas’ person.

I have to get a move on with Symphonie Magnifique, too. Crossed Genres are putting together a ‘Steampunk’ issue, and of course I have to throw something in there. It’s about Frenchmen, and women, in space in 1869 (or maybe 1871). As well as Symphonie, I’m going to have a crack at writing an article--How Re-writing the Past is Going to Change the Future--about Steampunk culture, how the aesthetic translates to sustainable living, user-serviceable products, all that stuff.

And after being pointed to two very interesting articles there by Jason Sanford, I’ve started following Jeff van der Meer’s blog. He’s a man who knows his writing.

Property is theft. Theft is illegal. Break the law, you go to goal.

2009-11-11T10:30:00.001Z

The good news from Pittsburgh is that is all changes against the Tortuga Twitter Two--good friends of Steampunk Magazine and freedom lovers everywhere--have been dropped. Just a little bit of pressure, and the government drop the case quicker than a flaming, radioactive, Arab-looking potato. I guess they wanted to make a statement and weren’t prepared for any sort of fighting back.

The bad news is that, not only are they not going to have their possessions returned in the near future, but the feds have been given the go-ahead to rummage through everything to see if there’s anything which takes their fancy. They can make copies of any electronic data before returning their laptops, memory cards and other electronic gumpth.

The property was seized under a Grand Jury investigation, the purpose of which remains a mystery. Of course, if they find evidence of other crimes during the searches, I’m sure they’ll be sure to prosecute.

So it turns out that, if you live in the US and you do something the government don’t like, they can harass, bully and try to intimidate you, steal your possessions, invade your privacy, and search every aspect of your life to see if they can find a crime you’ve committed. Whose freedoms are being protected here?

The idea that governments exist to protect freedom or protect people is of course a mis-conception. Like any body with power, governments exist to protect their own power. I guess it’s just kind of scary to see it so naked. I guess it’s also scary because, although I believe in what the Professor was doing and I believe in the cause he’s fighting for, and although I’m in another country with another government… I’m scared that it might be me one day. One day, I’ll be trying to do what I think is right, and it’ll be me sitting where he is.

If one good thing can come of this, it’s that they seized copies of Steampunk Magazine and a few more people out there might enjoy Of Mice and Journeymen. Hey, if I can’t be selfish and glib, what have I got left?

In which Foxie discards a word

2009-11-08T14:28:00.001Z

Things have been a bit tough lately. The UK Steampunk Network--which I still think is a great idea--is pushing me in all my uncomfortable areas and, although they need to be banished, it ain't easy. And then there's the trouble I'm in at work. I may lose my job on Tuesday and for nothing more than some manager's ego trip.

Anyway, I was at work the other day and I just needed to escape. You know, get out of that headspace. So, I put my expensive headphones and listened to Free's Fire and Water. That album is one of my happy places.

So there I am, listening, eyes closed, world screened out. Up pops Anne and I tell her I just needed some escapism.

“Why are the good things in life 'escapism', and all the bad things, 'real'?” she asks.

Why is a good movie, a beautiful song or breath-taking work of fiction 'escapism'? The implication is that we're escaping from something, and the usual assumption is that we're escaping from life. That would assume all these wonderful things somehow exist outside of life. That's clearly not true, because they are part of life. They exist in the real world, were created by real people and are accessible by real people without any special preparation. They exist within the real world, therefore within life.

How are they any less real than my disciplinary? Or my psychological hang-ups? They all exist in the same fabric of life.

So yeah, why are all the good things 'escapism' and the bad things 'real'? Why do I 'escape' into a song that reminds me how beautiful life can be, and 'come back to reality' for a piece of paper which reminds me how shitty people--and the world--can be?

I've not found an alternative phraseology yet, but I'm not going to use 'escapism' any more. It's just reinforcing the human propensity to focus on the negative and discount the positive. The 'escapism' is just as much a valid part of life as anything else. You're not 'escaping'. You're just changing the glasses you use to look at reality through.

Steampunk may have its first political prisoner

2009-10-06T07:12:00.002+01:00

Not in this country, but over in the States. It’s easy to say it’s got nothing to do with me, and maybe it doesn’t. Thing is, it never does until it’s too late. We all know that where the States lead, our government tries to follow and quite apart from that injustice is international. Something is happening that I believe is Wrong, so here’s my tiny fists shaking at the sky.

Here's a report from Pittsburg's local ink presses, and it makes for kind of scary reading. Lolcats have become evidence of criminal activity now? Justice... ur doin it wrong...

And, here’s a first-hand account of what happened and details of who to contact if you want to help:

On October 1st, 2009, at 6:00am, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (a
union of local police departments and the FBI), kicked out the front
door to our home—an anarchist collective house in Queens, NY,
affectionately known as Tortuga. The first crashes of the battering
ram were quickly followed by more upstairs, as the police broke in on
3 sleeping people, destroying bedroom doors that were unlocked.

Three more people, awoken by the most unpleasant means of bounding
footsteps, splintering wood, and shouting voices, waited in the
basement—their turn at drawn guns and blinding lights came quickly.

We put our hands out where they could see them. They ordered us out of
bed. They wouldn’t let us dress, but they did put a random assortment
of clothes on some people. We were handcuffed, and although the
upstairs and downstairs groups were kept separate initially, we were
soon all together, sitting in the living room, positioned like dolls
on the couches and chairs. We were in handcuffs for several hours, and
we were helpless as our little bird, a Finch we had rescued and were
rehabilitating, flew out the open door to certain death, after his
cage had been battered by the cops in their zeal to open the upstairs
bedroom doors by force. We shouted at them, but they stood there and
watched.

And they stood and watched us for hours and hours and hours. 16 hours
to be precise, 16 hours of the NYPD and FBI traipsing through our
house, confiscating our lives in a fishing expedition related to the
G20 protests of September 24th and 25th. The search warrant, when we
were finally allowed to read it, mentioned violation of federal
rioting laws and was vague enough to allow the entire house to be
searched. They kept repeating that we were not arrested, that we were
free to go. But being free meant being watched by the FBI, monitored
while using the bathroom, not allowed to make phone calls for hours or
to observe them ransacking our rooms. Being free meant they took two
of us away on bullshit summonses, and even though this was our house,
where we lived, if we left, we could not re-enter.

Three of us stayed to the bitter end. Three of us stayed to watch the
hazmat team come in to investigate a child’s chemistry set, to see
them search the garage on an additional warrant, to sign vouchers for
all the things they confiscated as “evidence”—Curious George plush
toys, artwork, correspondence with political prisoner Daniel McGowan,
birth certificates, passports, the entire video archive of a local
media collective, tax records, books, computers, storage devices, cell
phones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs, flags, banners, posters,
photographs and more than can be recounted here.

The apparent impetus for this raid came over a week ago, when two
members of our household were arrested, once again at gunpoint, in the
suburbs of Pittsburgh. They are accused of being devious masterminds,
of “directing” the rollicking G-20 protests, of using technology such
as Twitter to “hinder apprehension” of protesters. The two were held
on bail, one fetching the ridiculous amount of $30,000 cash, and
released 36 hours later after the bond was posted. As of this moment,
no additional charges have been levied against the two, nor against
any other housemates in the aftermath of the raid.

As anarchists, we are under no illusions about what the State is
capable of. We are not the first anarchists to have our house raided,
and unfortunately as long as the State remains, we will not be the
last. We are, along with other targeted individuals like David
Japenga, the outlets for the impotent rage the authorities feel when
they lose control, as they did during the G-20 in Pittsburgh. We, that
beautiful we, that include Tortuga House and all who find affinity
with us, refuse the rigid forms the authorities try and cram a world
bursting with infinite possibilities into—He is not a leader, she did
not act alone, they are not being directed. Repression is a strategy
that the state uses to put us on the defensive, to divert our energies
from being a proactive force and instead deal with the terms it has
set. We will not lie and say this has not left us reeling, but as time
and our dizziness pass, we know that friends surround us. Our resolve
is strengthened by this solidarity, and we will not be deterred by
this state aggression.

We wish to thank all of our friends and comrades who have stood by us
in these difficult few days. Our lawyer filed an injunction on the
raid the next morning (October 2nd) that was surprisingly granted- it
forbids the authorities from fishing through our belongings until we
head back to court on the 16th. In the weeks and months to come we
will do our best to share developments as they occur. If you want to
keep in touch or find out how you can help please email us at: tortugadefense@gmail.com

A Cup of Coffee and a Quick Chat

2009-10-03T06:44:00.001+01:00

I’m supposing that people blogging about not posting in their blogs is about as tiresome as writers writing about writing.

So, here’s a bunch of things I should have written about, crammed into one post:

I have a new car. Her name is Ann, and she’s a silver 1.4 Renault Clio. I had to drive two hours to Manchester to view her, because there are no used car dealers in North Wales which deal in my price range. I picked up her for £1,100 from a father and son team who prove that stereotypes do, actually, exist in the real world. Picture father and son used car dealers in Greater Manchester, and you’re there. She needs a few things fixing, but nothing major. She also has remote central locking, which is a great pleasure for me. I still grin like a schoolboy every time I press the switch. I grew up in the eighties, and, well, remote central locking ranks up there with the Porch 911s with the whale-tail spoilers on the back. Soon as I’m famous, I’m going to get me one of those, too.

Because I brought a new car, it transpired that Allegra and I were locked out after a night out with friends from work. The house keys got left in Stevie (our old car) when we left him in Manchester for the tender touch of the scrapper, so we’d been using the spare keys for the last week or so. I didn’t pick up the spare key before leaving the house. Normally, we leave the back door open. However, we’d just come back from Lincoln, and not unlocked the door yet. We normally have a Velux window open, but having just come back from Lincoln we’d shut them all tight. Did you know there’s only one locksmith in our area? We do, now. After a half-hour trying to find some to let us in at midnight, we crashed on ngaio’s floor--which was especially kind of her, considering she had her in-laws staying at the time. The morning was spent ringing around until £65 later we went to bed at half mid-day. We now have several spare keys, ngaio looking after one of them for us.

Allegra has arranged an amazing gig in Oxford on the 14th December, with Sunday Driver, Ghostfire and The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing all on the same bill. Lady Spagthorpe will be giving dancing classed during the day. As we will be too busy organising during the day to attend, we will be traveling to Lady Spagthorpe’s place in York for some private tuition.

I have two Feathers stories in my head which need writing, Stormy Weather is where I left it last time we talked, and I still have a story in my notebook from Scotland which needs attention. And that’s before we mention Bambi. I’m becoming a very bad writer, and I’m feeling the shame.

I can’t tell you the reason why I’m neglecting my duties, in true Wil Wheaton style. It’s a super-special project I’ve been working on and feeding all my time to. I should be able to show you next week, if all goes well.

The First Annual Steampunk Convivial

2009-09-20T08:06:00.002+01:00

Before leaving on Friday, I said something to Jo along the lines of, ‘I’ll write up the weekend in my blog. I don’t take pictures, you see, I write. That’s my way of understanding and remembering.’ Perhaps appropriately, I think I used actual film in my psychological camera and have had to send it away, and wait for it to be developed.

Without a doubt, that’s the most significant experience I had over the weekend. I’ve been back almost a week, and I’ve not put fingers to keyboard for anything other than emails and forums. Stormy Weather is still languishing and I need to find the time to work on it. I get twitchy if I don’t write for too long, and it’s been far too long; for weeks before the Asylum, I was working on my jacket instead of writing.

The long weekend itself was inspirational. It was like an alcoholic being given a free bar, and I’m still spinning.

Whitby was a lovely weekend, but people were very much, well, people. They stayed in their cliques, and talking to anyone else was awkward. The costumes were amazing, but it was sort of like shopping. Lincoln was more like...

It was so easy to talk to people. We arrived on the Friday, booked into our B&B which was some lovely old couple’s house, and made our way up a very unforgiving hill to register. We then sat in the beer garden of a near-by pub and recuperated. As the pub was near-by, other attendees came by. They sat down with us, introductions were swapped, and conversations happened. Just like that. People came and went and circulated and went off to get changed for the evening. I had a conversation with a wonderful man who turned out to be Robert Rankin.

Friday evening saw Trousseaux, comedian Andrew O’Neil and Sunday Driver play for us in said beer garden. The acoustics weren’t great, but the performers were. Andrew O’Neil told us that this was probably the last time he would be performing his ‘Absolutely Spot On History of British Industry’, and we were the weirdest hecklers he’d ever performed for. Allegra, Cal and myself danced to Sunday Driver, right up by the band. We were the only ones dancing, which I thought was strange at the time but now realise was prophetic.

We were up early Saturday to set up the stall and sell SteamPunk Magazine. Sales were slow but steady throughout the day. Again, the highlight was the people. They’d come over, and we’d talk. People would hang around the table and talk about costuming and music with us. Good friend Fozz also hung around a lot, chatting and talking up the magazine. I had a look around the other stalls, but decided the waistcoats looked too... well, neat and finished and by the time I decided to buy an opium pipe from Major Tinker, he’d sold them all. I was very impressed by his range of vegan ‘leather’ products and made sure to tell him. Terry Martin had a stall selling Murky Depths opposite us, as did a charming gentleman and his wife, selling watch parts and other sundries. I told them they were cruel because I didn’t have the time to put the pieces to good use, and they turned out to be Rachel and Robert Rankin. Terry and I talked and pawed each other’s merchandise.

There were also classes in folk dancing, a creative writing discussion, a costume competition (MC’d by Mister Rankin, in flamboyant style) and other activities I couldn’t go to because I was at the stall and not caring about not going because I was in the middle of people who wanted to talk and engage and have conversations.

The evening had Fearless Vampire Killers, The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing and Ghostfire playing. (I should point out that Ghostfire’s myspace is no longer hideous and waits to be asked before playing music at you. Also, I had a chance to meet them on the Friday and they scared me. Poor social skills + OMG Ghostfire! + extrovert musicians who’d just driven up from London and were probably still tired from the journey + professional musicians pissed off at the sound and acoustics = Foxie trying to be a wallflower but having no way of escaping...) The sound system was terrible, only the drums and bass being audible.

I was quite happy to treat this as a normal gig. I hung around the edges and talked to people, and got up by the stage and moshed. There were a few others, but no ‘pit’. Only when Ghostfire announced they had written a song for us, and it was a waltz did the floor fill up.

Afterwards, people complained about the music being too loud and not being able to talk to each other. In their pub gig days, Dire Straights used to ask for the volume to be turned down on their equipment so people could still talk to each other if they wanted. When they came back for an encore, Ghostfire asked the audience if they wanted Vaudevillian or the waltz again, and people wanted the waltz.

This wasn’t an ordinary gig. People wanted the socialising and engagement to continue. They wanted to talk and dance and engage through the music, not just stand in front of the band and jump up and down. They wanted the chance to use the folk dances they’d learned during the day and they wanted to dance with people, not just in the same space as them. This was the point Steampunk music became something separate from anything else out there at the moment. Other gigs, you have the band, and you have the audience, and never the twain shall meet. There’s a barrier between performer and consumer, where the former produces music and the latter absorbs it. At the Asylum, there was almost tangible resentment at that barrier. People didn’t want to just dumbly consume from the mosh pit. They wanted some sort of symbiotic level ground where musician and audience were part of the same entity, creating something more than the sum of its parts.

It’s hugely exciting, and something I personally am going to work towards making happen. Mostly by supporting Allegra as she does all the hard work. More on that later.

