Dan Coxon's Blog, page 4

'Tis the Season to be Scary

Halloween is here again, and with it comes a glut of 'best of' horror lists and spooky special issues. It's hard to think of another genre that has such a specific window for impressing the general populace. Readers who'd never dream of picking up a copy of the latest Stephen King are suddenly happy to be scared witless for a week or two, as winter begins to draw in and the darkness descends. Horror writers must have been counting down the days since the Spring.

I don't consider myself a horror writer, but my output has taken a notably horrific twist in recent months. I've found myself more and more attracted to the weird and the worrisome, from dark, twisted short fiction to novels of supernatural horror. I may not be horrific enough to be a genre writer, but I've felt an undeniable pull towards the dark side.

A couple of weeks ago my werewolf story ' Beasts of London ' was performed at Liars' League - you can see the live reading, and read the words, here (the video should also be at the end of this post). Following that, the Liars performed it at LitCrawl London, and then again at Liars' League Hong Kong. It's the story that just won't die. Given that it was originally an idea for a novel, this little 800 word nugget is already showing remarkable endurance - I've even thought that it might make a great comic book (comic/graphic novel publishers, take note)...

Werewolves are usually a little too cliched and mainstream for my tastes, however. I tend to lean more towards the weird and unsettling, and my flash story 'The Way of All Flesh' is a better indication of where things are heading. You can find it in the Wales Arts Review Halloween Special , an outstanding collection of weird and disturbing flash fiction. In addition to my story, it has wonderfully unsettling contributions from Niall Griffiths, Angela Readman, Dan Powell and Ashley Stokes, among others. It's the perfect literary companion to the haunting season. You can download it for FREE here.

The weirdest thing of all, however, is the fact that I appear to have been on this dark and devilish path for some time. Looking back over my recent publications (and a couple still to come) there's a dark vein running through them, a rich seam of eerie transformations and unrelieved fear. Perhaps this is the road I was always meant to take, the blackness at the heart of my imagination.

Watch the shadows. The dark is rising.

Chasing the White Whale

Those of you who follow my Twitter or Facebook pages will know that I recently read at the Royal Festival Hall, London, as part of Moby-Dick Unabridged . The project was as crazy as it sounds: the entirety of Melville's epic novel, read over four days by an enormous team of writers, celebrities and members of the public. My little contribution was to be a ten minute reading, somewhere in the vicinity of Chapter 72: The Monkey-Rope.

Even if you haven't read the book, you almost certainly know the story of Ahab, Ishmael, and the pursuit of the great white whale. It's a story of revenge and obsession, of a reckless, single-minded pursuit of one's prey that somehow becomes your entire life.

It's a sentiment that every writer knows all too well.

There's a reason that Moby-Dick is so beloved among writers. In Ahab's blinkered mission we see something of our own stubborn adherence to our dream. The white whale is our desire to see our work in print, to put the words in our head down on the page for people to read. We pursue it despite rejection after rejection, despite the havoc it wreaks in our personal lives, despite the overwhelming likelihood of our ultimate failure. Being a writer makes no sense, if we're trying to be logical. Most authors would make Ahab look like an inconstant ditherer.

The Moby-Dick Unabridged reading became a tiny white whale too. The morning of the reading my wife fell down the stairs, injuring her ankle and resulting in three hours in A&E. It seemed uncertain whether I would even make it to the Royal Festival Hall. Yet somehow it seemed vitally important that I should, that I should overcome the obstacles fate was throwing at me and make it onto that stage. Looking back, my obsession was positively Ahabian.

Of course, Moby-Dick is about more than just a man, and a whale, and an obsession. If there was anything that I learned during my Unabridged experience, it was that Melville's novel contains multitudes. There's humour, and pathos, and tragedy, and adventure, and long, long passages about the intricate workings of whaling vessels. And so, so much more.

