Attack of depression.

Have been having an attack of depression. When it happens to me, everything that I can see becomes something to feel guilty about. A link to a past failure. A book I haven’t read. A story I was supposed to write. Dust that shouldn’t be there. Dirt in corners. Everything becomes something that I should feel bad about.

Then I start looking for the point, I start going wrong. It keeps coming back to university. I keep wishing I had never gone. Getting a BA is irrelevant. If you mess the first week and take the wrong course, you have dammed yourself for the next few years.

It’s a domino effect. One thing goes and then everything does. You can do all the exercises, you tell yourself, that this is not your fault. But within you, something that feels more powerful is destroying all that. It’s like sending the bluebird of happiness out into ground zero of a nuclear test. No chance.

The realisation that you’ve been though this before can’t help. At the time, you are having the feelings, you feel that if they will just come back, why try to get to the surface?

What I want to happen, is to find some way I can just re-organise my life to correct this. Then I can’t make the changes I want and it all feels like it goes wrong again. Or something happens that disrupts the plans I had. (I would rate ‘Life is what happens when we are making other plans’ as one of the most sheer ‘howl-in-the-dark’ sentences ever.)

I know that I demand too much of myself. I know that things could be worse. But that can not stop the torrent of anger and spite that keeps sounding out, at me, within my mind.

Lost Gardens of Heligan

Went to the Lost Gardens of Heligan at the weekend, see www.heligan.com for further details. It was great to walk around there, hearing the birds and the sound of running water. This was really an occasion where we were lucky. The weather was great and there were less people around then you would expect. This is where the photos on this page come from.

I think that the reason that the gardens appealed to me and my lover so much, is that it did seem so much like we had travelled into a hidden wilderness, which is the basic back-story of Heligan. It is also the theme of so many stories, the discovery of the hidden world or landscape.

This is an aspect of Cornwall, which I tend to forget. It is easier to get to or to see spaces of greenery or woodland, then it is in London or Derby for example.

Great idea, but the research might be tricky and the cat isn't helping.

Finally found an idea to turn into a story to submit to a steampunk anthology. It can be set in Victorian times and does have the appeal of pitting a group of stiff-upper lipped English people against something completely different, in shape of a catastrophe and changed environment.

The disadvantage is that I need to research what Victorian London was like in 1885 in addition to working out the principle of the science that causes this destruction.

As well as that, there is the idea of the no-future societies. You know which ones I mean. The ones that emerge post-bomb and seem to have a lot of leather and fast vehicles. So what would Victorian post-end-of-the-world groups be like?

The only drawback is that the deadline for this only leaves me with 25 days to write it.

Feeling tried today because my cat,(shown above) brought in a mouse at 4am. Had to rescue it and release it back into the garden. This is one of the drawbacks of summer; the cat finds it easier to hunt.

Are most horror novels too linear?

Something I was thinking of recently, is a problem with horror novels. The action can be too linear. I’m thinking of something I recently read, centred around a haunted/cursed house. As a reader, you know that something is going to emerge in this place which the happy couple have brought. It’s in the middle of nowhere, the history starts emerging and you are just waiting for the supernatural things to start, that were promised on the back cover. I admit that the idea is that we are supposed to be getting the tension while we get to know the characters.

The drawback is that if you don’t like the characters, it gets to be a long wait. True, you can play guess-the-victim. However, the problem for me is that it already feels familiar already. As you have guessed from the above paragraph, I was waiting for the moments when the monsters emerge or something supernatural happens. A lot of the surprise of the narrative felt as if it had gone.

A possible solution to this is to try to avoid a conventional narrative for telling the story, to stop the reader getting too relaxed. I’m not a fan of ‘It’ by Stephen King but that does have the story move in two different time periods. Or ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ by Haruki Murakami. That appears to be two different narratives with the connection being gradually revealed. Or ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark Z. Danielewski. There is nothing set in stone, to say that a horror story has to be completely conventionally told. It could be told from different flashbacks, multiple viewpoints, starting with the ending and working backwards. The text could even move into different media as the story continues. I think that experimentation with the narrative will become more common, just to stop the reader getting too comfortable with the material.

