the rambles of my headspace

He wound the mechanism.  She wound him round her little finger.  He wound the mechanism.  She wound him up.  And when the police found the clockwork spider by the body, its vial of poison empty, its bronze fangs stained with blood, they both wound up in jail.


That one's actually a reworking of a short story that I haven't been able to sell.  Kind of funny to see it reduced to these elements.

In other news I am hoping to finish the current round of novel edits in the next hour or two.  Then its into my wife's hands for the first read and a brutal bloody beating into shape.  That however, won't stop these little pieces as I am now far too addicted.

Did I wax lyrical about Freakangels yet?  Not only is it free, not only is the art beautiful, but its written by Warren Ellis who pretty much the greatest comic book writer working today IMHO.

I know, I know... none of you care about post-harcore. But I do, any this is SO damn close to perfection, plus the video is uber-creepy...

...while some people have been very kind about the microfictions, if it is your opinion that one (/many/all) sucks then I'd love to hear about it and why.  Honesty over platitudes.  Otherwise I'll be relying on my own judgment about works and what doesn't and that is always a dangerous proposition.

That is not to say, however, that I'm not tremendously grateful for the kind words.  They are, of course, muchly appreciated.

Busy day at work so I had less time than usual, but here it is...

The acrobat’s daughter gripped the curtain with thick-fingered inelegant hands and watched as her father swept across the ring with a gazelle’s leap, a falcon’s graze.  She watched the faces watching him, the quiet awe, that expression trapped between wonder and fear.  And then, her father left the stage and the clowns rolled on, to tumble and fall, to trip and sprawl.  And she saw the expressions around them, widen, loosen, liberated by laughter.  And as she watched the curved clown’s figures go through their buffoon antics, she realized that for, the first time, she looked upon the spotlight with something like lust.

...to bring you news that my l'il sister, in a move of significant bad-ass-ness, won the urchin spring travel writing competition.  It's a really nice piece on Brighton in merry old England and well worth reading.

So, yes, Blogland: rejoice!

It was a dare, a bet, an act of bravado, a moment to become a legend to haunt the locker rooms--for immortality he kissed the beak-faced girl.

It was a dare, a bet, another way to embarrass her, to expose her as an outsider, and yet it was all she could expect, the best she could expect, and for that the beak-faced girl let him kiss her.

His soft lips met the hard contours of her yellow mouth, his wide red tongue flickered against her thing black one.  And in that moment of close-pressed teenage years she spread her wings and they lifted from the ground and he saw her for the first time true, in her own space, her own place, her own setting, and amongst the clouds she was beautiful.

The hard contours of her beak met his soft pink mouth.  She spread her wings at the contact.  She hoisted him aloft, she felt full, she felt beautiful.  And she opened her eyes, and she saw him, small frail sack of meat thing.  And in her horror at his sight she let go and he fell down, down to earth.

This one was based on a mishearing of the first by my wife.  I think it has a proper ending, so I'm pleased about that.  But, on the other hand, at almost 200 words it's definitely expanded beyond microfiction.  I was hoping to keep these shorter.  The experimentation continues...

The progenitor, the would-be man crawled from the primordial ooze.  Millennia span past, humanity evolved, DNA danced back and forth, consciousnesses expanded from analog to digital, upload cultures crossed between the stars.  And still 2001: A Space Odyssey made no damn sense.

I don't think this is going to be my official microfiction for the day.  But I woke up thinking about it and wondering how much time I could cover in a single piece and that was the only ending I could think of .  Endings are definitely the difficult bit for me with this format.  They end up either being really open (like yesterday's efforts) or joke-y (see above).  Both are fine, I have no problem with them, but it's a limited vocabulary.

Anyway, people seem to be enjoying these so there shall be more.

Because the one I posted earlier was yesterday's (when I came up with this idea) and I could really use a kick-start:

When they cut her open she was filled like a piñata, chock-full with secrets, with photographs, with pages torn from diaries, letters gone astray.  The medical men scratched their heads, stroked callused fingers against stubbled cheeks, rubbed their fingers in eyes gone red.  They sorted through what they found, catalogued it, tried to capture it in definitions, in text book phrases.  Their voices grew quieter.  Later they stitched her up, her skin the wrapping paper around an empty box.  As they burned what they had removed, safe at last in the light of day, none were able to meet each other’s eye.

Novel editing is killing me slowly.  Well...  no, obviously not.  But it is a little tedious, and I yearn to write something new.  However, if I do that then I'll never finish this bloody thing and so... well the solution is going to be microfictions.  I got to write something very short for a project I'm not sure I can talk about (so I won't) but it felt very refreshing.  Therefore as a sort of sanity check for myself, and just a way to keep the engine ticking over I'm going to try and put up some little microfictions here.  3 sentence jobs, very basic beginning, middle, end stuff.  They are not going to be very good to start, because it's just a format I don't really know, but hopefully they'll get better as I go on.  I suppose this will also serve as practice for a short story idea I have, which is to just put a lot of microfiction pieces together to create a sort of tapestry effect...  But anyway, enough blather.  I am already wasting time.

