Deadbeats

It was bound to happen one day of course, national exposure, a spread in a major newspaper filled almost entirely with my work.

If ONLY it hadn’t been the fucking Sport…

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Gx

So, Thomson the Design hits Spanish soil and I get the bastard working on a website redesign in return for Rioja. A few more bells and whistles may appear over the next few days but it’s done for the most part. As well as enhanced prettiness the plan was to build in more features so that our nonsensical blog conversation could be enhanced by well… y’know… proper stuff about books and that. I know, seems funny, but one has to bear in mind that the casual visitor to the site may wish to know a little more about me than the filth that we get up to in the comments sections.

By way of other proper writer stuff, a story of mine — “The Carver” — has been published by Reflections Edge in their November issue.

Their blurb:

“The Carver” is a gentleman, an artisan, re-creating the living as they lie blankly on his tables: with the touch of his hands they break open, or come together, all in the wave of a finger. A vignette comprised of powerful images and strange occurrences.

So there…

Gx

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.

And there we have it. Well, there the UK has it anyway (although as it’s co-funded by C.B.C., no doubt our token colonial will have it on his maple leaf shaped screen soon enough; ignoring the fact that, with the rife torrent network anyone in the world with a broadband connection — say someone in Spain… ahem — can now watch whatever television their browser favours). So, what do we think?

I know that Thomson The Design — my frequent sounding board in matters Who related — has his reservations, but the general feeling here in Casa Deadbeats was that we have another interesting show to occupy us for the next few months. It wasn’t perfect of course, no show is from the word go in my experience. It takes time for a cast of characters to build into something we care about. Let’s not forget quite how… fine Doctor Who seemed when its first episode screened a couple of years back. Impressive, yes but nothing compared to what was to come. There seems to me a huge amount of potential to Torchwood, some nice dialogue, rounded characters and a premise that opens up storytelling possibilities with consummate ease.

The second episode was a little hampered by its sex driven plot — Bruve felt the ‘lesbian snogging’ gratuitous, we boys refused to comment; although the wanking club owner was televisual gold on our sofa, three boys of varied ages laughing like drains — and showed that Chris Chibnall has a good ear for voices, which is always the most important thing in my book.

I interviewed Chris for the LOM book and we talked of Torchwood (he’s more involved story-wise than Russel T. Davies in many ways) and I was convinced then that the show would be in safe hands. His enthusiasm and understanding of TV drama with a fantastical edge was unerring and a splendid, anorak-y conversation was had.

Let’s just hope it’s successful because, not only will it provide another interesting diversion for a Sunday night it’s also another step towards getting genre television thriving again here in the UK — and Matthew Graham is being no slouch in this department either, his recently announced Life On Mars sequel being only the tip of this man’s fantastical iceberg.

It’s getting to the point that a resolute fantasist may have places to tell the stories he likes and get paid doing it.

Beats the shit out of writing for Casualty.

So… yeah… big contract fell through and I am now officially poor. Can’t be specific right now because not everybody involved actually knows so it would be bad protocol but most of you that are aware of my plans of late can probably guess anyway (and that doesn’t mean ’shout out the specifics in the comments section’, my lovely dears, for the reasons outlined above).

So. I’m back to the drawing board as far as a career is concerned through until March when Book Two of LOM offers another cheque in my direction.

All is not lost, there are a few possibilities, a few ideas. What’s that? You want specifics? Oh…

Okay then. I’ve got a really nice kid’s book idea that’s been brewing since I went snorkelling off the coast of my closest town a couple of months back. If one were to take The Water Babies, Stig of the Dump and Amando Ossorio’s Return of the Blind Dead and mix ‘em all up you would be close to the plot that bubbles in my head. My current editor has offered to put me in touch with the children’s editor at S&S so I shall remain foolishly optimistic.

Until the restraining order…

One of the writers I met through working on the LOM book has recently set up their own production company and has promised to have a meeting down the line with a view to me pitching a few scripts. I shall therefore look forward to my TV début (as a writer of course, who can forget my halcyon acting days? Emmerdale, Where the Heart is… Where would the pleasure start?).

