David Gullen's Blog, page 20

A Free Short Story – Schenectady

Here’s a little story about ideas, and where writers really get them from. Could it be we just make this stuff up, or is it as Harlan Ellison says – we get them wholesale from that little old lady in NY state? Or maybe…

Read it Here          Read it on WattPad

If you enjoyed this please consider buying my short story collection, Open Waters, from theEXAGGERATEDpress.

 “A collection with heart and imagination” - Peter Sutton, BRSBKBLOG

Open Waters – from Lulu

Open Waters – from Amazon

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This story was first published in #13 of the BFS Journal, the magazine of the British Fantasy Society. If you’re a fan of genre fiction, fantasy, SF, and horror, you might enjoy becoming a member.

Working from Home; Walking to Work

Last week I decided to start walking to work. It’s already done me a lot of good.

Let me explain – I work from home. Up until last week my commute was nothing more than the distance between the bedroom and the small office next door (or the room downstairs when I’m writing). A shower, a cup of tea, and I was good to go. Now I have a brisk twenty-minute walk up to the top of the hill, down through the garden suburb, round to the bottom of the hill and back up again.

I’ve been working from home for a few years. Three days a week at my IT tech support job, the rest of the time writing fiction and doing all the other things that involves. There are some good things about working from home – no commute costs, no traffic, no crowds and queues. The downside is it’s all too easy to become sedentary, especially during winter.

I’ve worked for the same IT company for 15 years. Three or four years ago we realised we no longer needed an office. The internet gave us secure access to client sites, and cloud services could run all our applications and storage. The cost of those services was small compared to office costs, it was a no-brainer.

There are downsides too. Our office camaraderie had always been brilliant – one of the reasons I’m still here after 15 years. We realised we risked losing this and so we have regular work-together days in London, and socialise more often too.

Our last team working day was a couple of weeks ago. As I was walking to the station that morning with the early morning traffic rolling by and groups of children heading to school, I realised there was one big thing about the commute that I enjoyed – the thinking time.

My office commute used to be a 40 minute drive out of London and against the traffic to the offices we rented at Fairoaks airport, once a WWII RAF training base, now a light commercial airport, not far from Heathrow. Traffic was free-flowing and light, I used to enjoy thinking about what the day would hold – my work, stories I was writing, and other things. I realised I really missed it.

One thing you definitely need as a writer is thinking time. It doesn’t get mentioned very often in all the blogs and books and advice, but it’s bloody important. Your mind needs time to wander, to mull ideas and plots and characters. Recently I’d come to realise I wasn’t getting enough.

So I decided that I would start walking to work again. Out the front door, around the block, and back home again. It felt a bit eccentric mentioning to my partner (she’s a full-time writer who also works from home), but I shouldn’t have worried. She liked the idea so much she’s started doing it too.

A lot of our life is habit and pattern, just as an enormous amount of what we believe and think are stories. I’ve started to understand how not enough structure can be a bad thing. (Too much is a bad thing too – that’s the difference between living your live in a rut or a groove.)

I’ve become a commuter again, and I love it. I’m actually waking up in the morning looking forwards to the walk. I’m even thinking about walking home at the end of the day as well.

~

Free Story – Geronimo’s Cadillac

Here’s another free story – this one’s about war, the invasion of an alien planet, and what happens when it all goes horribly wrong..

This particular story had about the longest gestation of any I’ve written so far. Although I liked it from the start I never felt that I’d really said what I wanted to say and told the right story. I rewrote it, it went through the workshop, and I rewrote it again. And again. Then I more or less forgot about it and moved on. Every now and then I’d come across it and think I really should take another look.

Eight years this one stayed in the drawer.

Finally I worked out what this story was about and saw that I hadn’t actually written it. Seeing those the flaws, all the mistakes, and ripping them out – that was great.

Read it Here          Read it on WattPad

 ~

If you enjoyed this please consider buying my short story collection, Open Waters, from theEXAGGERATEDpress.

 “A collection with heart and imagination” - Peter Sutton, BRSBKBLOG

 Open Waters – from Lulu

Open Waters – from Amazon

Kickstarting the Future

I knew I wanted to fund the Glowing Plants Kickstarter as soon as I heard of it. Synthetic Biology is not quite still in its infancy, but it’s still learning to walk, and projects like this play their part.

Synthetic Biology is still under the horizon for just about everyone, but there are already biohacker clubs. We’re going to need rules, we’re going to have to learn to be careful, very careful, but this new science is full of amazing potential. I’ve just joined the funders for two more Kickstarters, both to create low-cost essential lab kit for Synthetic biologists.