In a moment of bizarre coincidence, a story of mine was also just published in Popshot magazine. The story, 'Fathoming', involves a daring plunge beneath the waves, in an attempt to understand those murky waters that mankind has yet to conquer. While reading Moby-Dick live on stage, I came across this:

"That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou has been where bell or diver never went..."

The passage is so close to the ideas behind my own story that it immediately jumped from the page. It might almost have served as an epigram to the story.

Finally, I'd be doing myself a disservice if I didn't mention my own current white whale. For the past six months I've been working on an anthology of short fiction about fatherhood, Being Dad , gathering brand new stories by acclaimed authors such as Toby Litt, Nikesh Shukla, Dan Rhodes, Nicholas Royle, Courttia Newland, and many many more. We're currently crowdfunding the publication, with a target of £3500 - as I write, we're almost 80% of the way to that target, but with only five days to reach it. Once again I can see a shadow of Ahab's obsession in my own obstinacy, single-mindedly throwing myself after this dream to the detriment of the rest of my life.

So please, please - if you're able to, check out the Kickstarter campaign for Being Dad, and back us by preordering a copy of the book. Help me harpoon this white whale.

(Thanks to The Special Relationship for organising Moby-Dick Unabridged and being so understanding. You can listen to the unabridged reading of Moby-Dick on the Southbank Centre Soundcloud, including my own contribution in Chapters 72 and 73 here. I start about 8 minutes into Chapter 72. The Monkey-Rope.)

Your Fathers Need You...

If you've spoken to me at all in the last six months, you'll know that I've been bursting major bloodvessels in pursuit of Being Dad , an anthology of fatherhood-themed fiction which I'm editing. It started as a tiny droplet of an idea a couple of years ago, and it has now grown to overshadow most of my waking hours - and half the night too. Never mind that I've had an actual child in the interim. Every spare minute is being spent on this project.

Which basically means that I don't want it to fail. And that's where you come in. We're crowdfunding the book right now, and I really, really need people to pre-order a copy, and maybe nab themselves a fancy reward or two.

If you don't understand what crowdfunding is (and let's face it, who does?) then it's surprisingly simple. You can visit our page at Kickstarter , read a bit about the book, see what we have planned. Then you can pre-order the book (for a mere £10 inc. P&P), or even pledge a bit more and get some wonderful extras thrown in (Being Dad beer mats, signed copies of books by our contributors, limited edition chapbooks). You won't be charged immediately - you only have to pay if the project reaches its funding target. So you can see why it's so important that we get people signing up and pre-ordering the book!

The link for our Kickstarter page is below. Whether you’re thrilled by the chance to read new stories by the likes of Toby Litt, Dan Rhodes, Nikesh Shukla, Courttia Newland and Nicholas Royle, or you just want to give your father (or husband) something special for Father’s Day, please show us your love.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dan-coxon/being-dad-short-stories-about-fatherhood

(For extra credit, there's also an interview with me here on the Unthank website , discussing the idea behind the book and the stories we have lined up. Or you can follow us on Facebook . Or Twitter . The more the merrier.)

The Tweets

So far this month I've read two articles arguing that blogs are yesterday's news, and that social media has replaced the blogosphere. In order to prove something about something, this blog post is entirely composed of this month's Tweets from @DanCoxonAuthor, edited and cleaned up to try and impose some kind of logic. Point made (whatever it was): 

Woke to the toddler shouting 'Daddy, there's poo on my finger!'. So begins another week. New writing routine: wait until wife and kids are in bed, pour large glass of whiskey. Start writing. Lately I've been finding editing more enjoyable, while writing has grown harder. Need to train my tired parent brain to do both. 

