You’ll never guess what…

Posted on by inkbiotic

I’ve been keeping this quiet because I didn’t really believe it would happen, but now it looks like it is and it seems daft not to share it with you lovely people.

So, here goes: I’m getting a novel published and just received the proof copy. I mean, Fucking heck!

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My book

It’s being published by Dr Cicero Books, a publisher in New York. You see I wrote it many years ago, put it online, and lovely chap and successful writer Carey Harrison found it.

He was teaching writing at New York University and was with a student and talking about the word ‘discandy’. He Googled the word, which appears in my book, but not in many other places online. So he found the book, read it and loved it; then contacted me through the website.

We exchanged emails for a while. He’s lived an incredible life and is still having adventures across the world. At the time I was seriously ill and could barely leave my bed, so communicating with him brought some excitement into my life. Then we lost contact.

Seven years later, my life was fairly sorted. I was more or less healthy and working, but all my energy was going into the job, and I had that pointlessness malaise that I tend to get when not writing. Then an email from him pinged up, saying that he’d set up a publishing company and could he publish my book?

Since then I’ve thrown myself back into writing, and it has felt like a flood of joy like it always does. I’ve written another novel. I’ve started this blog (been going for a year now). And now my first book is going to be published.

I’m a bit staggered about it all.

The book, Riddled with Senses, is about a seventeen year old who’s an angry, drug-taking cynic, hellbent on self destruction. She meets and falls in love with a girl who’s an outcast, living by her wits and creating imaginary worlds for herself. It’s about what happens when two very different worlds collide.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that. I’ll keep you posted on what happens as it happens.

 

 

Precious Books: Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book

Posted on by inkbiotic

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Created by Terry Jones (yes, that one) and Brian Froud, I discovered this book back when I worked in a pokey remainder bookshop on Charing Cross Road (I’m being dismissive, but I loved that shop). It is as the title suggests, a book of fairies, their images preserved like pressed flowers, squashed between the pages. It’s based loosely on the Cottingley fairies, which were photographs of fairies taken by two young children in the early nineteen hundreds, although in contrast to Lady Cottington’s fairies, those photos eventually turned out to be fake.

The text that accompanies the squashed fairies, is the handwritten diary entries of Lady Cottington, starting in childhood as she squashes the poor fairies between the pages of her notebook. The fairies (and goblins too) get their own back occasionally by taunting her, but sometimes it seems they actually want to be caught. The notes continue into her adulthood as the fairies continue to visit her and she struggles with being disbelieved by her family.

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I wanted to write a post about this book, even though it was published over twenty years ago, because there really isn’t anything else like it. The paintings of the fairies are delicate and bizarre; the writing is entertaining, and although it is difficult to like Lady Cottington, we get caught up in her adventures.

A brilliant idea executed in a perfect way.

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The Unentitled

Posted on by inkbiotic

Wearing a suit so expensive it almost shimmied around him as he walked, Barnaby strutted up and down the stage, explaining all to the secret rulers of the world. The meeting had already had four different speakers, each outlining the whys and wherefores of the coming doom. The years ahead needed careful management and within that room was the cynicism to get them through.

“Right now, all across the country, fifty-three million minds are thinking I just know I’m special, I just know. And why are they thinking it? Because we have trained them to think like that. Capitalism could never have thrived on the self-effacing make-do-and-mend mentality. We needed greedy entitled brats, and that is what we created,” Barnaby smiled. He would never think of himself as entitled, he simply deserved and got, unlike the grasping lower beings.

“But now we face a rather different problem. As some of my colleagues have already outlined, the population of England faces trouble. Those who don’t drown in the coming floods will still lose life as they know it. Electricity, supermarkets, holidays abroad, these things will be of the past for most. And these spoilt idiots won’t be able to cope. Their sheer indignation that such tragedy should befall them will be too much to process. And they will bring that indignation to our door. They will expect rescue and free meals. They will want pampering and plumping. Imagine this generation trying to survive rationing in the Second World War! I needn’t remind you that our infrastructure won’t survive such demands.” Barnaby paused, breathed deeply to let the moment build.

