Election Jitters (05.05.2010) »

As a break from weeping over the state of my Lloyds shares, I've dropped by to shed high NaCl₂ content tears apropos my html mangling. The great, as yet unwritten, novel of my life will now be known as The Bridge Of Asses - it's something to do with geometry, and not a sexual fantasy of mine. Chartists who busy themselves in recording my lusty predelictions have started to fear I may be harbouring a bit of a foot fetish. Such appreciation of the female extremities has rather crept up on me. Inch by inch. Back to the day job, then...

Out Of The Closet (20.05.2008) »

One of the unfortunate side affects of rummaging through cupboards in search of stuff to eBay is that you occasionally come across lost creative 'gems' from a deep and distant past. What can I possibly utter in my defence? That I was young and in the thrall of Americana? That I'd been reading far too much early Slow Learner-era Pynchon? That I quaintly believed simply dropping a Greyhound bus in every now and again (as painful as it sounds...) would be sufficient to conjure late-sixties America?

Let's just pause there a moment and see quite how much clichéd gold-standard American iconography I've managed to cram into 4500 words:

Trailer Parks; Basketball; Gophers + Cottontails; Grain Silos;
Crop-Spraying Bi-Planes; Pick-up Trucks; Diners + Motels;
Jazz Music; Silly Sci-Fi Shows; Bald-Eagles; Banjos; Raccoons;

etc etc etc etc. I'd certainly done my research. And boy does it show. There's really no faulting the authenticity of all this rambling. What's that I hear you say? It's almost like he was there.... Well, you're just too kind...

This is a fragment of a much larger work, the remainder of which will doubtless warm me during the long winter evenings ahead (well, unless the chimney chokes to death on the vapour of hopelessy overwrought, dense prose). And you thought I was being metaphorical...!

Every character deserves a back story, ideally a small novella unto itself, and intricate enough to deflect the focus from the main narrative proper (which wastes much ink going nowhere). This is how you write 'big', surely? And this is Carly's Tale, shot through with an American landscape reimagined by somebody who's never ventured much further West than Wolverhampton. Well, don't say I didn't warn you. If I can paraphrase Edmund Blackadder - "It starts poorly, tails off in the middle, and the less said about the end the better..."

I suppose it's not totally devoid of merit. I mean, there's certainly one rather nice sentence, which I fully intend to reuse in the future (if I'm not in breach of my own stringent copyright laws). See if you can find it, buried like the proverbial needle in a Wisconsin corn field. Is Wisconsin famed for cornfields? Who the hell knows... There's a prize and everthing!

Apogee Synopsis (14.12.2007) »

Set amongst the transients and backpackers of modern-day London, with myriad excursions into the last century or so of British history, Apogee is the story of a dying man's quest, and the listless group of drifters who embrace him as their own.

It's 1889, and the light-fingered housekeeper of one Basil Foxton, a failed private detective fast approaching penury, has stolen his beloved pocket watch. Decades later, and hearing of his Great Uncle's sorry and scandalous demise, young Stanley Smyth, a dandy and society playboy, takes it upon himself to hunt down the perpetrator, restore family honour, and recover the watch. It will be his life's work.

Stanley is both helped and hindered in his quest by the sporadic appearances, in various guises, of a giant winged boar. The sinister creature emerges whenever the watch is near, but is also a floating pink portent of doom. After a narrow brush with the pig during a Floyd photoshoot in Battersea, 1976, a distraught Stanley suffers a heart attack and withdraws to a Hampstead retirement home.

Here he looks set to languish broken and unfulfilled. That is, however, until the appearance of Denny (Zen) Archer, a twenty-something itinerant who has been sent by his temp agency to vacuum the nursing home floors.

Denny, unbeknown to himself, may well hold a vital clue to the location of the pocket watch, and frail Stanley Smyth discovers a new, perhaps final, lease of life.