Right up until they throw me out of the office for wasting their time…

There still, in fact, seems a degree of enthusiasm for Deadbeat as a piece of Telly, so I look forward to bringing that particular vision to the screen.

Right up until they cast Dick and Dom in the main roles and change the club to a Jelly Bean factory in Leeds. Because they think their demographic would prefer it that way…

Also on the go: the makings of a Giallo story that may be a short novel, a particularly eerie novella called “Last Train Home” and a short story influenced by Lon Chaney, Sr.

A writer’s life, conflicted but never dull.

Gx

So then… FantasyCon.

Yeah. Well all would have been well were it not for the pernicious biological malingerer washed from some soft-drink pump into the unsuspecting gullet of your gentle author.

I missed most of it you see. Hunched fœtal in a hotel room smaller than dimensional physics should allow within the auspices of ‘twin’. I lost the plot sometime late Saturday afternoon, hit suddenly by intense gut-stabbing and nausea (oh yes, all the usual evacuations would follow over the next thirty-six hours have no fear of that; I would be incapable of retaining anything in the darkness that was to follow) and wouldn’t come out of ‘the fug’ of it all properly until 4:00 am Monday morning — five hours before my flight home.

It started well enough though. After a fond farewell to Bruve and the Boys (with a promise to return home extracted under physical duress and the judicious application of a cut-throat razor and a splintering pair of castanets) I flew my EasyJet way to Nottingham East-Midlands, riding out churning turbulence with a copy of The Reckoning by Sarah Pinborough (knowing she’d be at the Con I thought it only fair to finish it before arrival if only so I could rip the piss out of her for it; supportive like that, me). I nearly used it to bludgeon the sundry tossers that kept trying to sell me things during the flight (the trade off with ‘no frills’ it would seem — the fuckers don’t leave you alone: scratch cards, perfume, a Ginsters Pasty for three christing pounds fifty) but decided that tempers may still be thin in these ‘terrorist’ times.

Once down, and safe a taxi ride sees you at The Brittania Hotel in St. James Street. I managed to beat Thompson to it despite the fact that I gave myself what I like to think of as a fair handicap (starting in an entirely different country). Useless girl.

Once Her Ladyship had arrived and we’d checked that the books had been delivered (our stock for the weekend was being shipped by Parcel Force as Thompson was travelling by train) we decided that the only professional thing to do was go and stay in the bar for the rest of the evening — we did spend a while behind the Dealer’s Table at one point, but soon returned as our throats grew dry. Health first.

A splendid night was had in the company of such joyous folk as: Mark Morris (author of Toady from Humdrumming as well as many other superb novels - including Nowhere Near an Angel which I’ve finished since returning and suggest all discerning readers pick up), Pete Crowther (head of PS Publishing and Northern Gent), Graham Joyce, The Aforementioned Pinborough, Tim Lebbon, Steve Gallagher (it says so much that my last contact with this lovely chap was when I sent a picture of an Octogenarian with her tits out to him pretending it was Bruve; I am truly a Man of Letters) Adam L.G. Nevill (Gentleman Perv) and Kevin Mullins (Just Perv).

All was glorious, Humdrumming has a schedule planned for the next year — I believe the only way to strike such deals is with beer in hand — with some of the above names and I was very much on a high come bedtime.

I was also surprisingly sober.

Saturday morning, chipper and filling my face with the usual wilting bacon and cardboard toast that hotels do so well, Lee and I made ourselves ready for a ‘proper’ day of business. We had prepared some nice promotional things for the launch of Toady and Garry Kilworth’s In the Country of Tattooed Men, a sampler that looked like a school exercise book (Starmouth Secondary from the fictional world of Toady) containing short stories by Mark, Garry and myself as well as ‘Horror Club’ badges and a pack of temporary Humdrumming tattoos. They went down extremely well, causing lots of good intentioned jealousy from Pete. The spare packs of these are going to be given away by Shocklines — the prestigious US Horror bookstore.

