Deadbeats

It is infinitely probable that nobody other than HLoF and I give a tinker’s shit about this but what the hell. Just stumbled on this forthcoming boxset from Mad Tom O’the Waits. Apparently it collects 24 rare and 30 unreleased tracks from over the years. Predictably enough Waits describes it best on the Anti website:

When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song… and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.

What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer… I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.

Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that’s how we got together. We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be.

If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman’s purse with a Swiss Army Knife and a snake bite kit.

Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That’s when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water’s retreat.

Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It’s not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.

Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.

On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18^th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer… There’s even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who’s begging to be lied to.

I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won’t be disappointed either.

In an attempt to shoehorn some relevance to all of this and writing… erm… I listen to him a lot while working and he features as a recurring character in The Organisation.

Good enough.

Hmm… The word regular does tend to suggest (though not strictly grammatically) frequent. Which comes across as something of a fat-arsed lie when you consider the previous archived entry to this was written nigh on a year ago. Let me be clear then, the other entries were all written for the now defunct apocryphobia site and have been dumped here as this is my new home.

Got that? Happy? Fine.

And what a new home it is, flash in more ways than one. A touch empty here and there for now of course but given that this is a new site devoted almost entirely to my planned writing work that is only to be expected. The emphasis would be on the word planned.

Writing is even vaguer than acting you see, at any given time it would be true to say I have all manner of projects on the go (current count: one new novel, one reissued one, a short story collection, a novella, an on-line serial and several short stories) but due to the relative dearth of functioning markets in the ghettoised genre of writing there are many hurdles yet to leap.

The field has changed a lot over the last few years. What was once labelled small press would perhaps now be better thought of as “independent” press with many small scale publishers producing quality genre books by established authors (Ramsey Campbell and Simon Clark at PS Publishing, Christopher Fowler at Telos just to name a few examples). The true home of the old fashioned small press with its long lists of unknowns and bubbling unders has now moved to a handful of magazines and, more tellingly, a heroic quantity of websites.

This is of course no great surprise, on-line publishing is cheap and allows one to take risks that print publishing does not. Readers now expect a quality from printed matter that is financially awkward to provide.

Not that some aren’t giving it a fair go, The Third Alternative is certainly the most ‘news-stand’ example, a bi-monthly fiction magazine that deals with dark fantasy and horror - albeit with a sensibility that blurs the line of genre with mainstream fiction. For pure horror The Horror Express is flying an attractive flag with the addition of at least one ‘named’ author in their stable (Graham Masterton, Shaun Hutson, Simon Clark and Guy N. Smith have all featured) but with the rest of the magazine dealing with the less familiar (me included, my story ‘Mother’s Boy’ will be appearing in a forthcoming issue - not that this biases me of course…!) it can truly be said to offer a nice glossy playground for newer authors.

What’s that you say? Money?

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Still, nothing new in that. There are paying markets but nobody’s going to be retiring on the money earned from them just yet.

So what’s the trick? Well, seems to me that profile’s the key. That’s certainly my plan anyway. By all means try the best markets possible (the better the market the higher the readership - not absolute fact you understand but logical enough to run with) but the important thing is to get stuff out there. Variety is the key, a bit of print, a bit of web based. Whatever. Mix it up and hope that one reader picks it up, connects and goes hunting for more.

Which is why this site is here. This is the bridge, the library (oh, and while we’re on the subject I do feel I should clarify that any fiction I place here will be of a type that is unpublishable elsewhere - curiosities if you will, pieces that I have fondness for or that I feel offer something of interest while not being so ball breakingly marvellous that I could sell them tomorrow to a pro market - this is the rule of the dollar, say hallelujah publishers want first publishing rights, putting new stuff up here straight away would hamstring them utterly). Hopefully you know this, hopefully you’ve found this site for that very reason. If so then welcome, see what else you can find and let me know.

Spread the love, it’s good for your skin:

	Listen to: Real Gone - Tom Waits Latest album from the broken boy of ‘cubist funk’. Don’t be put off by your first listenings to this puppy, the music (for it is there) will find its way into your head eventually. Truly bizarre, utterly addictive.
	Read: Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor - Doug Bradley The actor behind the pins in the never-ending Hellraiser film series (and long time friend and colleague of Clive Barker) gives a fascinating, historical, literate view of mask acting. Much more than the usual superficial pamphlets on such matters this book goes from the mask’s routes in the Paleolithic right through to the iconic figures of Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger and, of course, Pinhead. Genuinely fascinating stuff.
	Watch: Collateral Hmm. Bit of a popular choice for me, defeats the issue of this column a touch, mind you I could insist on tagging To Live and Die in L.A. on there as well same director), that would up the obscurity ante a notch. Still what a movie. Tom Cruise is an actor I used to loathe, judgmentally writing him off as eye candy. I was wrong. Beautifully shot. Beautifully played. A film that oozes class.