So, since coming back I’ve been on Brass Goggles talking to people, trying to keep that engagement alive. I’ve been looking at their photos from the weekend, reading their blogs... And trying to bring some order to the bjallon new projects I now have to do.

Now, here’s a photo of me in my jacket, along with Allegra and Cal:

There’s nothing actually wrong with me, cameras just make me go rigid. It’s something to do with they way the photons from the flash interact with my hind-brain...

StreamPunk Magazine #6

2009-09-03T06:25:00.003+01:00

It's been a bit of a fight, but SteamPunk Magazine #6 is now out! It's free to download, or you can purchase a copy for $5 and have it delivered to your door.

From their press release ('press release'... isn't that posh?):

“The theme for the issue is 'The Pre-Industrial Revolution', offering an opportunity for us to begin explore the pre-Victorian aspects of the steampunk ethic, and the many faces of steampunk before and beyond the constraints of the Duskless Empire. It also investigates the ways in which steampunk is often an unindustrial (if not pre-industrial) revolution in its own right. All on top of a glut of regular content, such as features on:

Alchemy;
The Luddites;
Victorian Martial Arts;
Creating your own steampunk sculptures;
Building your own windmill;
An interview with British steampunk outfit 'Ghostfire'.”

It also has Of Mice and Journeymen in it! Very proud to have a piece of fiction in this issue, especially as it's appearing along side the likes of John Reppion. Leah Dearborn's The Useless Pistol is also an amazing piece of work and well worth taking the time to enjoy. And there's some quality non-fiction in there, too, but I don't want to sound like I'm on the advertising payroll so I'll just say I particularly enjoyed the Alchemy and Romantics pieces.

Wahoo! I Is in print!

Bagsy bagsy bagsy!

2009-08-25T12:40:00.001+01:00

While swimming in the gym yesterday, I was idly contemplating the Bambi stories. Trying to think of an umbrella name for them. In Bambi’s world, there are humans as we know them today, humans grown in factories and enhanced with technology, and machines put together in factories and enhanced with organics. The latter two have, until now, been referred to as ‘post-organics’. In the pool it struck me--I should call them techno sapiens! I was over-whelmed with my genius for a good few minutes. While I was in the shower afterwards, it occurred to me it’s so bloody obvious I’m not going to be the first to think of it. Turns out I’m not, but there are only a couple of noteworthy hits on Google; mostly Google turns up usernames and record labels and things. So, I’m claiming it! It’s mine. Mine mine mine!

Actually (and in all seriousness), it’s kind of helpful. You get post-organics which are sentient, and those which are a bit too simple to be sentient (they’re called bots, like spam bots). I can use post-organics as an umbrella term for things from the factories, and techno sapiens for those with sentience. (Sapien coming Latin, meaning ‘wise’, or ‘thinking’. Thank you, Wikipedia.)

Terribly dull I’m sure, all this ‘writer’s stuff’. Like the tiny cogs of any craft, fascinating to the maker, dull as Dilbert to the rest of the world.

That said, here’s some more...

I’ve been playing around with a new idea over the past few days. I thought I’d post something up here about it, because that’s not normally something I do. I normally scribble everything into a notebook and save it for no one’s eyes but mine. I won’t go into details, but here’s the basic idea:

I’m calling it Stormy Weather. I know that name’s taken and I need to look into that. It’s set in a city--maybe Brighton, because I used to live there--and the main character is Emily Swan, who’s an old roleplay character of mine I’ve been keeping in deep freeze for a while. She has a deaf dog, and Alsatian called Benito Mussolini, or Beni for sort, and she’s a talented drummer. The basic idea with the story is that every day or so, at night, it rains heavy and hard. Thanks to some technobable, the rains wipe everyone’s memories. So almost every day, the entire population wake up not knowing who they are, why they’re there, what they’re doing. They have to figure things out the best they can based on where they are, what they’re wearing, who they wake up with. Sometimes memories linger, but they’re like dreams. Be interesting to see how people live like that, I think.

If it comes to anything, I’ll see if I can post up some more about it.

True Confessions

2009-08-24T10:55:00.001+01:00

Hm, as apposed to False Confessions. ‘Father, forgive me, I have sinned. I had sex with two Swedish twin sisters at the same time, while watching Battlestar Galactica. And I filmed it. And then put a link to in on Facebook.’ ‘My son, that is an unforgivable sin. You will burn in Hell forever.’ ‘Woah, woah, chill out! I didn’t really. Just, you know, wouldn’t it be cool...’ Mind you, I suppose I could ask the Guildford Four about that...

I was reading a discussion on Fark about who would win in a fight between Spiderman and the Green Lantern. (My money’s on Spiderman, just so you know. I mean, Spidy always beats the odds, and the harder they’re stacked against him the better. Plus the Green Lantern is a bit of a dick. I’ve never really read any Green Lantern, but all-American hero with phenomenal cosmic power? Always turns out to be a dick. Mind you, in any fight Batman wins. He’d just have to whack anybody with his giant adamantium balls, and game over. Apart from Judge Dredd, of course. Dredd nuked East Meg 1 without blinking an eye. Dredd not only stared straight into the face of Judge Fear, but delivered an amazing one-liner before putting his fist in Fear’s face. Different league man, different league.)

I read eight pages of people arguing about Spiderman vs. Green Lantern. I’ve never read a Green Lantern comic. Truth be told, I’ve never read a Spiderman comic either (used to love the Saturday morning CGI-enhanced cartoon show, and seen the first two movies... and the other Spiderman movie from the 80s.). But I was enthralled by all these comic book geeks fighting it out, the trivia becoming more and more obscure. And then it struck me:

I am not a geek.

I’m not. I read Penny Arcade almost religiously, but the last time I went to buy a video game I brought a book instead, and didn’t regret it. I use Linux but the closest I get to programming anything is putting leftovers in the microwave. I follow Wil Wheaton on Twitter. I love, love listening to music and talking about guitars and how they sound, but can just about manage to change from a C to a G. I’ve seen all ten Star Trek movies (the reboot doesn’t count... I’ve seen it, and you can’t make me acknowledge it), TNG, DS9, all six Star Wars films (nothing in the Star Wars EU counts... you can’t make me acknowledge it), at least two different versions of Blade Runner, own the first to seasons of Quantum Leap and watched the whole thing back when it was on TV, can name all ten Doctors both in chronological order and in order of personal preference, can quote extensively from the first six seasons of Red Dwarf (seasons seven and eight... you get the idea) I’ve read some Asimov and love Bradley... But I don’t know enough about any of these things to have really, really geeky discussions about them. As illustrated by the Spiderman/Green Lantern thing, I know enough to make broad judgements, but not enough to get into the meat of these things.

But I love watching the geeks. I love watching argue and fight over trivia, digging deep into their reserves to win a point which means nothing to anyone on the outside. I love watching them take some show they love and has been destroyed by the latest irritation, and twisting and turning, trying desperately to make it all okay again. I love reading about them doing all their geeky things.

So, I’m not a geek, but I love to watch them. I’m not really a geek geek, because--again--I don’t have the in-depth personal knowledge about geeks.

I don’t play football, but I love to watch it (ah, the beautiful game indeed). So, does that make me a geek fan? That sounds a bit weird. It’s also pretty self-explanatory, and we can’t have that. There should be a degree of esoteric Gnostic cryptography about the pigeon holes we put ourselves in. We must do something to keep the outsiders out. So... I’m not a geek, but I love the things that geeks produce. I consume the geek product. A geek consumer? That sounds way too sexual. And, again, weird. We should go with something a bit self-referential, I think. Geek end-user? Hmm.... Yeah.

I am not a geek. I am a geek end-user.

(I’m also not a furry, I’m a furri. But that’s another post.)

The AR Supermarket Distress Flare

2009-08-19T12:02:00.001+01:00

I hate shopping in supermarkets. I mean, it’s not like I have much chance to compare it to something else, but I quite like window shopping and internet shopping. Anyway. The problem I have with supermarkets is that they attack some things which are quintessential to my nature. They move things around, and I dislike new places and change. They’re full of people, and I dislike crowds. And they have lots of shiny things in fascinating looking packets, and I’m easily distracted by shiny things. Allegra will send me off to get a bag of sugar, and I’ll spend hours wandering the isle in a vague funk of confusion, bewilderment and sense of purpose. Then she gets angry at me for wandering off for half-an-hour and not even coming back with the sugar. Which is fair enough.

The other problem I have is finding people in crowds. You put my nearest and dearest in a crowd, and I’d be lucky to find them. Even when I’m staring right at them.

So, we have the Augmented Reality Supermarket Distress Flare. (What’s AR? It’s the new Web 2.0. What happened to the old Web 2.0? I dunno. It was only a marketing gimmick anyway.) I go off to get the sugar, get lost, confused and upset. So, I take out my AR device, and activate the flare. Allegra’s AR device is tuned in to mine, so when my flare goes off it rings. She takes it out, turns on the AR display and starts scanning the tops of the shelves. My device is giving off a signal which shows up on hers, and so she can easily find me. And because her device is only tuned into mine, and no one else’s, everyone in the supermarket can have their own flares and only the ones you’re interested in show up when you scan for them. Wouldn’t that be civilised?

In other news, FFM has crashed and burned. Back to eating regular food now. Allegra and I got sick last weekend, and we thought that when you’re body is fighting off infection, it’s a bit silly to go putting that extra pressure on it. The thing which struck me most about my week on rice, chickpeas, nuts and lentils is just how boring it was. I mean, really boring. It felt like my days were one ceaseless procession of grey, rolling on down a bland and featureless motorway. Do we in the West have such a high standard of living that we need a constantly varying diet to keep us interested in life? We don’t need to worry about our next meal, about the next famine, about our livestock, about whether we’re going to get shot or blown up by a land mine. So, we use our vast variety of food to keep those parts of the brain occupied. Is that it? Is that what’s going on here?

If Only I Had the Patience to Learn Patience

2009-08-04T08:06:00.001+01:00

Sewing is a whole new mentality for me. I’m sure it’s the same mentality which accompanies any manual craft, and goes a long way to explaining why I’m so bad at things. See, I lack patience and a certain amount of self-control. When things are hard, I don’t like to do them. When I’m writing, and I come across a bit which I’m not sure how to write or don’t think I can write, I’ll put up a sort of ‘place holder’. I’ll write a scene in which my two main characters lose their tempers with each other and resolve not to speak to each other again. It won’t be the scene I need to be there and they won’t say the things I need them to say, but then the scene is done and I can go back to writing the bits I can write. Maybe the characters will say or do something interesting. Then, when I’ve reached the end of the story, I go back, take out the placeholder and put a proper scene in there, where the right things get said and done. I just want to wave a magic wand and have the hard bit done.

You can’t do that with sewing. If I fudge a seam, then it’s like that forever. I can’t go back and fix it later. My entire jacket will look that bit more tatty and amateur. So, I have to sit there, and fight and fight to get it right first time. I’ll be honest--it’s as hard as quitting smoking (and even now, years later, I still get the occasional craving). Still, I guess it’s a skill I need. Going to be useful in life as well as sewing and crafts. Not going to enjoy getting there, though. You can’t make me.

Anyway, reason why I’m posting instead of sewing is that, after an hour of pinning a seam in place, I was half-way through my first stitch when my needle broke. My needle broke!

You know what the weirdest thing about FFM is? I’m too full the whole time. I’m eating nothing but the bare minimum food to sustain my body, and I’m too full. My stomach is protesting, but I have to shove shovel after shovel of lentils and chickpeas down my throat. The foods we habitually consume in the West must be so full of calories it’s unreal. It’s no wonder obesity is such a problem.

6 O'clock, Day One

2009-08-01T18:21:00.001+01:00

I've eaten nothing but nuts, chickpeas, rice and lentils so far today. I have more than 2/3rds of my daily dose left, and I'm not at all hungry. As Allegra just pointed out to me, I need to eat more and keep pace, otherwise I'm going to fall behind and not get enough nutrients.

The preliminary draft of Bambi VI is now done. I need to give it a read through and edit before I can put it down, but I have the foundations. You have no idea what a relief it is. Although, slightly depressingly, it came out at just over 14,000 words. I need to get rid of at least 4,000 for it to be 'in budget'. Maybe I should split it into two stories. You always get a two-parter at the end of the season, right? Not such a bad idea...

You Have Taken Your First Steps into a Larger World

2009-08-01T11:47:00.001+01:00

Well, today is the start of Fuck Food Month, hereafter refered to as FFM. My weight on our extremely cheap and unreliable scales was 14st last night, and my last meal was a mushroom pizza. I woke up this morning thinking about breakfast and found the only thing I could find enthusiasm for was the nuts. I like nuts. It’s the first few hours and I mustn’t be hard on myself.

Bambi VI is reaching its dramatic conclusion. I have no idea how saving Lady Taylor--Bambi’s mother--is going to save the world and heal Bambi’s psychological wounds, but it’s going to be interesting to find out. I have today set aside for reaching the last sentence, and then writing it. My actors haven’t been feeling settled and the sooner we all know how it ends, the sooner we can all relax.

SPM #6 has been proof-read, and the corrections sent to our layout guy. (I’m sure he has a proper title, but I haven’t a clue what it is.) It’s a bit much to expect him to have it back to us today, given that the corrections were only sent last night, but I’m still going to be a bit disappointed if Allegra doesn’t receive a final copy tonight.

Now, back to Bambi. Urgh, I want a cup of peppermint tea to go with my writing. What do I get? Water. It’s okay. It’s fine. I’m going to come out the other side a more enlightened, aware, better human being.

If I don’t achieve Nirvana by the end of the month, I’m going to have some very serious questions for myself.

The Man in the Mirror

2009-07-29T07:46:00.002+01:00

The hair project has been, I think, a success. I’ve had my hair in the same style for many years now. It’s been down to the small of my back with a brush pulled through it to keep it neat. I’d normally tie it back, because it being in my face irritated me. I started growing my hair in earnest when I was 14, and have only really cut it one time since, in 2003. Ever since I was in double digits, I wanted long hair. I’ve had it for a long time now. I wanted a change.

It may seem like only a small change; Allegra cut the hair forwards of my ears to chin length. The effect is that I now have wide ‘bangs’, or ‘ears’ at the front while the back is still almost waist-length.

I wear it down, and am becoming accustomed to the feel of my ears on my cheeks and the sight of them in the edges of my vision.

The first time I looked in the mirror after they were cut was an horrific moment. My first thought was that I looked like Prince Valium. My second was that I looked like I was sixteen again. Sixteen was not a happy time for me, and that was due in a large part to my chin-length hair. Seeing that face staring back in the mirror was... a challenge.

The unwritten rule is that if people don’t comment on your new hairstyle, they hate it. You can imagine, then, my fears and thoughts about debuting my new locks. Especially at the steam barbecue. And then bringing it into work on Monday. Every silence was a condemnation.

To my surprise, there were more compliments than silence. People who don’t normally notice told me it looked good and brought out the shape of my face.

It hasn’t laid that sixteen-year-old ghost to rest, but I’m seeing it less and less in the mirror.

It sounds vein, I’m sure, but my long hair has long been a defining trait of mine. When I was fourteen, I decided that society was going to hate me no matter what I did, so I would do what I wanted. And that was to have long hair. I've stuck with it, through thick and thin, fashion, impulse and accidents. It’s the one thing I’ve had that no one could take away from me or take control of. We all have our battlefields, I suppose.

So, I have a slightly different hairstyle. And I’m growing quite fond of it.

