How low can they go?

The tabloid press in the UK have always been gutter scum - but the latest revelations about tapping the phone of a murdered girl show they can sink to even lower depths. Further vile revelations are following, including taps on the relatives of victims of the 7/7 bombings in London and the parents of the murdered Soham girls:

News of the World hacked 7/7 Family phones

One hopes that heads will roll over this, frankly Rupert Murdoch himself should stand down. In the meantime - don't buy The Sun, don't buy The News of the World, don't buy The Times or Sunday Times, stop watching Fox, cancel your Sky subscription, even, stop watching The Simpsons.

Half acceptance....

June was spent mostly writing a new short story which will be getting submitted to Triskaideka Books for their "Masters of Horror: Grave Grimoire" anthology. It's an undead themed anthology - my story is a mix of sex, drugs, rock'n' roll and the living dead. For once I did not have to write the whole thing and then figure out what the story was actually about and write it all again...

As is often the case though, the minor character who was there to provide a vital body organ turned out to have a lot more going for her than I realised, which is all part of the fun of writing. The story is with my current grammar/ punctuation nazi, which is always necessary, considering the way I use semi-colons in particular. Hell, leave out the semi-colon, just write two short, sharp sentences - c'oh!

This month, I will do a story for another anthology, wanting stories about Monster Hunters - I've been writing rough "treatments" - already it has switched from a story about a grizzled werewolf hunter, to one about a lady monster hunter who's after something that might be, or might not be a werewolf. Actually, I'd better pull my finger out on that one.

Some good news - my superhero story "The Girl who blew his mind", starring the Man with a Million Brains, has made the first cut of the anthology, but the Editor still has to make decisions around how much space he's got to play with.

Today's Drabble continuing the story of Oog and Sog, is partially inspired by Christopher Hitchen's "God is Not Great" - he's very angry about the whole thing, but frankly, does make a lot of valid points.

Oog and Sog gazed at the night sky. There were lots of stars but no-one had invented numbers so no-one knew how many.

“Where did they come from?” asked Sog, ignoring his hunger.

Oog thought. “Either, a burst of energy sent out lots of stuff which bashed into each other to make lots of bigger things. On our big thing, lots of that stuff mixed together over lots of time to make us, sitting here, looking at lots of other big things.”

“Or?” said Sog.

“Some bloke just switched it all on.”

“Could we ask that bloke for more deer?”

Submitted, rejected, being written and consequences..

A status update:

"Trip Hawker and the Asteroid of Vengeance" is waiting to be published in "Rockets, Swords and Rainbows" anthology.
"Trip Hawker and the Point of Death" is currently "in process" with RayGun Revival - meaning it's been read by a slush reader and is waiting for an Editor to peruse. So someone thought it worth pushing along the chain, which is nice.
"The Big Three-oh" was finally let go by "Andromoda Spaceways Inflight Magazine" - it was accepted but didn't fit in with their upcoming issues. They were good enough to give me some kind feedback, so I'll need to see where else this can be submitted.
"Everybody Goes to Hell" has been submitted to WilyWriters competition for members of the Masters of Horror group.

Work in progress:

I'm working on my submission to Masters of Horror: Grave Grimoire - an anthology of undead fiction. My story is a sick little number about pop stars, groupies and weird voodoo priests. It's rolling in at about 6500 words at the moment, but my first re-cut should trim it back to 5000 (lose the more obvious exposition and get rid of the adverbs etc) - then we'll look at the re-jigging and beefing up and toning down. Hopefully a good title will occur to me at some point.

After that:

I am determined to have a go at a novel - BUT what to write....I have several ideas but the fact that nothing has made me run at it (or maybe I'm just daunted by the whole prospect), makes me wonder if that they're just not the "right" idea. Or perhaps I should just get off my lazy butt and write SOMETHING.

Current notions:

Carrie Black is Dead - being the tale of an embittered corpse and a ball of hate.
Strange Days in the Budaland - sword and sorcery in a hot, desert landscape.
What's it all about? - far future society and the search for meaning.

And recent mind-vomit splurged up overnight:

A Boy and his Dog - in a screwed up small town, an abusive father chucks his son's dog out to the mercy of the weird things in the woods. But the dog returns...

Hell, one thing at a time - let's get the voodoo/ popstar story finished and sent off...

Todays drabble is inspired by the life and achievements of Thomas Midgley Jr - who I read about in Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything. Midgley was one of the pioneers of putting lead into petrol, a dangerous process which nearly killed him (when he demonstrated how safe it was to journalists). They made the process safer but the longer term consequences of leaded petrol took many decades to address.