James Christie came over for a couple of hours, as did Steve Newman (Lee and I were introduced to his new lady; poor woman, she’s probably stopped crying now).

I drank a Coke.

All were quick to remind me how popular my launch speech had been the year before and were fascinated to know if I could match it for this year. No pressure.

The Coke did bad things.

Soft drinks had been off at the bar for awhile, some problem with the pump apparently. The pint I’d downed had been a bit flat, but it was wet and cold and I was too busy or thirsty to care.

I started to sweat.

Lee and I decided that we should get some food before the evening kicked off so we strolled into town, all the while my stomach stabbing and churning. Hopefully, I thought, a bit of food would settle it.

Ten minutes later I was dashing back to the hotel, convinced I was going to throw up in the near future. In the lobby I bumped into Clive Barker — a genuine hero and someone I had a business proposition for but had yet to get him on his own to discuss. Here he was, stepping out the lift. “Hey”, he said, all Trans-Atlantic smiles and approachability. “Hey”, I replied, deciding that throwing-up on a best-selling author is never a way of endearing oneself. Racing up in the lift, swearing at the bastard for being so slow, furious that I’d had my perfect ‘in’ with Barker but was in no fit state to use it. I made it to the room bathroom on time and had my body beaten up from the inside. Muscles straining, twitching, tears in my eyes, abject bloody misery.

All the time keeping my eye on the time as the book launch was in less than an hour.

After a couple of abortive attempts to leave the room I finally got down there with a couple of minutes to spare, apologised to Lee and Mark for the exercise in brevity they were about to hear and — after being introduced as “our insane friends from Humdrumming”; they’ll be calling us bloody ‘zany’ next — managed a few minutes of nonsense involving Mark’s addiction to the lethal by-products of the brewing process found in the outlet pipes of his local Tadcaster breweries and promptly shut up. Bit of an anti-climax for all, really.

I tried to hang around, everyone was grabbing a curry and, hoping that whatever had been wrong with my system was now well and truly out of it, I was determined to have my Saturday night.

An hour later and I’m back in my room for one of the longest, most painful and feverish nights I can remember.

Lee had fun though - he may well flesh out this part of the weekend himself, drinking games and barfly debates — but I remember little of it. Even water made my stomach roll before flooding back out again. It was desperate.

I grabbed a few hours of Sunday. I covered Lee for an hour in the Dealers’ Room while he tried to get over his hangover, met Mark’s family briefly and then vanished back upstairs where I lost consciousness again until the Award Ceremony.

It’s no great surprise that we didn’t win, both Mark and I were nominated (he for the aforementioned Nowhere Near an Angel) but we could see that the competition was harsh and — more to the point — the predictable winner in each of our categories was a ’shoo-in’, so we agreed that we were both silver medallists in the absence of proof to the contrary and clapped in all the right places.

I did manage a brief word with The Lord Barker — covering my fever sweats well, one presumes — which hopefully will lead to something interesting but vanished swiftly back upstairs again.

Knowing I still had to forward my return flight details to Bruve, book a taxi, and sort out various paperwork things with Lee, I was determined not to space out straight away but — worse than ever — I crashed and didn’t resurface until four the following morning feeling the best I had so far.

So, an early morning of planning and much water drinking and before you know it I’m back here in Spain. Back to final deadlines and — I shit you not — some form of bloody cold virus!

Just about had enough now, thank you. Could some kind soul please point to exactly where it was my health went?

Ah well, there’s always Toronto…

Gx

So then my gentle folks, here I am, warmed over by an August Spanish sun; bleached by pool dipping. Still in expatriate limbo right now, tapping this from an internet café in Calpe (south of Valencia, north of Alicante). Tomorrow should see me in my permanent-for-the-next-six-months-or-so residence and a viable office and broadband connection should follow relatively quickly. It’s hot but good, the lizards are well mannered, the beer is cold, and the mountains beautiful. There will be photos aplenty as and when I am in the position to upload them have no fear and I shall do my best to bring a little of the continent to your eyes. The image here comes from Thompson’s Blog, taken during our ‘leaving night’.