Finally finished the first draft of the short story, I want to submit to an anthology. Unfortunately, it now has to go through the whole process of re-writing and re-drafting.

Cut Price Opera

In the light of cutbacks everywhere, a group of new credit conscious operas will be premiering soon. So coming to an opera house near you will be:
Madame Caterpillar
The Magic Paper and Comb
La Trivial Pursuit
The Plastic Ring Cycle
The Toenail clipper of Seville.

Boscastle, Museum of Witchcraft, new story in production.

Recently went to the Cornish village of Boscastle with my family and lover. We had great time walking the dog along the paths. It’s a great experience to walk and hear the sound of water running. (See picture for further detail.)

The Museum of Witchcraft is also worth visiting. It now has panels dotted around the walls to show the heights that the floods reached.

I’m currently working on a short story, I’ve got an optimistic feeling about. Of course, this is before I get feedback on the first draft. It’s for an anthology that wants stories involving two types of monster. I have managed to find two different kinds that don’t get used that much and have a reason to be working together.

The first of many moans....

Already the hype for the World Cup is starting to grate on my nerves. It’s becoming another excuse to sell TV’s. Then everybody is supposed to be surprised when England gets knocked out in the first few games.

They should do a realistic World Cup video game. “You are the England team manager. You have to keep the squad together in time for the games to start. Prevent your strikers from injuring their feet beforehand. Stop the players cheating on their WAGS and missing the game from getting stuck in divorce courts. Persuade them to give up drinking and clubbing with their showbiz mates.” Look, it would bring the element of strategy back to football and is more interesting then 11 over-paid men kicking a ball.

Parallel worlds and chats with vampires

Working on something for a workshop, I recently got stuck on a technical question. Well the problem was trying to think a way to do something impossible involving a well-known speculation. If you accept the idea that parallel universes exist, how do you get to one and back and how do you find a specific one that you where aiming for?

Admittedly I was terrible at physics at school, which might not be helping. I have thought of one way but it is very vague for the minute. It probably isn’t going to have much of a solid scientific explanation either. It could work for the context of the story though.

This is a common problem though I think. At a certain point, scientific accuracy has to leave the room for the story to continue. I think we can all think of one example, where we have spotted some factual detail, there to show us that the writer has done some research.

Also re-read ‘Interview with the Vampire’ by Anne Rice. Given the latter entries in this series, it is actually rather interesting. It becomes in places a discussion on the New World which lacks God and morality and so makes the vampires the walking dead in that sense. They live in a universe where they have moved themselves beyond morality and then want it back and find they can’t. Well that was my reading of the character of Louis anyway. I also remembered ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’. Both are about a young man given immortality and have sensual writing amid moral decline.

'Handling the undead' and life experiences

Finished reading ‘Handling the Undead’ by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It deals with the return of the dead, but they don’t shamble around biting people. They return and the living have to deal with it. This turns the novel into something that cuts deeper. Ramsey Campbell reviewed ‘Pet Sematary (Spoiler warning) saying that he would have preferred it, if the child returned dead, but not malevolent and the family had to cope with this. It’s difficult to believe that Lindquist has read this, but the finished book proves the success of this approach.

Something else I’ve been wondering, is it easier to become moved by fictional events once you have lived for a while? When you are young, it’s possible to not get the full force of what death or heartbreak means. So when it happens in fiction, you don’t really understand until a certain point in your life.

Location and A Short history of Myth

Trying to think a plot for the vampire story. Basically where it is going to be set. There needs to be a reason for it. Although, it could always just happen in the place. But I think I should at least make an effort for some attempt at a reason.

Finished reading 'A Short history of Myth' by Karen Armstrong. Very interesting study, that makes you wish that the writer could be given space to expand it.

