I’m about to commit map¹. I’ve been deliberately trying to hold it all in my head to avoid the mistake of not leaving myself enough room to play with in future, or the temptation of join-the-dots quest plotting. But I need to work some things out about the layout of the University that nothing short of scribbling them down will do. It’s just enough different from what you’d get by mashing a few Cambridge colleges together that my mental model is having trouble holding together.

It’s not cat-vaccuuming. (Although blogging about it may be.) Thinking about it has already cleared one bit of awkward plot for me (I just needed to change which side of the river the back porters’ lodge is on). I’m hoping to post some new content after Easter.

¹I’ve known people self-deprecatingly, or perhaps publishing-industry-deprecatingly, refer to themselves as “committing trilogy”.

Having just had offline crit from Ingi….

That’s another positive response for Aurelius being a fascinating character, both for the reader and within the world. Which is really, really encouraging, because the greater story is about his character (when it’s not being meta) and the reaction of other characters within the story to him don’t make sense unless he’s got a certain presence. If I can keep this up, I’ll be very happy.

The big negative was that the in media res opening is too much in media and the res is insufficiently engaging. I don’t think I can sensibly push the start any further back for this story, but there is always space for an early one within the bigger picture. And I think that primarily wants to be about who Gules is, with more background on Tethera.

A huge problem I’m having with this is that the world and the characters have been sloshing around in my head for a very long time now, and dribbling it out is a very fine line between obscurity and infodump. Gules is clearly too obscure at this point for his pivotal role in this story, which is why the “backfill” should be about him. There’s also a great inconsistency about how much physical description a character gets on introduction, which makes it look like there should be an early, descriptive introduction. And tells me who I get to use in the earlier story. But Ingi said there was something of Lucius Malfoy about Aury, which set me off into crippling giggles at the thought of adding him to the wielders of this set. The scary thing is, I’ve enough of this world in my head to know where the damn sword would come from.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but the work in progress is conceived of as five (or so) largely self-contained sections whose background events come together to form an overall story. The five parts I had ready formed the first section. I’ve just put up the final part, so you can now read the whole thing. (Although of course you get the parts presented in reverse order.)

I’ve almost got the first part of the second section ready, so that could go up next week. How long it will be before the next update is anybody’s guess, though. My instinct is to make use of this natural break to build up some more material (and give me some time to work out what this section is called). I said 3000 words a week was a high target, and what I’ve managed is more like 2000 in eight weeks. Even skipping three updates (two through being ill, one through having something else to say) hasn’t bought me the time needed. So: it might have helped me unblock, but progress is still slow. It could be a long while before you get to fin dout what happens next.

I’m curious what kinds of creative things people are up to.

I’ve been working on the magical-bureaucracy thing, which I’m a bit bored of at the moment, and am kind of awaiting a new idea to freshen it up. It’s on paper at the moment, so I can’t really type it in.

As a bit of light relief, I’ve been looking again at podcaster. This was a silly idea which got out of hand. It’s just a pun, based on the vague idea that Podcaster sounds like a town in Yorkshire, which kind of developed into an everyday tale of co-locating folk, which turned into an Under Milk Wood parody where you go into what’s happening in individual servers rather than houses, with in one rack at a co-lo facility.

Of course, the first step is to read Under Milk Wood carefully, to try to get some ideas for silliness. The problem is that I love the poem so much, that I end up getting so absorbed in it, and following it so closely, that the spoof is overly faithful superficially, whilst lacking any of the underlying talent.

Despite this stupidity, I’m also rediscovering lots about Under Milk Wood, and his other poetry. It’s also incredibly slow. It’s great fun to write, because I get really absorbed in the original, and the reflections of things in his other stuff, even though I go at about a sentence a day (ie hour), and will finish just about in time for the next ice-age. I guess it’s more of a reading exercise than a writing one, really, but I do like to understand-by-doing.

Here’s the opening prologue (about all there is, working on the top machine now, a battered USENET server entangled in constant debate about the good ole days, substituting for Captain Cat, ). I’m also terrified that someone will be upset by what’s just ham-fisted recreational silliness.

But let me know what you’re up to! I’m curious.

Podcaster
=========

[Silence] FIRST VOICE [Softly] London, the centre of it all.

It is Sodium-stained unseasoned night in the city's east, earthless
and migraine-grey, signals change blindly, a helicoptered,
satellited sky stares unseen down on lead grey, dead grey,
pill-popping downer grey, seastone inundated land. The tops of
towers stand pithed and vacant, abscesses as dead as Lenin, while
the boardmen sleep, sword in hand, in Hertfordshire cottages, and
dream yachtdreams and beachdreams, from slowly unravelling minds.