However, Midgley topped this considerable acheivement by inventing CFCs - one of the main contributors to Global Warming. To be fair, it took decades before anyone realised CFCs were a problem, but it makes you wonder about how much we might consider the wider consequences of our actions...

Oog was freezing. No matter how many skins he heaped on himself, he was still cold. He rubbed sticks together to keep moving and warm. Suddenly there was a spark and then a flame.

He felt warmth and added more sticks.

Sog arrived with a deer. There was something orange by Oog. He sat down.

“It’s warm,” said Sog.

“Neat, eh?” said Oog.

“We should do more of it,” said Sog.

“We need wood,” said Oog, “we’d need to cut down some of these trees.”

Sog shrugged. “There are millions of trees. We’ll never run out. What could go wrong?”

A rant about literary fiction...

I’ve got issues with Literary Fiction. Admittedly, I have read very little of what is marketed as Literary Fiction (and I appreciate that authors may not necessarily class their books as such but seeing stacks of books with suitably arty covers all over the walls at Borders implies it’s a powerful marketing term.) My issue with Lit Fiction is as a marketing concept; the books themselves may be perfectly good reads.

My problem with Lit Fiction is that it appears to be consciously NOT Genre fiction (eg Sci-Fi, Western, Crime etc) but, it’s not hard to see certain repeated conventions dominating such books – it’s a genre whether it likes it or not. My rough checklist of Lit Fiction conventions:

• Arty-farty cover with only an abstract connection to the story.
• Not set in the English speaking world (Chocolat, The Shadow of the Wind).
• Detail about some kind of artisanship – (Chocolat, The Vinter’s Luck)
• Connection to real historical events which are known, but not too well known, or some suitably novel aspect is addressed (The Shadow of the Wind and Franco’s Spain, Birdsong and miners digging underneath the trenches/ no-man’s land)
• Pretensions to some deep and meaningful universal human truth but without any great insight actually turning up (all of them…)

There is, to my mind, a desire for Lit Fiction to be worthy. You, the reader, will learn something as opposed to just being entertained. There is an implication that there is something wrong with simply sitting down and enjoying a thumping good read. This even infects stuff like Harry Potter – which is why (in the UK at least) the books were each printed with an adult and children’s edition – different covers, the words remained exactly the same.

Is there something wrong with genre media (meaning books, films, TV and so on)?

Is this a reaction to some culture becoming so completely devoid of relevance (ie, so-called reality TV) that as consumers we don’t want to be associated with that trash so want to think we’re being immersed in more substantial fare? Perhaps, someone I work with said that if they were ever going to read “War and Peace”, they’d read it in book form, not on their e-reader – they wanted people to see they were reading it.

OR, has genre culture become so “franchised” (eg Star Wars, Trek etc) that we see it as just another machine produced product?

And in response – Literary Fiction in exactly 100words

‘Joseph kneaded the dough in the traditional way, used in this part of France for centuries. He could have done it the modern way, but since Jerome’s death, he wanted to do the work, to put something of himself back into it, something to remember and honour his brother.

The door creaked open. It was Mariette, the girl his brother had come to France for.

“The bread, it is how Jerome did it,” she said with a smile. It was her first smile since Jerome had died in Bleriot’s plane. Her hand met Joseph’s and they kneaded the dough together.’

Goddamn, I am so sarcastic...

Another submission out the door....

The deadline for the SpecFicNZ competition was today (31/03/11) - so naturally it took until right up to today to finish off my story (Trip Hawker and the Point of Death) and get it submitted.
Frankly, I have no idea what kind of chance it has of winning, I worry that my writing is a bit low-brow for NZ tastes - although the competition is being run by the Wily Writers website which is based in the US.

This story is the second to feature my character, Trip Hawker, (the first, ..and the Asteroid of Vengeance is soon to turn up in "Rockets, Swords and Rainbows: New Tales of Science Fiction") - it's deliberately breathless pulp, hopefully with a bit of oomph in the subject matter, but more than anything, I want it to be a thumping good piece of action. If I have an issue with New Zealand writing, it always seems to be very deliberately deep and meaningful - I should note that there is still lots of excellent writing, but I find it all a little serious.

Interestingly, the main force behind the Wily Writers website is Angel Leigh McCoy who penned the superb "Barnes Family Reunion" in the Masters of Horror anthology (also featuring my story, "Something Unpleasant")  ... Angel's story is NOT any reflection of my own family get-togethers...

Todays drabble is inspired by the dramatic tumbling of despotic regimes across the middle-east and the exciting surge of democracy and freedom...

The President’s bunker was finally breached and the Allied troops charged in, shooting the henchmen of the tyrant.

Captain Flint pointed his gun at the President.

“Flint,” said the President, “remember when we took out those terrorists?”

