This is embarrassing…

So I insisted you’d be getting new stuff and you haven’t. Life has its ways of getting in the way. Hopefully something new soon. I’m doing some thinking.

All Children are still Martians

How I manage the comments here is to have to actually manually permit them. It was a conscious decision so that the site wasn’t flooded with nonsense about enhancing this and webcam that. It can be quite time-consuming if I don’t keep on top of it, but I feel it’s worthwhile. About 100% of comments are spam. It’s intriguing what gets hit. All Children Are Martians is the current favourite. And it is a nice little story with a downbeat ending, so if spambots like that, who am I to argue.

They also like Stories, which is good, I like Stories too.

They never hit Technofetish, which would seem an obvious one to me.

In an attempt to get things going, I’m offering you, yes you Madam or Sir, to offer some suggestions for a story to appear on the site. Random elements like character names, timeframes, backdrops. Just one of these elements. Let me know what you want and I’ll try to craft a story round it.

Art using manga studio

That's what I'm talking about

Writing again

I sincerely believe in the power of catharsis. Holding things inside doesn’t seem to work for me, have to let it all out and announce it in order to be rid of it. Sometimes that was fictionalising it. A lot of my early fiction, while a clear rip-off of the Harry Harrison/Terry Pratchett/Tom Holt/Douglas Adams stuff I enjoyed as a teenager (although no not a rip-off, because it never borrowed from them…), often also had folded into it my own neuroses and issues and saw me try to write a way out of them. It was rare that the characters embodying these neuroses got a happy ending but it was kind of a way to consign them to somewhere I owned.

There did come a point in the last couple of years where that approach no longer worked, mostly because the issues I thought I’d defeated returned, but also because I began to realise how little control I ultimately have over what happens. What happens, as a famous man once said, happens and you can do what you can but sometimes you just ride it out and behave the way you think is best.

My post of a couple of days ago… well. I’m not sure that I feel that I was completely at fault in that situation, though it was a complicated one. But. I needed to purge my darkest interpretation of the situation, which was coloured by the past. And after writing it, I felt freed. And true writing returned. True happiness came back. Life felt better, smelled better, tasted better.

So yeah, I’d recommend catharsis. Get it out.

Yahoo

1500 words so far. At this rate, we’re going to Vegas.

Okay…

So, there was this girl.

A lot of stories start this way, and in my world they all tend to end the same way. And anyway, she was in her 20’s so she was a woman, not a girl. (There’s problem no. 1.)

And she wasn’t, although I’m not really clear on what this means, my type, necessarily, but from very early on, I began to realise that here was a nice, sunny person who I would like to be friends with. And whaddayaknow? We had lots in common. This is rare. I don’t have lots in common with anyone. Even my best friend has generally absorbed my interests - and while I’ve tried, I’ve not really done so well the other way. But here was someone not only who had read and watched a lot of stuff I had, but who also felt the same way about it. Someone who had the same kind of hangups and neuroses about life.

And she was in a relationship. And this was fine, because at this point I saw her as a friend, someone who I could spend an hour talking about just stuff and then realised that we both should hadn’t gotten our work done because we’d just gone through the ins and outs of Londo Mollari’s fall from grace. And the relationship, as best I could tell, made her happy. And that was good.

Now, I’m not good with social situations. I quail at the idea of parties unless I’m in a pretty secure position of knowing a few people going who I can talk to, or if it’s being held in my house, then I’m fine. If I’m expected to talk to a group of people I don’t know, I can’t do it. I don’t know what’s expected of me and I find that I don’t speak the same language as them. And that tends to taint things. Except this woman knew how that felt, and we would in certain social situations support one another. And then the Florence Nightingale effect happened and I fell in love with her. Not lust. I can’t say it was ever really a physical thing. I fell in love with her soul. Which is what I tend to do. I’m not saying that I don’t ever feel physical love, but it’s not really a big thing for me. (And that’s partly I guess, because I’ve never got any, but I digress.)

And then her relationship went sour. And I wasn’t surprised. I saw that the boyfriend was neglecting her (he was quite selfish) and that she was devoting her time to him for little reward. Meanwhile she became more difficult to be friends with, because of this and because when I didn’t know it was going on, all I knew was I was being frozen out. Which made me act like a douche. We fell out a few times and then we became friends again and then she left the area because the breakup was that scarring but also incomplete. They clung to each other probably for the same reason that I held onto her friendship.

And I try to hold onto the friendship and then in my head it turned into something more. I saw signs where signs did not exist. Fool that I am. And eventually after a few very nice visits where we had a lovely time, I asked her out. And that ruined it. Silly me. I lost a really great friend at the same time. What a fool.

Of course it’s not as simple as that. These things never are. I think clingy is a word that could be applied to me, and I think that the friendship had lost its lustre for her a long time before it all went South. If you have too much in common then you run out of things to say, I suppose, and you don’t help each other or compliment each other. And I began to realise that I didn’t know her half so well as I thought. Probably made up a load of junk or hid things from myself to make it work better for me.

