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.

Give me that baby, it needs my tongue.

So… yeah! Time for more words I think. Both Humdrumming and Deadbeat have been nominated for an award by the British Fantasy Society (best publisher and novella respectively). Thompson the Design and myself have built a mini-site here to publicize the fact, have a look it’s a bit silly. Tomorrow night we’re in London to kiss babies, press flesh and generally curry votes at the BFS Awards Showcase night. I’ll probably get too drunk and throw up on Christopher Fowler and that’ll be that door firmly closed to me in future.

The Organisation - the bizarre serial I wrote for a nutty Californian company a couple of years ago has returned via the medium of Blog thanks to the kindness of the blog-crazy John Evans (he set it all up then had to pull his network out of it as my naughty words caused issues with his sponsors!). I also feature on another of his blogs (the man earns one hell of a living out of this believe it or not, the network is huge) as it would seem I and the rest of the Humdrummers have been mistaken for a ‘celebrity’.

Ha!!!

It’s [link no longer available - I.A.M.] by the way.

Any assistance in spreading the word on both of these much appreciated of course…

Visiting the set of Life On Mars in a fortnight or so, the lovely Exec. Producer Claire Parker has even secured Lee and I an office to work from! Probably the bloody broom cupboard but the thought’s there.

Work has commenced already - it has to, the book needs to be completed and delivered in under a couple of months.

Jesus…

All go innit?

So how are you all?

Gx

Yadda yadda yadda.

I am suffering from intense festive overkill, much more of this and I’m liable to start slaughtering elves.

I’m currently smoothing down the edges of a Christmas anthology book for KIC sourced from the best competition entrants and contracted writers.

I opened my mouth, I made the suggestion. I am idiot made flesh.

It’ll be with you in a couple of weeks and I shall expect mince pies and herculean flagons of sherry, no carrots please, Rudolph can do his own damn shopping.

After that I intend to lock myself in a dark office, laced with fags and laudanum and only emerge when I have a bunch of shiny new creative things. The Organization goes well, Daddy’s proud, but there must and shall be other work.

On 6^th January I shall be one year older, used underwear and cash to the usual address.

Bunch ‘O work for the Keep It Coming Print Magazine:

I’ll be doing two regular features -

1. A humorous ‘opinion’ column along the rough lines of the anorakism features here. So as not to confuse the dear Americans it’s been retitled ‘Get A Life’ referencing Bill (The Girth) Shatner’s spectacularly misplaced announcement at a Star Trek convention a few years ago, clearly forgetting precisely who it was that kept him up to his bulging belly in Hookers and Gin.
2. A ‘forgotten heroes’ kind of thing where I do a feature on a particularly inflential area of creativity that has been glossed over or forgotten. First issue is on the subject of the Parisien Théâtre Du Grand Guignol. Something of a pet subject, the sixty five year history of this perverse theatre, plying its works of extreme theatrical horror within a deconsecrated chapel in the Red Light district of Montmartre, has always fascinated me. Subscribers to The Organization will see the place turn up ther before too long…

William Hope Hodgeson will follow in the second issue…

‘Mothers Boy’ will most likely appear in Issue #4 of Horror Express (published in about six months so don’t hold your breath just yet!). Artwork’s been done, Marc Shemmans (Editor) is pleased so no future embarrassment there then.

Over the next couple of weeks expect a slew of page updates here on the site, I’ve been pitifully lax since going online and am determined to get it done!

I want to get a few issues ahead on the serial, work on an upcoming short story submission and, believe it or not, I’m one of the judges on KIC’s Christmas Short Story Competition so there’s a few festive words to plow through for that; but…

…eventually, I’ll get ’round to this Digital Dump.

That’s it, move along there’s nothing to be seen here!

The Organization goes live!

To subscribe, go here.

1. My short story “Mother’s Boy” will be appearing in a future issue of The Horror Express, Marc Shemman’s superb horror fiction magazine. A thick chunk of high gloss quality it has already featured the work of such luminaries as Graham Masterton, Simon Clark and Shaun Hutson as well as some of the best writing from new authors.

   Chuffed is not the word.

   I am also planning on illustrating it!

   Publishing date details as and when I get them.

2. An online serial called The Organization (yes, yes, I know I’ve used the American spelling) is due to start in a couple of weeks at www.keepitcoming.net Keep it Coming is an exciting venture by Kelli Ballard in California, a website filled with serial stories in various genres. Readers subscribe to any given series and receive two episodes a week via e-mail. Steve Newman, a good friend and theatre director, has been releasing a serial about Ernest Hemingway over there for knocking on six months and has been badgering me to come up with a series since about day one.

So I have and thankfully Kelli likes it, contracts have been signed, a month’s worth of episodes delivered and it should début any day (I’ll post a link at the top of this page the moment it does).

Here’s the pitch:

No, no, no… You’re quite wrong. Every thought or preconceived notion you have regarding authority, control, and the very framework of history. All of those movers, all of those shakers, did nothing.

That is the first great secret.

The world outside your window, so safe and secure, so perpetual, all of that hangs by a thread.

That is the second great secret.

The Organization.

That is the third great secret.

Both a fantastical conspiracy history and an action adventure The Organization is an ongoing serial about a secret society of temporal agents who have controlled our world for centuries. With the ability to write history and, if necessary, mould the fabric of reality itself, they have kept us on their chosen path.

Now, however, the ultimate disaster is upon us. The planet reached the point of physical collapse five years ago and has been maintained unnaturally by The Organization since then. Their hold, however, is slipping…

We follow Organization operatives Rathbone and Keller as they attempt to regain control. Trapped and under siege from forces that would see us all dead, they must keep the most important person in the world alive so that she can fulfil the plans The Organization have for her.

She however is an English teacher who counts reading romance novels and collecting china figurines of rabbits as a full and exciting life.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, she’s having none of it.

As well as the ‘main arc’ of the story, The Organization features stand-alone adventures featuring Organization operatives throughout history, many of whom are well known to us… Well, we thought they were…

There is nowhere The Organization cannot go and no type of story it cannot tell. From science fiction to horror, comedy to thriller the only limit is several millennia of history.

ooh…

I’m over the moon about this having watched Keep it Coming go from strength to strength over the last twelve months. It’s an exciting format and great to be involved.

Subscriptions start at $3.33 per month (via PayPal) but I’m looking into various ‘bulk deals’ and offers.

A dedicated space here on the site will be given over to The Organization that will grow as the series continues.