A young boy stands upon a beach, tide encroaching, and releases his balloon--his wish heaven-sent.  A gull, unsuspecting, strikes it, yellow beak bursting orange rubber.  The boy watches as, in the haze of helium the gull circles then, unexpectedly, ascends, disappearing through the clouds.


Like I said, they'll get better...

Just the other day I wrapped up Bioshock on the Xbox (OMFG - how awesome?) and picked up Condemned 2.  Condemned 2 bills itself as a horror game, but one that marries the whole survival, creeping around without any ammo thing with the sensibilities of a first-person shooter and looked fairly promising as all the reviews seem to indicated something fairly nightmare-inducing.  To a certain extent the game works.  I pretty much ran through the end of the first level because I just wanted to get the fuck out of dodge--"screw objectives, how do I finish this."  However, as I progress I am increasingly struck by a mounting frustration.

In order to see anything clearly in the game I must use a flashlight.  This pretty much eliminates peripheral vision, everything focused on the center of things.  This, of course, is a pretty standard tactic.  We are afraid of the dark, of what we can't see.  The constant threat of something unforseen coming at us.  And, in the game, it achieves that.

But it feels cheap.

It is not that what is presented to me in the game is particularly horrific (at least no more than in many other games) it is rather that presentation is horrific.  There is an initial jolt, an initial shock and thrill.  But the sensation doesn't last, and becomes repetitive quickly.  It is the chewing gum of genre tactics, rapidly becoming a tasteless wad that simply gives my mouth something to do.

I see this in movies too.  The monster is only frightening until it is seen wholly.  It is at its most terrifying when it is off camera, when it is only glimpses, before the CGI-reality disappoints.  Part of the genius of the Blair Witch Project, and the reason why it seemed to possess the power to truly disturb, was that the pursuing force was never seen, that it only ever existed in that nightmare portion of the imagination.  We were never forced to rationalize it.

Of course, by the time I saw it, the fact that the Witch (or whatever it was meant to be) was never seen was well advertised and the movie had therefore lost most of its power.  And that's the problem with this sort of monster, this sort of horror.  Again, it's a trick that will quickly lose its flavor.

What I want from my horror, not just in video games but in all varieties, is something that can be dragged into the light and retain it's ability to shock, its ability to disturb.  I want Cthulhu in the everyday, the cosmic horror of our daily lives, the existential catastrophe trapped in the quotidien, the unsaid finally said.  And I want it right there, center stage, it broad daylight, so that we cannot help but see it and be afraid.

So the Steampunk anthology is out now, demanding I spend my money on it.  Excited about that. but it's put me to thinking about steampunk a bit.  I've written my own number of faux-Victorian pieces (though I think the first to see the light of day will be the one in Electric Velocipede #15) but I'm not sure I'd qualify them as steampunk.  There again, I like the definition of steampunk that I saw in Steampunk magazine which demanded steam (shock!) and a punk aesthetic (double shock) and I'm not sure anything I've written really fits that specifically.  So I end up using pompous phrases like faux-Victorian...

The thing that worries me about Steampunk though, is that it seems a harkening back to the more escapist forms of SF.  Don't get me wrong, I love me some blimps, but the fiction derived from the movement can seem a little... well "twee" seems to be the catchphrase of the moment.  As a general aesthetic movement I like that it's a reaction against disposable electronics, against pod people with all the appropriately branded pod people accoutrements (brief aside--does anyone else find it ironic that Apple ran the seminal "1984" ad campaign, and now their own product is the paragon of ubiquity?).  That said, as steampunk strives towards mass ciulture acceptance it seems to me it is posed to suffer the cultural trends it is reacts against, and I fear a world where we all once more where top hats to work to prove how different we are...

But even assuming (and, let's face it, it's not that hard an assumption to make) that Steampunk has less of an impact than that, then I still don't feel that the admirable do-it-yourself aesthetic of steampunk really applies to fiction.  Fiction has always been a do-it-yourself kind of activity.   And heedlessly evoking the Victorian era in fiction seems fraught with dangers.  Victorian society was hideously stratified by class.  When that society is emulated, held up as a shining example even, then it is rarely the seamy underside that is dreamed of.  The majority of steampunk fiction seems, rather, to focus on the gentlemen sipping brandy, smoking cigars, and having wonderful adventures in their wonderfully inventive machines, while women swirl about in their wonderful and oh-so elegant gowns.  Even the dirtier, grungier inventors who actually get grease on themselves seem to be having a simply smashing time.  And that smacks resoundingly of escapism.

Now, yes, all fiction (and, I would argue, most non-fiction) is escapist.  It's an unavoidable part of reading/writing.  By partaking in the act your are escaping the moment.  But it's a sliding scale.  You can escape reality and yet still learn something of it.  By desiring to emulate  a society so stratified by class and money in a time when the wealth gap between rich and poor is ever-increasing, and racism and classism are so confused as to have become one and the same, seems to me to be a little dangerous.  It seems too escapist.