I gave the bake off everything, abandoning my marriage to sprinkles and glacé cherries. I came 6th. But at least there was cake.
Postman likes me... Received the latest issue of The Lonely Crowd. Lovely cover by Jo Mazelis. Can't wait to read it. This is brilliant: EnriqueVila-Matas on his friendship with Roberto Bolano, via The White Review.
I can't find the words to say what I need to say so I'll just say this: Best thing about staying in touch with Uni friends is you all turn 40 at the same time. Worst thing is... you all turn 40 at the same time.
Once upon a time there was a man who grew older. One day he woke to see his dead father in the mirror. He no longer buys mirrors.
Anyone know what Australia's lowest ever Test innings is? Might be in for a record here... Michael Clarke said they'd have a 'red-hot crack' this morning. Can we blame this collapse on rampant venereal disease? Not even a respectable T20 score in the end. Well done England, and Stuart Broad. Two day Test match?
Quick Twitter poll - what should I read next? Ishiguro's Buried Giant? Howard Jacobson's J? or Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who And The Mutants? Whoever re-blurbed this edition of The Bell Jardeserves an award. It now sounds like an episode of Sex & the City. Latest Structomagazine arrived today, further proof that the postman likes me. I just hope he doesn't ring twice.
Wrestling a short story that I can't quite get to work. I need a cool wrestler name. And maybe a mask. Finally watching 20,000 Days on Earth. Fascinating examination of the creative process, highly recommended. 'To act on a bad idea is better than to not act at all.'
I snuck into my kids' bedroom and photographed them while they slept. A memory card filled with what my memory couldn't hold onto.

Welcoming 'The Lonely Crowd'

If you've been following me on social media, you'll know that I'm thrilled by the new literary magazine The Lonely Crowd. (If you're not following me, do it now - @DanCoxonAuthor on Twitter).

My excitement isn't purely voyeuristic. Yes, it's a beautiful-looking journal. Yes, at £6 it's possibly the bargain of the year. Yes, it has some amazing new fiction by Alison Moore, Tom Vowler, Stevie Davies, Anna Metcalfe and many more. But just as important - for me, anyway - is the fact that it also includes my short story 'What We Burned in the Fire'.

The story is a continuation-of-sorts of 'Not the End of the World', which appeared in The Portland Review in 2013. You can find out more about the ideas behind it - and the spark that inspired it - in a short essay called 'A Land in Ruins' that I wrote for the Lonely Crowd website.

If you want to read the story itself, though (and you should - I think you'll like it), then you'll need to buy the mag. Which is something you should do, for all the reasons I outlined above. It's the most exciting new literary magazine I've seen in a while, and easily worth your time and your money. Their shop is here. Go do it now.

Dad Again: the Positive Pressures of Fatherhood

When our son was born in February 2012, it sent seismic changes through our lives. Anyone with kids will tell you this - life on the other side is wholly different to what went before. Somehow the addition of one small person drains your days and your energy, leaving you with barely enough time to indulge in basic activities like eating or showering. To those without kids, it doesn't sound like that big a deal. To those of us who have become zombified by our offspring, it's possibly life's biggest game-changer.

And for some reason we're about to do it all over again. Our second son is due any day now, and with his arrival will come the same decimation of our free time. I recently did a short interview for The Good Men Project, in which we discussed what it was like being a stay-at-home dad, and how I managed to fit my writing and editing work in alongside something as overwhelming as parenting. The simple process of talking about my role as a father, and as a writer, set me to thinking about the funny ways the creative muse works. It's not quite what you might expect.

The plain fact is that I've been more productive as a father than I ever was before, despite having significantly less time to work in. Somehow the added pressure of the ticking clock has made me more ruthless, more dedicated, and more determined than ever. In the last two weeks, as we've waited for Boy #2 to arrive, I've written drafts of three (quite long) short stories - making it one of my most fertile writing periods in recent memory.

The same happened when our son was born three years ago - and not only before he arrived, either. Once he was with us, and we were enduring the sleepless nights, my focus changed, but I was still able to find time to write. In fact, I produced some of the work that I'm most proud of. My essay on Edward Lear's 'The Jumblies' is still among my favourites, and I think my tongue-in-cheek parenting lessons for The Nervous Breakdown hold up well too. I even managed a few short stories on the topic of fatherhood, including ' Mapreading ', which appeared in both the online and the print editions of Spartan magazine, and 'The Claw' in ADP's Daddy Cool anthology.