And storeys below, and seams and eons beneath, here and there,
vigliant, sleep-wrecking lights spot tenured insomniacs, those cold
privateers stooped behind screens, and scuding on the surface of
sleep, wrapped in tickertape and taunted by newsrolling choirs.

Around the city the sleepless stare, anxiously divining
dawn-awaiting skies. Teachers, secretaries, barmen, and solicitors;
postmen, librarians, and cooks, they sit in end-terrace kitchens
and, with closed-circuit eyes worry reasonable furniture, treat
auras with aspirin, and starve hope half blind. From fashionable
laptops balanced on inhereted armchairs; from skip-pilfered
workstations bending inadequate shelves; and from rats-paw
puppet-stage telephones, those sleepless send phantoms to silently
wander through recent and notional lands.

Here's a stylishly murdered pica-point weblog, cascading ornament
and cosecant headache, some tyre-tread text in an immaculate desert,
and beige to within a breath of dispair. And there is a forum
dyspeptic with bawling, soap bitter, and iron-tasting, as salty as
the a knifeedge. Self-important news of wars, armed with trumpets in
sandpits; biographies of footballers now fifty and lonely; a
clockwork bazzar of desire and longing wound up on credit,
billboards, and hoarding: watch the sleepless wander now, rising
from tables, from solace-less beds and from sweating armchairs, watch
them as they rise, like the dead of Revelations, tied into herds
by cables and waves.

Lights in the greyness flicker at their passing, in the deep-digging
basement of Podcaster House.

Aaron and Pete, above in the guardroom, displayed to the street in
reptile-house glory, employed and careerless, and passing the night.

AARON

On a Zeus Five Thousand: deluxe and professional, adjustable,
reclining, the king of all chairs.

PETE

which will one day be mine.

FIRST VOICE

In front of Aaron, in dead-eye middle distance, monitors flicker
from leaf to leaf like fly-tipped mags in a breeze. On coma-grey
screens, silent rooms and alleys march past in silent procession,
as Aaron god-like dozes.

Pete is pining for his motorbike and the weekend coast.  Aaron
dreaming: watching and sleeping. Unbidden and unwanted, we join them
now in their night-light guardroom in Podcaster House.

See, on the pale, paned, monitors, an endless rhythm of
machine-racks, upright caskets in tin-soldier ranks, as still and as
dumb as Eros in the circus; cooled and fed with nursery care. Behind
grills, the shuttered faces, endlessly counting, clicking beads and
hailing Mary, but unrepentently spewing dragon-dry air. Trace the
anenome wires, ribbon-gay, perplexed, as they violate each coffin,
and like the worms surfacing from good loam, see them writhe within
a whisper of goose-bump and shiver, in aisles that vanish to
patterned beyonds.

See the blood spots, dried as brown as autumn, as they fleck and
fall, from nineteen-inch corners where, bated by pumice caresses,
naked cuts of iron have fished for and caught, nameless, careless
flesh. See all of these things, from the street-side guardhouse.

We stay. Aaron and Pete mark time. In a steel pergatory beneath our
feet, before our eyes, devout machines are also waiting.

See, amongst these down-shuttered dead, in the furthest corner, a
glass-fronted casket, its organs displayed to our gaze. Follow me
now as we shuffle toward this tomb, and examine the body screwed
silent within. The carcass is dreaming, swaddled in strings of
carnival lamps -- lucifer red, apple green, crem-fire blue --
twinkling like whores in heaven. Labels, switches, and bulks of
brain lurk earth-caged, grill-grated, underlit grotesques and
am-dram villains, angel-damn rhythm-dancing in paint-dampened
light.

Fall through the dust-grey mesh, now, into winking cloisters
beneath; to where no one else can travel, straight into the dreams
of machines.

A Usenet server, age-ached and weather-worn, its black-brushed face
drilled and filled by parades of bug-track fly-by-night dentists,
askew and wonky and racked into place, expires, spools, makes
history, teases threads and stalks the world along stark reporting
alleys, familiar stew-in-the-pot ginnels, past time-stamped
tub-thumping greasers and cross-post desert-island chemists; tuts
its disks, spits its packets, and drowns in eternal autumn.

And drawn to the heart of its mother-could-love body

            a bubbling sea of teeth-rotting, sugar-blackening vitriol.