Life On Mars approaches completion — it would approach it a lot sooner if some bastard would let Thompson interview Phil Glenister and John Simm! — and the horizon begins to broaden. Deadbeat went and got itself shortlisted for the BFS “Best Novella” award didn’t it? Beating both Simon Clark and any offering from Telos (the company it was originally pitched for) so I’m surprised but pleased. Mark Morris (shortlisted for “Best Novel” with Nowhere Near an Angel) and I have agreed to get mucho drunk in celebration or commiseration come award night.

I fancy writing something big.

Just a random thought that came to me in the pool…

More in a couple of days.

Love to all of you bastards.

Gx

Hot? Oh yes. dabbled around the 40 mark for the entirety of our stay. No air-con at the Travelodge — very little at the Travelodge in fact, except a cheap air of seedy fatalism and a special needs chef who clearly ejaculated in my meal on the first night (something that in most ‘restaurants’ would put one off dining, here though it was a welcome seasoning to what would have otherwise been a decidedly bland meal).

It was a very productive visit though, after a hellish first day of travel and having a head full of editing the Garry Kilworth collection Humdrumming are releasing in a couple of months (it needed finishing so that we could get a proof out to Brian Aldiss who’s writing us a foreword). Most production staff clearly thought that the Life On Mars book was being written by a vague simpleton who had no idea what he was doing — which is not so far from the truth — but come Tuesday morning, I was able to instill a little more faith into proceedings.

Very little actual writing was achieved which is no great surprise — it’s a long day in television, 7:00–7:30 on average — but interviews were had (on the stairs to the prop department lav, in the BBC bar, the annexe of a church… we were varied in location) and many hours of filming were attended, photographed and documented.

I know lots of things about next year that you all don’t! Ha!

And no, I’m not telling. You’ll just have to bloody wait.

Tuesday, and it’s over to Matthew Graham’s (co-creator and main writer) for a steak dinner or maybe a fondue party.

I passed your offer of interior decoration on to Ms. White, HLOF; no doubt she will be in touch (although personally or via solicitor I couldn’t say).

Could everyone join me in wishing aforementioned gentleman a happy birthday by the way? It is to my great embarrassment that I forgot the date…

Sorry old chap, still, no great surprise is it? This is me we’re talking about.

Sigh…

Useless shit.

Gx

So then, off to the set of Life On Mars tomorrow for five days of Travelodge living, catering coach eating and general kicking around in the hope of gathering material for Lee and I’s Life On Mars — The Official Companion.

Yes, the title’s now confirmed. Lee and I always fancied using the title of this post rather than go the obvious route but Pocket Books are wiser than us in the way of the sell so, the Ronseal School of Titling it is.

Other than that justifiable change Lee and I seem to be getting a free reign with some of our more unconventional ideas for the book. Both Kudos and Pocket Books were up for this being a little different to your usual TV Tie-In (in fact that’s why Kudos got us involved in the first place). Obviously some early ideas were a little too revolutionary (no episode guide at all, lots of historical matter, weird graphics) but there’s quite a bit that’s made it through to this ‘confirmed’ stage that, on reflection, should make it a rather unusual affair. It has a fictional thread running through it for example and, having agreed that an Episode Guide really must be present we have found a fun way of doing it.

One of the slight disapointments to next week - and I mention it purely to stem the flow of redundant requests and/or violent suggestions - we are very unlikely to talk to either John Simm or Phillip Glenister. Obviously they will be interviewed for the book but probably by phone and in a couple of weeks time. This is due to their workload rather than any unpleasantness on their part (if you think about it, John Simm is in every scene; has to be of course, when you accept that this is something we are experiencing through him, like a story told in the first person nothing could happen without his presence.). We will be talking to the other regular cast though so, Saturday Swap-Shop style feel free to offer questions you wish us to ask via the comments to this post.

I reserve the right to ignore every crude suggestion towards Liz White and in no way guarantee to pass them on.

Unless they’re really funny of course.

Gx