A £10 Bid for Freedom

2009-07-27T12:52:00.001+01:00

Well, the start of next month--this Saturday--marks the start of what is being colloquially called ‘Fuck Food Month’.

This idea was born out of a rant I had one day in Scotland. Flush with the cleansing feeling brought about by the lack of TV and internet, the fact I hadn’t even wound my watch since we’d arrived, deciding what to do that day when we woke up and congregated in the living room, I started looking around at the rest of my life. What did I find? Food.

You see, from before we’re born with indoctrinated with the idea that food matters. What we eat, what we don’t eat, how much we eat, where we buy things from, how the things we buy are produced, how they’re transported... the list goes on. Just a quick look around shows you how obsessed our society is with food. Count how many food shops there are in your town--supermarkets, restaurants, fast food places, bakers, butchers... How many adverts on the TV are about food? How many shows are there about food? Magazines? Billboards? People are even more obsessed over food than they are over sex, and that’s saying something.

Food aid charities keep running adverts saying, ‘£10 will feed a family for a month...’, or whatever. Well, clearly then food is a choice, not a necessity. When we’re eating, we’re sustaining our bodies and our brains. Strip everything away, and that’s what you’re left with. Anything above and beyond that is an indulgence in the experience of food. In the taste, the texture, the preparation, the art and sensation of it. When you look at the food you eat every day, and the way you eat it, it seems as if we’re being stiffed a bit. The supermarkets have convinced us that choice of food is a human necessity, and have consistently lowered the standards of the foods offered, masked by an increase in choice.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to play any more. For all of August, I’m going to be sustaining my body and my brain, not worrying about food and getting on with far more important things life has to offer. I’m going to be breaking my psychological addiction to food. I must have made some sense, because Allegra has decided to join me in the experiment. Using the same tables and charts the food charities use, she has worked out our diet for the coming month. Per day:
200 grams of rice;
250 grams of chickpeas;
150 grams of nuts;
to be supplemented with fresh fruit as and when we can.

I have high hopes, to be honest. By the end of the month, I hope to have cleared away another chunk of the blinding smog society forces into our psyches without us even realising it.

I’ve already given up alcohol and meat. That’s pretty mundane and, on the surface, makes me look a bit boring (or religious...). I’m hoping I can eliminate more and more of this institutional smog my brain is so choked with. I’m also hoping that if I eliminate enough, I will pass through ‘boring’ and into the eccentric side of ‘interesting’.

Surgery and Hacking

2009-07-24T10:34:00.002+01:00

Just so you know, I’ve been working on Bambi VI recently. By working, I really mean ‘re-working’. I may even mean ‘re-writing’. How many words from the original work need to be left for it to be counted as the same piece? I’m taking out one half of the main story, putting in another one, putting in four extra characters who weren’t there before, changing the relationships between all the main characters... oh, yes, and tearing the whole world apart. Which includes the slaughter of millions of avatars--people who live solely in the digital world. They have souls, so they’re people. But, more significant than that, Bambi goes from tricking her mother into killing herself to convincing her to choose life and sacrifice her pedigree. That’s kind of like getting Jerry to save Tom’s soul.

Tomorrow, Allegra, ngaio and I are off to Chester for a barbeque with the 1816 Society, being the S.T.E.A.M.C.R.E.W. It’s a chance for us Steampunks in the North West to get dressed up, talk about reshaping society and who would win in a fist fight between Darwin and H.G. Wells, and eat corn cobs and sweet potatoes. And, of course, have the odd beverage and cup of tea. I made a Battenberg for the occasion. I hope it goes down well.

Maybe I can find some more converts for my ‘Steampunk Quantum Leap’ pet project. It has to be done, and it will be awesome. By ‘pet project’ I mean, of course, idea I like to get heated and rant incoherently about. Alfonse--Al--will be ‘magic lantern’ 2D projection onto flat surfaces and will chomp on a pipe, and he will communicate with the project’s difference engine ‘Bierce’ through his walnut hand communicator which gives off the occasional hiss of steam. Alfonse: “Samuel, Bierce says that there’s a 96.4% chance that you’re here to ensure Miss Feathering-Smithe attends the passing out ball on Tuesday... as the timeline currently rests, she sprains her ankle and misses the ball, and never meets Jonathan, her husband and inventor of the clockwork match-striker--which was inspired by his wife!”...and, Samuel: “I’ve leapt into the body of Charles Darwin... Egads!”

What Did I Do Before TV and the Internet?

2009-07-23T22:01:00.002+01:00

Been a while, I know. Stevie (the car), Scotland, my ISP and work have knocked the wind out of me of late. Work has reached the point where there is serious talk in the Fox/Hawksmoor household of quitting and moving 100 miles down the road to Chester.

While in Scotland, I read through El Sombra, the second in Abaddon Books’ Pax Brittania world. I’ve passed their first one, Unnatural History around a few people. I wrote an enthusiastic review of it for Steampunk Magazine #6. T’other Paul (we already had one Paul when he started) had it next and loved it like I did. ngaio and Allegra were less than impressed--Allegra didn’t even finish it, and ngaio only finished it so she could understand what T’other Paul and I were talking about.

El Sombra was better, in my opinion. In a small Mexican town, a masked vigilante fights to free his people from the Nazi’s. Loud, bright, explosive, no-holds-barred pulp action Saturday morning pictures extravaganza. Bereft of characters or moral ambiguities. Great fun.

Since coming back to Wales, I’ve also read Rob Grant’s Backwards. I’d read all the other Red Dwarf books years ago, but somehow never managed to get through to this one. Far better than Doug Naylor’s offering, The Last Human. Backwards had a stronger plot, better writing and one bit where I laughed out loud. I haven’t done that when reading a book since... blimey, I can’t recall a single time.

And I simply can’t forget to mention Ray Bardbury’s The Illustrated Man. Fahrenheit 451 is a book which has endured with me and I frequently say is my favourite. The Illustrated Man has some pretty good stories, and some amazing ones. The Highway, The Long Rain and Kaleidoscope are worth a mention. I find it hard to explain what I find so hypnotic about Bradbury’s writing. He’s like a magician: He’s standing there, nothing up his sleeves and you watch him wandering around on stage, perfectly ordinarily. And then he stops, and you realize he’s built this amazing, beautiful home to ideas which whisper gently to you when your brain is just running idle. If I knew how he did it, I’d be copying it. Without shame.

Scotland was an amazing experience. The most enduring part of has been the silence. We had no computers, no television and only watched one video the entire week. We had music playing just one evening, and that was it. There were no neighbours, no road and cars, no people walking around outside. Just the sea and the birds and the wind. Since coming back, Allegra and I only have the television if there’s a specific programme we want to watch. At the moment, it gets turned on at 8:00pm on Sunday for Top Gear, and back off again at 9:00pm. The elimination of just that background noise from out daily lives has made the whole world seem different.

I get +1 Geek Points for following @isaacasimov, and another +1 for buying a mobile so I can update my Twitter when I’m away from the ‘net. The mobile is a Motorola W377, a slim flip phone. I have vague ideas of turning it into something resembling a cigarette case.

The copies of Steampunk Magazine #6 are back from the layout guy. There’s a lot of proof-reading in my future. I may have only had a minor part in putting it together, but it’s going to be amazing to see it all there, together, just like a real magazine! And, of course, Of Mice and Journeymen is appearing in there. I’m very excited about that. My first paying story, ever!

Three Meme T-Shirt

2009-07-23T10:23:00.004+01:00

It doesn't cure cancer, or AIDS, have magic powers, act as a chick magnet or any of those other fancy things the real McCoy does.

It was enough to make me smile, though

Props, of course, to the people behind the Keyboard Cat shirt. Win, guys.

Fly Me To The...

2009-07-20T20:38:00.001+01:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing.

It was real, and it was worth it.

We should go back. Test out the new tech before we take it to Mars.

From the wilds of Scotland, back to reality

2009-07-07T15:27:00.001+01:00

My journey home, let me tell you about it...

On the Thursday night before, my companions stayed up late and made a determined effort to finish the alcohol while I got an early night. Fair play to them--if I wasn’t the designated driver, I would have stayed up with them even though I don’t drink. Drain the cup to the dregs and pay the piper in the morning!

I did what last minute packing and tidying I could while they paid their dues, and got them out of bed as late as was reasonable. Between me, the one human being and them, the three kind of human zombies, we got most of the odds and ends packed and ready to be loaded into Stevie, our car. I went out to bring him to the door, to make the loading as painless as possible.

This is where the story starts.

Stevie wouldn’t start. No matter how many times I tried, no matter how many prayers I sent, all I got was a clicking from.... some part of the engine. Panicked phone calls to parents later, we decided it was probably a flat battery. We tried a bump start. We tried many push starts. Have you ever pushed a car along an old, gravel country road with grass growing down the middle and rabbit holes in the way? If you haven’t, two things: First, it’s hard and leaves you with painful shoulders; second, you can’t get enough speed for a push start.

We called the caretaker of the cottage and told him we’d be late leaving. He said that was fine, and he’d bring jump leads. He was good to his word and we were very grateful. Our bonnets’ opened, he secured the leads to his battery and, after a moment of deliberation, to Stevie’s. Sparks few and smoke poured off the terminals. “Try your engine!” he urged. “Quick!” I leapt into the driver’s seat and, my eyes on the smoke pluming out of my battery, turned the key. “Nothing!” I yelled. He pulled the leads off, and frowned at me. After a few moments’ frowning, he reconnected the leads, this time to the opposite terminals. “Give that a try,” he said. I did, and there was the glorious sound of the starter motor firing, and the pistons moving.

Despite being behind schedule, we decided to take the more scenic route and drive around Loch Lomond. There were still dregs to be had. Allegra was directing me and told me to turn right at the next T-junction. I pulled up, indicated, braked, clutch, put the handbrake on and said, “Oh.” “Huh?” Allegra asked, and then looked up. “Oh,” she said. The Rest and Be Thankful Pass, through which we were looking forwards to driving, was closed. I pulled into a lay-by and asked the lone high-vis-jacketed man on guard if there was a way around, and what had happened. F15 Tornado crashed into the hillside of the pass. We took the diversion, contemplating the irony and the extra hour of driving.

There a couple of hours of beautiful scenery, fiddly driving and rain before the story picks up again on the M8 just outside Glasgow--which is a shithole. If you live in Glasgow, I apologise--no one should have to live like that. There was a hefty tailback, and we were crawling along, my left calf getting increasingly painful (you drivers will know why). Then Stevie stalled. And wouldn’t turn over. I turned the key and got... nothing. Allegra and I swapped seats as I pushed Stevie onto the hard shoulder. I wandered a little way off, and found out what those orange SOS phones on the side of the road do. They put you through to a disinterested sounding man with a London accent who gives you three options: Number one, join the AA; number two, join the RAC; number three, have the police come out and call a local garage who will then give you a stonking bill. We deliberated, and eventually went for number two. Now, my friends, that’s good marketing. “Ah! I see you’ve got a gaping hole in your femoral artery! Well, you can join BUPA, join PPP, or the police can drop you off at a GP surgery. Or you could just keep on bleeding. Talk it over, you know, I’m in no hurry...”

A hundred-and-twenty quid and half-an-hour later, the RAC van turned up, jumped the battery (again) and lead us off the motorway and outside a carpet warehouse. He did things with leads and cables and meters, and then told me to try the engine. I did, and Stevie breathed again. The RAC man told me it was a problem with the alternator, he had fixed it, and as soon as he had deposited his paperwork with us like a cat using a litter tray, we were free to go again.

About an hour later, we stopped to get petrol. It was all going well until I urged Stevie to walk on. You can guess what happened. We pushed him away from the pumps and put in another call to the RAC. Allegra had been the cheerfully optimistic wind in our sails all day. At every pothole, she had a smile and a happy whimsy which made everything seem, you know, okay. While I was on the phone to the RAC (it took a while... I waited five minutes to get through, had half a conversation, and then my credit ran out...) something happened to her. The one hour’s sleep she managed to steal from the night before, the burning pain in her arms and shoulders from the red wine, the money we’d had to spend on a car we’re planning to replace in the next couple of months, the rain... It all condensed into a ball of, ‘fuck you, world! Fuck You!’. We pushed Stevie up the forecourt, and down, up, and down... I think the universe decided to reward us for our--Allegra’s--sheer bloody mindedness. Two-and-a-half hours of motorway later, the RAC man called to say he was on the way. We told him he wasn’t needed.

After nine hours, we left Scotland. The entire journey back to North West Wales was supposed to take nine hours, tops. As ngaio said, sometimes it just takes nine hours to get out of Scotland.

We stopped... at some point so I could have a break from driving. The motor ran while we swapped seats. I napped in the back for an hour-and-some before taking the wheel again. Tez was deposited without further incident, some time around midnight. His mother gave us tea and his father jumped Stevie back into life, and we were on our way again. Fifteen hours or so after we’d set off, we pulled into Bangor. We parked Stevie at a local garage (because there was no way we could get him there if we stopped again), and slept on ngaio’s sofa bed for the night.

I explained the problem to a young lad at the garage, he put a couple of wires on the battery and said, “yep, you were right, dead as Jacko. A new one is... fifty quid.” He looked up at me, awaiting my decision. I was caught: Did I pay for a new battery, or did I lie on my living room floor as the blood drained out my artery? Having taken all my tools out the boot to make way for holiday packing, I asked him to install it for me and spent a quarter-of-an-hour looking for my wallet. I had to drag ngaio back to the garage to pay in my steed if it had been sacrificed the previous day at some point.

If I was writing this on Saturday afternoon, as I was planning to, this would be the end of the story. I’m not writing this on Saturday afternoon because our ISP had cut us off for not paying the bill, and after Stevie’s bills we couldn’t afford to make it up to them. Can’t afford to.

The story picks up on Monday morning, on the way to work. There we are, on the A5, chatting about what Stevie had taught us during the trip on Friday. There’s a clunk. I put my foot down to accelerate, and get nothing. So I change down, and try again. Nothing. As I’m pondering this, Allegra’s eyes have gone wide. “Dylan, there’s smoke coming out the bonnet--pull over!” She was right. White smoke was coming out the bonnet like bad eighties special effects, and was being blown into the cabin through the air vents. Something was dripping through the passenger’s footwell onto Allegra’s feet. I pulled over, tried to put the hazard lights on and failed. Opening the bonnet, I found that the battery had welded itself to it. We called the RAC as traffic pulled around us. The A5 is a single carriage way, tightly weaving through the Welsh landscape, and we were blocking it. It wasn’t long before we had a police car flashing blues and twos either side of us, directing traffic. The RAC man turned up, and gave us a tow back to the garage.

When we got there, I popped the bonnet and he took the battery out. Acid dribbled out of it in a steady stream. “Your battery’s fucked... your electrics probably fucked, too.” The manager from the garage came out, and agreed with him. “There’s no restraining bolt holding the battery down,” the manager said. “It just bounced up and hit the bonnet. You’re lucky it didn’t explode. The lad who fitted it isn’t in today, but I’m going to have A Word with him...”

I’ve had a car for the last ten years. Public transport is something of a foreign world to me. When I was a kid, I took the bus all the time. A lot has changed in the last ten years, including where I live. ngaio is a regular busser, and Allegra is a smart cookie, so they arranged transport to and from work while I was hiding in the internets.

The garage are replacing the battery and fixing the wiring for me at no charge. It’s amazing. They’re wonderful. It’ll be ready to pick up Wednesday night, but we’ve already got weekly bus tickets so we’re going to bus it to work and back all week. Between the alternator being fixed (which had been on the fritz for a while), the battery being replaced (which randomly discharged overnight in Scotland and was probably on the fritz) and the wiring being replaced (which had been on the fritz for a while), I’m ending up with a better car then when I started.