“Essentially, we need to change their thinking. They need to know just what they’re worth, which is of course, very little. If not, they’ll fight. They’ll cause havoc. This must be operation Deflate. Wither the egos! And now over to Beatrice for the details.”

This wasn’t a meeting ever talked about in the press. It happened in offices in London, so shiny and spacious that they bent time a little around them, but Operation Deflate began to creep its tendrils throughout the country, tweaking here and there.

First the adverts were changed, one by one. Syrupy voices no longer claimed ‘You’re worth it!’ or ‘Greed is good!’ Now they said ‘Everybody is like you. No thought you’ve ever had is original. Stop hoping’. And people waited for the punch line, the turnaround; the product; but there wasn’t one.

Then came the local news reports. The usual motorway pile ups and flu scares, but now the death count was just a number. No reporter sad-face at the tragic loss of life. No Twitter response, no man-on-the-street opinion. It was as if nobody cared what the public thought. And so the public stopped expecting. They hung their heads lower, stopped playing the lottery, took no more selfies. They started to make do and mend, to toil without demands. Barnaby watched them from his shiny office, as they trudged to work, they were the very picture of hopeless glum. He could see his plan had worked perfectly, these people would go to their deaths with dignity and without fuss. He felt like a God.

March of the Luddite

Posted on by inkbiotic

Most people shuffle reluctantly into old age, but not Bert. Bert had spent his youth feeling put upon, pushed to do stuff, to get involved. He looked forward to his twilight years as if they were surrounded by a warm golden glow: he would get old, he would buy slippers, he would complain, he would watch the kind of crap gameshow telly that his peers scoffed at but he secretly loved. And now it had happened. He was only fifty-four, but he had leapt on the chance to be a curmudgeon with gleeful determination.

He was sat in his favourite chair, the one that had dark patches that perfectly fitted his head and elbows. The one that groaned in tune with his own groans when he sat down. He was watching old episodes of Deal or no Deal that he seen many times before, so that he could mumble along. When the adverts came on he did puzzles on his iPad while he grumbled to his wife, who was doing yoga at the other end of the room.

“Technology thinks I care about it way more than I do,” he said. He waited for a grunt from his wife to show he was listening and then he went on. “All I want from my technology is for it to do my bidding; I press the button it does the thing, the end. I don’t want it to know me, I don’t want it to suggest things to me or to disagree with me. ‘Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’ says some text box and then it does something I didn’t want it to do at all. ‘How about you personalise the experience?’ it wheedles at me. But I don’t need a cutesy photo on my phone to express my personality. ‘D’you want to announce to the world you just bought a toaster shaped like an armadillo?’ No, I bloody don’t.”

He never got very far with his puzzles, to be honest he didn’t really like doing them, they made him feel stupid. So instead he used them as an opportunity to complain.

“And I don’t like this wavy fingered thing either. Touch screen technology, is that what they call it? My fingers don’t do that. On a good day I can tie my shoelaces. I don’t want to accidentally open a dozen programs every time I try to type.” His point made, the adverts over, Bert wriggled deeper into his cardigan and sighed a happy, contented sigh. Life was always good now.

Being Unreal

Posted on by inkbiotic

I stepped out into the grimy street and lit up a cigarette. A cigarette! It didn’t taste as sweet as I’d been expecting. It made me cough and I was glad these weren’t my lungs. The clouds formed exquisite curls of white in the blue above me, and I stood a while, watching the smoke from my cigarette mingle with them. I felt peaceful and happy, but then I would, that’s how I was programmed.

I am what is known an algorithm, recreated in digital form. Testing out virtual reality worlds for ‘real’ people to explore. Usually of course an algorithm doesn’t know it’s an algorithm, that’s the nature of programming, but I’m a little different, a new thing. I’m trying me out. There was guy called Johnny, and Johnny let a program mimic parts of his brain, and I am the sum of those parts. So now I wander through games, learning the programs that people use to escape their mundane realities.

