The plot thickens

Aha! I think I have my entry for the Terry Pratchett Prize underway. It’s something I’ve never really done before (okay, it’s Fantasy with a big F, but as I’ve never been a big reader of fantasy - I never actually read the whole of Lord of the Rings, but I watched nearly every episode of Dungeons and Dragons twice - I think I have the opportunity to turn out something a leetle different, and remember Fantasy, not urban fantasy… This will not be Neverwhere for a new generation, like so many books being published at the moment) so that’s actually good because it means I’ll be applying a different kind of logic to it, in much the same way as I used to do with super hero stuff and Doctor Who fan fiction. Unexpected influences.

(I used to write super hero stories in a Douglas Adams [particularly So Long and Thanks for all the Fish which is still my favourite Hitchhiker's]/Red Dwarf style back in the 90s. And then did something similar with spy fiction in the early 00s. I’m thinking it’s likely that something unexpected will squat in any attempt I make at creating fantasy stuff.)

I mean, is there a fantasy equivalent of Neal Stephenson? (Ha, that’s set me up for a fall, hasn’t it?)

So this could go somewhere. David, I may be stripmining old ideas and characters from some of the old stuff, like Adote with Destiny. There were at least a couple of characters in there who could easily be lifted. If there isn’t a Benny and Burke cameo, then I’m not doing right.

Inception

Just saw this film. And it’s nice, but it is basically Memento again. And I could have written the story. In fact, some might say I already have…

To be shared…

http://axecop.com/index.php/acask/read/ask_axe_cop_1/

I cannot even describe this.

Starbucks, eh?

So my friend and I went to Starbucks today. David has a caffeine dependency problem, and takes seven shots of espresso in his coffee. It seems that the Starbucks monkeys could not let this go uncommented. Seven? You want seven shots? How do you sleep at night? Did you know it used to be illegal for us to serve drinks with over six shots of espresso in them. Paul Simon takes eight shots of espresso. One monkey took to imitating someone undergoing electroshock therapy.

As David’s friend, I felt I had to step in and pointed out that he needed it to counteract the valium. And that it was like hydration, you have to take a certain amount of caffeine per pound of bodyweight.

David was not amused.

As I ordered my own manly peppermint latte (not the girl from Peanuts), I was asked how many shots I wanted. Did I want seven too? No no, one was fine.

Travelling on the train, I was enjoying Jay Lake’s Mainspring and peanut crackers, right up to the point where two women in their mid-twenties came on board, giggling and dressed up like they had escaped from Richard O’Brien’s basement. They proceeded to talk for an hour in the most irritatingly self-important and chirpy manner. They were going to a gig. Jay’s gig. Jay is the leader of the band. Oh god, said the one with blue hair, I am going to marry him, he’s insane and that’s why I love him. She had had mental issues, and a baby at 17, the child currently apparently left alone and was to be picked up by its errant father. And she had a blog, so you might be able to find her if you google Jay and Newcastle. I wouldn’t advise it though. And as they were middle class there was the usual thing of them having dated everyone in their circle of friends and now hating everyone in that two-faced, Steptoe and Son circle-jerk of hatred and apparent self-loathing. As if all middle class English people learned social interaction from Caligula or Claudius. By the time we got to York, I was wishing I carried piano wire with me at all times.

I also learned that I am the least librarian-y librarian in the world. I went to a course, in which they tried to discover people’s preferences in learning. When asked which people were likely to open up a new gadget and just start using it, and which would have to go through the manual and ask for help, I found myself alone at the end of the room for active learners, and found myself constantly running up to the front of the classroom to do stuff, while the others folded in on themselves as if they were collapsing into their own event horizons. This is why the University of Bradford want to make a job based on me.

Really?

Julian Barratt was the original inspiration for Brian in Spaced. And it makes sense. But I can’t see anyone other than Mark Heap playing the role.

It was ever thus…

Tarkovsky, the man who did the film version of Roadside Picnic, one of the best science fiction novels ever written, has his films free online. At http://www.openculture.com/2010/07/tarkovksy.html. At the very least watch Stalker. It’s fantastic. Science Fiction on what appears to be no budget.