It's for this reason that I'm anticipating the baby's arrival with hopeful enthusiasm. Life will be tough once he's here. We'll struggle to snatch moments of sleep, be vomited on, pissed on, shit on... and yet, somehow, that will only serve to feed my creative desire. There once was a time when I only wrote for myself. Now, I want to put down on paper something that my boys can one day be proud of. The future is almost with us.

Burning Lightbulbs: Stories Inspired by Ride

If you follow me on Twitter, or have befriended me on Facebook, you'll know that I'm an unrepentant fan of Nineties shoegazers Ride. The news that the band has reformed, and will be playing this year's Field Day festival - as well as occasional hints that Mark Gardener, Andy Bell, Loz Colbert, and Steve Queralt might start writing new material - has already made 2015 my favourite year since... well, since the Pixies rose from the dead. (You can read my essay exploring my love of both bands at The Weeklings, or duplicated on Salon).

What you're less likely to know is that Ride have inspired my writing more than any other band, musician, or composer. They've not just been the background music while I'm writing - over the years they've provided prompts for a grand total of five stories, some more successful than others. Here's the rundown of my five Ride-inspired moments of creative genius... and failure:

1) 'Last Love' - This story was one of the first I wrote, and my first to be published. Printed in local fiction collection Shorts From Surrey, it was largely composed while I walked back from Ride's infamous Brixton gig in 1992. The incident in question - a stabbing at a concert - was actually an anecdote I'd heard about a Megadeath show several months earlier, but the rest of the story is 100% Ride. Some people still tell me this is their favourite story of mine, which I'm sure must be some kind of insult.

2) 'The Memory Engine' - It wasn't until I listened to 'Time Machine' again that I realised how much this story owed to it. Originally published in Roadworks magazine, it told of an amateur time-traveller who builds a time machine without realising that it's worked.When pieces start to go missing at night he's convinced that it's an act of sabotage, when in fact it's actually the machine slipping backwards through time. The ending in particular owes a lot to the lines "Losing control, landing back in this year/Did I ever move? Did I disappear?". My personal favourite of these stories, which probably means that no one else enjoyed it.

3) 'Drive Blind' - Rather unsurprisingly, this was inspired by the Ride song of the same name. Written in 1995 (I think), it appeared in four weekly installments in the St. Andrews student newspaper, of which I also happened to be Assistant Editor. Otherwise I doubt it would ever have seen the light of day. An early attempt at sub-William Gibson cyberpunk, it made little sense unless you were already familiar with the song. Still, I think I managed the cliffhangers pretty well.

4) Unnamed Playground Story - Okay, this probably did have a title... but I can't remember it. What I do remember is labouring over it on an old manual typewriter in my student bedroom, slowly filling the waste basket with balls of white paper encrusted with Tipp-Ex. Loosely based on the song 'Not Fazed' and the instrumental B-side 'Grasshopper', it tackled parallel storylines in which children scrapped at school and dinosaurs tore at each other in a tar pit. Awful stuff.

5) Unnamed 'Close My Eyes' Story - Not much to say about this, other than the fact that I can remember almost nothing about it. I think it had something to do with suicide, and - given my teenage angst - it's likely that a girl was involved. It may even have evolved into a later story which also ended in suicide, although I think that was an entirely different depressing tale. Since then I've been highly suspicious of writers who end a story with a suicide. It always feels so grubbily adolescent.

If you aren't familiar with Ride, none of this will mean very much to you. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a video of 'Drive Blind' (see story #3), recorded live at Brixton Academy in 1992 (see story #1). Somewhere in the foreground you may occasionally spot the back of my head.

The Top 5 of Everything - 2014

As we all look back on the past year - and ahead to the next - it's customary to produce lists. These lists can be made for many reasons. They can be lists of resolutions, lists of achievements, lists of Christmas presents we need to return.