Would anyone be interested in collecting together some stuff for an anthology for a lulu book? You can get a 200 page B/W perfect bound trade paperback done for a fiver a copy, with no up-front fees. The idea would be, I guess, to get some of each others work to read in a more “user-friendly”, and persistent form, for each other, mainly. We’d get, I guess thirty to fifty pages each, depending on people being interested. Could have sketches, too, for people with talent in that direction (they do colour but it’s a fair bit more). I guess I’d personally be interested in things people have written already and I’ve liked as much as (more than?) new stuff, but whatever, really. I’m notoriously bad at organising, though. It wouldn’t be publishing, just medium-conversion.

Updated: I should have said that I’d pay for the cost of our copies (as it was my idea).

I have my fingers in three creative pies. Or maybe my feet in three creative camps. I’ve already talked about photogrpahy, which is where I think I have the talent; and writing, which I feel compelled to attempt. The third leg is music, and that’s the one I really enjoy. The Blue String Pudding reunion reminded me just how just how good it feels to be making music with other people (the most fun you can have with a group of at least three people?). Sometimes, in this breed of music, I feel being at the keyboard can be something of a cheat. With the right patch, I can provide a contribution essentially no-handed (but two-footed). But it still feels good. There aren’t many fields of creative endeavour, I think, where collaboration adds so much to the experience of artist or audience, except possibly acting, and music has the advantage that a band can be as good as, or even better than, its best member, while a cast will be limited by its weakest. I might not be much of musician, but by hooking up with people like Steve (lead) and Jeremy (drums, and it was noticable how much we missed him at the reunion) I can be part of producing something better than I could on my own.

(No update to the fiction this week: you’ve got something else from me, and it gives me an extra week to try and get part 6 written.)

Having failed to write anything “proper” I thought I’d try to join in on the “something, anything” front, and post something I’d scribbled in my notebook a week or so ago, but abandoned. It was supposed to be SF, but evidence suggests I still can’t write SF. For lack of rulers, I’ll do the 1,2,3 thing.

1. He watched the waves silently break as the scorpion approached him from behind. He closed his eyes and hung his head silently mouthing a prayer. As each of its limbs fully embraced him, he let the air be squeezed from his body. He felt the smooth edge of its stinging point run the length of his back, and briefly withdraw in preparation. He flexed his body in lordotic anticipation.

Shattering, then silence.

2. They wre not of the species of secret police who wear trenchcoats and shades in Hollywood films; they failed to arrive in high-powered cars with blackened windows. Most were unshaven, unclean, soiled: one even arrived on the bus. They had no mastery of technology, nor bureaucracy. They were state blackmailers and government pimps, confidence tricksters and white-market racketeers. The operation, such as it was, had the air of a gangster’s daytrip to the seaside, turned brutally violent with booze and sun.

Two middle-aged agents, some muscle perhaps given way to fat, broke down the door of the pavilion, and stumbled inside. The director’s sun lay face-down on the floor, as the Atlantic ocean battered at the large, curved window. The boy, 21, perhaps 24, twitched, sometimes with violence, as toxins pulsed through his body. The wound in his back frothed unnaturally with a scummy white fluid, bloodless and clean.

A secret policeman rolled the boy onto his front with his boot: “He’ll be fine”.

3. “People have been killed for less: taken to the woods and shot. I bet there are few who have let themselves be stung who aren’t now at least building roads in the desert”

“It’s best not to think these things through”.

The doctors whispered in a tiny dispensing alcove at the end of the ward.

“My father has never liked doctors” shouted the boy, now sitting brightly against plump, white hospital pillows. “Always skulking in corners”

He spoke with good humour, but the doctors immediately separated and walked purposefully away, one this way, one that, like sentries parting at a gate.

“They’re rounding up the scorpion men, you know! Shipping them off to reservations in the outer planets.” The patient opposite was spoiling for a fight: he smiled over to the boy a broad, sarcastic smile. “But I suppose you knew that already”. The impossibly old man raised his eyebrows and bit his bottom lip. He demanded a response.

“And what exactly do you know about the scorpions?” asked the boy.

“Well, I’ll admit that I’m not on as personal terms as some people hereabouts, but a General sees enough as he goes about his vocation.”

The boy removed his earphones, and threw them onto his bed in frustration. “Regiment?” he barked.

The old, crumpled man laughed. “What’s daddy going to do? Put me out of my misery with a bullet? Better treatment than any of us get from these quacks.”