And so I return to the definition put forward by steampunk magazine.  Steampunk that deserves the title should have a punk aesthetic.  It's perfectly placed to challenge authority, to question everyday society.  Because do we really want to be the Victorians again?

I'm not a US citizen, and I can't vote, so I normally don't talk much about politics on this site (vote Obama!  But of course I'd say that, I'm European.) but through talking about writing (particularly the discussions about post--new weird on the short-lived Broken Circles forum) watching all the primary shenanigans, and reflecting on 8 years of Bush, I have put together my own shiny cultural theory of the post-9/11 world.  It's not very complete and it's probably obvious to some, but I'm going to save it here for posterity anyway.

So, I'm positing 9/11 itself as a post-modern event.  it was a moment when a large number of people in the US were confronted with the vast gap between their perception of the world and other's perceptions of the world.  It was an event that just didn't fit with the grand narrative of the age.  It was a horrendous terrible thing, and it violated the story we told ourselves.  Many people were for the first time shockingly and violently exposed to the post-modern nature of the world, the arbitrariness, the non-sensicality.

And such an abrupt and awful confrontation I think (quite understandably) scared the living bejeezus out of some people.  And a lot of people (again understandably) retreated from that vision.  U.S. mass culture retreated into simple black and white, into good guys vs. bad guys.  Bush is the exemplary expression of this mentality.  Simple rhetoric.  A simple picture of the world, demanding it fit back into the old narrative.  Another example I'd cite is the rise of the comic books.  Three of the big summer blockbusters (Iron Man, Batman, Hulk) are comic book movies - movies with a clear good guy, a clear bad guy, and the certainty that the good guy will win.

But what 8 years of Bush, and especially the war in Iraq, have shown is that trying to fit everything neatly and squarely back into the modernist box isn't working.  It's no longer a reasonable way to go about things.  And slowly, and I think Obama especially, and his unexpected unseating of Hilary Clinon, is representative of this slow recognition that a more nuanced way of looking at things is necessary.  After 7 years, I think the US is coming out of the shock 9/11 caused and has a chance to move to a place where it can deal with the world realistically.  As someone who writes a lot about a postmodern worldview, and finding hope there (at least that's what I think I write about) I find that quite uplifting.

As ever, feel free to tell me if I'm talking out of my blow-hole.

Quietly, unassumingly, what I now anticipate to be the best thing I'll read all year (and I'm stuck well in to Hal Duncan's Vellum which is amazing and yet STILL not this good), has surfaced in a quiet corner of the internet.

Go.
Now.
Behind the Wainscot.
Berrien Hendersen (selfavowedgeek).


OMG.  T. H. White just had his arse kicked.

Teh novel -- it consumes me.  I'm way too deep into the big push to the end of the first draft.  I've broken through 100k (I might even have made it past 110...) and I think I've got a week or so left on it (I really want to finish it by Friday, but we'll see).  But essentially that is to say that I am obviously not posting here, and I'm not even really reading much blogland stuff either. 

If anything interesting kicks off, please let me know.

Right now, this very instant, the word count in the novel is 97979.  That feels weird.

Am trying to concetrate on that today as work is quiet so am mostly on hiatus from teh internet.  In a day or two will post something up about I-CON, but for now suffice it to say that the Vandermeers, Liz Gorinsky, John McCarthy, and Paolo Bacigalupi are all lovely people.

I don't if anyone reads this journal at its actual URL (thexmedic.livejournal.com) - I suspect its just read by people who've put me on their f-list.  But if you do read it at it's URL there is a very slim chance that you might have noticed that I've moved the ads to sit between posts rather than off to the side, as this bumps up the (out-of-date) list of links to my stories.

However, some people might find it annoying to have ads between the posts, and if that is the case just let me know and if anybody out there actually cares I'll change it back.

I was again thinking about my approach to characters in stories, (because I tend to fixate on things, that's why) and about where I come from as a writer.  It would be foolish of me to ignore the influence of my RPG-ing past on my writing.  I would say that in my group of friends I picked up GM-ing duties about 70% of the time (mostly playing Shadowrun because it was cyberpunk AND magic, and that is awesomeness all wrapped up in a pot and covered in sparkles).  So again, my focus was plot and action, getting the beats in place, rather than on characters.  Sure I got play a lot of characters as the GM but they were rarely major recurrent characters, they were usually throwaways, grace notes, and rarely developed past a quick character quirk or two (one thing I'd do differently if ever went back to roleplaying is making sure I had a good stock of recurring NPCs).

But yeah, that's another reason why I think I've been having problems.

The reason I've been blathering on about this is that I usually find identifying the problem is about 75% of the work.  Solutions are the easy part.

Does anyone else find their writing modified by the geeky indulgences of the past?  Do habitual PCs have issues with plot?  Or am I just wittering nonsense again?

Mixwit.

Create your own mixtapes and share them via the internet, without ever having to upload a single mp3.  Just hunt the tracks down on seeqpod.  OMG, teh coolness.

The first six minutes of Alice by Jan Svankmajer