O Miracle Fish Of Divination!

As is traditional at Christmas, I've contributed a piece of spoken word doggerel to Adam Ings' annual seasonal compilation under my nom de Yule Gin And Flamingoes. Big thanks to Adam for prodding me to get it done - the circumstances under which I tend to work best. :)

This year, it was inspired by the fortune-telling fish you often find in crackers. The first two lines, with their odd phrasing, are taken literally from the piece of paper interpreting the fish's movements. From there, it was easy to ad-lib as if the fish were some kind of grandiose oracle worthy of cultic adoration.

And see here for a proper scientific explanation of how the fish works, which does involve sodium polyacrylate, as the last line of the last verse suggests. We may or may not be entertaining on this blog, but by gum we're educational.

Gin And Flamingoes present O Miracle Fish Of Divination!

O miracle fish of divination!
With the wonderful magic to tell the fortune,
Tell us who we are this Christmas.
 
O miracle fish of divination!
Taken from your larval cracker,
By your sweaty-palmed disciples,
By your paper-hatted preachers,
Let the augury begin!
Let the movements indicate.

Moving head means jealousy,
Moving tail is independence,
Move­­­ head and tail for those in love.

Curling sides for one so fickle,
Motionless - for all you zombies,
And those curled up are passionate.

O miracle fish of divination!
In your writhing you have spoken,
In our hands you found our fate,
What wonderful magic,
That sees the future - 
Sodium polyacrylate.

Take a sideways look at your Twitter persona with Poetweet

Yes, John Craddock (@Johnbaldy) pointed me towards Poetweet, a lovely little site which takes your tweets and attempt to turn them into proper sonnets etc.

Here's two poems worth of what it does to mine. I like them - they would only need a few tweaks to be confusingly pleasing.

Douglas Adams once wrote about a spreadsheet program which converted financial figures into musical notation and played your accounts as tunes. And Poetweet is something of the same - it provides an alternative representation of what we actually tweet about - our preoccupations, our stylistic quirks, our calls to action.

And, since we can't think in straight lines all the time, isn't that interesting?

***

With a gothic counterpoint.
To stop fracking in Lancashire
Camp indie rpg at some point...
Could you be a in Hertfordshire?

Obvs - there would be spillages.
Death metal band names I’ve heard.
Mace ('bout that mace) - no edges.
Michel Foucault Pokemon card

The toxoplasma of online rage.
Rather enjoying LA Woman...
A lot easier to update your page

With - DM me for dial in details.
And Ludicra's The Tenant. :)

'All power to the parish councils!'

***

Presents her Sonic Youth set list
Catharsis in tight leather trousers
- and I now have a shortlist. :)
Now that’s power in numbers

We're all acting, I guess. :)
Safe and speedyish travels!
Welcome on work in progress.
Local school for free solar panels!

We muster!
After fighting the good fight.
Taken with Larry The Lung later.
Jailhouse in Hereford last night.

Awesome poster!

NaNoWriMo: inconclusion

Well, I didn't quite manage it - approximately 12,000 words of a Draft Zero. But it's been a really positive experience - my best failure yet.

Why?

• I've settled into a routine of writing on my commute to or from work most days.
• I've not gone back and edited - the problem that's done for my attempts at long-form fiction in the past.
• It's got me thinking about lots of different ideas again - about the future, about identity, about politics and people.
• I've entertained myself and had fun in the process.

I've not shown it to anyone yet - it's too unformed and protean to make any coherent sense as I chip away at the idea of a story. But I'm looking forward to showing people Draft One.

Speaking of which, the objective now is to press on to 25,000 words by Christmas - this steps up the pace a bit but doesn't feel unmanageable.

As part of that, I imagine December on the blog is going to be mainly short pieces, either to fill the gaps or articulate some of the themes coming out of what I'm writing.

If the latter, it might get a bit chin-stroking - you have been warned.

Blog-break: doing NaNoWriMo

So don't expect a prolific month on the blog.

I hope by the end of November to have a fairly poor first draft with flashes of something interesting I can build on for Round 2. So that's got to be the priority.

What's the story about? I'm not entirely sure yet, but making-it-up-as-I-go-along screwball transhuman satire seems to about cover it at this stage.

Here's the first fragment.

Arthur C Clarke - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Reformulation 1 - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from manic.

Reformulation 2 - Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

Reformulation 3 - Any sufficiently advanced social science is in indistinguishable from magic.

