15 Authors

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and who will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.) 

In alphabetical order:

Jane Austen

Emily Bronte

Don Cupitt (theologian)

Stephen Donaldson (writer of bad fantasy - first exposure to environmentalism)

Fyodor Dostoevsky (if only for Notes from Underground, which I refuse to re-read)

Alistair MacIntosh (environmental activist and spiritual writer)

Herbert Marcuse

Grant Morrison

Anais Nin

Fernando Pessoa (for the Book of Disquiet)

Adam Philips (psychologist)

Laetitia Sadier

Sheri Tepper (feminist SF)

JRR Tolkien (for better or more probably for worse)

Leo Tolstoy

Belated Halloween / Rampage tribute

Context: I am trying to write something each day in half an hour's lunch-break and then brush it up slightly at home.

Today: a rather elliptical Anglo-centric tribute to Rampage, the eighties arcade game which saw a giant gorilla, lizard and wolfman knock down skyscrapers by punching them repeatedly.

Apologies if it's a bit rubbish, but it's writing practice and I'd rather subject it to an audience from the word go rather than get all precious about it.

As soon as you could walk, you practiced on Lego.

Then progressed to dollhouses

Fisher Price garages were your stomp fodder

With a tail-flick, Castle Greyskull was gone.

No-one talks about your disastrous trip to Bekonscot

But, hey, it’s ok!

Because you’re family.

We saw the footage on About Anglia

The ruins of Sizewell A, B and C

You are a garguantuan scale-clad cause celebre

Questions are asked of us as the destruction continues.

We deny everything to the TV crews and hide the mutant iguanas in the cellar.

But it’s all right!

For we too have an uneasy relationship with authority.

How many times can you thrill to punching out a copter? Did it pall?

Did you eat one too many toasters?

Or did you start to think that Le Corb had a point?

It matters not. After your masterstroke - the destruction of Basingstoke - you left.

A hollowed out volcano your tropical exile.

But we understand.

All the greats leave us in the end.