Almost. The brakes are grinding, which I’m told is a bad thing.

So, in conclusion... does anyone know a good--and by good I mean fuel efficient and reliable--and by reliable I mean German--erm--3 door, 1.4 ltr car I can get second hand for between £1,500 and £2,000?

Retreating and Retracing

2009-06-23T13:42:00.003+01:00

Bertie is due to be taken out of his pot and put into a planter tonight. I hope he likes his new home. He is going to have a jam jar of stout by his side (excellent suggestion, btw Jo).

I had to take our youngest cat, Jack, to the vet this morning. It took a good ten minutes and skulduggery with food to get him into the box. When we got home, I opened the door, and that was it--he was gone. He probably won't trust me ever again.

All this preparation is so, when we’re away next week, there’s nothing to worry about. On Friday, Allegra, ngaio, Tez (a friend of Allegra’s) and I are journeying up to the wilds of Scotland for a week of meditation, writing and rambling over the hills and moors. I’m trying to leave my expectations at home so I can just go with whatever is flowing. It’s about as contrary to my nature as a fish running, but that’s not to say it’s impossible. It’s going to be interesting, as Allegra has banned me from taking my laptop. I tried explaining to her that my laptop is my main means of creative expression, and it was kind of like asking a guy with no legs to leave his prosthetics at home. Deaf ears.

The break from my normal creative process has the potential to do wonders. I just have to let it. Despite anxiety, I’m looking forwards to the break. Stress seems to be piling up and it’ll be good to be in a place where I can’t do anything about it, so I don’t have to worry about it. And a place where I can just write and do whatever. I can start something new and throw it around with everyone else, and watch it take a direction I never thought of.

I’m worried about the midges, though. I used to holiday in the Outer Hebrides when I was a kit and midges are a trauma. They love my blood. They love my sweat. They love climbing in my ears and under my eyelids and in my long hair. The only people who understand my pain are my aunt and my brother. I’m bringing two different kinds of repellent. I still feel under-prepared.

In other news, I’ve finished my first, ‘hack’. I’ve taken an old shirt I didn’t wear any more, and turned it into a new waistcoat. I’d be lying if I said it looked great, but it does okay and I’m happily wearing it today. I plan to make another waistcoat out of an old black shirt I found at the bottom of the wardrobe. Being able to create something tangible like that has an addictive quality. If I wasn’t a writer, I’d have found my new vocation.

Sewing all done, I’ve been going back to Bambi’s stories. As I’m sure you can imagine, some need more work than others. Number two in the series was a pain, number three needed some surgery, but number four needed very little work. I wrote it over Christmas 2008 and its set at that time of year. The ending is a bit sappy, but I let that stand. Five and six are the last two, but they’re also probably going to need the most work. I just sat down and wrote those, no planning or forethought. Now I’m going back and reshaping them all to be part of the same narrative, I’m not only going to have to clean them up but also remould them to fit in. Once all the stories have been put into a second draft, I can go back and refine them. The first draft is just what happens to come out my fingers when I'm at the keyboard.. The second draft is what I meant to write. Third and forth are refining. Sometimes there’s a fifth draft. Normally I’m done in four, though. It’d be nice to get the last two into draft-ii before the trip, but that’s not going to happen. Maybe I’ll print them out and bring them with me. At least I have the option then, even if I don’t take it up.

Arctic Blasts

2009-06-22T10:19:00.001+01:00

What I meant to talk about on Saturday was tea.

My coffee consumption has dwindled to a few lonely, slightly soggy grounds (I think I last had a cup on Thursday), and my tea ball is working over-time. ngaio was kind enough to buy me a ‘sampler’ of lose-leaf teas which Evis and I have been testing over the past few weeks. I have a table on my computer at work, wherein I have commented on the teas, and given them marks out of ten. The marks range from eight to two (it tasted like broad beans...) When it’s complete, I shall of course be posting it up here.

The fantastic news is that I’ve found a tea which scores an amazing, big, fat ten out of ten. It’s called Arctic Fire, and I picked it up in London. It’s almost sweet and floral, like Turkish Delight, but then it weighs in with a heavy kick of mint.

There’s only two problems:
I need an air-tight jar to keep it in, as it’s very quickly losing it’s bite;
I can’t find anywhere in the UK to buy it on-line! The shop sealed the packets with stickers giving their street address and telephone number, so when I come back from Scotland I’m going to give them a call and ask if they can post me some.

I’ve got another two teas from the London shop as well: One is a violet tea which Allegra brought and doesn’t really like; and the other is one called Chinese Hookah. I’ve not tried the Hookah yet--I’m using up the Arctic Fire before it becomes tasteless, and have kept the Hookah sealed against degeneration. The violet tea tastes like Palmer Violets, which can’t be a bad thing. It’s a sweet tea that’s like eating a Mars Bar--a bit fun and indulgent.

Peppermint tea is quickly replacing coffee as my writing drink. This is very significant. It’s like changing operating systems. I replaced smoking with coffee, and now I’m replacing coffee with peppermint tea. I love mint teas. I’ve even brought my own mint plant--called Bertie--so I can make fresh mint tea. Only problem is that the slugs seem to quite like mint, too.

A Week in FoxieLand

2009-06-20T21:27:00.001+01:00

It’s been a kind of crappy week. Work’s been a steady rolling ball of unpleasantness, mainly due to the atmosphere. The company are treating us like crap, people are feeling like crap and it’s not taking much for people to get bruised.

The landlord came over on Thursday to deliver a new cooker for us. That meant the house needed cleaning. (I don’t live in a sty, but I’ve got more interesting things to be doing than vacuuming every few days and Turtle Waxing my books.)

The week before, I put down the work I’ve been doing on Bambi to turn an old shirt into a new waistcoat. I’ve really taken to sewing. It has a tangible feel of achievement, and I can watch Quantum Leap while I do it. I just brought Season 2 on DVD and, well, childhood feelings are the sweetest. The house cleaning meant that I worked, came home, cleaned, went to bed...

On top of that, I’m seriously considering leaving Critters. Critters is amazing. It’s a group of writers who exchange critiques on each other’s stories. Each week, about two dozen short stories are mailed out to members and put on the website. Everyone reads a manuscript or two, or ten, and submit their 300 word plus critique, which then gets sent to the writer. You can expect about a dozen critiques on a story. Writing the crits has helped me as much as getting them back on the two stories I’ve had critted.

The trouble is, you have to submit three critiques every four weeks. I’m having trouble doing that. It’s so damned simple, but this is the sort of thing I’ve always struggled with. You know, commitment and consistency. I pick things up, chase them around the living room for a bit, and then sort of get bored and wander off. I’m changing my nature, but there’s only so hard you can fight against it.

In other news, I’m looking forwards to having a new puppy to play with. According to the BBC, the British Library are putting 2 million pages from 19th century newspapers online for the public to view. It costs, but not much and I’m happy to pay. The opportunity to paw through the minutiae of life over a century ago is making my jaws slather.

I do apologise for the boring, negative post. It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I’m trying to keep playing with this toy even after the shine has stopped sparkling. I just keep reminding myself that it doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s one of the things which enables me to drop things: I leave them for a bit, and then the momentum goes and the longer I leave it, the more I’m convinced it’s got to be perfect, so the longer I leave it... You don’t have to make it up the mountain in one step, Foxie.

The London Adventure

2009-06-10T12:52:00.001+01:00

London was a different world to me. There was such a huge variety of people all doing their own thing. Almost half of them were plugged into their phones, Nintendo DS, mp3 player... The other half stared blankly into space, into books or at the person with them. Everyone was going somewhere, and only worried about arriving.

The thing which struck me most were the smells of London. I’d start off at one end of a street with beer and cigarette smoke, and pass through grilled meat, perfume, cars, buses, spices and a whole host of other things I couldn’t identify. And what is it that the Tube trains smell of? There’s some grease around the edges of it, maybe some copper, something with hints of rubber and something sharp... The Tube smells like the Tube.

I spent my time on the trains and the streets like a kitten in a catnip patch. I guess the locals can be as angry at me as I get with the tourists who amble down the Welsh roads at 20 m.p.h. while they stare stupidly at the mountains.

Castlevania and Crossbones

Out in Finchley, it smelt of rain and hedgerows. We had a twenty minute walk to the arcade through tree-lined avenues and the occasional passing car, only to find that the machine was long-gone. It was a shame, but Allegra took it very well. We played on the Silent Hill shooter instead, pumping pound coins into the machine as Pyramid Head killed us.

That left the evening free to visit Crossbones. It was a haunting experience. The gates were tightly shut but covered in flowers, epitaphs, ribbons, candles and photographs that other people had left for the dead. Ordinarily, I don’t think the dead can hear. When they’re close, though, my conviction slips away. Allegra and I borrowed a pair of ngaio’s nail scissors, (eventually) drew some blood with them and left it at the gates. I don’t have an explanation for why I did that.

The Espresso Book Machine

Before we left, the EBM had me excited. With the machine, a publisher no longer has to commit to huge print runs. You can go into the shop, pick the book you want, have it printed and then leave with it. I had the idea of shelves being stacked, not with books, but with flashcards showing the front and back covers, the bookshop resembling a Blockbuster more than a library.

My whole experience was terribly British. I picked out the book I wanted before leaving, and had a map to the store. I went in, Allegra found the machine and I waited patiently for someone to serve me. Eventually, I hunted someone down who told me that the someone I needed was on their break, but she’d find him for me. Ten minutes later, he came back from his break, checked the EBM library and told my assistant--who then told me--that they couldn’t print the book I wanted and did I want to order it instead. Rather defeated the point, I thought. I could do that at home.

And that’s what I left thinking. I go to a bookshop to smell the books, hold them, flick through the pages and be snagged by the covers. If I want a specific book... I go to Amazon, or eBay, or Play, or Google Shopping, or anywhere else on-line. The only advantage the EBM seems to have over other print-on-demand is that you have to go to the store to pick up your book. That's a real... um... pain in the arse? I think the EBM is going to be an odd side-track on the evolution of publishing rather than the linotype I thought it was going to be.

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum was great. I secretly liked Museums when I was a kid. Every display I walk past, I read and am fascinated by. I slowly made my way through the human body exhibit, then the dinosaurs, then the natural world and then the restless Earth. The human body exhibit hadn’t changed since I saw it in around 1992, when I thought Terminator 2 was the best thing in the world, ever. I walked over the dinosaur skeletons and watched the arms of a iguanodon shake like it was still alive. The natural world told me a bunch of stuff about global warming I knew already, and the restless Earth showed me how rocks are made and how the planet’s core is mainly iron.

When we look out to the horizon, the Earth looks flat. Time’s like that, I think. Things seem static and set, but only because we’re too small to see the curvature of time’s arc. Like Eratosthenes, we can prove time’s curve but we can’t observe it. Maybe one day, we will be able to.

The Ballet

The ballet was interesting. The dancers twisted and contorted like creatures from Silent Hill. I didn’t know humans could move like that without being possessed by forces of evil. The dance itself explored the evolution of imagination, mathematics, relationships and the space they exist in as they touched each other. Interesting, but I think I still prefer Giselle.

We were pushed for time, but needed to eat before the performance. We found an Indian buffet, and I filled up a plate with food, ate it, polished of half of ngaio’s and left within ten minutes. Yes, I am proud of myself.

Docklands and Doughnuts

On Sunday morning we sat on the Docklands Light Railway from Bank station to the train’s terminus, and then rode it back again. I watched the houses, apartments, warehouses, gardens, office blocks and rivers go by my window. I gawked at the Isle of Dogs as it jutted out of London like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. This random mash of new developments, history and organic human cultural growth is what London has always been for me. The HSBC building, stations with names like Heron’s Quay and Mudchute, an old abandoned boat lying in the low tide and covered in plants, rows of Victorian terraced houses with their satellite dishes and washing in the gardens, gaudy new apartment blocks full of city boy wankers and DKNYs... The DLR ride was definitely a high-light.

Waiting in London Victoria for the train back, we visited the Krispy Kreme stall and picked up doughnuts for the office. All in, I think we ended up buying five dozen, not counting the few single ones we brought. The people who served us--Martin and Leena--were wonderful and gave us free tea and coffee.

And the rest...

The falafel place was indeed fantastic and well-worth seeking out. Opposite it, ngaio found a shop selling specialist loose-leaf teas and coffee. Yes, it was Heaven and of course I spent money I shouldn't. The Bridge Cafe lost out to time, unfortunately.

Now I’m utterly skint, but very glad I went.

European Election Results

2009-06-10T11:01:00.003+01:00

*sad sigh*

Google has judged me...

2009-06-10T10:50:00.001+01:00

After I'd finished a draft of a post about my adventures in London, I checked my email and found that 'URGENT ACTION [was] REQUIRED' on my Blogger account. I read the email, and found that my account had been suspended, as a suspected, 'spam blog'. What's a spam blog? According to Blogger's FAQ:

Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical text?

*sad face with puppy dog eyes*

A Trip to the Bright Lights of Bartertown

2009-06-03T15:30:00.001+01:00

Allegra, ngaio and myself are heading off to London on Friday. The trip started as Allegra wanted to go and see Wayne McGregor’s ballet, Random Dance. The ballet is on Saturday, but we decided to make a weekend of it. Last year, I spent my birthday with my parents while Allegra and ngaio spent the weekend in London. I joined them on the Monday, to go to Forbidden Planet, the Doctor Who exhibition and the First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum. Such a good time was had by all that we decided to do it again.

Current items on the itinerary include:

Blackwells Bookshop on Charing Cross Road to see the Espresso Book Machine;
Canary Wharf to look at the sky scrapers;
Cross Bones Graveyard, responsible for the Southwark Mysteries;
the Hollywood Bowl in Finchley to play the new Castlevania arcade game;
the Bridge Café, where losing teams from The Apprentice go to psyche up before the chicken pecking in the boardroom;
the falafel place Allegra and ngaio went to last time before I joined them in the capital;
Krispy Kreme donuts, where we are going to pick up Kremey goodness for our department at work;
the Natural History Museum;
and of course the ballet on Saturday night.

The hostel we’re staying in is, I’m told, a rung below the one at Whitby. ngaio refused to use the shower last time she was there for fear of being consumed by the mould and other organisms which had annexed it.

It’s a marvel of modern society that I can describe that list as ‘geeky’, and not ‘just plain sad’. Eschewing the normal gravity wells of London which draw in most tourists, we’re indulging ourselves. Sad or geeky, we’re doing what we want and people can call it what they like. I’m really looking forwards to it.

A Brief Interlude Sponsored by A Coalition of My Principles

2009-06-02T16:39:00.003+01:00

There’s a tactic called ‘confusion marketing’. The idea is that you bombard the consumer with so much information and so much choice, that they get confused and either decide to stick with what they’ve already got or make a choice which leaves them worse off than before.

Democracy is kind of like that. There are so many layers of government, so many elected representatives and unelected officials, so many parties, so many policies, so many fliers, so much bullshit. It’s no wonder most people don’t care enough to take an interest, and those that do have specific and narrow agendas.

British Parliamentary democracy goes all the way back to William the Conquer trying to consolidate his new kingdom after 1066. It wasn’t until 1969 that every adult over 18 got the right to vote. Just over 900 years. All that fighting, all that blood, all those wars, all that pain. We've grown up assuming the right to vote as one of our most basic rights, and so all that blood and tears seems like something of a foreign country to us.