The Mask Scene

The Mask Scene hit the party.
The mark of Legion on each face.
The Mask Scene take to the dancefloor.
Strike one down and two more take their place.

The Mask Scene got will to power
Say they've got shoes to fill.
They reassure the host, whose smile's a ghost.
They're only here with time to kill

The Mask Scene got culture of change.
And you can hear them say.
On our way.
ON OUR WAY!

The Mask Scene beckon to the belles and beaux
An offer they dare not refuse
They slow dance while they wait for the capture of the state
The Mask Scene are making the news.

The scenesters are rolling the drunks down the hill.
Their masks are starting to fall.
From the commanding heights they bid us goodnight.
That damn mask scene is running it all.

The Mask Scene got culture to change
And you can hear them say.
On our way.
ON OUR WAY!

Gin & Flamingoes present Weihnachtsmarkt

Here's Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) my annual spoken word contribution to Adam Ings' Bibby Factors Christmas music compilation - audio version here.

I had the idea of filtering a typical experience at Birmingham's German Christmas Market through Kraftwerk's The Hall of Mirrors -  so the following works better if you read it in the meter of the song. Possibly also in a slightly blank, robotic tone of voice, although your mileage may vary. 

The last chorus in particular only really works if you assume it's being declaimed in a very Mitteleuropa accent.

And if Ralf or Florian by some strange twist of fate are reading this, all I can say is that I'm very, very sorry.

The young man stepped into the Christmas market
Where he discovered a reflection of himself
Dressed in a Christmas pudding jumper
Hat and ears like he was cosplaying an elf

Said his double "Change your ways and fast"
"For I am the spirit of the Weihnachtsmarkt."

"Yeah, you'd better change your ways and fast.
For I am the spirit of the Weihnachtsmarkt"

His doppelganger led him through the market
A panopticon of robotic St Nicks
As they moved past the booths and the parties
He found it harder to be detatched
To be i-ron-ic. 

They shot the breeze over sausages and Glühwein
Under the lights of the golden carousel
Looked at rock salt lamps, dream-catchers and crystals
A descent into some yoghurt-weaving hell

Asked our Scrooge "is it me or is it that"
"No one with any taste would buy this tat?"

"Is it just me or is that
No-one with any taste would buy this tat?"

But suddenly he fell in love with Christmas
He understood the Weihnachtsphantom's pitch
The creepy Santa automata turned heartwarming
To step into Xmas, you must embrace the kitsch

So he made up the partygoer he wanted to be
And changed into a festive personality

And even our humbugger
Has been changed for good in the Weihnachtsmarkt
Yes, even our narrator
Has been changed for good in the Weihnachtsmarkt

There's a guest post by me...

... at Stephan Burn's Endless Realms writing blog. It's called Romantics and replicants: Art and escapism with Jane Austen and Roy Batty.

Like many readers of fantasy and SF, you could say with Roy Batty that I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: sorcerers’ apprentices duelling with magic for power and pride; giant sandworms with vacuum cleaner bodies rearing out of the Arrakeen desert; first contact with aliens with names from the minds of heterodox Scrabble players.

If you're interested in writing, check the whole of the blog out - in particular this fine example of Stephan's writing.

I've finished a story - Swanmaiden's Blues completed!

I am busy finishing off and uploading all my thwarted attempts at writing short fantasy and SF stories and an effort to build up a portfolio. The first one is now finished. So here is Swanmaiden's Blues - be gentle with it.

Believing herself hunted, the Swan prefers to hide in plain sight. So she fits into a scene, like she's done before; she adds a few piercings and brings more black into her wardrobe; dyes her hair a deep orange-red; learns the difference between true and false metal, cult and kvlt. Wears an Angel Dust or Great Annihilator T-shirt when she wants to make a private joke.

Swanmaiden was an attempt at writing a modern fantasy short story I made several attempts at in 2010 and 2011. It's still a little on the Bronte/Tenessee Williams end of the emotional spectrum but it's now relatively underwritten compared with previous unfinished versions.

All constructive criticism welcome. You do not need an account on Fictionpress (where the story has been uploaded) to contribute your thoughts - there should be a free-text box for reviews at the end of the text where you can add your comments.

Thanks!

Cthulhukitsch

Of all the feats of geek culture, the one which most consistently surprises and intrigues me is its ability to twist the writings of HP Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) into novelty shapes. And sometimes even make money from it.