Convention worries and more paradoxes

I’ve been feeling down of late. A large part of it, is that a couple of conventions are looming and I’m getting worried that I haven’t got anything to submit to editors, or have read all the relevant books beforehand. I realise that I may be the only person who thinks like this. I have not signed up for any sessions for pitching anything, or having to interview anybody. I am not going to have to take an exam, when I get there, so I should not have to worry.

Trying to work on idea for a story, I’m having a problem with the Grandfather paradox. You can’t kill your own grandfather, but your grandchild could kill you, after you have caused it to be born. There should be a reason, for why this can’t work, but I can’t think of it.

'Fairyland', connection fail, the branch strikes, vampire ideas

Finished reading ‘Fairyland’ by Paul J. McAuley. It’s a very good novel dealing with the emergence of new genetic modification technology and the emergence of artificially created creatures called Dolls.

One of the things that impressed me about the novel, was that the future world felt believable through the technique of accumulated little details. We know we are in the future when the lead character remembers an event from his childhood dated to before the end of the twentieth century. It makes references to small things, rather then having long passages about how the world works.

These posts are getting less frequent at the moment, because my internet connection seems to fail, in windy weather. And now it appears to be on the verge of a massive fail.

Well actually it did. We had a man from the phone company around. Basically the problem was that a branch had poked its way through the phone line. This is probably symbolic of something, but I am not sure what.

I am still trying think of a new angle for a vampire story. Think that I might have got one, but still in the stages of making it work. Just having the idea is not good enough. Where I have stumbled before is having the idea, then that moment of err, and then what? I still don’t want it to be one which tries to find a scientific explanation for vampires. It’s not that, this notion is a good one; it’s just that it seems to have been by people before, who are more talented then me. So that’s out.

Also, really uneasy about the whole vulnerable to Christian symbols thing. That could end up asking for a scene where the vampire is confronted with a cross and then tries to hide behind the complete works of Richard Dawkins. (I’m sure somebody has done something like this.)

Sleepwalking, TV book clubs and the power level of vampires.

I’ve recently read ‘The Sleepwalker’s Introduction to Flight’ by Sion Scott-Wilson. I picked this up, because I liked the sound of the novel’s premise. Practising to become a cliff-diver in the garden, Mikey Hough hits the ground and puts himself into a coma. When he comes out of it, he learns that in the accident, he has lost the ability to sleep. While in hospital, he befriends a former RAF pilot and vows to track down his stolen Distinguished Flying Cross.

However, this apparently is a comic novel. What this translates into is a succession of grotesqueries. None of them are funny. It also turns into another story where the teenage narrator is able to win the girl next door. This is a familiar device that feels more like fan fiction then anything believable. The difficulty I have is that the novel strains to be funny, when it would work better with a more restrained style. Not everything has to be humorous.

I’ve finally seen the new channel 4/More 4 programme ‘The TV Book Club’. It suffers from having less than 30 minutes to cover an interview, an author profile, a look at obscure words and a study and review of the featured book. So the book that some person has been trying to fit in time to read in a week gets dealt with, over four minutes.

I’ve also been trying to think of a vampire story that could work and be relatively fresh. The difficulty is that it does all seem as if it has been done before. Something that I have noticed is that the power level of vampires seems to have been going down since ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker. In the novel, Van Helsing sits down and tells everybody about Dracula’s powers. According to him, Dracula has the strength of 20 men, the powers of necromancy, can control the weather, control rats, owls, bats, foxes and wolves, change himself into mist, go out in the day and dematerialise. But vampires rarely demonstrate all these powers in one novel these days

Spider-Man, jobs, Day of the Triffids

Sad to hear that Toby Maguire and Sam Raimi have been dropped from doing another Spider-Man film. Sony doesn’t really seem to be getting much goodwill from doing this. Criticism of Spider-Man 3 was largely defected from Ramie, as he clearly didn’t want to have Venom in the film. The studio has been talking about doing a reboot of the franchise, although the audience may not be that interested in sitting though another origin story. Unless it’s all over in 20 minutes.

