Iron Armour Heart

Context

There is none.

Hissatsu Teleport!

When you decide at 5:00 am that making new lecteur de tarot cards is a good idea.

"Candy is a Motherfucker"

This is funny only to me.

For your convenience, you can now buy An Echo of the Way You Knew Me Under Foreign Skies in paperback on amazon, I whisper quietly in you ear.

Today, in a quiet office in Walthamstow where the heating is always turned up far too high, I completed my new book. Writing the final confrontation, the final scene, saving it and then making a cup of tea, listening to the sound of the kettle boil, not saying a word. You won’t see anything of this until February next year – touch wood.

I haven’t told you the name. I realise now that I never told you the title of the previous book, possibly because it didn’t have a title for a long time. I hashed out several possibilities with H.H. Neville over the year or so since it was completed. My favourite was POP!, but he disapproved.

So in the end the book became This is a Book About Emily, by Emily. You’ll get to meet her later this year.

I’m going through a long title phase and thus the new new book, its title set since the introduction of one its principle characters, is named and he said to me, he said, “Jack, Cancer is a Motherfucker.”

In other news, as mentioned elsewhere, yesterday Margaret Thatcher died.

This might not seem an important article for this blog to cover but it is, it really is. In order to give voice to everything I felt, in order to sum up the complex emotions I felt in the context of my now being an adult, in the shadow of the London Riots of 2011, I at first tried to fashion a narrative based on the title. What it became instead was something else however.

The story again utilises Ayesha Swanson and Mister Mo from Love Amongst Strangers in their roles as agents of UKXD.

The story is called Margaret Thatcher in Hell. You can read it at Serial Prizes.

I’m not really someone who likes to share. I don’t like to explain myself, to offer explanations for what I do and why I do it – all of which are traits which make updating a blog primarily about writing somewhat cumbersome.

Therefore, sometimes it’s easier to just show you how things are going, to fabricate a memory in which I have shared the suggestion of what I am working on.

Saturday’s great work. vine.co/v/bTDUVVetvdK

— Psychopomp (@Psychopompadour) April 7, 2013

So, this Saturday, as I mentioned to you when we met, I came close to reaching the end.

10 Years, 2 Columns

I shouldn’t really be posting this, especially as I haven’t exactly introduced you to what I’m presently working on. Nonetheless, here it is.

In other news, for those enjoying a prolonged Easter break, why not go to Hell?

(by this of course I mean, why not take a look at a brief seasonal piece revisiting aspects of Angels Over Albion?)

As part of my ongoing love of new mediums and platforms, I thought I’d show you what the new book actually looks like in a short six second clip.

First look! Love Amongst Strangers (Again) by Mister Milnestein in paperback ~ vine.co/v/bjFlIiMjXBO

— Psychopomp (@Psychopompadour) March 29, 2013

I have a lot of love right now for vine. I’ve been hammering the point home to a lot of my friends – and any one else who will listen – about the potential for this to open up new narrative potentials in terms of storytelling as well as the beauty of both its immediacy and its presence as a method of capturing youth culture within its context rather than from the hazy distance of nostalgia, and I really hope to start making more of its usefulness in the future.

I’m expecting big things of these little six second clips.

/insert further heartfelt sentiments here.

An Echo of the Way You Knew Me Under Foreign Skies ~ Love Amongst Strangers (Again) is unexpectedly cute in its presentation.

I am aware I shouldn’t say this as, well, I put it together, and yet holding this small paperback in my hands – slightly thicker but roughly the same dimensions as the copy of On the Road I had carried with me over the week or two prior to meeting Ayesha – is somewhat satisfying. Like the first book, when I open it and look inside, it does not feel like something I have written, something I have scripted.

This last comment comes dangerously close to a personal admission.

This book is a graveyard of people I will never see again. Little mannerisms half-remembered, gestures vaguely recalled, this is a book of speculative fiction regarding the future after such memories. It is reinvention of nostalgia, a class reunion in which I am the sole attendee.

I sit at a table festooned with streamers, a hat retrieved from a Christmas cracker upon my head, a half-filled glass before me. It is a jubilee, a celebration, and everyone else is a shadow or ghost.

It is not a bad place to be.

So, after all that, here’s a toast to those old ghosts, here’s a drink for those featureless shadows and heartfelt regrets! Here’s to the people we remade in our memory because they just wouldn’t do what we wanted them to do in real life! Here’s to love and strangers and all the echoes of such that lie in between.

Here’s to the new book, which you can now buy in paperback from lulu or for Kindle from amazon… and if you make it through to the end… well, there’s a little surprise for you.