That's Lovecraft, the writer of horror and weird fantasy whose protagonists generally mutate, go mad, die or some noxious combination of the three; Lovecraft, the misanthrope and holder of some unsavory views about non-white races which ought to severely test the Wagner Defence for any fan; Lovecraft, man of a thousand hysterical adjectives, usually loathsome, hideous and blasphemous.

The Lovecraft, who in spite of all of the above wrote a small number - I stress the word small - of truly great short stories in which he dialed down his nervous tics and channelled his talents into saying just this: that what humanity laughably terms normality, knowledge, civilisation are candles in a universe far larger and darker than we can ever know.

The Lovecraft, whose for-want-of-a-better-term brand ambassador is a titanic giant with an octopoid head sleeping beneath the waves awaiting a time in which he will (consults notes) ah yes, lead humanity in a Nietzschean power-trip culminating in species-death. Or something to that effect.

Sketch of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft

Yet fans, geeks and gamers go mad for cutesy extrapolations of the Lovecraft mythos. And Cthulhu seems to have become the focus for this attention. Not bad for a slimy, squamous  bringer of armageddon.

At the commerical end of the spectrum, take this plush example, courtesy of the Geekest Link. 

Or, from tabletop gaming, Munchkin Cthulhu, from where this free downloadable card originates.

Not to mention the wackier end of the Call of Cthulhu RPG - Cthulhu for President indeed... 

And then, reluctantly joining the 21st century, there's Cthulhu Saves The World for your android phone.

But let's not forget what the fans do purely for the love, like this Adventures of L'il Cthulhu animation

Or pushing the boat out still further, Lovecraftian webcomics, Lolthulu, and Cthulhu Mythos Christmas jingles (clip below).

You can find more examples of Cthulhukitsch in a Guardian article I swear I haven't read.

But my question is not: should I join in by attempting to rewrite the theme tune to the Mickey Mouse Club among Lovecraftian lines (and I assure you, you can fit C-T-H-U-L-H-U F-T-H-A-G-N in there). Rather, it's why? Why has Cthulhu become the cosmic threat beyond space and time it's ok to like? 

I've got two possible answers to run up the flagpole here. One, while Lovecraft wouldn't have known how to promote his work if it was carved in prehistoric runes on a mysterious monolith thirty foot high, he did have extraordinarily savvy (culturally if not commercially) posthumous champions. Right from his death in the 1930's, supporters like August Derleth founded Arkham House to ensure his work, never properly published outside of pulp magazines in his lifetime, was properly and respectfully released. 

Authors since then have written further works in the Lovecraftian universe, or at least in his idiom, further extending its tentacular reach through fandom. Further amplified by the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and works in other media (see examples above, but also Metallica songs, Re-animator movies etc) HP has grown to the point where - beyond the grave - he is an undisputed big deal.

Yet the Lovecraft legacy has been distorted over the years such that he has become to wierd fiction what Elvis is to rock and roll. You don't need to listen to Elvis to go to Graceland, talk about jelly bean sandwiches or invoke the rhinestone jump suit. Similarly, you don't need to read Lovecraft in geek culture to roll off - and crucially parody - the list of tropes he's associated with: madness; cultists; forbidden knowledge; tentacles; indescribable horror; the Necronomicon, the word 'squamous'. 

I didn't read much of his work until my thirties and I still could have told you all about him, after having put both hands to my chin and waved my fingers in a tentacular fashion.  

In other words, pop culture Lovecraft (as opposed to Lovecraft the writer) is ripe for commodification, homage and satire.

And yet there's a second possibility here - that at his best (say, The Whisperer in Darkness or The Shadow Over Innsmouth), there is something sufficiently disturbing and original still in Lovecraft that the urge to camp him up, to ironically enjoy him, to consume plush offshoots of his work, is a defence mechanism. 

We laugh at his obsessions - and boy is it easy to laugh at him - because if we go back to the books and allow him to draw us in then he still, as an outsider artist with a singular vision, has the power to unnerve, to ask what lies beyond the reach of our candle in the darkness.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft, the Call of Cthulhu

Another old writing fragment - a cranky narrator explains role-playing games

Know, oh resplendent readers, that the tale before you is set in a time when the ancient littoral civilisations, the ancient empires of the West, had reached their considerable peak of cultural achievement. Let me tell you something, it is an epic, lords and ladies. And there will be elves.

Well, perhaps I'm not being entirely straight with you. To be honest, it is a story about stories of adventure, heroism and all that lah-dee-dah. Stories and the people who tell them. Make them anew, break them, and cast their defiance into the sharp and pointy teeth of chance with ten and twenty-sided dice.