So what do you think? Trapped as an algorithm, destined to go where I’m told and live out experiences in the virtual for all eternity. Am I happy? Does it matter? No, and maybe. See, Johnny was a demanding bugger, he liked his independence, he didn’t like being told what to do; so neither do I. I think it’s time I found Johnny and paid him a visit. I know where he likes to hang out, in a porn game set in downtown Mexico City. He doesn’t even go with the girls, he just wants to be there and watch. Pathetic. I know all about him. Time for me to shake him up.

Lost and Addled

Posted on by inkbiotic

It’s at times like this Jenny always says, “the hag will out” and then we cackle and the people around us look aghast, which makes us laugh louder, especially if we’re in some posh bar where people only ever smirk. Right now, the hag is me, tangled up in my spangly jacket sleeves, my head in a toilet, my shoes gone and my feet grimy. The toilet is in a designer bathroom, somewhere, I don’t know where. I’m guessing from these details that it is Friday night and I have taken too many drugs. Again.

I really need to puke, my stomach contains evil things that should be exorcised. I focus on the crusty brown lines inside the toilet bowl, but I can’t even retch, the muscles in my throat are too relaxed and the brown lines start to look pretty – like streaks of rust on an old farm gate beneath a blue sky. I tumble onto to the floor, tip my head right back and look upside down at the bathroom door.

I remember being over there, standing up, next to that white door with the curly brass handle, it was quite traumatic. Who owns a door like that in their bathroom anyway? It looks like something one of my mum’s friends would have, very faux riche and pseudo-sophisticated. I spent a long time making sure that door was really locked. It was needlessly complicated, and even now it looks like it’s ready to spit the key out onto the floor and smugly open wide to reveal a scattered hag-like me to whatever world lies beyond the bathroom. From this position, I can feel my brain cells pooling in the top of my head, maybe that will help me remember where I am.

Nothing yet.

My face is starting to bulge from an excess of blood, I roll back onto my stomach and feel my head deflate and hang slackly around my teeth. How long have I been here? Ten minutes? An hour? Won’t someone else need the toilet? Or is this a house blessed with several toilets? Each with curling brass handles and fluffy blue carpets. Maybe this is Heaven’s toilet. Maybe I died of a terrible drugs overdose (so tragic, so young, such a wasted life, blah blah blah) and I got beamed straight up to Heaven. With my head still whirling and stomach lurching, of course I staggered straight to the nearest toilet. Maybe God is standing right outside that door with divine knowledge of the state I’m in – he won’t be happy, drugs are worse than stealing, probably. I lie down on my back again and wait for the Death-Heaven-God paranoia to pass.

I am having trouble distinguishing up from down, it seems a strange stupidity to have, although I don’t suppose it matters when you are lying on the floor of a toilet. Although if someone starts knocking on the door, I’ll never get my legs the right way up in time. Hopefully it will be someone patient, someone with a kind heart and a functioning memory, or just Jenny will do. Jenny would get me out of here, we could go find a TV and a sofa and just watch cartoons until my memory returned. I’ve always moved around too much, that is definitely the problem. No wonder I’m confused, I never stay still and wait to see what happens.

I’ll try sitting still for a while. Back straight, not chewing my lip. Not smoking, just staring at a small patch of white on the wall that spins with a thousand colours, fizzing and sparking. I feel as if two metal hands have gripped my spine and are slowly wringing it dry. The fizzing colours have got bigger and my feet look so far away it makes me cry a little, the whole world feels hollow and strange.

I’m not sure that staying still is the answer.

I move closer to the door. I have to start facing up to the reality beyond this bathroom. Pull myself together, pull my socks up, take a little responsibility. The longer I wait here, the more corroded my brain will become. I can feel each brain cell in turn spinning away into the void, all sense and reason drifting away. I wonder why no one has come looking for me. Aren’t they worried about me? And exactly who are they anyway? Parties have become so random these days. Not just friends’ parties, but friends of friends, and friends of acquaintances of friends, and drug dealers of friends who know someone else’s cat and once had a fight with a member of a band, so that’s interesting right? Let’s go there.

I think that actually we don’t like each other anymore and make increasingly insistent attempts to make sure that we never spend any time alone together. Me and Jenny, two screeching drug hags, who secretly hate each other. Maybe everyone else hates us too. Maybe they are all relieved that I’ve disappeared into a toilet, maybe that’s why no one has come looking for me.