Open qPCR* will bring low cost diagnostics to everyone – in the home, third-world doctors, field workers. It will let us quickly test food safety, detect diseases like Ebola, HIV and Malaria, inspect your own genotype, and speed and cheapen existing lab work

miniPCR is another DNA search and analysis mini-lab. Essentially a DNA amplifier, this one had control and monitor from a bluetooth app.

There’s a huge amount of interest for these projects. Glowing Plants asked for $65K and received $484K, OpenqPCR asked for $50K and got $132k, and miniPCR is currently at $62k on a $20K starter.

I’m pretty excited by all this. For one thing, I’ll soon be getting my own miniPCR lab and will be able to start my first experiments.

~

* PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction, a way to rapidly multiply copies of a single strand of DNA. The technique won the 1993 Nobel prize for Chemistry.

Bucket List – Baptised by Neptune

I have this joke in my author bio that my first girlfriend was a mermaid. It’s true in a way, she was Marina from Gerry Anderson’s Stingray, and I was seven years old. She was rescued from slavery in Triton’s palace by the heroic Captain Troy Tempest, I lived in that most suburban of places – Surbiton, in Surrey.

I’ve grown up with a fascination of water, rivers, and the sea, and have always felt an affinity with it. If there’s a reason for this, an actual origin, then it is this proclamation which has been hanging on my wall wherever I go. It is signed by King Neptune himself, and he gave it to me when I was three years old.

Back in 1950 my parents were newly weds. My father had recovered from his war injuries as much as he ever would. An opportunity arose and they emigrated to South Africa to start a new life. Ten years later than returned to England on the RMS Pendennis Castle. When we crossed the equator I was baptised by Neptune. It was an event I was too young to remember, but I had my proclamation, which proved it was a Very Important occasion, and also showed it had actually happened. Also, my parents said it had too. And they had been there.

One of Us.

The wording ion my certificate is perhaps unsurprisingly very similar to that used by the Royal Navy during WW2 for their Line Crossing ceremoniess. Sailors have marked crossing the equator like this for hundreds of years, and still do. In 1832 Charles Darwin endured a much rougher ceremony than me on HMS Beagle.

He, like me, is now one of the Sons & Daughters of Neptune. I know if I fall in the sea a passing mermaid might save me, and that’s no bad thing. I love this certificate, the little fish and angular sea horses in the border, the shoals of red fish and dotted shipping lanes, the brave ships running with the trade winds…

I used to lie in bed and look at this Proclamation on the wall and dream. Back then I knew it really meant something. It still does.

~

Review – The Last Flight of the Brobdingnag

Here’s a strange one.

I first came across the opening chapters of this oddly charming and compelling tale anonymously posted on Tumblr a couple of years ago. Since then I’d been wondering, off and on,  if the full story would ever come to light. Much to my surprise it has, and in  a rather strange and mysterious way (more of that later).

Ruprecht von Mallard is a war veteran. Badly wounded in an unspecified European conflict, he now has heavy mechanical legs (with integral blunderbus), and artificial eyes. Too heavy to fly, he can only find the freedom of the skies in his beloved ornithopter. He’s a philanderer and a dandy – and he’s also a duck. In fact all the characters are anthropomorphic animals, including ducks, pelicans, frogs and newts.

We first encounter von Mallard when he’s about to fight a duel with the husband of his latest paramour, Ffyona Smythe-Pelican. From there the adventure goes from one desperate escape to another, with various wild adventures in between, as von Mallard struggles to thwart the evil plans of his final nemesis, Dr Pond.

So far, so good. Superficially this is a glorious romp of an adventure set in a steam-punk world of gigantic airships, cyborg ducks and beautiful heroines. The anonymous author knows how to write, the narrative is witty and engaging, and there are some clever references to modern popular culture. But there’s more to it than that, von Mallard’s philandering is driven by psychological trauma caused by the wounds that crippled him, and Dr Pond, ruling the skies from his aerial dreadnought, the eponymous Brobdingnag, has likewise been brutalised both physically and mentally by the same wars that took so much from von Mallard. The demands of Empire have taken the toll on a generation and the whirlwind is being reaped. As the story progresses the romping adventure remains, but underneath it the darkness grows. The climactic ending is, in its own way, touching, magnificent, and poignant.

So how did I get my copy? This really is the most mysterious thing – one day it simply arrived through my letterbox in a plain brown envelope. Now, I know people can do some clever things with internet IP logging, and it made me wonder – had the author – or more likely the equally anonymous editor – managed to track me down from Tumblr sessions? It would be interesting to know if anyone else who discovered those pages has received their own copy in the post.

