London

"FUSSELWAG...

FUSSELWAG landed with a flutter of feathers upon the cobbled stone, his one maimed foot offsetting his landing slightly and causing him to stumble forward. It was a far from perfect return to the ground, an act that would cause amusement amongst his peers, he was sure.

Fusselwag however no longer cared for such things. The cruel jibes of the others who gathered in the stone artifice beneath the blue skies of their home no longer mattered to him.

He was, as in so many other things, above such matters.

Unlike the others, Fusselwag – poor, lame-legged Fusselwag – had not forgotten that the endless blue skies and the breaking clouds were the home from which they had been exiled but also to which they rightfully belonged. The stone artifice was but a prison, a gaol, and, like any other gaol, with all its wardens and cruelty, it was unable to truly hold one of such noble spirit as he.

For even though his body was wounded, his right foot severed, the flesh poorly healed, leaving only a raw stump as reminder, his spirit was indomitable; received from a far greater power than that which had conceived of his poorly designed body.

"poorly healed...

For all the beauty of his wings, his keen dark eyes and his varied shaded feathers, Fusselwag knew his body was as much a prison as the stone artifice around him.

Abruptly, he felt his daydreaming interrupted by the presence of another – swift-footed and silent, given away only by the nervous cooing as his large, black eyes blinked quickly, scanning the cobbled stones for signs of food and predators.

“Still dreaming, Fusselwag?” he asked nervously between the noises Fusselwag suspected were made to reassure himself rather than locate others.

“As much as you are, Cindersoot,” the older bird replied, “the difference being that we dream of very different matters.”

Cindersoot did not look up at the other bird, keeping his eyes fixed solely on the stones before him,

“You should concern yourself with more important matters, you know – like eating or mating or, I don’t know, just being warm or something.

“This city is our home, you know. I don’t know why you don’t make the most of it. Honestly, the Parliament are beginning to talk of you, you know – and not favourable talk either, Fusselwag; cruel talk, nasty talk.”

“Let them talk,” Fusselwag said angrily, “there are more important things than the concerns of the Parliament of Fowls’ gossip.”

Cindersoot blinked more nervously than Fusselwag would have thought possible had he not known the other bird since he was a nestling.

In the short years that dragged them down like centuries in the stone artifice, Fuselwag had seen Cindersoot raised from sickly newborn to subordinate adult, an anxious and weary member of their circle, forever on the outside, pecking at leftovers abandoned by bigger birds as he dreamed of nothing but being accepted as one of their number.

“L-Like what?” the younger bird questioned, paused and, for the fist time, as he lifted his head, slowly turned his dark eyes towards Fusselwag.

"lifted his head...

“Don’t tell me you’re still going on about that sky business, that old heaven nonsense, are you?”

Fusselwag’s feathers ruffled in annoyance, a sea of greys, whites and blacks rising along the curve of his spine.

“It’s not nonsense, Cindersoot,” he joined.

Cindersoot affected a look of disinterest, the kind of look he hoped would win him favour with others of their kind.

“If I’ve heard you say that once, I’ve heard you say it a million times,” the younger bird said sharply – far sharper than he would have been with any of the others, Fusselwag noted.

“You have to give these things up, you know. They’re not healthy – they’re not real.”

Fusselwag lifted his head, staring up at the breaking down, the endless horizon occluded by the minarets and towers of the stone artifice, those perches the wardens of the artifice had raised up in order that they too might be elevated to the blue skies beyond.

His body was old, he reflected, riddled with the parasites that bred in the gutters of the artifice, the parasites that had never existed in their first home.

Yet he was not defeated.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on National Express coaches recently. The great thing about this is that it affords me a lot of time to think, the bad thing about it is that I rarely get to act on such thoughts. This means that a lot of ideas get abandoned in those halfway lands between the initial creative spark and actualisation. It also means that a lot of current projects remain in limbo.

As a means to tie up loose ends and to inspire new ideas, I’ve recently begun to email a few very old friends about some of these ideas. My first email, on the 26th June went something like this:

"doomed to repeat the same cycle..."

The result was even better than I could have imagined.

ROLAND (For Jac)

There is just no way to argue with the stance and posture of the man.

Having been realised, Roland, of course, soon started to talk.

The following is a brief excerpt from notes made this morning on yet another National Express coach:

“There’s not much to recommend Stratford. If you’re not from here, you probably think Stratford’s that place where Shakespeare lived and all that but you’re wrong, that’s Stratford-upon-Avon, that ain’t even in London.

“Why you even looking at me like that? Do I look like tourist information?

“Anyway, Stratford. It’s all right. It’s nothing special. Better than Hackney, certainly better than where you’re from.

“It’s not bad, you know. You’re not far from Bow and you can get into Leytonstone or Romford or Walthamstow – that’s where I come from properly, you know – if that’s what you need. From there you can go into Chingford maybe, or Edmonton or something but you probably don’t need to.

“Like I said, Stratford’s got connexions to all of East London so you’re all right, if you know what I mean; Bow, Mile End, Aldgate and the city proper.

“Me, I work in the city for real, you know. Weird shit happens in there, the stuff they don’t tell you about on Wikipedia. You get past Stepney Green and Whitechapel and into Cheapside in the shadow of St. Paul’s and it’s like there’s something really old watching over you. Something serious, man.

“That’s my job, yeah. Dealing with all the serious stuff that comes in and out of the ghost gate on Ludgate Circus.

“You might want to call me a private detective or a ghostbuster or whatever but you’re wrong. I’m not no black Harry Potter… but I am wise to this shit.

“And that’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m telling you this story and not the other way around.

“Now shut up and listen to me and shit, yeah?”

Perhaps not in October but, at the back of my mind, there is a vague plan forming about the possibility of booking a table for next year’s London MCM Expo.