A nurse arrived with a sedative for the boy, who waved her to place the tiny plastic cup on his bedside table.

“You’re no General” he laughed, at last, after an extended period of brooding. “Generals are amongst the best rewarded people in our country. And I can see that your locker is empty”.

4. “This man does not earn his living operating this machine”

“Director?”

“I have seen people who work machines all day: traitors, counter-revolutionaries, whatever degeneracy, still they can work them. They … they know them. Inside their head is …. This man here, he is imitating affection to this machine, he is an actor, a stranger”.

“He is a hero of the empire, director. He is here to be awarded a senior honour by our glorious president.”

“Not him! Not this man. Stop this charade! Cut the power! Sort it out, root out the cancer. Unravel things. Apply surgery. You know what to do.”

The director and his deputy left the laboratory as secret policemen flooded in, and took the situation in hand.

“Tell me about my son”, the director asked the deputy calmly.

“He will recover, director. Be as healthy as ever. He is already causing trouble in the hospital; nothing serious”.

“Don’t let him off too lightly. For every action there must be an equal and …”, he tails off. “He hates me I think”.

“Oh no, director.”

“Well he bloody well should! I sure as hell hated my father when I was his age. I was marching on the old regime’s palace when I was only a few years older than my son. This scorpion thing, he hates me I think: becoming a deviant; the lowest thing he could do. He must hate me, and all this”. He gestured broadly. The director paused, and spoke more softly before the two middle-aged men in poorly-tailored suits resumed their walk along the dull, brown corridor.

“How are the reassignments going?”

“According to schedule, director. Most of the northern sea-board is scorpion-free. Ships depart for the off-world colonies four times a day. We’re even finding planets not so immediately lethal to the scorpions. Mainly a house-to-house operation, going through the streets, the postcodes.”

The two men reached the glass-panelled entrance to The Palace of the People. “Keep me informed, Amon”. He nodded and headed along another corridor leading from reception, as the director left the building.

5. The boy opened the door of the small dilapidated flat to see his scorpion before him, standing in the street, in broad daylight. Angrily, and nervously he invited it into his rooms, checking along the street, side-to-side before he closed the door. The scorpion started clicking and screaming at him inside his front room.

“Quiet!” the boy spat, in an angry whisper, “quiet!”, but the scorpion continued to squeal. “I don’t have a translator box. Hey, look, no translator! Fuck! Where can I get a translator around here?”

The boy put on a shirt whilst nodding to himself as he anxiously considered options. He walked to the front door. “Wait here! Quietly!”

They asked for ID at the counter: “only available for law enforcement”. He always enjoyed being asked for ID. The delayed reaction was what clinched it.

Back home, he pointed the translator in the scorpion’s direction, as if waving a Geiger counter at radioactive cargo. Finally it interpreted his clicks and screams.

“I do not understand you” came the tinny, robotic voice of the translator. The boy thought the translator faulty, or the scorpion’s dialect too strong: he hit it against the wall. But again it translated, “I do not understand who you are. Your identity is a mysterious object to me”.

“For love of the goddess!” He threw the translator into a corner of the room near the fireplace, where it burst open and its circuits were eviscerated. The boy opened the door, grabbed the scorpion by its tail, and dragged it screaming through the startled streets.

6. Next to the ministry is a mall, where secret service agents buy camping supplies and extra socks, for their weekends away with their families; buy quarts of milk and specialist cheeses; and flowers when late from the office. A few years earlier there were explosions, gas leaks it was said, after which security was immeasurably tighter. With almost every shopper working for the ministry, the extra cameras, barriers and control points seemed almost to be homely reminders to their occupations.

In the central hall, a glass lift rose from the basement levels, revealing a boy dragging a scorpion man by its tail: heresy inside the inner temple. The scorpion shouted as if on fire, in uninterpreted cascades of screams and clicks. Spooks acted as they were trained to: they went about their business as if nothing were amiss. The boy reentered the elevator, leaving the scorpion in the mall. As the doors closed, he shouted “Now you know who I am”.

The boy returned some few hours later to buy a slush puppy from a barrow-stall, and there was no sign of the scorpion.

7. No longer a boy, he stood at the pram-stop on the promenade. After the other species had been dealt with, the regime had reduced in ferocity; the secret police cut back. His father, the first to leave the post of director alive, would retire shortly from a directorship of the state-owned nuclear fuel reprocessing corporation. His son, the man who was once a boy, sold air-conditioning to hotels. He had had a successful day of customer meetings. Atlantic salt added a bite to the autumnal air as he gazed at the rusting bandstands of the promenade.