But the upshot is that a hole was left in my life that I can’t easily fill and it’s not her fault so I can’t even be angry and channel that into anything.

Oh I also hurt my back recently which made it nearly impossible to write. I might work something out.

The thing is…

I have all these old ideas…

I always imagined doing a run on Incredible Hulk. I’d start with Bruce Banner being taken to a parallel world where he didn’t become the Hulk and showing him this paradise he made possible with gamma tech, making him more inclined to get rid of the Hulk. Only to show the reader at the end of the first issue that the parallel Bruce is still full of anger and has turned into a very nasty person. Hulk would become less powerful as a result of one of Bruce’s attempts to rid himself of the cancer. From there the Hulk would be captured as a super-terrorist by a unit of supersoldiers (who would be the characters from the short-lived Marvel UK series), only to eventually join them as a WMD. I always thought the military aspect of Hulk is one of the big important things, alongside the fugitive, lonely man element, and the antagonism between Banner and Hulk. He’s divided, he should hate himself. That’s the character. I also wanted to play up the mystery of what the Hulk actually is, because we now know how dodgy Stan Lee’s science was, and there’s nothing in the way Hulk is portrayed in the comics that fits a straightforward, the Hulk is a mutated Bruce concept.

I would have also sent him into the far future for a little while, because science fiction is a big part of what the Hulk is. I also had half a mind to do a little horror with him too.

I also wanted to do a Captain Britain comic, which starts with Captain Britain discovering that the Prime Minister is an evil techno-wizard in disguise and the whole country is actually enslaved if you look at it the right way (shades of the Matrix and the Invisibles). CB is then mindwiped and has to regain his powers through a quest structure, using modern Britain to inform the quests he undertakes.

I wanted to do an Elseworlds take on the old World’s Finest story where Batman, Superman and Robin sub in for the Three Musketeers, though I never really figured that one out.

I wanted to do a Flash Gordon story and a more planned out take on Defenders of the Earth. And while I was at it, I wanted to do a slightly creepier version of Battle of the Planets, that deals with what the kids of Science Ninja team Gatchaman actually are. (Essentially, not human anymore. But also playing up the Science and the Ninja elements more too.)

I wanted to write more Silas Crumb stories. Silas is meant to be Arthur Daley in space. A spiv who owes the wrong people money and ends up having to shift dodgy packages around the galaxy. Somehow I lost that Casablanca/Han Solo side to things.

Benny and Burke were meant to live forever. Supposedly they fit into a thousand genres like Laurel and Hardy. But I found I couldn’t even figure out how they’re meant to be together. Can you have a spy who’s an idiot? I guess you can.

Superstu become a lost concern when I started to realise that… well, it isn’t just my shyness that keeps the women away. When I lost that optimism and hope, Tao Ehl became a dead character.

And yet I can’t ratchet any of these things into shape.

Getting back on the horse

Moebius died at the weekend. He’s one of those creators held up as a shining ideal. And he did draw some very pretty pictures.

A lot of writers say they write for themselves. I think they’re liars. I don’t think anyone writes particularly to appease an itch that’s self-contained. They do it to prove something to someone. Maybe it’s someone they think they’re in love with and want to impress. Maybe it’s an intellectual rebuttal like Philip Pullman’s strange extended rant again C S Lewis, which turns into the Eden myth at the end (surely a proclaimed atheist wouldn’t use religious tropes in his writing?). Or maybe it’s a cry for help. Sylvia.
At any rate, audiences are important. Sure they puff somebody up to the point where an author can lose objectivity, but they also act as a counterweight to the author’s excesses. After all, otherwise we’d all just write about getting the thing we wanted.
My problem at the moment is that I have no audience in mind. There’s no one I think I’m in love with who I can try to impress.
There’s no one whose opinion that counts that I have to try and debate. Life is vague, and slightly empty.
It’s not bad, but there are no driving forces behind what I’m doing right now, beyond a desire to be able to eat. It’s dissatisfying in many ways, but not uncomfortable. That alone should be something to fight against. But it’s not because I feel now like there’s no way to win. I can’t see how they’ll fix the economy because the UK is no longer capable of manufacturing anything and anyone who becomes an expert in computing, science, etc. is going to go to where they can get stuff done. i.e. not the UK. This is the problem all Europe faces.
And yet there are things that are really making me feel like I want to write something. I’ve been reading poetry for the first time in ages, and am much enjoying Ros Barber’s the Marlowe Papers, a novel written in iambic pentametre telling the story of Marlowe becoming Shakespeare. The language is excellent and speaks to my heart.
But there’s a sense of futility to it all at the moment. I have no illusions about getting published. It won’t happen. I’ve been trying too long. If someone wanted my stuff it should’ve happened by now. And my fiction, well it isn’t commercial or unique or innovative and the limitations in human experience that I have mean that the stories are limited. I can write fan fiction about asexual childlike alien pseudointellectuals, but beyond that?
And yet, they say what makes a good writer is that they keep going.
Irritating.

Last night

I wrote words. We may be back on people.