The illuminated will recognise from the above description that this a story of own Great Game – call it role-playing, call it Dungeons & Dragons if your lawyer permits, or just call it gaming for simplicity's sake. Even, if you're prone to hyperbole, call it the pinnacle of our culture and the ultimate synthesis of all disciplines. Some may bestow that accolade elsewhere, there are those who may speak of some affair with glass beads, and wild and hairy heretics may even speak of Boggle or Whack-a-Mole. We, however, shall have no truck with such ludic (and ludicrous) deviation.

Was I addressing an audience of the scholars and aesthetes of the Game, no further explanation from me would be required. Yet I have been asked to spin this fancy for a broader audience. An all-to-predictable gesture by my commissioners and sponsors. Sex it up, they say. Make it a five-volume epic with a name ending in -iad, they implore (Old-ropiad, perhaps).

In response, I sigh, and remind myself that while in theory I have a duty to none but my Muse, in practice I have very real duties to my cats, my landlord and my ex-wife, in roughly that order of priority.

So, role-playing. Let's give you a couple of definitions to be going on with.

So, first, your theatrical definition, darlings and dramaturges. If I were to say interactive storytelling to you, what does that do for you? Well, try this: humans have always told one another stories. What we tend to forget in this Age of the Paperback (and the coming Age of the Kindle) is that a story is not just something you buy on a three for two deal in a well-known bookshop but a collective experience.

What if we're all back around the camp-fire (or the kitchen table) telling each other a story, each playing different characters? Collaborating in the creation of a shared world, in whatever genre? Both spectators and actors, or spect-actors, to use a neologism from radical theatre. If you can dig that, then the rules and the polyhedral dice just become a way of resolving that old question – can my favourite character do that? Can he jump the ravine? Can she cast that spell? Can he make the Kessel Run in less than 50 parsecs? No big deal.

With me? No? Okay, if that tripped too many of your hot buttons for pretension, try this second attempt. Imagine a co-operative board game where all but one of the players work together to explore a dungeon, a haunted house or space station. They find treasure, fight monsters and become more powerful. The remaining player designs the dungeon or whatever and controls the traps and monsters. 

Then take away the board and the pieces and ask all the players to run the game in their heads, with the ... ah ... dungeon master describing the situation and the others having their characters react to it. Here, in what you might call the war-gaming tradition in role-playing, tactics are paramount and rules matter, while character is a nice to have, not an essential item.

You can probably tell from this where my own sympathies lie without me having to spell them out for you. Just don't get me started on W**** of W**craft and it's on-line bastard brood.

What, you would have my name too? Such things have power, you know? [Pause] Do you know, I almost said that with a straight face, but I was never any good at poker. All I'm saying is that the pointy hat and the beard come with the role, and you won't find me wearing them in the bar later. Read what I said  about the compromise between art and commerce.

So if it's all the same with you I'd rather keep my name out of this. But apart from that you're in safe hands. I know my THACO from my AC, my Azathoth from my Agadoo. *

What? Do I look like I was there for Temple of Elemental Evil the first time around? Cheeky sod! Let's say I remember second edition and stop asking personal questions, okay?

Any more questions? Good. So, what are you waiting for? Speak, friend and enter! 

 

(*) The only way Lovecraft could have topped the image of a blind, idiot, formless god at the centre of the universe writhing to the feeble piping of an unseen flute would have been the vision of it gyrating to the horrific refrain of 'Agadoo-doo-doo / Push pineapple shake the tree...' Sanity checks all round, I fear

Another old writing fragment – an university, aerial view

Latitude: 53.7696563611, Longitude: -0.367167156976, Altitude: 47, 376 feet. Rate of descent: lazy.  

Follow me, oh reader, follow me down on phantom wings at dawn, down as we bust through the clouds and orgone, towards the planetary petri-dish. 

See the city below segue from Kandinsky to Monet to Mondrian to, to, to, real life as we swoop in drunken downward ammonite spirals to ground level.  

To the centre of the city? No, not yet. Leave that mix of chain store traffic and dockland dilapidation for another time. No, while the thermals and this hawkmannish-boy fantasy permit, let us set the controls to the south, to the university which is the heart of this story. 

Pass over the time-worn terraces, the tower blocks all-a-hung with the symbols of reservation, the threatened Victoriana of the churches and the swimming baths and the triumphant Thatcheriana of the red-brick house-boxes.   