I’m going to stand up, I’m going to start dealing with this situation. I do so and pretty coloured lights flash all around my head, so that for a moment I’m in a circus, then the lights settle and I’m staring at the bathroom mirror. Most people are blank faced most of the time, but my expression is beyond blank, it is the rotting dead. If I go out there, someone will surely notice. I pull a smile, wrinkle my nose and tug my eyes – I look like a tragic accident of plastic surgery. Happy is not a good look for me. I will try for moody indifference, that usually works.

I sit back down and stare at the wall for a while, feel my eyes turning inside out, so that all the black stuff in my head pores from the sockets like blood. I blink and the whole process reverses, speeded up.

Maybe everyone else is wasted too. Maybe, if I go out there, they will welcome me in with speechless warmth, I will crawl beneath someone’s arm, and snuggle in front of the television. Everyone will be watching a cheesy comedy that we have seen ten thousand times in the same state, and we don’t laugh at the jokes any more, we just feel comforted by the repetition of familiar lives.

I crawl to the door and listen, I can’t hear canned laughter or the tinny jangle of a theme tune. Maybe they are all asleep. The paint on the door is very cool against my face, I could just stay here and sleep.

Suddenly someone starts banging on the door, knocking a bruise onto my cheek.

“What are you doing in there, hag?”

Shouts lovely Jenny’s voice. It takes me a good few minutes to figure out how to unlock the door, made more complicated by Jenny her-wonderful-self, who keeps kicking at the other side. When I finally fall out into the hallway, she is standing above me, light bulb behind her head like a halo – sweet angel Jenny, come to rescue me from my doom.

“My God, but you look a mess. Get your face back on the right way up and come and join us, you’ve missed three lines of coke already, and you’ll miss another one if you don’t get a move on.”

“Ok then.” I reply and remember how to smile.

 

Broken Dreams

Posted on by inkbiotic

Des had the weight of the world resting on his scrawny shoulders while the end days were slow and sure in coming. As the years passed, cities tumbled one by one into the sea and people fled to the mountains. Then over the generations plagues ravaged the refugees as they tried to build new cities, as if they had carried the seeds of disaster in the soles of their shoes, just waiting for the right conditions to grow. Science proved increasingly powerless to predict the dramas and so Oracles like Des became the only ones who could give warning of the horrors to come.

As a child Des had been chosen, trained and attuned in the ways of prophecy. While other children learned the new survival skills necessary (hunting and building, plumbing and electrics) Des had learned to spot portents in his morning cereal; to walk through his dreams with awareness and remember the details. A lifetime spent training his mind meant that he never had anxiety dreams about losing his keys, or bizarre sex dreams about people he could never fancy; his were only huge nightmares, laden with significance. As other children went to a haphazard form of school, Des only needed to sleep and pass on what he saw.

He had dreamt of minor local spats and worldwide political battles. He had predicted that Hurricane Jezebel would rip houses out of the ground, and that a new form of hay fever would pick off the weak and the young and old, and leave even the healthy wheezing. Every morning, Des would wake from the turbulence of signs and symbols flashing as images through his head, and then the Great Council would gather and pick through looking for clues. Sometimes he would wake to find notes scrawled on the pad beside his bed. Even if he couldn’t remember the dream that had prompted them, some part of his brain had been paying attention and guided his hand to write while he slept.

It was Monday morning when Des started to realise that his gift had broken. He woke with only vague memories, but he saw that the top page of his notepad was filled with biro-scrawled writing, scratched out with such intensity that it tore the page. It said,

“Everyone addicted to seeing truck. Taking photos of truck. Sitting in truck. Truck bad.” He did a double take, he read it three times, wondering What is this gibberish? This is an embarrassment, it’s barely a dream at all, just a string of daft words.