I think we should listen to our ancestors and those 900 years of fighting. I think 900 years outweighs our few decades of saturation and disillusion with the modern political process and the people involved in it. No matter how ineffectual it is, 30 generations clearly thought it was better than the alternative. The ideal is bigger and far more important than the individual spinning it to their own ends on the TV.

And you’re right: Your vote isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference. One voice among the millions (or, these days, hundreds of thousands), all voting in a ‘first past the post’ system... each individual voice gets lost. Two points, though:

It’s unfortunately true that, if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. One of those narrow agenda parties will win because only those who have narrow agendas will vote. Then we’ll be building a fence around the UK shoreline and executing dissidents and wondering where it all went wrong.
Secondly, in order to vote knowledgably you have to know your own views. You have to know where society is at the moment, and where you want it to go. When you know those things, how you live is going to change. Not much. You might just shop in different places and buy different brands. Or start growing your own vegetables. Or realise that money isn’t as important as you think it is, quit your job and live in a tent in a field. And, the changes you make in your life will make small changes in the world around you. By interacting with the macrocosm of greater society, you change the microcosm of your personal world.

So, go out and vote on 4th June. Or whenever else you have the chance. And if there’s no one you want to vote for, do something about it. Form your own party, drop out from society, start a revolution, buy a boat and live out in international waters. Not bothering to do anything is the worst of all options, because apathy leads to consent and to ignorance.

The European Parliament is made up of so many different parties from so many different countries, they’ve organised themselves into voting blocs. The blocs work together to push through or defeat legislation. Find a bloc who’s principles you agree with, and find a party in that bloc who’s policies you agree with.

The BBC has a guide to the voting blocs;
this blog has a fantastic entry on where the UK parties fit into them;
and you can find out the results of the last European election from the BBC here.

C’mon. A couple hours of your time verses 900 years?

The Mth Dimension

2009-05-31T11:38:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was a surprisingly enjoyable day. Allegra, ngaio and myself went to Chester to a mini steam meet. A group of like minded people spending the majority of the day just ‘hanging out’. We had tea in a very hot tea room, sat on the grass by a ruined church, and then had a couple of drinks down the pub. We talked about music and clothing and other things I can’t remember directly. I can only assume that this is what ‘a life’ is. We made semi-organised plans for another meet at the end of July to which I’m looking forwards immensely. I’m sure it’s a combination of the right people and being at a point in my psychological development where I can recognise and appreciate that which made the meeting so enjoyable. I have a feeling I met some good friends yesterday.

The only trouble is the distance. The hour’s drive isn’t prohibitive, but it is a bit of a pain. It might not be a problem for much more than the next few months; work is becoming more and more unreasonable, and if things don’t improve I am seriously considering decamping to the Chester area.

There is a man, called Dylan (to pick a name at random). Dylan can do 100 units of work per normal working week. A change in working conditions means he can now only do 65 units of work per normal working week, and the other 35 need to be done outside of the normal week. Each unit takes 0.2 hours to complete, so Dylan is working 7 additional hours. Dylan’s workload is increased to 120 units, and the number of units he can do during his normal week decreases to 35 units. The extra 85 units are now being done outside the normal week, totalling an extra 17 hours of work. Dylan is then forbidden from doing work outside his normal working week.

In a special dimension where managers exist, the extra 85 units of work are done without problems. This is the Mth Dimension, where time, maths and people work to a different set of laws which are inscrutable to us, trapped in the normal four dimensions. Current theories suggest the Mth Dimension is located several miles up someone’s arsehole.

29, and Old Enough to Know Better

2009-05-29T14:20:00.002+01:00

The new companion for Doctor Who has been announced (which is probably old news by now). Ms Gillan, I’m sure, is a fine actress. She’s also 21, which bugs me. The new Doctor is 26. That bugs me, too.

It's not because they’re both younger than me. I mean, it is, but that’s selfish. What bugs me more is what this is saying to people who watch the show. Doctor Who is aspirational. We aspire to be the Doctor and we aspire to be his companion. Now, at seven o’clock on Saturday nights, we’re telling children that they should aspire to be young and attractive. We’re telling them that you can be anything you like, just so long as you’ve got fantastic social skills, a pretty face and aren't old enough to know what a mortgage is yet. If you don't have a circle of friends or you're old enough to support yourself, then stop dreaming and get back to serving the pretty people, damn you!

And this is before I start on the writing side of things. Why is it so terrifying to give the Doctor a strong, male companion? A companion who has some meat and is going to give the Doctor as good as he gets? You know, someone who’s going to do that without being ‘feisty’, or ‘rebellious’ or outright childish. Oh, and someone who doesn’t spend the entire series fawning over the Doctor would be nice.

I should know better. It’s only a kids’ show, I know. But... science fiction was supposed to be a safe place. It was a place we could all go away from the young and popular and attractive people who were made us feel fat and unattractive and unpopular. They were supposed to be going to nightclubs and meeting over the park and other things us people with stunted social skills were told made ‘a life’ (remember being told to, ‘get a life’?). Now they’re in our television shows and playing our computer games. And heavens forefend that we say something which offends them! It is the path to playing it safe, the slow trek to mediocrity.

Of course I’m going to be watching the new series. Why on Earth wouldn’t I be?

A Review I Didn't Mean to Write

2009-05-21T16:30:00.003+01:00

Time for some more spitting into the ocean...

(For full disclosure, Evis T's review provides a suitable counter-point to my little rant.)

I wasn’t going to go into details about the new Star Trek film, because there’s a lot of that sort of thing about right now. The more of it I hear, though, the more I keep on hearing the same thing:
“This film is amazing. The only reason not to like it is if you’re a ‘hard core’ trekkie. The sort of geek that normal geeks shun for being too geeky.”

The above statement is a straw man and tries to lump all those ‘against me’ into a single category, which it then denigrates. You know what? I didn’t think it was amazing.

As I said this morning, the characters were brilliant. The acting and the special effects were, almost without exception, fantastic. They threw the canon out the window, and that’s fine. No, honestly, I’m okay with that. TOS canon was always kind of crappy anyway.

So, why wasn’t it amazing?

Lazy writing. In this case, when you just can’t be bothered to come up with a proper explanation for something, and end up saying, ‘sod it, the audience will let me get away with it’. The alternate universe in the movie was created so they could throw canon out the window. The explanation we get in the film is ‘um, yeah... science done it... Look! Here’s Leonard Nimoy!’
The movie is the birth of a cash cow. It’s a precursor to a new franchise, and it doesn’t even have the decency to blush. Get into the story you want to tell with your new characters and new universe, and give us the back story in a few well-written, gutsy flashbacks.
Lazy writing. Kirk needs to be captain of the Enterprise by the end of the film. He’s just graduated from Star Fleet Academy, and should expect to wait eight years before he gets command of a ship. So... look! Almost TOS music with Leonard Nimoy doing the, ‘Space... the final frontier’ speech!
Mr. Spock Snr. Firstly: Oh no! We’ve written ourselves into a corner. What can we do now... hang on, here comes Spock! Look--it’s Leonard Nimoy everyone! (If only I could come up with a phrase for that...) Secondly: his acting isn’t that great in the film. I mean, he’s about seven-hundred-and-sixty (and still younger than Shatner), but still.
They want to milk this cow for all they can get, but they’re going to have to square it with the canon sooner or later. So, every time I sit down to watch the latest udder squirt, I’m going to be thinking, ‘are they going to square it now? Is this going to be it? Are they going to write themselves out of this hole by fixing it now?’ The new franchise should end by the new Enterprise crew having to choose to end their existence, and the existence of their entire time line, in order for the proper time line to exist. That’s the ultimate test of their character, and of course they pass. But that’s not going to happen. Kill the cow? Even when she’s old, lame, cancer-ridden and has only got one working stomach left? No! There’s milk in there yet!

So, there we are. It was a good film, but not amazing. I write sci-fi and I know my flaws. I don’t forgive them in myself, so I find it hard to forgive them in others. I’m not over-whelmed not because I’m a hard core trekkie nerd, but maybe it’s because I’m a hard core sci-fi writer nerd.

So there.

Same Planet, Different Worlds

2009-05-21T09:54:00.002+01:00

I came in to work this morning, and the day started on a bad foot: someone had parked in my space. I always park in the space to the left of the lamp post in the first part of the car park, and today I had to park directly in-front of the lamp post. Some bugger in a fancy black... thing that I’d never seen before was there, sitting in my space. It took an amazing effort to put the incident behind me.

Then, when I came in and sat at my desk, I realised that there are actually two offices instead of just the one. There’s the physical office, where people put numbers into spreadsheets, bitch about our on-line systems and indulge on gratuitous sexual harassment (but we all do it to each other, so it’s okay). Then there’s the virtual office which exists in email land. People have blazing rows, emotional heart-to-hearts, fall in love, fall out of love and get pregnant all without disturbing the physical world, save for the space of a moment or the length of a dream.

We’re not allowed to have windows which open because... the power might go to our heads? Chairs become a way for us to express our personality. Tactic wars erupt over staples and bulldog clips. Pot plants replace children.

We’re a strange lot, really.

Saw the new Star Trek film last night. Too much lazy writing for me to really enjoy it, but the characters were fantastic. Who’d of thought I’d like Kirk, even empathise with him? And it was pretty, which always helps.

Bubbles

2009-05-18T14:18:00.002+01:00

Not the monkey.

Anyone else remember the dot-com bubble? How it popped and everyone ended up with bubble juice on their faces?

Now the housing market bubble is bursting. Negative equity is being handed out like swine 'flu at Scotland Yard (...because, you know, police, pigs... see what I did there?). Then there was the South Sea Bubble.

I'm reading this article by the Really-Grand-Pointy-Hat Archdruid of the Incredibly Ancient Order of Druids in American who Really are a Real Religion Honest (founded 1980). I'm only about a third of the way through, but he's made the point that when we run out of fossil fuels we're going to have to abandon our motorways and trains. When they're gone, we're going to have to turn back to canals and other 19th century technologies.

Maybe we're in a fossil fuel bubble. Artificially inflated and due to pop soon, with all the normal wailing and gnashing of teeth and bubble juice going everywhere.

Bubbles always pop. It’s in their nature.

I don’t feel so bad about the end of the carbon-eating world now. It’s just another cycle running its course.

Tea, and cake. Twice.

2009-05-16T20:17:00.001+01:00

I’ve been trying my best to find a substitute for my beloved coffee. The decaf is okay, but...

Anyway, the World of Tea is the new hotspot. Unlike coffee, tea lets you get your fingers dirty. Buy your own lose-leaf, pick your own, mix-and-match to your heart’s content. Even just, you know, go out and pick something you like the smell of, chop it up and pour hot water over it.

I’m still in the pre-game training level, playing around with bagged stuff. Earl Grey, Lady Grey and English Breakfast all left me rather cold. I tried, but whenever I drank them I kept thinking, ‘what this really needs is some milk and sugar’. That felt kind of like saying to your new girlfriend, ‘okay, I kind of fancy you, but never let me see you without your make-up’.

I’m not fond of anything which smells like cloves. I blame that bag of clove sweets I brought last time I was in the Outer Hebrides.

There’s a vanilla chai I’m quite fond of. It’s made by the London Tea Company, and can be found in Evis’ Amazing Box of Tea. I’ve tried their green tea, as well as lose-leaf green tea. It tastes a bit like those sticks of bubblegum you used to get in packets of collectable cards and stickers.

I thought green tea might go well with mint (peppermint tea is also quite nice, if a little light for me). I brought a box of Twining’s ‘Light and Delicate’ Green Tea with Mint, mainly because Stephen Fry told me to. Light and delicate my hiney! It does the same thing to my mouth that a can of Coke does. Which is good news in my books. The mint is a bit over-powering, though, so I may have to buy some lose-leaf green and mint, and try making my own.

I tried nettle tea today. It made my tongue sting. And it tasted like nettles. Jury’s out on that one.

When it stops raining and blowing a gale, I’m going to go out to the mountains and pick some gorse flowers. They smell like coconut, and will hopefully make a nice brew. I’d also like to try rose petal tea. See, the idea is that I end up using stuff straight from the plant, and ideally plants which are growing where I live.

Also, I have a tea ball. It is awesome. It’s a little sieve-like ball that I fill with my lose-leaves, and dunk in hot water to infuse their taste. It’s on a chain. The chain is going to be enlargened so it can hang from my belt, always to hand. The tea ball is the humming, charged nucleus of Tea Land. It is the centre which holds.

Spitting into the Sea

2009-05-14T06:49:00.002+01:00

Problem/Solution marketing is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Convince people that there is a problem, and then sell them the solution. The seller then comes out as a hero, a saviour. Religions do it (sell the idea of sin, and then the idea of salvation); Hitler did it (Jews are the problem, he is the solution); Burger King do it (not being able to have a burger your way is the problem... you just, you know, eat something else...)

This MP expenses is a perfect example. Whip up a storm of anger and resentment among the general public, act shocked and repentant, reform the system*. Sell us the problem, and then come along and solve it. We’re all grateful and have a bit of confidence restored in our leaders. Hey, they’re human and, under it all, descent after all, right?

It’s a smoke-screen, a distraction, and everyone’s falling for it like trout at a fish farm. Can’t fix the economy. Won’t stop abusing human rights in the name of security. Dead soldiers still coming home from the foreign countries with no chance to claim victory--can’t or won’t change that.

Am I pissed off about tens of thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money being used to buy televisions and fund property deals? Sure. I’m more pissed off about the millions and billions being used to sustain our nuclear arsenal; I’m more upset by the millions being used to fund wars; I feel more betrayed by the unwillingness to help the oppressed in Africa and the continuing drive to shift our manufacturing base to oppressive factories in China. Global warming, ID cards, billions in national debt that we and our children are going to be paying off our whole lives, CCTV culture and RFID tags, unsustainable population growth, eduction being used to train children for the workforce...

I’m so angry. If I wasn’t so sure of my reasons for voting, I’d skip the European elections in June. And so I join the other insignificant crustaceans in shouting my futile fury in my tiny voice into the vastness of the ocean; another minnow spitting into the sea. Balls to it. Balls to it all.

I’m going down the pub.

Only I don’t drink and it’s half-six in the morning.

I’m going to have a cookie.

Mmmm... cookie.

*Having MP expenses authorised and audited by an external body sounds like a good idea, right? You know, the people who are asking for the money can’t give it out. Thing is, you move it to the private sector, we lose the right to see what’s happening under the Freedom of Information Act. Convenient, eh?

Hacker... one who hacks

2009-05-13T06:01:00.001+01:00

Back in the 1970’s, men were men, women were women, programmers were people like my dad and hackers were wily people who hacked through lines of superfluous code to create a more intelligent, streamlined program. Then the nineties came. Men were trying to be women, women were trying to be men, programmers were tossers in Mercs and Beemers and hackers were seven-year-olds who could access the top secret Pentagon files while their parents were failing to use this new-fangled email thing.

Now, men are trying to be men again, women are trying to be men too, programmers are self-proclaimed geeks and hackers are hacking.

I’ve been mooching around the steampunk thing for a while now, and my slippery paws are beginning to find some purchase.

Hacking is becoming increasingly fashionable, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that it’s a part of steampunk. A hack (if I’m understanding the term correctly, of course) is when someone takes something, and adapts it to be either more suitable for the task they have for it, more aesthetically pleasing, or both. Anything, preferably everything, should be hacked. Like their ancestors, modern hackers are cutting through the overgrowth of superfluous crap pre-manufactured products come replete with to create something more intelligent, streamlined and suited to purpose.