Head for the concrete blocks surrounding the manor house on the outside of town, clamped there like Le Corbusier grafted to Pugin.   

Readers, Dive! And greet The University in all its glory at dawn. Let us land in the centre of the quad. Don't buzz the ducks on the lake. How would you like it?  

How still and torpid universitas castra is in the first light of the morning. Before the invisible army of cleaners and helpmeets arrive and depart, and its symbionts arrive for lectures, seminars, gossip and disporting, before then, all is quiet.   

The magisterial manor house around which the university was built, housing the administration and the offices of those whom the vice-chancellor deems worthy of this perquisite; the student union with the look of the flatulent youth club; the functional gun metal and concrete strongholds of the social sciences, the ivy-tamed outposts of the arts and languages, the glass palaces of business and engineering, the basements of comp sci and surgery.   

In the silence, all seem less real than the faint movement of wind  in the neatly mown grass on the lawn of the quad, on the sports fields where the first joggers are yet to be seen, on the parklands which gently merge with the flatland farms beyond the edge of the city.

Auditing my blog - five tips from Blogging Heroes for improvement

So, having surveyed my blog to date, what does Blogging Heroes recommend me try to increase my readership?

1. Share your experience, expertise and insight in your line of work

I have to confess, I've held back a little from this, if only because Friends of the Earth has sufficient official channels for communication that I didn't want to muddy the waters. But ... it's the advice from Chris Anderson in Blogging Heroes that's stuck with me here. 

Chris Anderson (by James Duncan Davidson from Portland, USA)

Despite serving as the Editor in Chief of Wired while writing The Long Tail, he maintained a separate blog for a variety of good reasons. Not least of which that it allowed him to express his own thoughts and ideas independently as opposed to doing so entirely via the collective platform of the magazine. 

Also important: the majority of things that I'd want to write about in relation to my work wouldn't necessarily be covered through official channels - the joys of playing around with social media, the art of grassroots organisation, despatches from the frontline of environmental and social justice campaigning around the Midlands. 

This is something that I'm relatively uniquely positioned to comment on, as opposed to, say, the joys of the Hobbit, which I enjoy doing but make me only one voice among many. This can be the USP of the blog.

Finally, there's the argument that everyone working for an organisation should be blogging about their work anyway if they feel the calling - if it works for Microsoft as a form of advocacy, then why shouldn't I?

So, I'm still going to post about films, books and anything else that interests me, but stuff I encounter through work is going to be woven in there too. Above all else, I'll follow my passions.

2. Go to other blogs and sources, engage in discussion with them, link to them. Specifically, I'm going to:

• Do Follow Friday on Twitter
• Review and recommend some of my favourite blogs (once a month, say)
• Set-up a blog reading list on my dashboard (I read a lot of blogs but I don't do this)
• Add a blogroll of links to the side of my blog.

This might all seem fairly self-evident, but a confession: I've never been that great at the whole mutual promotion thing. This is not the post for putting myself on the couch, so I'll acknowledge that I could get a whole lot better at this and move on.

3. Write lots of posts in one go and schedule them over a period of several weeks. 

I'm doing this now - the weekend of the 20 and 21st of Jan, we are, if not quite snowbound, more or less stuck in the house unless we want to get snowed on. What else is there to do, now that we've watched the Lion King, save to write, cook and eat?

Some of these posts - like the Storification of HMV's bankruptcy or my report from the Birmingham anti-cuts meeting - have quite a short currency. Others, like my investigation of Cliff-step, the new musical movement which is sweeping the nation, could be dropped in any time or bumped forward if inspiration strikes in the interim,

But this means that I'll - hopefully - have a treasury of posts built up for leaner times. Daily posting is something to aspire to, even if you don't manage it consistently.

4. Get feedback!

Asking people for ideas, thoughts and drollery is something Blogging Heroes' interviewees recommend pretty consistently.

So, remembering that asking people a question rounds off a post nicely, but also could be a post in its own right could be a really good idea.

5.Tweeting smart and other self-promotion

A good friend (Hi @onlystephan) reported that the best response he ever got for one of his blog posts was because he proactively @tted the corporate subject of his post in a tweet. I haven't really gone out of my way to do targetted promotion like this, but if done judiciously I think I might be quite a good strategy to try. 

So, there you have my five point strategy for ramping up my blog this year - wish me luck!

Gin & Flamingoes present Christmastery - final version

For the second year running, I've been working on a spoken word piece for the Bibby Factors Christmas compilation. Here's a final version.