This slim volume on my desk looks to be a partial reconstruction of the original, a para-facsimile. Though the cover seems to be a near-perfect reconstruction of the original artwork, (with some slight compression in the vertical plane) the interior is sparse. Beyond a single-page editorial note from the mysterious SPC, and a list of von Mallard’s earlier adventures at the rear (along with reproductions of three original blurbs – Let Slip the Drakes of War, No Sparrow Falls, and Dark Wings at Dawn – there is no hint as to the original publisher, author, or year of publication.

I do wonder if this could actually be a reprint of some lost collection, a minor footnote of Edwardian or WW1 speculative literature. Perhaps the Tumblr chapters are the originals after all, and those modern references in that later chapters could easily be editorial inserts designed to obfuscate the true origins. But why?

Inept amateurism, or wilful obfuscation? I feel in some gentle and amusing way I’m being taunted. Believe what you like. I’ve got my copy and I’m hanging on to it.

Back Cover

 ~

Itsy bitsy teenie weenie

Back on the first of September I wrote about how I hoped I had successfully propagated tree ferns for the first time. Two months later and I’m still not sure whether I have, or if the hundred or so that did germinate have all died and these few survivors have grown from spores from other types.

Whichever species they are, they have grown quite nicely and are starting to get their third fronds. I’m also hopeful I still might get one or two more plants.

Are they tree ferns? Time will tell. I will almost certainly have to wait until the growing season next year. Each frond will be bigger than the one before and I’ll finally be able to tell which species they are.

This is a very slow kind of excitement.

~

 

A Free Story – The Fledgling

I’ve just realised I’ve not posted any free fiction for a while, so here is ‘The Fledgling’, a short story about a girl growing up in ancient, China from my Open Waters collection.

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If you like this, you can find some more here.

Enjoy!

Stonehenge – True Origins

About three years ago the exact location of the quarries used for the bluestones of Stonehenge was found, using petrography, a kind of geological fingerprinting. A few days ago I was lucky enough to go to one of the sites.

This is it – a humpback mass rising from the base of a small river valley. The current archaeological dig is in the foreground at the base of the outcrop

 

 

A bit closer, and you can see how the rocks naturally weather into vertical slabs and so would be relatively easy to extract. The ground to the front and right is heavily worked, the earth along the base of the outcrop has been moved by the dig.

How the neolithic people actually moved the stones to Stonehenge is unknown, the fact they did so, and with the simplest of stone and wood tools, is astonishing. Around eighty of these stones, each weighing two to four tonnes, were moved 150 miles. (43 remain at Stonehenge today, the rest are inferred from their holes.). Sitting at the bottom of a very steep-sided valley, I wondered if they used the stream to move the rocks out of the quarry, not to float the stones, but simply as a natural flat trail.

This shot, looking back the other way shows a slab sitting on ‘rock rollers’. The slab is badly cracked, so could be a stone abandoned after extraction. However, it doesn’t look very weathered considering it should have been lying there for 4,500 years, so maybe it became covered in topsoil or was a more recent attempt. A lot of the rocks in the foreground also very fresh edges.

It doesn’t really matter, the location is the thing, and It was nice to sit there for a while and think about the whys and hows of the people who worked here so long ago, the real purpose of this great effort, and what it might have been like to be a part of it.

~

How to get there: The site is on public land close to a ford on an unclassified road between Brynberian and Ffynnangroes on the B4329.

Cranachan – Again!

Cranachan – ingredients

I’ve written before about this delicious, quick and simple, and rather boozy pudding. Yesterday was the first chance* to make it this year, and I went back to same recipe I used in the past.

This time I tried a variation in quantities, which worked well – so here is my definitive recipe for perfect cranachan.

40g medium or coarse oatmeal

200g raspberries

400ml double cream

3 tbsp runny honey

3 tbsp malt whisky

Mash half the raspberries to a pulp and mix into the cream with the honey and whisky. Gently roast the oats, spread on baking tray under the grill until they are just beginning to brown. Stir in the rest of the raspberries, add all but a teaspoon of the oats. Mix gently, and serve, sprinkled with a few roast oats. This makes plenty for four.

Secret tip: Leave for ten minutes before serving – the flavours mix, mingle and strengthen.

Our favourite whisky for this, as for whisky toddies, is Famous Grouse. The balance of flavours is just right. We’ve tried a few good single malts and surprisingly they are just not as good.- either too subtle and soft, or too single-note peaty.

Cranachan – definitely the porridge of the Gods.

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* Not that the crop has been bad this year, it’s been brilliant and we’ve been picking them pretty much every day to eat fresh for breakfast.