What’s up, Duck?

So did anyone ever prefer Bugs to Daffy? Did anyone not sit through a cartoon and think, I really hope that Daffy loses. Because I never did. I liked Daffy best. Bugs was great in his own cartoons, when dealing with homicidal maniacs, but Daffy, dear covetous, over-achieving, id-controlled Daffy, was my favourite because he was funnier. Bugs became the straight man, the conservative, the spreader of morality, in the Bugs/Daffy cartoons, and that was sad. He lost his Groucho-inspired anarchist subversive edge, and if the Looney Tunes were about anything it was about subversion. (Which co-incidentally is why all Warner Bros. cartoons after the 60s suck. They went commercial man. They sold us out.)

Why am I bringing this up? I dunno. But my thoughts ran to the little black duck, recently. He was one of my role models as a boy. I wanted to be like Daffy. I wanted to stick it to the man, to walk on the outside. And now I do. I am a living, breathing Daffy Duck.

There’s a really rather nice article on io9 at the moment at http://io9.com/5581855/your-fantasies-are-not-acceptable. It’s all about the manner in which we are constantly assured that liking something is wrong. I’ve been through this from an early age. Liking Doctor Who was wrong (ha, world, how’d'ya like me now?), liking comics was wrong (ha, world, how’d'ya like me now?), liking… well, you get the picture. I could never figure out a.) why people cared and b.) why they cared so much that they had to poohpooh me for liking stuff. There is stuff that I don’t like and I may have made mention of this here, but if somebody liked that stuff, I wouldn’t brand them a subnormal moron for liking it. There would be other things that would allow me to do that.

And it irritates me that such things are used for cheap humour on television or in the media, where liking something immediately identifies you as a certain type of person.

I did a talk in GCSE English about Red Dwarf, in which the teacher looked uncomfortable and asked if I thought that it would appeal to everyone. I explained why it should, that the science fiction was just masking human relations and exaggerating them to make a point. After that I was branded as the person in love with Red Dwarf and every time there was a bit of news about something to do with Red Dwarf, like Craig Charles’ little bit of trouble that effectively sank the show, people would sneeringly ask my opinion. I didn’t actually care that much but I was branded.

At any rate, those are my thoughts for today. Fiction may be cancelled for the forseeable future as I work out that novel for the TPP.

The creeping moss of Shoggoth

I seem to be receiving posts from the spambot minions of the Great Old Ones. Cthulhu, or possibly Golgoroth. (Had to be careful not to write Elder Gods, which isn’t technically right.) Incoherent ramblings in some tongue that qwerty keyboards find hard to accommodate.

Which is nice. I have got a tendency to look for patterns in things that aren’t there, being human and all, so having these profane explusions cluttering up my blog dashboard is the proverbial larf.

But my mind is elsewhere, swirling around in a miasma of uncertainty about the future and what it holds for yours truly. (Is he a formula one racing car driver? Drives for Lotus?) Many dreams could be dispersed with one sentence. Oh life! So strange, so higgledy piggledy in your chaos. No cube of order at your heart. Synchronicity is never so serendipitous as one might hope.

Still, I have my projects. 80,000 words for the year’s end. I’ve just read the first couple of chapters of Jay Lake’s Mainspring and the first 50 pages of an Elric omnibus and they have rekindled the writing spark so I think I could produce something. I’ve also been reading the collected Northwest Smith, C. L. Moore’s Golden Age science fiction adventurer. He’s a hardnosed chap that may or may not have influenced Doctor Henry Jones Jr. and seems so far to stumble about being tough and having things happen to him. But I like the cut of his jib. Sentences are appearing in my head left right and centre, and I don’t know what the story is, but by golly it feels lively.

Do you think he’s forgotten yet?

Thanks to Kate Orman for this: http://dreamer-easy.livejournal.com/35670.html

It includes a link to the Terry Pratchett prize, which is essentially asking unpublished writers to submit a novel by the end of the year.

Can I do it? Does Terry remember Superstu the Unadulterated Novel and insisting we read Carl Hiassen? (And damn his eyes, I did. Never again.)