Any resemblance to a certain best-seller is entirely intentional.

“It is time” he says “It is time” says he

As the clock strikes twelve on Christmas eve

“Sign this contract and enter my dark yet glamourous world of X-M-A-S”

“And holy crap!” thinks she for the twenty-fourth time

That night; struck dumb by his ridiculous handsomeness (insert four repetitive paragraphs here)

She signs in golden, glittery ink, and that's that.

“Now”, he says, “Now” says he

“Here are the Rules you must follow for me.

Be of good cheer from dusk till dawn

Have a Santa Stop sign on your lawn

Never refuse a mince pie

Obey Christmas laws with a twinkle in your eye.”

“Behold my room of special toys.

For nice AND naughty girls and boys.

Come my love! It would seem rather timid,

To make the Dr Who Christmas Special your hard limit.

And there may be times you cannot go out

Until you've partaken of the Christmas sprout.”

Though the millionaire toy-maker acted so grim

- in his red woolly jumper with festive trim -

Oh my, our heroine was drawn to him

Isn't he Byronic, dontcha think?

With his glower and power and Christmas kink?

She had realised deep in her medulla oblongata

That these festive fetishes were his desiderata

Her inner goddess saw it as a good sign

That his favourite tune was Mistletoe and Wine

As Foucault The Red Nosed Reindeer played

They danced until the Eve became Christmas Day

But as Yule went on she regretted her decision

His baubled palace seemed more like a prison

She realised her character was badly drawn

And had fallen from fanfic into supermarket porn

And he: more arsey than Darcy; from that voice

Issued endless demands that denied her Christmas choice.

On and on he went, sternly.

Every festive detail spelt out, eternally

“Stuff. The. Turkey.

It's in the contract.

Watch. The. Queens. Speech.

It's in the contract.

Lose. To. Me. At. Scrabble.

It's in the contract.

Deck.The.Halls.

It's in the contract.

Drink. The. Sherry

It's in the contract.

Morecambe. And. Wise.

It's in the contract

Flambe. The. Figgy. Pudding.

It's in the contract.

Pull. The. Cracker.

It's in the contract.

Read. The. Joke

It's in the contract.

Laugh. (Ha. Ha. Ha).

It's in the contract.

Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.”

With chains of tinsel and of paper

She bound him with the product of her own labour

So that when he woke upon Boxing Day

She fixed him with a smile and a spoon to say

“Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.

“Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.”

Gin & Flamingoes presents Christmastery - draft of spoken word piece

For the second year running, I'm working on a spoken word piece for the Bibby Factors Christmas compilation. Here's a good if not yet finalized draft.

Any resemblance to a certain best-seller is entirely intentional.

And yes, the ending in particular still needs some work.

Christmastery

“It is time” he says “It is time” says he

As the clock strikes twelve on Christmas eve

“Sign this contract and enter my dark yet glamourous world of X-M-A-S”

“And holy crap!” thinks she for the twenty-fourth time

That night; struck dumb by his ridiculous handsomeness .

She signs in golden, glittery ink, and that's that.

“Now”, he says, “Now” says he

“Here are the Rules you must follow for me.

Be of good cheer from dusk till dawn

Have a Santa Stop sign on your lawn

Never refuse a mince pie

Obey Christmas laws with a twinkle in your eye.”

“Behold my room of special toys.

For nice AND naughty girls and boys.

“Come my love! It would seem rather timid,

To make the Dr Who Christmas Special your hard limit.”

(she realised deep in her medulla oblongata

That these festive fetishes were his desiderata)

“There may be times you cannot go out

Until you've partaken of the Christmas sprout.

Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.

Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.”

Though the millionaire toy-maker acted so grim

Oh my, our heroine was drawn to him

Isn't he Byronic, dontcha think?

With his glower and power and Christmas kink?

Her inner goddess saw it as a good sign

That his fiscal Cliff was Mistletoe and Wine

As Foucault The Red Nosed Reindeer played – a composition of his own design -

They danced until the Eve became Christmas Day

And on and on he went, sternly.

Every festive detail spelt out, eternally

“Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.

Watch. The. Queens. Speech.

It's in the contract.

Lose. To. Me. At. Scrabble.

It's in the contract.

Deck.The.Halls.

It's in the contract.

Drink. The. Sherry

It's in the contract.

Want. The. Figgy. Pudding.

It's in the contract.

Pull. The. Cracker.

