TetsuMan

Like a true Victorian enthusiast, this week I have mostly been dealing with the depiction of death and the rites of passing. Both TetsuMan and heronaut have featured manifest ‘Death’ with her knowing smile and mischievous nature, and its arguable that, what with both stories being worked on in tandem, that she is the same character in both.

It’s hard to write Death, especially as a feminine character, without either going overboard on the Persephone-like tragedy of her nature or reducing her to a carbon copy of the popular representation featured in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Originally I attempted to sidestep this issue by incorporating aspects of La Santa Muerte but, if I’m honest, she simply converged with a certain character from Love Amongst Strangers (Again).

The musical context for the writing I’m doing at the moment has been very freeform, without properly being established again. I’ve been leaning towards pop music, one of my many genuine loves but talk of such things is probably better confined to journals that do not possess aspirations of being a professional record of my writing endeavours.

However, should my plan for a story involving David Bowie investigating the Artifice Comics universe ever manifest itself as a viable option, then I dare say there will be a lot about music being written here.

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot of stuff for Artifice Comics, a site that I enjoy a very love/hate relationship with.

I first joined the site in 2001 after seeing an appeal for new writers on USEnet and later, when then site editor, Dorin, felt that he could no longer find motivation to lead the site, I took over editorial duties for several years…with mixed results.

Whilst now is not the time to give a history of my involvement with online shared universe fiction sites, there’s a lot about Artifice that keeps calling to me – just as there’s a lot about the site that endures despite best efforts to kill it off. So, many years after writing my first story there, I’m currently playing around with four semi-regular serials.

The trouble with writing these projects is that it often leads to a sense of claustrophobia for me. I feel that I have to crank them out as quickly as possible in order to stay ahead of myself and that means that I often don’t spare the time to fall in love with what I’m writing. Now that I’m committed to a regular schedule with heronaut and TetsuMan for Mister Watts, I’m hoping that I will be forced to take a break from my crazy 4891 words a day schedule for work on the site and come up with a better plan that can accommodate more freedom.

I really find writing serials more difficult than books, even when the serial has a projected end. Each chapter of a serial is like a thorn I have to pick out with my fingers and each thorn is bigger than the previous month’s. The only exception to this rule has been TetsuMan which has, touch wood, thus been a joy to write.

Whilst brainstorming for directions I could take my work I came up with a variety of notions, some which I think will work, others which probably won’t. The following text is an edited version of an email I sent out to the staff list on the 27th May explaining how I felt a new Artifice status- quo could be developed:

In order to complicate things but with the intention of making things easier, I’m going to suggest that, as well as steering away from concepts/characters that may or may not be touched on elsewhere, the site dateline be shifted up to round about 2015. Even if this means creating another gap, I’m still for it because the space between 2015 and the Artifice ‘present’ of 2007 is big enough to accommodate lots of new things and to use lots of ideas that don’t relate to Pacific City/non-Pacific City stuff and can be exploited over several books.

So I’m thinking, what would the setting of 2015 be like?

Well, my first thought/suggestion is FaceCam – a social networking application that operates, like tumblr, on a sense of immediacy. FaceCam runs from a wireless Blátönn (TM & (C) Burke Enterprises) dongle incorporated into the frames of glasses/sunglasses, the material of contact lenses or worn as an independent earpiece that advances the idea of ‘predictive text’ seen in mobile phones to incorporate a feature called ‘predictive thought’ – this feature automatically takes images of its surroundings corresponding to certain factors such as an increase in heart rate, blood pressure and adrenaline – i.e. if you pass a pretty girl in a red dress, your heartbeat might increase, blood might rush to your cheeks and the Blátönn dongle, sensing this increase, will take a photo of anything in your immediate line of vision, assuming that the change in your bodily functions is a result of external stimuli. This information will then be uploaded to your FaceCam account online and be visible to anyone on your friends list, depending on your security settings.

FaceCam has an addition manual interface but, for the most part, it is sold as a daily, up-to-the-minute record of your waking life.

In addition to this, everyone is on FaceCam. It is *the* social networking app of 2015.

The second thought/suggestion comes in the shape of pop culture. In Millennium Man, it is suggested that, up until her disappearance, Komatsubara Eumi is a very well known talent in both Japan and PC. Following the theme of musical trends and the idea that superheroes are so commonplace that everyday heroes of the past have been reinvented as fictional television dramas (again, MM states there is a drama ‘adaptation’ of Albert Weisz’s adventures on Saturday morning TV), I would like to introduce you…to the band.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you could please put your hands together…for Magenta and the Magicians.

Guitar, bass, drums and sugar sweet vocals, Magenta and the Magicians are the ultimate in pop/rock. Taking their influence from everything from 50s doo-wop to losercore, Magenta and the Magicians are the current music industry’s darlings, outselling their rivals at an unbelievable rate. Their lead singer, the aforementioned Magenta, seems very cautious about preserving her on-stage persona and not mentioning her real name but, aside from that, no one has a bad thing to say about this band. Subscribers to their official FaceCam feed number in the millions.

As an aside, this version of Magenta did make an appearance in Artifice’s recent Anthology 2 special, The Broken, the Beaten and the Damned and, of course, the idea of FaceCam originally appeared in a short story that was intended as part of an alternate history anthology that never happen.

More on that later perhaps.

lecteur de tarot + Love Amongst Strangers (Again) progress chart

98 pages of lecteur de tarot, although the above picture of my notes – often buried beneath piles of paperwork but never too far from my keyboard – was taken before beginning today’s writing.

Beneath the tick chart and above the dates is the layout for the Love Amongst Strangers sequel, blocked out with two different highlighter pens (that’s right, count them! Two!) but don’t let its seeming lack of progress fool you – chapters 7 and 8 are roughly 80 – 90% compleat but I keep getting distracted by other projects with impending deadlines.

Adjacent to the lecteur de tarot tick boxes is a very obvious TetsuMan spoiler – points out of ten if you can see what it is.

One of my guilty pleasures in writing is alternative history and the art of reconstructing – some might argue correcting – time by depicted differing portrayals of the equally loved and hated ‘Second’ British Empire of 1783 to its final decline in 1997. Like any expansive regime, there were astounding advances and hideous atrocities. Only through examining the shadows of these events in our own everyday life can we truly understand where we come from and this is where fiction is such a wonderful and insightful tool.

I defy anyone who has ever picked up a pen and scratched a few words of narrative on paper not to take joy in inverting the familiar and exploring the dynamics of the country they grew up in.

During the reign of the Empress, there had been a brief but distinct drive to eliminate regional accents. From within the walls of the Imperial Capital to Mauretania and even as far as the world of the Nimravidae, all dialect terms and accents were considered improper, especially for those in governmental or influential positions.

Far from being tyrannical about the issue and beheading people left, right and centre – a style of government comparative with the satirical Queen of Hearts in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Abroad, a charge that had been levelled many a time by dissenters – the Empress had allowed the government to commission a campaign intended in engaging the hearts and minds of the people.

The government subsidised Imperial Broadcasting Corporation had been swift to build up a multimedia campaign of stereovision adverts, billboards and periodic announcements featuring popular boy-band UKXD expounding the delights of ‘Empress’ English’.

She still remembered the annoying tune and the irritating holograms projected out from the boards of Leicester Square in Imperial Capital.