It got me thinking. One of my beliefs is that the same patterns are repeated throughout the universe. The pattern of helplessness, immaturity, selfishness, angst, self-realisation, repentance, identity-seeking, education, hunger and satisfaction is one most people’s lives seem to take, for example. It’s one societies seem to go through, too, as well as ideas, philosophies, movements and, really, any other complex system. Once completed, it will start again. Broadly, one can make the pattern work.

Nothing in the universe is, ‘finished’. Things are constantly changing and growing with the environment they’re part of. People, planets, music... Why should a product we buy from the shop be considered, ‘finished’? Why should things manufactured by people be exempt from the natural cycle of change, adaptation and evolution?

I shall be taking out a subscription to Make and preparing to start the cycle of education from the beginning. I’ll also be learning to sew in earnest. Clothes are a vital part of our lives and, more than anything, should be mended, modded and hacked.

Steampunk is, partly, a style of hacking. It’s a preference for styles, materials and aesthetic, and a reason for doing it.

I think.

Bob Dylan and Ghostfire

2009-05-08T07:04:00.003+01:00

Dylan has a huge back catalogue. Everyone has albums they always return to, and albums which quietly collect dust. Modern Times, Love and Theft and Time out of Mind (his last three studio albums) have all found a place in fan’s hearts, mine included. Full of twistingly poetic lyrics supported by a tight band, it’s what we expect from Bobby.

Together Through Life was a bit of a disappointment for me. There are some good tracks, like Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, My Wife’s Home Town and It’s All Good. Bobby’s band plays like guys who have been playing in the same bar with each other every night for the past forty years. Bobby sings to us like we’re sitting by the fire in that same bar and he’s a much a part of the place as the stag’s head on the wall. When it works, it’s nice and cosy. When it doesn’t, though, we’re left with bland lyrics which lack the poetry I worship Bobby for. The songs sound a bit like they were doodled on bar mats in-between conversations which were far more interesting.

Some of the songs will find their way onto a playlist, but numbers like If You Ever Go To Huston, Shake Shake Mamma and This Dream of You will find collect dust with Wriggle Wriggle and, well, pretty much anything from the 80s. But it’s okay, it’s just a blip. This album sort of budded from a song he wrote for the film Life Is Hard, and he’ll get back to writing proper lyrics soon. He’s allowed his indulgences.

And I’m allowed mine. My latest is Ghostfire, a self-styled steampunk band with an utterly horrible MySpace page (LGT to it and it’s a sod to turn the music off, so you may want to mute your speakers). The lyrics are good but not great, but that’s no sin. The rhythm section gives a constant chugging engine and the lead guitar and organ add well-played and sympathetic augmentation. It’s a sound I’m utterly in love with.

I’ve been having a discussion at the Gaslamp Bazaar about what might go into steampunk music. My contention is that it should sound hand-made and by people who understand their instruments and understand that it’s about embracing the dirty innards of the machine making it beautiful. It’s not about sequences and synthesizers and sounding like any other darkwave or electronica band while singing about airships and wearing goggles. Ghostfire sound like people who agree with me. They sound like people who want to explore their instruments and work with them, not hide behind computer-generated sounds and tie themselves to pre-record samples. Music is about performing, not reproducing.

I actually brought Ghostfire’s EP. Best three quid I’ve spent in a very long time. They're playing in Lincoln... That'll be me, front-row-centre, screaming like a twenty-nine year old who should know better but stopped caring some time last year.

Don't sell me the illusion of participation

2009-05-06T09:53:00.001+01:00

Driving into work today, I was caught up in a tailback on the A55 because they had closed a lane on either side of the duel carriageway. In the ten years I’ve lived in North Wales, I’ve never been able to drive along the length of the A55 without coming across closed lanes. They never seem to do anything, either. Most of the time, there’s not even anybody working. They just put the cones out, close the lanes off and cause major headaches for anyone trying to get from A to B.

They were cutting the grass on the hard shoulder today. I saw two guys with hand strimmers, and a road sweeper.

If you hadn’t guessed it already, this is going to be a rant. Barely logical, entirely subjective and--probably--lacking in common sense and reason.

Road works are a major pain in the arse up here. There’s always some section of the road closed and it’s always for some pointless reason. There’s a road--one single road--between my village (Bethesda) and the rest of Wales. It’s the A5. A while ago, they closed it. The whole damned road. Did it need resurfacing? No, but they did it anyway. Waste of time and my (my! I’m a taxpayer, damnit!) money. I wrote to my MP and they told me they were doing it because it needed to be done, whatever I thought about it.

ID cards are being introduced in Manchester today. Voluntary, of course, but it’s only a matter of time before you need to show your card to get cigarettes, alcohol, rent a flat, buy a mobile phone (terrorists use them, you know)... The ID card scheme is just another layer of bureaucracy which to tie us up in red tape, another attrition of our personal liberties in the name of security, another tool the government--or whoever it is that’s in charge, because the policies and tactics really don’t seem to change with the governments--to keep us scared of wil o’ the wisps.

30 years from now, after a generation of children have been brought up to believe ID cards keep us safe, they’ll be turning around to us and demanding to know what we have to hide. After all, if we had nothing to hide, we wouldn’t object to carrying a card, would we?

Be scared of terrorists. Be scared of strangers. Of hoodies. Of bird ‘flu. Swine ‘flu. Slightly bumpy roads. Long grass. But don’t worry--we’re here to protect you!

I’m not so naive to believe there’s some great conspiracy to keep us all scared and keep us all under control. Get ten people in a room together and tell them to open the door, and you’ll see why large-scale, organised conspiracies are simply outside the nature of humanity. The people in power are so busy running around after their own tails and jumping at their own shadows, they’re just trying to keep us running and jumping so we don’t notice.

Well, I don’t want to play. I want to bumble through life in my own way. I’m small and insignificant, and could be killed by terrorists or foreign superbugs or potholes at any time. I could be killed by slipping in the bath or being struck by falling tree branches. I could catch an entirely normal, bog-standard, indigenous bug and die. There’s so many things out there trying to kill me, it’s a wonder I’ve managed 29 years. It’s a wonder anyone’s managed for the past four-thousand years at all.

I can look both ways before crossing the road and I don’t eat from tins cans which have holes in them. You don’t need to protect me from ethereal threats of harm and ghosts and shadows.

The government will know everything about you

2009-05-04T12:26:00.005+01:00

Allegra (my SO) and I were driving home from a long, lovely day of Beltine celebrations yesterday, and my mind was wandering:

ME: They should make cars with plug sockets in them. I mean, on a long trip I’d have my sat. nav.--if I had one--plugged into my cigarette light, my mp3 player plugged into my cigarette lighter, my mp3 player charger plugged into my cigarette lighter... I should have little plugs on the dashboard where I can just have them all plugged in.

ALLEGRA: Yeah, but they’re not going to do that. They’d just have a particular spot to plug your iPod in.

ME: Oh, Gods, you’re right. Ford will enter into an unholy alliance with Apple. If you drive a Ford, you’ll need to own an iPod, a Mac, use iTunes... it’s terrifying because it’s true.

But it goes beyond that. When you take your Ford in to be repaired, they’ll ask for your iPod because the car downloads diagnostic info to it. Don’t have an iPod? Sorry sir, can’t service your car.

And it would make so much sense to have your iPod talk to Google Maps and Google Traffic (give it a few months). Of course, you won’t be able to turn off the traffic announcements any more than you can when they come through the damned car radio. And then, of course, your iPod will talk to Twitter. It can automatically upload your location, your speed and what song you’re listening to. You’ll be able to search Twitter for useful info: ‘between junctions 9 and 10 on the M25, the most popular song at the moment is Chris Rea’s, ‘Road to Hell’. Amazon will be listening to Twitter and looking for patterns. ‘People who like this roundabout also liked... Do you want to download these songs?’

It won’t be long before you can run some other random car your stuck behind’s number plate through your magical iPod, find out what song they’re listening to, where their going and how long they’ve been going there, and Tweet insulting messages to them.

The future: combining road rage and flame wars. Coming to a motorway near you soon!

On another note, check out DM of the Ring s. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. It’s hilarious. It's the entire trilogy as a D&D game. There's no room for fail in that equation.

Whitby--The Director's Cut

2009-04-28T21:56:00.006+01:00

Okay, I'm going to go on a little so you should grab yourself a panad and a biscuit first.

The Hostel

We stayed at the Whitby Youth Hostel, and it was amazing. Swipe cards to get in and out. Bunk beds. A ‘help yourself to any seven items’ complimentary breakfast with scrambled eggs, beans, toast, pain au chocolat among other things... En suite shower that never ran out of hot water. I’d pick it over a Travel, Premier or Holiday Inn any day. And it’s set in the grounds of an old Benedictine Abbey, the courtyard of which you have to drive through to get to the car park. Even the Guardian says it’s bloody fantastic.

Carolyn

The first social encounter was with a friend of my SO’s, Carolyn. An acquaintance of hers through Steampunk Magazine, we met up on the Friday evening and she left us on the Saturday afternoon. There were five of us and one of her. I admire her for taking us on single-handed. She was wonderfully tolerant of our inside talk and jokes, intelligent and relaxed, and a pleasure to spend the majority of the weekend with. I’m looking forwards to seeing her again in September.

The Friday Night Set

Zeitgeist Zero, Last Dance and Abney Park were playing the night set. Zeitgeist Zero were okay. I haven’t hear live music in so long that I loved just listening to them. Last Dance were a great live band who played a very short set. Jeff Diehm made a great front man and shared a touching story about Abney Park’s early days.

Who were, of course, the main draw. I’ll be honest, before going I could sort of take or leave them, really. Boy, did their show change that. I would never believe that a band which relies on sequences could put on such an engaging show. Cpt. Robert was constantly on his toes, stealing the stage back from Nathaniel and Finn. There was no producers/consumers line, we were just altogether sharing an experience. We wouldn’t let them off the stage. They got through all their regular songs, and then their new ones. Then the old ones. Then the really, really old ones. Then any bloody song they could still play. It reminds me of the stories you hear about Zeppelin’s first American tour, when the audience wouldn’t let them leave the stage and they just played old Elvis songs until they could escape.

Photography

I’ve already aired my feelings about photographs at concerts, but they extend to all walks of life. You can’t photograph the feel of the wind, the intangible atmosphere of a moment or the small slips in reality which happen when you’re not looking, and you can’t experience them if you’re sticking a camera lens in-front of your face the whole time. This girl converted me a few years ago.

The streets were filled with goths and steampunks. They were also filled with people with cameras. I was in costume and walking through town on Friday and Saturday, and I couldn’t go more than five steps without someone asking if they could take my photo. It wasn’t just me--it was all the goths and steampunks who’d made an effort. Some of the photographers were tourists and locals (one adolescent child took great pleasure in snapping me on her ‘phone.) As Ngaio said at the time, it’s kind of weird to think I’m now part of someone’s holiday experience. A lot of the photographers were professionals, though, with many thousands of pounds (£s) worth of equipment. I suppose they’ll be appearing for sale or as promotional material in an internet near you in the next few weeks.

The Steam Bus

It’s an old steam-powered flatbed wagon that some guy rescued from the knacker’s yard, and turned into a bus. It runs on coal and when you go down hill, the cab fills with flames as the driver lets off the heat. Vernon Smith, the owner and builder, has been working with steam engines since he was eight-years-old and pretty much has steam instead of blood. Yes, it’s as cool as it sounds. If you go anywhere near Whitby and don’t take a ride on it, that’s a certifiable medical condition.

The Steam Meet

This is the part which really fried my brain.

When I was eighteen months old, I had an accident on a train and didn’t speak again I was sent to a speech therapist at the age of four. I’ve always had trouble with my words; when I speak, all the sounds fall out of my mouth in some sort of confused jumble and my tongue feels huge. It makes me hard to understand, and that makes people want to not talk to me. The fine art of conversation is never something I was introduced to, and even the crass art of conversation passed me by. Groups of people I’m expected to interact with lead to panic, withdrawal and wallflower manifestations.

The stream meet was in a cafe. It was full of strangers who were all part of a scene that I’m not part of (I’m never part of a scene, no matter what it may look like). I was there to engage them in conversation, and hand out business cards for Steampunk Magazine.

I finished my cappuccino and someone came over to talk to us...

When we left, I wanted more. I wanted more people, more socialising, more interacting. I wasn’t good at it I’m sure, but I enjoyed it.

It’s left me looking forwards to the first UK steam meet in September. I feel a bit like I’ve been dumped out a plane, at night, and landed in a foreign country where even the laws of gravity are different.

I should be talking about the wonderful and interesting people I met, I know, but this is a tectonic-plate sized shift in my head. Almost two years of CBT has done amazing things.

Saturday Night

A good proportion of the night was spent wading through quantum fish and chip shops trying to find somewhere to eat. We finally found a crepe place, and had crepes. They were nice, but I wouldn’t call them a meal.

We were all knackered by this point, having been on our feet pretty much constantly since Friday afternoon and only catching a few hours' sleep. The rest of the party had crashed during the day, but were still suffering. The music was okay but not worth enduring the pain for, so we got an early night.

Fountains Abbey

It was only an hour or so away and my SO has wanted to see it for over five years, so we took the time to do a grand tour. The abbey itself is absolutely amazing and the gardens spectacular. Well worth going to see, if you’re ever in the area. All the walking was hard work on my tired legs, though.

And back home again

We got pizza from a Hutt on the way home, and the best bit was seeing the cats alive and well and happy to see us when we got in. The second best bit was being back in my own bed. But bloody hell the pizza was good. Cheese, extra cheese, goat’s cheese, mushrooms and onions. Goat’s cheese is amazing on pizza.

…

So, those are my memories of Whitby Goth Weekend. I hope you enjoyed your panad.

Now I just need to finish--by which I mean start--my costume for The Asylum...

Jaunty Jackalope and Bob Dylan

2009-04-28T09:05:00.001+01:00

The installation of Jaunty went off, pretty much, without a hitch. Install a whole new operating system without problems? That’s Ubuntu. The fonts and icons are a bit crisper, the boot time a bit quicker, the menus less cluttered, the installation of new programmes and packages from the repositories quicker, whatever problem with the default movie player which meant it couldn’t play movies is fixed and the default desktop background different, but other than that it’s the same old warhorse.

I’ll use it for a while and if I have anything else to say about it then, I’ll say it. I’m a user and not a programmer, so I just look at the pretty colours. If you’re looking to switch from Windows, there’s never been a better time. Jaunty is the most user-friendly release yet and only takes half-an-hour to install, tops.

In other, more important news, Dylan’s new album Together Through Life drops today. I’m taking a half-day from work, buying an actual physical copy from an actual physical shop, burning it to mp3 so I can X-Fi it through my expensive headphones, lay in bed and experience it. Then I’ll come back here and rant about how great it is.

Concept Sci-fi Issue #5

2009-04-27T13:24:00.001+01:00

...is now out!

(LGT magazine's home page, where you can download the 'zine for free!)

From their newsletter:
In this issue, you can find short fiction from Lawrence Buentello, Dylan Fox and Jonathan Lowe, plus an interview with Lou Anders from Pyr SF, Andrew Males' /88 Miles Per Hour/ Column and the next article in [editor Gary Reynold's] "Beginning Writing" series which this time focuses on controlling the pace and flow of your fiction.