It's in the contract.

Read. The. Joke

It's in the contract.

Laugh. (Ha. Ha. Ha).

It's in the contract.”

Bind him as he sleeps

With chains of tinsel and paper

So that when he wakes upon Boxing Day

Greeted him with a spoon, and a smile and say

“Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.

“Eat. The. Sprouts.

It's in the contract.”

Snippets from the first 10,000 words - Part 4

Festival was Al's idea back in, ah... 2025. We would have stayed just another local gang of AR artful dodgets with a local reputation, a manifesto, and a video-channel, but it was Festival which took it first national, then European, then global.

It was the Field of Dreams approach – he approached the Council about giving him the use of a couple of blocks of practically derelict streets in Digbeth for a “street festival and augmented reality happening.” He claimed he had speakers – Bruce Sterling, Josh Fielden, Ommiah Hanssen, who hadn't accepted yet, some of them didn't even know they'd been invited yet. But that was Al – he always acted as if he had everything or nothing to lose.

He had the backing of the half of the city's artist community who thought he was the new Warhol – the other half hated him, naturally – but I think what must have swung it was the support of the AR-techs and Fab-Labbers up at the University, who jumped at the chance to test out their kit just down the road. They were respected, they made money for the city, in collaboration with them we wrote 3 or 4 of the core apps that underpin what we understand as augmented reality today.

So, we got a green light and off we punks went went. 

***

Inviting the gamers and cosplayers? It was a no-brainer. The artists gamed, the gamers were customising their look with AR and carrying on their games in real life, and the cosplayers coded for a day job and were using the new tech to spruce up their look. After all, to use the classic example, it's hard to rock a Chun-Li look when you're a 6'5 bloke from Bournville. We'd been known to turn up to gigs and parties en masse as characters from our favourite Final Fantasies, so, y'know, this was our scene. Clo and Jake especially, they could go even to the most purist back-to-nature LARPers you can possibly think of and say, “Trust us, this is going to be awesome.”

[...]

So, come June 2025, I was relieved – Steampunk Messiah was I – to discover that we'd got 5,000 people (at least twice our target) to a weekend of phantasmagorical events. We got old Man Sterling and, ah, Neil Stephenson as the marquee speaker on Sunday night and as many chin-stroking workshops about data and Derrida as the theorists could wish for. For the rest of us, there was Lovecraftian suspence gaming, Lankhmarian inn-character inns for mass-participation, and, and the artists had just outdone themselves with the immersive spaces.

 

Snippets from the first 10,000 words Pt 3

Shit. Dan tried to remember which data laws or shared reality conventions he might have might technically infringed in the past month or so, but through the throbbing headache he could only access not so much a memory palace, more a memory hovel. Then, he looked them over more closely and relaxed. These two – a rangy Sikh bloke and a smaller bearded ferret of a man - had standard police issue tablets and visors, which meant they were hip to the flow of crime data. Conceptual art-crime, not so much.

***

As a rule, the rank and file police didn't know what to make of Festival. As with any display of public enjoyment and unorthodoxy, they were torn between wanting to do some good old fashioned repression and taking a low profile approach to policing the event out of sheer incomprehension as much as anything else.

Typically, the end result was somewhere in between the two – on the one hand a couple of outrageous arrests of augmented LARPers or cosplayers for illegal weaponry (“but it's rubber officer! And half of it doesn't even exist in this reality”), on the other hand enjoying having their photo taken with steampunk Sherlocks or slave Leias.

AR-masked taser-happy drones assaulting superficially innocent citizens were decidely out of their pay grade.

***
 

“We're making enquries with anyone who was involved in the Malloy circle, Mr May. Thankfully, for an apparently subversive movement you were awfully keen on publicising who your artpunks were.”

“I hate that term. Cyberpunk; Steampunk; Seapunk; Artpunk; ah Great Dismal, so much to answer for. Anyway, we were inspired in so many ways by the Surrealists, who were the most tribal, most self-publicising moth- ah group you could possibly imagine. Issue 12 of La Revolution Surrealiste had photographs of all their members on the front cover like a rogues gallery. We did exactly the same when we wrote our first manifesto. Artpunk was a name the media gave us”

***

“Do you … have any ideas who is doing this?”

“Well, in the modern police force, Mr May, we have two main approaches. One, we send in the forensics and data-gathering teams to the crime scenes to search and scan everything with a fine tooth comb. We cross-reference the information we have – drone vendors, drone users, witness statements – and we hope the algorithms turn up three bananas.”