After a time waiting calmly on the platform, the middle-aged man thought he heard music on the wind, a brass band perhaps. But he couldn’t place its direction, nor name the tune, which he was sure he knew well. Looking over at the old bandstands, the lack of any evidence of a band disturbed him, and he agitatedly looked in all directions. The music grew louder, more dissonant, more familiar, closer, is if from inside his head.

The tram approached just as a rolling nausea took hold in his belly. He turned to face the tram as it approached the platform. There was a disturbing, indescribably property of the shape of the cab: its sharp, pointed nose, its round blank lights. High above the carriage, a pantograph bent to an easy tip where it met the overhead wire with a spark, an immeasurably poignant, beautiful spark.

His stomach filled with a substance as unpalatable as sea-water, but much, much heavier, and his body tumbled forwards, like a diver from a board, to the ground beneath the wheels of his tram.

Inspired by two things. Firstly, Kaet’s “Drawing a week” as an attempt to put something behind the effort to get unblocked and just write. Secondly, I’ve now posted two witters about this stuff in rather abstract terms and Ingi has pointed out that it’s very difficult to comment on what I’m doing without something more concrete. So. Over at my WordPress blog I’ll be posting 3000–4000 words’ worth a week, starting from today. I’ve got five parts ready to go, so that gives me a month to start trying to get ahead of the curve. Now, 3000 words a week is probably going to be pushing me, so I expect it to slow down once I’ve caught up. Or I might stop, if everyone says “Why are you bothering?” But some kind of schedule might impose the discipline I need.

Yeah, I know the names are crap. That can be sorted out later.

Update: Now up, part 2. In which not a great deal happens.

Update: Now up, part 3. In which the plot thickens.

Update: Now up, rather delayed by music and illness, part 4. In which matters come to a head.

I actually wrote something this evening.

See, there is a section I’d skipped ahead to writing. I think of it as the hinge of the story—it’s the point where everything changes as three revelations pile in on top of each other.

Except … I’m not sure I’ve got them in the right order. The first is fixed, but hot on its heels come two pieces of news from half way across the continent. One is a political situation spiralling towards civil war—it shouldn’t have an impact on the protagonist, half a continent away and in a very different country, but by the end of the story it most profoundly will have done so. The other, the bearer of the news doesn’t initially believe—half-forgotten monsters from the past have returned to stalk the land. This is something which could end up having the kind of impact on the continent of the black death hitting Europe. It’s also going to have an impact on the protagonist—he already knows this has happened, and has been enjoined to secrecy—but within the arc of this story it’s a rather incidental one. It’s more of a set up for what I know happens afterwards.

Originally, I wrote the delivery of these two pieces the other way round. And I’ve just realised that the result is “OMG, it’s the end of the world! And to make things worse, this distant country is about to break out in a civil war which won’t touch us!” I’m not sure I could write a finer example of bathos if I tried. Plus which, it over-telegraphs which is the more important to the story. So I’ve just rewritten it the other way round. I think the result is more natural, and improves the story telling. Although I’m willing to be told otherwise. And, while it was largely a pile of cut-and-paste, it means I’m writing again.

I’ve always despaired a little with surrealism: it seemed to run out of energy so soon after it began. I think that a part of the problem was that it seemed to be very symbolic and, well conscious, and grounded in theory, so what it presented was almost like an anthropological report of the subconscious. When I looked at it portrayed back to me, it reminded me of what it must be like to read a report of your strange and remarkable civilisation, dictated in fragments over telephone to a writer of potboilers, hidden somewhere within London literary society.

For the real depth, I’ve always found illustrators like Austin Spare more forthcoming. (There’s surprisingly little of his “automatic” sigil-form illustration on the web).

So I was overjoyed to find a similarly engaging book in Heffers today: 50 Drawings to Murder Magic by Antonin Artaud in English translated side-by-side facsimile. A short poem of intent is followed by ambiguous and semi-automatic sketches, with a real coherence and shared structure. Most are little more than scribbles, but have real subconscious grip. I can see it being a real source of inspiration.

As he writes of his drawings:

merely commentary / on action that / has really occurred / merely a limited / figuration / on the paper / of a rush of feeling / that has occurred / and magnetically / and magically worked its effects.

Interestingly, I now see that one of my favourite dramatists, Heiner Müller, used Artaud as inspiration. This suggests that I should might Caryl Churchill, too, whose work I’m not aware of.