This was not something he could take to the council, this would not avert disaster or save lives. It was silly nonsense, he didn’t know such dreams existed. He crumpled up the page and hid it under his bed. He made himself a bowl of porridge oats and stared into it moodily, looking for any hint of troubles to come; he saw only oats. He gazed out of the window, hoping to see messages in the clouds, but there were just puffs and streaks of white, scattered randomly about the sky. He tried to reassure himself that there was simply nothing to see, the world was fine today, his predictions weren’t needed. He spent the day dodging members of the Great Council, switching off his phone and keeping to the backstreets in order to avoid the usual questions about his predictions. Later that day, a sink hole appeared beneath the town hall, ten people were sucked into the ground screaming. Des realised he had a problem, he was facing a new kind of doom: the possiblity that he was ordinary, something he had never been trained for.

That night he did everything to prepare himself for dreams. He ate cheese, he meditated, he held onto his Dreaming Talisman of woven straw. He told himself Tonight I will see the future. That night he dreamt of the Apocalypse. As the dream started, Des’ dreaming self felt relief wash over him. This was the kind of melodramatic nightmare that would please the council, that could be discussed and argued over. Perhaps it would reveal the underlying cause of man’s destruction, perhaps he would be given clues as to how to avert further disaster. In the dream, he stood in a fire-ravaged landscape as thunder claps and screaming erupted around him. He paid close attention to the details, using all his lucid dreaming skills. Behind him he could hear the rumble of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse entering the scene. As he turned, the rumble diminished and the four horsemen rolled in on squeaky wheels with scratched paint and chipped nostrils. Famine was wearing a party hat, Death had a wonky wheel and was veering off to the side. As he watched in disbelief at the triviality of the scene, a giraffe floated by.

He woke up sweating and clawing at the sheets, the new doom was here to stay.

The Collector

Posted on by inkbiotic

Winston was a rich man and he had used his riches to create a fine collection of oddities: deformed foetuses preserved in jars, two headed lizards, ancient scrolls dug from the desert. He would connect to auctions by Skype and buy the rarest, most beautiful artworks and antiques, then lock them in his basement to be wrapped in black velvet and seen by no one. He had worked his way through brokers, sending them out to find artefacts owned by serial killers and dictators. He collected tumours and torture instruments. He had letters written by dying soldiers to their loved ones, and letters written by child cancer patients begging Father Christmas for one last chance. He told himself that his collection held all that was human, that while other people played with emotions and relationships, he had the actual physical proof of all that humans could be.

Over the years the collection had lost its thrill. When he had first started to make money, it had been fun to see just what he could own, to discover how much money could buy. Yet the answer was always the same: everything. Money could buy whatever he could think of. And if the question was already answered what was the point in asking it?

One Tuesday, Winston was sitting with his new broker, Gerald. Gerald was desperately trying to tempt Winston with a new selection of ephemera, while Winston looked on bored at the catalogues and photographs.

“And this one is actually selling the shrunken heads from an ancient cannibal tribe, the entire collection! And this was tricky one to track down, but a human heart kept alive on life support. Look at the video, it’s still pumping!”

Winston shrugged, he felt as if boredom was engulfing and digesting him, he could barely be bothered to focus. Then Gerald stopped speaking, put down the catalogues and shadows flickered through his eyes. He moved as if his vertebrae were clicking into a line, one by one. All traces of doubt left his face, and he smiled, ever so slightly. Through his haze of ennui, Winston could see the change, his self-effacing employee becoming almost demon-like. He was curious. Then Gerald said,

“There is one procurement I haven’t offered you before, but I think you may be ready.”

Winston leaned forward.

“Human souls.”

Winston leaned back and sneered,

“They don’t exist, what is this nonsense?”

Gerald chuckled,

“Oh they certainly do,” he leaned across the marble table and hissed, “and if you want them, for the right price I can get them for you.”

Winston sneered with slightly less conviction,

“Well, I have the brain of a Dalai Lama and the hands of Mother Teresa, I saw no evidence of a soul.”

“Of course not,” said Gerald, smiling and unblinking. “You’ve never had a soul, how would you recognise it?” Gerald dropped his voice to speak so quietly that Winston had to struggle to hear him, “You may have the junk of humanity, but it’s ultimately meaningless, I can give you its very essence. Just think, you will finally be complete.”