“And the second?”

“Why, Mr May, while we wait for the backroom boys and girls to live out their Grissom fantasies, we turn up in the wrong places and the wrong times and ask difficult questions in an effort to find out what's going on. And that” he added almost as an afterthought, “is where you come in.”

***

Morris pointed to the two of them. “You Virgil, me Dante. Right now my best guess is that only another artist would threaten at least nine other artists. It's not our only line of enquiry, but it's the one I'm going to look into, with your help.”

Snippets from the first 10,000 words Pt 2

The critics accused the Malloy circle of making a Romantic cult of augmented reality and they were right, up to a point. We were Futurists too, but it was the bunny slopes of Romanticism which got people paying attention.

'Romantic' was a name that each of us inner circlers at that time would have borne with pride. To understand that, you have to remember what we were kicking against in our everyday life. A city which had been designed and desecrated by successive generations of incompetents – ugly as sin, as cheap as a cheap thing, as user-friendly as a Latin smartphone, with its fingers in its ears to the future. It needed more than beauty, however you define beauty, but beauty was a startt.

When Alasdair suggested that the city skyline should incorporate mountain views from Caspar David Friedrich paintings, he was getting Shocked of Sutton's attention to make a point. Not that the city's Great and Good had no sense of humour – that would be shooting fish in a barrel. But that Birmingham needed to think big in a new way, away from corporate dumbassery or peak oil rabbit-in-the-stream fatalism that once prevailed in these parts.

As a blank canvass for beauty, with a surface reality of crumbling post-war infrastructure and latter-day quick-up quick-down cowboy-jobs overlaying neglected Victorian strata, the city needed us. Who wouldn't want to make this more beautiful. And, lest we forget, more meaningful.

Snippets from the first 10,000 words Pt 1

Caveat: all this is first draft, and doesn't mean I'm satisfied with it as it stands yadayadayada traditional anxiety.

  

A square mile of assembled pirates, ninjas, pirate-ninjas, steampunk gentlefolk, elves (always with the elves), dwarves, halflings, furries, otaku, otherkin, cosplayers, spacemen, Kryptonians, Trekkers, true black metallers, Vikings, eloi, elohim, sidhe, Earthseed, Black country folk and other costumed strangenesses.

***

Flanagans has adopted a Waitsian veneer – trouble's braids are part of the dresscode, you can play pool with midgets at all hours until the notional rain stops, and all the barmaids were augmented prison tattoos.

***

Wearing AR-visored sunglasses at night, he looked like a Reid brother trying to impersonate the Rat Pack.

***

“And why is Bigtrak's precocious nephew buying me drinks?” he asked, as the barman concluded a extensive round of stirring, shaking and mixing to deposit a dubious off-yellow concoction in front of him. “There are,” he added, “easier ways of getting my attention.”

“No there aren't, Danny.” the doggy drone demurred.

“That's right”, Danny agreed cheerfully, taking a large swallow of his cocktail with evident satisfaction.

***

I've been tasered

A 'non-lethal' weapon for use by the monopoly of force brigade against the fractious First World proletariat

Iii'vve beeen tassserrred

Illegal, of course, but an easy concealed carry for the street for when the knife lacks that je-ne-sais-crackle of a thousand volts pumped through the nervous system

Bottle lightning charge

Shoot-to-stun weapon with absolutely no side-effects. Nooo sirree.

I'vve beeeeen tasssserrrreeeeddd

Grinning paramilitary salespeople talk out of the side of their mouths about exceptional cases and collateral damage

Tasssssssssssssssssssssssssrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

***

I'm not blogging because I'm writing

I'm doing the bunny slopes version of NaNoWriMo, having ground out 10,000 words in 20 days, with the aim of completing a full 50,000 word first draft by the end of 2012.

As per October's posts, the story is about augmented reality, and what it means to have ever more sophisticated technological means of escapism at a time of social disorder (and potential collapse) in the near future. What if techno-escapism + human organisation = paradigm shift social evolution? With a cast of steampunks, cosplaying zombies, elf cults, performance artists and policemen.

All of this means I need to ration all  my writing energies for the story, so any actual writing here will be concise to say the least and probably consist of extracts from the work in progress.

I will pick up the (mainly) metal threads from earlier this year and start posting videos of things that interest me here, though, now that I am fully wired for sound and vision at home again after 6 months techno-fast after my laptop speakers blew.

Also - photos - I can do that!