Expect to hear more about this at a later date.

As of this morning I’ve been searching on a nostalgic whim for a copy of Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen on vinyl. This album has been an intermittent soundtrack to my life. Nekyia, one of the mythical 27+ stories, was written entirely to the sounds of this album as recently as 2008 but the first time I heard the album in its fullness was ten years ago in a house in Hackney at the behest of fellow author and talented guitarist, Dave Karnstein. If you follow the link to amazon for his collection, Cats and Logic, you’ll note that the review from November 2000 from ‘A Customer’ was actually written by the author of this blog. Unlike Ocean Rain though, it appears that Cats and Logic can’t be found for under a fiver on ebay, something that is actually quite sad.

2009 is something of an anniversary year for me, not just because it’s been ten years since I heard Ocean Rain but also because it’s been ten years since I met my wife, ten years since the creation of a character named Livingston Chance (more on him later) and ten years since the publication of a book called Love Amongst Strangers.

Whilst idly going through stacks of books piled into shelves in the cluttered hallway bookcases, I found a stack of paperwork relating to the publication of Love Amongst Strangers, some of which I intend to reproduce here to serve as a kind of memorial to this most lonesome of teenage publications. One piece from the Royston Mercury, I won’t post here because it is, quite frankly, embarrassing and, whilst all of these pieces of paper are embarrassing to one degree or another, the above mentioned is the most embarrassing, therefore it can stay buried for now.

What I will post today however is a review from populist Science Fiction magazine, SFX from December 1999. This was kind of a big deal for me as no one in my circle of the time had been featured in the magazine before. I remember my girlfriend-later-to-be-wife received a phone call from her brother telling us about the review and we went out to a little newspaper stand behind a shopping centre to buy a copy. I felt that, even if I achieved nothing else, at least I had been reviewed in SFX. This was somewhat fortunate for me as I later went on to achieve nothing else. When A Nation of Shadows was published, I sent a copy to them but nothing ever came of it, which was probably for the best in light of the errors that plagued the latter novel’s manuscript.

SFX #58 p104 (part 1)

SFX #58 p104 (part 2)

There are quite a few other bits and pieces I found such as commentary on both Love Amongst Strangers and my ‘audition piece’ (a 30 odd page piece named Exorcism in D Minor that begins with the statement, “If this is not already my darkest hour then I shall do my utmost to make it so.”) but I’m going to try and stagger my posting of such information in the misguided hope that it might get you all psyched for the forthcoming sequel (go on, try).

In other news, yesterday, I finally finished my first draft of a planned story featuring yeti, yokai and a whole mountain range of snow in a Lovecraft meets Planets of the Apes inspired tale intended for release as part and parcel of a *.pdf project for the pen and paper role-playing types. I won’t claim to really be too familiar with role-playing games but hopefully my loving homage to the science fiction and fantasy genres of the 1950s and 1960s should be enough to encourage you to part with your pennies, right?

…

Should that not be the case there are some other more RPG specific pieces in the release which I’m sure will win you over, providing of course, that you have a heart.

More information on this can be found on the registry page of paizo.com and RPGLife however, I dare say that, once editing is complete you’ll hear about this from me again.

Until then, I have a cup of tea to make.

I’ve mentioned briefly (i.e. scratched the surface) that music is a significant influence on mood when writing. Another important part of the process is to make sure that I don’t read anything detrimental to the way I write.

I will fully admit to being omnivorous in my tastes and I have more than a fondness for disposable pop culture but, whilst in the process of writing a book, I find it imperative to only read books that are either so far in theme and style from the content of what I am writing as to make them impossible to reconcile or to read non-fiction. I call this my ‘reading diet’.

When not writing a book, then the diet’s over and I’m allowed to ’snack’ on franchise media ties, pulp titles and teenage fiction. This isn’t to say that any of these genres don’t possess their own charms and qualities and shouldn’t be considered as important books in their own right but, like I said, I’m omnivorous and I will devour and incorporate anything and everything into what I’m doing even if it’s detrimental to the story I’m trying to tell. This happened for a while when I was reading a lot of Doctor Who tie-in fiction.

I’m a big fan of the old Doctor Who and I really enjoyed some of the ways in which Virgin Publishing pushed the envelope with the style and context of the series’ central precepts but the company did have the unfortunate habit of also hiring some really bad writers to write some really bad books. I’m not going to name names but, after a while, I found myself so mired in the drudgery of what I was reading that it utterly sapped my energy to write. This happened smack bang in the middle of working on Do Not Choose to Ask My Name, and again (I think) during A Nation of Shadows. It didn’t result in a happy atmosphere as I am, of course, not the kind of person that leave a book unfinished once he’s started reading. It becomes like a challenge, a test of sheer bloodymindedness. Thus, everyone suffered.

By the time I had committed myself to writing Sophistry (I think I made the final decision to write the book sometime around November 2007, having ‘met’ the characters on a bus journey to work a year or so previously) I resolved to change my habits and hence my reading diet came into effect. The only two books I touched during the five or six months I wrote Sophistry were Peter Ackroyd’s epic London: The Biography (which actually influenced my writing in a much more positive way) and Nabokov’s Lolita, which I had, until then, had a terrible record of beginning to read and then falling asleep – this is, of course, no judgement on the quality of Nabokov’s writing.

This time around I’ve been reading Emma by Jane Austen and Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. So far, Murakami is working out better for me than Austen but I also feel that this is because I’m kind of learning some life lessons from him.

I would also be lying if, despite my best efforts, his memories about his early writing career weren’t party in my attempts to make this blog a solid collection of ideas about how I write.

He’s also almost convinced me to take up running…but that’s a conversation for a different time, I think.