One of those names looks familiar...

It's amazing to see Mind Games along side all those other pieces, treated like it's an actual piece of fiction and not something that I made up on my computer. I hope I never lose this painful embarrassment-cum-joy I get when I see one of my pieces in print. The six-year-old me who wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world is so proud right now.

Whtiby Goth Weekend--Abridged

2009-04-27T11:05:00.001+01:00

I’ll find the time to write a longer post about Whitby at some point in the near future. (Maybe tonight... maybe tomorrow. I’m going to be installing Jaunty Jackalope tonight, so it all kind of depends on how that goes.)

In the meantime, here’s a few quick lessons I learned over my three days:

Although the sight of streets awash with goths is scary, few sights warm the cockles of my heart as so many of them walking down the streets, enjoying 99 Flakes with strawberry sauce;
Cameras should be banned from concerts. What the hell is the matter with you people? The band is right there. Why do you need all your experiences sanitised by a screen?
I need to learn how to sew so I can make myself a new costume. It’s going to be the best costume ever;
Socialising is fun! You would not believe how much that one screws with my head. It’s like being kicked out an air lock and discovering you can breathe in a vacuum. I’m a bit terrified and wondering where the real me has gone;
Whitby has more fish and chip shops then there is actual retail space. I swear, the sheer density of fish and chip shops in the town has created sympathetic shifts in the wave function of the town’s quanta to produce quantum fish and chip shops which shift in and out of existence, merge and split apart on a microscopic level;
Abney Park are an amazing live band. Especially for all their reliance on sequences and effects, I’ve not seen such a good show since Colour of Fire;
Steampunk should be fun!

Anyway, hopefully more later...

I’m a Thought-Train Hobo

2009-04-23T14:23:00.001+01:00

No matter where I am or what I’m doing, when a train of thought rumbles through my mind I pick up my bottle and jump into the box car. I ride the train until it stops somewhere, I hop off and I look around.

It’s a compulsion. I don’t realise what I’m doing until miles of landscape have rushed past and I’m making myself comfortable among the crates. And hell, when I’m on the train already I might as well see where it’s going.

I’m a transient by nature. Without a home, but at home anywhere the train pulls up. Just like a swallow migrates and salmon swim against the river to breed, I ride the thought-trains.

It’s why I have such trouble being in the moment. I’m always on a train, always moving somewhere. It’s the only life I’ve ever known.

Like any Romantic lifestyle, though, it takes its toll. When you never settle anywhere, you become isolated from everywhere. And you become isolated from everyone because, at the end of the day, it’s only ever going to you in the box car.

Eunuchs drink decaff

2009-04-22T10:50:00.001+01:00

Let’s be honest: decaff coffee is emasculating. It’s drunk by thin, weedy people with nasal voices who drive G-Wiz’s and insist on speaking about a girl’s right to have pierced nipples for her twelfth birthday at the local P.T.A. meeting (it’s empowering). They’re not new-age crystal waving hippies, though: They work in offices, have granite work surfaces and still drink coffee, dammit! They just think caffeine interferes with their chi... and their heart. I may be a vegetarian, a card-carrying member of the CND and increasingly convinced that the Lib Dems are too right-wing, but there’s a line. I spend my life terrified of crossing it.

Yes, I have gender roll issues. I grew up in the eighties and nineties, which meant that when I was forming my (very important) ideas about gender identity, mainstream media was constantly telling me that every natural instinct I have is Bad and Wrong and solely responsible for every Evil of the World. It’s lead to a man approaching thirty who feels the primal need to go out and kill wolverines with his bear hands, and then come home and cry his guilt into a cup of peppermint tea. But I digress.

I like the taste of coffee and that’s why I drink it. That’s why I have it so strong. Does decaff taste the same? Well, over the next few days my SO will be making my coffee for me. She’ll be making cups of decaff, normal cups and cups which mix both. She’s not going to tell me which cup is which. With a little luck, it will eliminate the bias I have against decaff and allow me to judge empirically.

Meanwhile, Evis has been generous enough to bring his Amazing Tea Stash in for shares. I had a cup of Earl Grey just now. It was quite nice. Tasted a bit like tea (normal tea), with a slight aftertaste of pizza. Tea is a whole world to itself, isn’t it? I never realised. Dare I venture into this brave new world?

From My Cold, Dead, Shaking Hand

2009-04-21T12:59:00.001+01:00

I like to imagine my physical self as a sort of see-saw. One side is labelled ‘health’, and the other ‘unhealth’. On the health side, we have exercise, nutrition... all that boring stuff. On the unhealth side, we have my vices.

Each of the things on the see-saw has a weight, and that combined with its distance from the fulcrum determines its affect on my physical self.

I used to have a lot of vices that sat a long way from the fulcrum. These vices weren’t indulgences, but things which were a part of my lifestyle. Whenever I sat down to write, I’d light a cigarette. It got to the point when I was smoking in my breaks at work, when I was taking shopping in from the car, when I was laid up in bed and the room was spinning. So, I quit.

When I was a student, I drank to excess. After I graduated, I drank to be social. For the last two years--apart of a very small sip when someone orders something interesting and some liquors around Christmas--I haven’t had any alcohol for almost two years.

And meat! I don’t eat meat and haven’t for a year-and-a-half. It’s harder than it sounds, because I can’t eat Wine Gums or Liquorice Allsorts or Pick-and-Mix any more. I can’t have bacon sarnies or black pudding.

Those are three pretty big vices, and they sit a way from the fulcrum. Now, I have a pretty sedentary lifestyle and exercise upsets me, but taking those three off the unhealth side surely more than balanced things out. It left me with two vices (just two): food; and coffee.

Food loves me. Food is always there for me, and never judges me. Food makes me happy.

I take my coffee black. I take it strong enough to stand a spoon up in. Where as most people have their instant coffee ‘strong’ and ask for a full teaspoon, I’ll have two-and-a-half. On an average day, I’ll have six of seven of these cups. Whenever I write, I have a hot steaming cup of Jackson by my hand (as in Samuel L. Jackson: Black; bitter; and quad-hard).

My heart’s been doing funny things, recently. Walking across the room makes it beat so hard it feels like it’s about to burst out my chest. Stairs are a problem. Lying in bed sometimes feels like it’s going to be fatal... Apparently, my heart can’t stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space any more.

I was hoping I had angina. Or a valve was faulty. Or that maybe I needed a whole new heart altogether. The doctor did some tests, took my blood pressure, booked me some blood tests and an ECG.

But you can see where this is going. After all the medical niceties were out the way, ‘Cut down on the coffee’, she says.

Haven’t I done enough?!

Surely, surely the booze, the fags and the flesh balances things out. Surely coffee is a light weight, close to the fulcrum. A vice, sure, but a small and almost harmless one. Right near the centre, keeping the pizza and cookies company (we know how easily they get lonely).

~sigh~

Yes, it’s a chance to embrace change and discover Brave New Worlds.

I don’t like change or Brave New Worlds. I like routine and places I know.

Somewhat prophetically, the last time I saw her my mother said that she’d learned the dangers of drinking strong, black coffee, ‘too late’. She has a liturgy of health problems and I was scared to ask which one the coffee was responsible for.

But yes, I’ll do the right thing. I’ll embrace this growth experience and discard yet another vice. I’ll give up the coffee.

Right after this cup.

The Sordid Topic of Time

2009-04-20T20:00:00.003+01:00

Well, one of the terrible things with life is that when you have something to talk about, you have little time to talk about it in.

Since pay day (believe me, I haven't been so relieved since I was getting paid weekly at KFC, and smoking 20 a day), I've been doing many mundane things.

Most of my online time has been spent looking at the Espresso Book Machine. The essence of it is that you can order a book, wait ten minutes and then walk out the shop with your freshly printed volume. I'm very excited by the idea; when I have the time, I'm going to talk about it in depth. My nature of living somewhere other than the here and now gives me occasional glimpses of the future. I suppose that's why I write sci-fi instead of fantasy. The EBM gave me a (naïve and misty-eyed) glimpse of a soon-to-come time. Believe me, it is a beautiful place.

Most of my writing time was going into Bambi's second story, Space to Breathe. I've been feeling it's something of a weak link, and I put the third draft to bed with a little flutter of excitement: It has some teeth. Now, with the deadline approaching, I'm now turning my focus to Of Mice and Journeymen, my magpie attempt at pre-industrial steampunk. A story I left with bad feelings on the second draft, and came back to a different story to the one I remembered. It had some teeth, some dirt and some grit.

And my remaining time has been spent on Whitby. I've been sewing myself a sash to go with my magpie uniform. I'm very bad at sewing and haven't done any since I entered double figures. Still, it only has to last three days. I have an advantage through my persona: Mister Elijah Quinn. He's a cavalier, a rogue, a Victorian Gentleman Explorer through time and space. No matter what the truth, he'll have a truly fantastic tale to tell about any subject. That includes bad sewing.

After the weekend, maybe he'll have a story or two to tell about his adventures among the 'Goths' of the early twenty-first century (“far more make-up than my last encounter, far less beer and less sacking of Rome... but at least you could dance to the music this time”).

From the Department of the Obvious

2009-04-14T19:10:00.001+01:00

I've been doing my best to practice with my drum. I am the rhythmic equivalent of the number zero (thank you Mr Pratchett), and so I've been sitting with my metronome and playing at 80 bpm for five minutes a day. Well, for five minutes some days. Regular practice, I think, eloped with my sense of rhythm. But I figure little and often is better than trying to do it all in one go. If I can beat a steady rhythm, then I can concentrate on the journey and not have to worry about anything else. I can only do that when the beat becomes instinctive.

I have found the practice to be somewhat soothing and hypnotic. Who'd have thought that, hey?

The other thing I've noticed is that I have real trouble, 'being here now'. My mind is always somewhere in the future or the past, and is terrified of the prospect of the present. I'm thinking about what's going to happen when I meet X or go to Y, and I find I'm wound up about it. And when I get to X and Y, I'm upset when things don't go as planned. I ignore anything which I don't want there. Why is it so terrifying to just let whatever will be, be?

Easter weekend was nice, although very, very poor. There's something deeply wrong about an Easter with no Easter Eggs. Or hot-cross buns. The weather was lovely, though, and we took a walk up the mountain outside our house. We passed a farm with some free-range laying hens, and I indulged my fantasy of roast chicken. They looked like the sort of hens they put on the front of egg boxes. Then we came home to minced Quorn pie and mash. Nice but... roast chicken?

Still, pay day tomorrow and cheques cleared today. That means I have pizza for tea. I've also brought myself a gadget which will plug into my mp3 player and play it through my car stereo. Saves on CD's and on long car journeys, I can just put the player onto Play All, and not have to worry about changing CD's when I should be changing lanes. Of course, it's just going to transfer the argument from, 'who's CD do we play next', to 'who's mp3 player do we plug in'. Maybe I'm old, but that's what real progress looks like.

Castlevania: Opus of Awesome

2009-04-10T10:54:00.001+01:00

Konami are releasing a new Castlevania game for the Xbox 360 and PS3. SO is a huge Symphony of the Night fan. I mean, really huge. She has a beautiful piece of Ayami Kojima Alucard flash art tattooed on her thigh. Okay, she doesn't, but it's the sort of thing she might do.

Having looked into the 360 and PS3, we've decided to invest in a 360. The PS3, frankly, is still over-priced and sucky. It's badly supported and the announcement of text chat kind of put the nail in its coffin for me. We're going to have to have an extension built for the 360, of course, due to its vast size and set up an alter with dribly candles to ward off the red ring of death. We're also going to have to start rescuing kittens and helping small orphans with huge, innocent eyes to off-set the evil we'll be accruing by owning it, but I'm assured that this is all worth it.

The Castlevania franchise is the sort of thing I grew up with. Platforms, bad guys, power-ups, bosses. I completed Curse of Darkness a while ago, and I'm pleased they've kept true to the original intent. Games that require a significant portion of your life are fine, but not for me. I found a Chuckie Egg game yesterday, and it's the best game I've played in years. Sure, nostalgia all you like but it's just me, the eggs and the birds. None of this fancy graphics or silly plot lines or anything like that to get in the way. Just pure gaming experience. Castlevania's like that, for me, but with better graphics. It's a game, not a life-style choice. It's good to know that someone still remembers us.

It does make you wonder a bit, though...

DRACULA: Prepare the Castle! Summon the evil minions!

EVIL PRIEST: Erm, my lord, the other evil priests and I... we've been thinking...

DRACULA: Thinking?

EVIL PRIEST: Yeah... I mean, we went through a lot of trouble to summon you. Finding a comely seventeen-year-old virgin to sacrifice isn't easy these days. John--that's John, there--he had to get married, have a child, and keep her locked in a cellar so we'd have a virgin to sacrifice--

DRACULA: And I appreciate your efforts. Really, I do. It's good to be back.

EVIL PRIEST: It's good to have you back. And that's just it--every time we summon you, we do the whole evil castle thing, and then a Belmont comes along and kills you.

DRACULA: It will be different this time.

EVIL PRIEST: We want it to be different, too. So... that's what me and the other priests were talking about. I mean, the whole 'evil castle' thing... we were thinking we might skip that.

DRACULA: Skip the evil castle?!

EVIL PRIEST: Yeah, it's just it... I mean, you know. We've done it, what? Thirteen times? Fourteen? It's never worked. So, we were thinking--

DRACULA: Prepare the castle! Summon the skeletons!

EVIL PRIEST: My lord---

DRACULA: Destabilise the ledges! Take these bags of money and hide them in the light fixtures!

EVIL PRIEST: (sigh) Yes, my lord.

DRACULA: Take this one item which can defeat me and hide it behind a cracked wall! Summon the succubus!

EVIL PRIEST: The succubus is busy, my lord. She has her own YouTube channel on growing and making her own natural remedies.

DRACULA: Summon her I say! We don't pay her a retainer for nothing!

Meanwhile, in a faux-medieval village somewhere...

COMELY MAIDEN #4: My love! Strange portents are abound!

BELMONT: Hush wife! I'm working on my speech for when I fight Dracula, just like my father and his father before him.

COMELY MAIDEN #4: I feel an abhorrence in the generic mystical forces...

BELMONT: You think I can quote Shelley? Or is that too much? I just want to get across this feeling of the grand cycle of the years, how everything turns to dust, even unimaginable evil.

COMELY MAIDEN #4: My dreams tell of dark forces moving against us, my love.

BELMONT: Day follows night... I am the sun, and you are the moon. The moon only reflects the light of the sun... hm, that's good. I think I'll use that...

COMELY MAIDEN #4: I'm going out into our garden to pick flowers, or sit on our garden swing, or something equally twee.

BELMONT: Mmm.

After a few moments, there's a scream from the garden.

EVIL PRIEST: Belmont! We have captured your wife!

BELMONT: What?!

EVIL PRIEST: We've taken your wife captive. She's in the evil castle.

BELMONT: How can this be?!

EVIL PRIEST: (sigh) Just... come and try to rescue her.

BELMONT: This can only be Dracula's doing! Wait, my speech! Dammit, I'll just have to ad-lib something...