Flint smiled. “This is nothing personal, but we’re on the side of the freedom fighters now.”

The President shrugged. “Freedom fighters, terrorists?” Flint shot him dead.

The rebel leader stormed in, shoved the President’s body aside and tried out the chair behind the desk.

“So when are the elections?” asked Flint.

The Leader waved a hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll get round to it.”

Super-heroics for Canterbury, not so super heroics for my story....

I finally finished and submitted my superhero story “The Girl who blew his mind” to the Beta City Anthology – and once again, its writing is a tale of three different stories, all different. The first was a straight good vs evil battle with Redstar, our socialist super hero taking on evil aliens with his more human nemesis, Charles Vance complicating issues. Version two made Redstar more of an ally of Mr Vance, but one who was about to be thoroughly stabbed in the back as the story progressed. Our final version sees Redstar deleted altogether and Charles Vance (now the Man with a Billion Brains) takes centre stage in a furious battle in cyberspace and his own psyche!!!!

It has been fun working on this story. As always, I had to go through my weird process to discover what my story actually is. What is slightly annoying is that if it is rejected (or maybe when) I really have no idea what to do with it – unlike my western horror story, which has been bounced around a couple of other horror anthologies, this story was conceived and written for one particular anthology.

Ah well, it is out there now, and although I’m not particularly confident, I still take satisfaction in actually finishing it. As Neil Gaiman advised at the Wellington Readers and Writers Festival last year, if you want to be a writer you’ve got to write and finish stuff. The writing bit is sort of obvious, but the finishing bit was a very good tip – my hard drive is still littered with half done stuff – it is a good habit to grind on through to the end, as I have found, it may not be the story I want, but it often points to the story that I’m after. At the signing session after his talk, Neil stole my Gold pen... but that’s another story.

Talking of Neil Gaiman, he has agreed to provide a story for a great anthology that is being worked on right now: Tales for Canterbury. It’s a book being put together by Cassie Hart and Anna Caro (both of whom have excellent stories in “A Foreign Country”) and all proceeds from it will be going to help victims of the Christchurch earthquake.

And this blog’s drabble – a bit of Biblical satire...

God waved to Adam. “All OK?” He called.

Adam waved cheerily back. “Sweet as,” he shouted back as Eve, his stunning, naked wife walked up.

“Now,” said God, “you haven’t eaten from the tree of knowledge, eh?”

“Course not,” said Adam.

“Cool,” said God, and off He trotted. He found the Serpent.

“So they’re not eating the fruit?” said the Serpent.

“No,” said God, “how is My Plan supposed to work if they won’t eat the fruit?”

“I could tell them to eat it?” said the Serpent.

“Oh go on, then,” said God, “we’ve got to get this going somehow.”

New Year, new writing, new reading, new child..

The year was old 22 days old when I got my first creation of the year out - to be fair, it was a collaboration with my wife, and she actually did most of the work. Eddie was born on 22nd January and is reminding me of how newborn babies work. I've impressed myself with how the skills of changing nappies, feeding, the sterilizer and managing the baby capsule for the car are all coming back to me.

I've had two weeks off and am looking forward to getting back to work for a rest. My writing has taken a definite back-seat, but helping with a ten day old and keeping my three and half year old amused are, at least, good excuses as to why I'm not writing.

However, the announcement of the SpecFicNZ short story competition sent a jolt to my creative bone - I woke up the other day with a fully formed story bubbling in my head. It features a couple of characters that have been rattling around my mind for years but I've never quite figured out a story to put them into, but this one was just right. And, suddenly seeing Emily Blunt as my female lead helped give her character that she had never had. It's pretty fast and furious, I doubt it will be more than 3000 words, but that's a relief really - usually it all gets way too complicated.

Take my superhero story - it started with a fight between hero and villain and aliens, then it became a more localised fight between hero and villain and aliens, then it morphed into a virtual fight between hero WITH villain and aliens...and now, in its hopeful last state, my hero has vanished, my villain has stepped into the lead role and the aliens are a whole new bunch....

Okay, today's drabble - 100 words inspired by the Rugby Sevens, which are on TV as I write...

Fred Flinstone was at the bar. Barney and Wilma shouted at him but Homer, Lisa and Ned Flanders were trying to push past.

The barman shoved six bottles over to Fred. Homer shoved Fred, who stumbled back, barging into a furious wookie and knocking a soggy burger to the floor.

A French maid stepped in the burger and he slipped over. Barney helped the maid up and she realised she worked in the same building as the maid.

Romance was blossoming, wookies were shouting and the Simpsons weren’t getting served. Somewhere, somebody was playing rugby, but who cared about that?