Do you have ever those moments, when it feels that your ambitions have been thwarted by geography? I’ve seen an advert for a job of a library assistant that I would have liked to apply for but it’s in a different part of the country.

Saw the adaptation of ‘Day of the Triffids’ that was shown over Christmas, eventually. Good updating of the reason for the breeding of the Triffids and Eddie Izzard was impressive as the villain. However I ultimately felt that it was a let down. Firstly have the traffics gain roots that can grasp people and drag them though things, may have sounded impressive, but makes no sense. If they can do that, why have a sting, when they could just have prey dragged to them? It also weakens the basis for their name. (Three main roots – tri). Then there is the whole idea that the hero needs to have unresolved issues with his father. This smacks of something from an American book on screen writing. As does the whole ‘trying to remember something important from his childhood’ strand.

More snow and qoutes

Another day of snow. My father is going out buying new sacks of coal and getting batteries for the radio. I sometimes wonder if there is something in the nation’s mindset that looks forward to things going wrong.

Noticed on the website for Wired magazine a list of 100 quotes every geek should know http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/01/100-quotes-every-geek-should-know/. Here’s the ones I think they should have had in:

“Help, Help I’m being repressed” - Dennis the Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

“You’ll regret being so damn abusive when the electric UFO gods transphase in from dimension ten to appoint me manager of the universe. I said that out loud, didn’t I?” - The Drummer, from Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday.

“Look at us! Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense?” Mr Nobody from Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison and Richard Case.

“A coward you are Withnail, an expert on bulls you are not.” - Marwood from Withnail and I by Bruce Robinson.

“I was having a mildly paranoid day , mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.” - Spider Jerusalem from Transmetroplitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson.

“People like listening to characters. Characters are safe, because they’re not real. So today I become a character.” - Doktor Sleepless from Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez.

“Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!” Dracula by Bram Stoker.

“Why is there bacon in the soap?” Invader Zim

January snow and monsters on the rampage

January and yet again the country is paralysed in the face of snow. Because we are so unused to it, we never seem prepared. No doubt, the news will show the lines of cars, trapped on the road while the snow piles up. Of course, children will overjoyed at the closing of schools. In a few years, that won’t matter. So many children will have computers with internet connections, that they will be made to work from home.

I’d ordered the films ‘Q-The Winged Serpent’ (1981) and ‘Alligator’ (1981) on DVD, as the price had dropped down and the former has arrived. I’d ordered the two from fond memories of seeing them on video. That was from when they were part of a double bill from the format of ‘Moviedrome’ on BBC2. This was film director Alex Cox introducing a movie considered to be ‘cult’ on a Sunday night. This could be anything from ‘The Terminator’ (1984) to ‘Yojimbo’ (1961).

Both ‘Q-The Winged Serpent’ and ‘Alligator’ admittedly lack the technical sophistication of ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993). But it may be agued that they have more interesting, frightening and intelligent scripts then the latter movie.

Sorry for the break in transmission

Okay, normal services should be resumed by now. I’m sorry for the break in transmission caused by doing November Novel Writing month and then getting a brief Christmas job.

I did manage to get past the total for finishing November Novel Writing month with 50408 words. Unfortunately, the book has not got the main action so is only about a quarter of the way through. I have a feeling that once I finish the first draft, I will have to throw out most of it. Still at least I proved to myself I can have a chance at writing a novel. I’ve now got to finish the first draft in the next couple of months. However, there is another one I need to plan enough to get into a workshop at the World Horror Con. Ho hum.

I’ve finished reading ‘The New Annotated Dracula’ edited by Leslie S. Klinger. It’s a fascinating look at the text and its influences and references.

The general election campaign appears to be already starting. It’s hard to shake the feeling of a lack of excitement. Neither of the two main parties seems to be offering anything except degrees of austerity. There appears to be no promise of any new and exciting approach. Just the same as before.