Interzone 221's fiction reviewed

2009-04-09T20:03:00.001+01:00

About 20 minutes' walk away from where I grew up, there was Pineridge Driving Range and Bowling Alley. When my uncle came down to visit, he'd sometimes take us down there to whack a few buckets of balls, and bowl a couple of games. One time when we were down there, a few allies down, there was a guy there with his kid. The kid couldn't have been more than eight. They were both kitted up to the nines: shirts; their own shoes; silly bowling gloves. The kid was throwing gutter balls almost every time. He had this really weird way of throwing the ball, sort of twisting his hand and only taking a step before releasing. If he bowled like a normal person, he could be getting strikes and spares. But he was doing this weird twisting hand thing. Every once in a while, though, he'd throw a perfect ball. Straight down, pins to the wind with more accuracy and strength than an eight-year-old should have.

I think about that kid quite a lot.

Interzone 221 didn't have much for me. The cover was absolutely beautiful but the fiction left me luke-warm at best.

A Clown Escapes from Circus Town, by Will McIntosh, followed Beaners the clown as he escapes his own circus hell and wanders through various themed villages, looking for a Truth. The world seemed a bit like Westworld drawn in crayons, so maybe more like Red Dwarf's Waxworld. The characters, prose and plot all seemed to be going through the motions, which is a shame because the Truth Beaners finds is an interesting idea. It just gets a bit mangled by the story.

Al Robertson's Fishermen is an evocative story which reads like poetry. In a renaissance-era world, an artist gets captured by savage pirates and forced to painting their church. The artist discovers that the pirates aren't savage and, through living with them, discovers the true face of his faith. It's just as long as it needs to be and makes a worth-while read, but I'm still trying to work out why it was in Interzone--there's hints of something extra-ordinary at the end, but other than that it seems pretty straight-forward and mundane.

An ex-junkie drops his dead-end job and travels across the universe to help a friend from his high-days get clean in Matthew Kressel's Saving Diego. Set on a world that boarders on a stereotypical Mystical Middle-East (kind of like Tatoonie with daily prayers, bazaars, socially isolated locals and mystical herbs), the titular Diego has become addicted to the mind-enhancing substance the locals use as part of their religion. His friend, Mikal, slowly weans him off while getting addicted himself. If we assume the visions the herb induces are real, and not just hallucinations (which is what we're told is happening), then this story of co-dependants becomes a bit more interesting, but not much. There's no big ideas and no empathy with the rise from and fall into addiction. (Maybe that's because I'm holding it up Aerosmith's Walk This Way autobiography, which hits me like a cannon ball in the gut every time.)

I was worried that Alaya Dawn Johnson's Far and Deep was falling into the same cultural stereotype habit as Diego for a while. Island culture, diving for precious gems, all a bit Philippines without the grinding poverty and human rights abuses. A rebellious elder is murdered, and her daughter sets out to find the killer. No, she's no Philip Marlow. Johnson spends her time showing us the island and it's relatively complicated culture, it's social divisions, expectations and rituals, and I came away glad I'd read it. It was sort of like eating a Bounty bar: Sweet and tropical; and wickedly indulgent.

Paul M. Berger's Home Again sees a traveller return to his family after a long space trip. The hook is the ships travel the interstellar distances by altering reality somehow, allowing the pilot to just think about being somewhere, and then the ship is there. It's an interesting idea, but the story felt like it was missing a couple of hundred words somewhere. The idea, the family, or the world isn't given enough space to breath and I'm not sure which of those the story was about.

The headline piece for the issue was Bruce Stirling's Black Swan. Yes, BRUCE STIRLING. I'll confess my sins and admit that it was the first piece of his I've read. I have the Difference Engine in the bathroom, waiting to be read... The prose in Black Swan was a pleasure and the plot took the reality hopping computer geek trope for a spin. It was all going great until the end. Then it all went a bit wtf. Massimo, the geek with the magic laptop, takes our narrator through the looking glass, explains the differences between the parallel worlds and then gets killed so he can pass the baton on. The story didn't prepare me for an ending I'd have to re-read. It's probably just me being stupid, but it's my blog, damnit. With a different ending, this story could have been great. As it is, it feels like a vehicle for a great idea which is dumped by the roadside when it's served its purpose.

I don't know where the kid from the bowling alley is right now. I don't know if he's even still bowling. I just remember him doing his weird twisty-hand thing and throwing gutter ball after gutter ball, maybe hitting the odd pin. When he scored a strike, though, it was a blinder. Interzone could consistently print good fiction that gets warm reviews every time. But they have their own style, their own twisty-hand thing. When they hit a strike, it's amazing. All the gutter balls are forgotten. What's the point in being good, if you can shoot for brilliant?

The Last Thoughts of Ben Kenobi

2009-04-08T13:40:00.001+01:00

OBI-WAN: Only a master of evil, Darth.

See, until the prequels I always assumed that Obi-Wan used ‘Darth’ as a name, not a title. That’s the way the line is delivered. In Obi-Wan’s mind, Anakin is dead and there is only Vader. What made him utterly give up hope on his pupil and friend? He left Anakin on Mustafa because he couldn’t bring himself to finish the job. He couldn’t be the one to kill him, because he cared so much for Anakin. What changed in his vigil on Tatooine?

Or is Obi-Wan just being a dick? It seems to be something Jedi do when they get older. I mean, witness Qui-Gon’s ‘I’ll take Anakin as my apprentice’ when Obi-Wan is standing right there. Or Yoda’s, ‘I got my arse kicked so I’m going to a swamp to sulk for the next sixteen years... No, no, I’m not going to help the rebellion, or try and protect the remaining Jedi. I’m not even going to take anything from the Jedi temple with me--too many bad memories. I’m going to a swamp to think about what a failure I am. I’m going to paint my hut black and listen to Morrissey.’

So Obi-Wan comes face-to-face with his failure and acts like a twelve-year-old. ‘Only a master of evil, Darth’. ‘You’re just a Darth. I’m a Jedi Master. Ner-ner-ne-ner-ner.’

OBI-WAN: Strike me down now, and I’ll become more powerful then you can possibly imagine.

VADER: More powerful then I can possibly imagine?

OBI-WAN: Yes, far more powerful.

VADER: I can imagine quite a lot of power.

OBI-WAN: I’ll be more powerful than that.

VADER: Will you be able to blow up planets? This battle station can, so I don’t even have to imagine that.

OBI-WAN: I don’t mean--

VADER: Or how about that time I landed that Star Destroyer on Coruscant. That was pretty pimp. If I kill you, will you be able to do that?

OBI-WAN: It’s not like--

VADER: Are you going to be able to bring Padme back? Palpatine said he could, but every time I ask him about it, he’s all like, ‘tomorrow, Lord Vader’, ‘we just need to destroy this planet, Lord Vader’. To be honest, I’m beginning to wonder...

OBI-WAN: Padme’s dead, Darth. I was there when it happened.

VADER: Nuh-Uhhh. She’s being kept alive on Coruscant. With, like, tubes and robotics and shit. Palpatine told me. Only I can’t see her, because my suit has germs on it. But he’s working on a decontamination thing for me. He told me.

LUKE: Ben!

VADER: Huh? Who’s that?

OBI-WAN: No one! He’s no one! Pay no attention to the boy behind the blast shield!

VADER: He feels familiar...

OBI-WAN: Um, yeah, well, that’s because... you see... you know that guy? We met in that bar that one time? Yeah, well, that’s his son. Luke Sky... Wanderer. Luke Skywanderer.

I dunno. Maybe they’re both as bad as each other.

On My Lunch, I Lay By the Lake and Listened to the Birds

2009-04-07T13:57:00.001+01:00

Permanence is the problem.

We want things to last. When we have a good day, we want it to last forever. We want the good things in our life to always be there. That leads us to wanting to expel the bad things. And that leads us to want to control, and believing we can control.

We want the friend we make today to be a friend tomorrow. We want the lover we take today to love us tomorrow.

I had a moment, about three minutes’ worth, when I thought about a world where we didn’t crave permanence. Where we just took what life was offering us right here, right now, and made the most of it.

The lover we take today may be indifferent to us tomorrow. They may be someone else’s lover, and why would we worry about that? I was walking down the road, kicking a pine cone. There were birds singing, and cars passing a street away. The sun was shining, but the wind had a chill. A few spots of rain had fallen on me.

The lover we take today may wake up with us tomorrow, and we can fall in love all over again. The enemy we made yesterday can be the shoulder we cry on today.

And everyone’s okay with this, everyone expects this and everyone understands this, so why should there be any problems?

Then I got back into work, and sat down at my desk. Some days I love work, and some days I hate it. I just put on my work persona and it doesn’t matter.

But maybe, the secret me can discover coffee for the first time. Maybe he can appreciate the kindness of a co-worker without qualms, without history and without suspicion. It’s a big ask, but when I was kicking my pine cone I was quite content. There was me, the cone, the sounds and the sun, we all had our place and it was all good. ‘Content’ is a way station I would very much like to reach.

Sunday Evening and a Fire

2009-04-05T20:03:00.001+01:00

My t-shirt arrived on Thursday. As a denizen of Netland, I'm sure you appreciate how import a t-shirt is. It's like a tattoo you can change every day. It's the billboard you use to advertise yourself to the world. You love a band? You know php and think it makes you better than everyone else? You an anarchist? There's a t-shirt out there with your brand on it, and it's imcumbant on you to wear it with pride. How else are we going to know who you are today?

I have one t-shirt from Theardless (community orientated, intelligent and silly, net-based), one Ngaio brought me from London (it has a fox on it), two plain ones (hey, there's days when I want to keep myself to myself), and now this one:

The house is made up of words from stories I've written. Specifically, from Mind Games, Regeneration, and other Myths, Rose Among the Thorns, and One More for the Road (which the last story in Bambi's arc, and is going to need a title change). The t-shirt is light grey.

In other news, we realised on Friday that we hadn't paid this month's rent yet and so are now very poor. Excersions to Tesco when we don't fancy what's in the cupboard are well off the menu. In its place, over-time. Lots and lots of over-time. Whitby (which we're attending in Steampunk finery) is coming out of April's paycheck, so that's done and dusted. May's payslip needs to cover a trip to London--to see the ballet and the sights--and a trip to my brother's engagement party. And June's needs to fund a holiday to the Scottish neverlands. If money is the root of all evil, the next few months are going to mining Satan's arsehole. Still, the pay off is going to be worth it. More than worth it.

And, with my new watch, I can know exactly how many hours of over-time I've done. It's an analogue skeleton watch with gold casing. It's beautiful. I brought a similiar one a few months ago and tortured the department with it. After two days, it taught me that a watch which cost three quid from Hong-Kong probably isn't a good investment. Lesson learned. For now.

So, a lean couple of weeks coming up but plenty to get me throught it. Next week is going to be spent thinking about editing Bambi's stories over the weekend. If I didn't love doing the editing, I'd find a vanity site to publish on. Editing is the difference between a lump of clay and something beautiful.

I'm going to try and remember that. When I can't drink any more coffee because my fingers are already twitching and I've been staring at an unaltered page for two hours, it'll keep me going. Or porn. Porn is good.

The Second Part

2009-04-02T21:21:00.000+01:00

Well, this is my attempt at using ScribeFire at home. A few noteworthy things happened today, actually: my colleagues gave me a beautiful watch as a belated birthday present (if you're having sex--you know, proper full-on naked sex--are you supposed to take your watch off?);I spent this evening working in the garden; and I typed the <end> tag on the last story in Bambi's arc. Thinking back over it, it seems really rather messy and is probably going to need some serious work. I'll do that over Easter weekend, though: That's 'Bambi Editing Weekend'. More on that later, though. I'm just posting while dinner is cooking.

I'm really hoping this works.

~crosses fingers~

(I must remember to change the font from the default to Arial when posting. With luck, writing it here will remind me.)

EDIT: success of a kind, I think. The fonts are going to need some tweaking, but okay for today.

Success?

2009-04-02T09:50:00.001+01:00

Wonderful! Let us judge this a tentative success until I can get home and see how things post from Ubuntu.

Hidden Crap

2009-04-02T09:45:00.001+01:00

It's amazing the amount of crap Word puts in documents. All that hidden code. It copy pasta'ed into my ScribeFire, which then refused to publish it. Understandable, really. I don't really want it there, either. I pasted it into Notepad, and then into ScribeFire. That solved that problem.

Now, let us see how this comes out when I push, 'Publish'...

A Matter of Consistency

2009-04-02T09:43:00.001+01:00

Those of you who know me probably know how nuts I’ve been driving myself over the last two posts. The spacing between the lines is different. The spacing between the paragraphs is different. The more I look at them, the more I’m convinced that the spacing between the letters is different.

I’m looking for a way to make consistent posts both from work, and from home. Normally using the same program would be a problem, as I use Ubuntu at home and Windows at work. I’m trying out ScribeFire. It’s an add-on for Firefox, a browser I use on both platforms, so I may have a solution.

The only trouble is that it doesn’t come with a spell checker. I need a spell checker--I’m a writer with an English degree. I need it like Steven Hawkins needs a calculator.

Scribefire is supposed to use the spell checker in Firefox, and it works fine at home. Not at work, though. So, I’m at work and typing this post in Word. I’m going to copy pasta it into Scribefire, and post it. I’m then going to type a post straight into Scribefire, and see how that turns out.

The reason for the difference in formatting between the first two entries is that the first one was typed in word, and pasted into Blogger’s editor. The second was typed straight into the editor.

Let us see...

The Cold Hand of Evolution

2009-03-31T10:18:00.000+01:00

Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy... It's a genetic condition which gives sufferers 40% more muscle mass, with no negative side effects.

I sometimes worry that human kind is stagnating itself, declaring anything outside accepted norms a 'deformity' and treating it into extinction. With seven billion people in the world, one-in-a-billion chances happen occasionally. Eugenics is probably a step too far, but we should be seizing these opportunities.

Of course, the masses rule and turkeys wouldn't vote for Christmas. I just thought it was interesting and worth remembering. There's a thought experiment which might lead to a story in there somewhere...

Weather it Matters

2009-03-29T20:41:00.000+01:00

The weather has been beautiful today. I wilt like a lettuce leaf on a hot grill in the heat and the cold makes me crave creature comforts I don't have. Today, the sky was crayon-blue, there was an occasional cloud and the sun was getting in some early practice for August. The wind was cold, but very light. It was the sort of day where I could wear jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper, and tie the jumper around my waist if I got too hot. It was my sort of day. It's just a complicated series of events coming together in a particular way, and it they just happened to come together on my birthday. There's no real reason for it.

I realised that at some point. It's a special day because the weather is lovely and my friends and I are working in our garden. The next time the weather is beautiful and I'm happy to be where I am, I can have that same warm sunburst of realisation: There's no reason for it, it's just happened. The universe hands us moments without telling us sometimes, and if you're too busy looking for them you'll miss them. As the hippies used to say, 'be here now'. I think that's the lesson for my twenty-ninth year.

My SO brought me a shamanic drum. She played it for me so I could meet the drum's spirit. I'll admit I felt horrifically self-conscious, even though there was just her and me. I mean, a drum's spirit? It's all a bit, you know... BBC 2. The spirit I met was a blackbird. According to some reading I've done, the blackbird leads us through change and helps us realise a creative and spiritual awakening. It's also a very shy spirit who feels self-conscious in groups. If we have patience with each other, I think we're going to get on well.

Ngaio brought me a stack of books and I have a cheque from an aunt who thought I was a year older. The cheque is going to be spending money for the next few months, and the books are going to be some new herbs for the casserole of my mind. The best thing about other people buying you books is that you'd probably never read them otherwise. It's like finding a new coloured pencil in a set you've been using for years.

I've also written a short bio for Concept Sci-Fi. For the record, I hate writing bios and I don't photograph well. Accepting these things and saying, 'oh, sod it then' can be liberating at times.