And then there are the Best Of... lists.

Having a toddler around the house, I can't claim to have listened to enough music, or watched enough films, or read enough books to make a truly informed decision about what was great in 2014. But there were a few things that made the year a little bit brighter and more exciting for me. So here are my favourite five things of 2014, in no particular order:

Best Album - The War on Drugs, 'Lost in the Dream'

I'd never heard of TWoD before 2014, and their discovery was a slow-burner. At first this album seemed like a mashup between Dire Straits and Bob Dylan, but the more I listened to it, the more I loved it. Now I can't go a few days without a fix. Combine that with their awe-inspiring performance at the Green Man Festival, and TWoD ruled the sonic realm this year.

Best Festival - Green Man

Which brings me neatly to my best festival experience in a long time. Okay, so I'm not exactly a regular at these things, but Green Man exceeded all expectations. Great music, great food, an interesting literary tent, movies, beer - it had it all. Plus the toilets were remarkably clean. I've already booked my ticket for next year, and advise you to do the same.

Best Film - Under the Skin

This has already topped a few best-of-year lists, so it's not exactly a controversial choice - but I know some people found it overrated. For me, it was a brilliant blend of sci-fi, horror, realism and artifice, entertaining and gripping from start to finish. Add in the superb soundtrack and some truly original sequences, and this reminded me why I love cinema.

Best TV Show - True Detective

I'm certain that not many people will dispute this choice. True Detective was the TV revelation of 2014, and like everyone else I can't wait to see where it heads next. It's hard to believe that it'll get close to the genius of this first season, though.

Best Literary Genre - Supernatural Horror

I read many great books in 2014, but if there was a trend, it was towards the ghostly and the supernatural. This was due in part to editing Litro's Horror issue, and attending the SCARdiff horror convention - but at times this fascination went beyond the personal. Supernatural horror seems to be on the rise, and reading the likes of Robert Aickman, Adam Nevill and the superb collection Poor Souls' Light from the Curious Tales collective made the genre seem fresh and unsettling all over again.

The Long, Hard Road to J.G. Ballard

A couple of months ago a conversation started online. Spurred on by Nick Hornby's comments on whether we should feel obliged to finish a book, the discussion quickly became a literary confessional. All those classics we'd given up on, all the bestsellers we'd left half-read on a beach somewhere - it all came pouring out, as if we'd simply been waiting for the opportunity to confess our failure as readers.

In my case, my sin came in the form of J.G. Ballard.

I'd attempted Ballard's books several times during my adolescence, my interest sparked by the British author's connection with William Burroughs, one of my literary heroes. I was certain that I'd love them the way that I'd loved Naked Lunch and Junkie, so my reaction came as a surprise, and a disappointment. I tried Crash (inspired in part by the Cronenberg film), The Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise. Each time I'd get a few pages in and be swamped by the density of the language, the dry fascination with theories and concepts. While Burroughs was lurid and intriguing, I found Ballard almost wilfully impenetrable.

So I gave up on them. Three times I tried to read him, and three times I failed. In the end I came to the conclusion that J.G. Ballard just wasn't for me, and relegated them to the far corner of my bookshelf.

With my recent confession, however, came a new spark of interest. A few friends started to sing his praises, with the weight of critical opinion firmly behind them - and yes, I felt as if I'd somehow missed something, that Ballard was a writer who I ought to love but had given up on too early. Having taken recommendations, I dusted off my old copy of High-Rise and warily cracked the spine.

To my surprise, I loved it. Twenty years has changed the books I read, the things I expect from a writer. What had seemed tangled and difficult before became rich and multi-layered. The concepts that had obstructed me two decades earlier now propelled me forwards, pulling me into the author's dense web of language and ideas. It's fair to say that High-Rise is now one of my favourite books.

There's a weird footnote to this story. I read the final pages of High-Rise on the train up to London last month, on my way to do a reading for Listen Softly London in Southwark. For the event I was reading 'Among the Pines', a short story I had written over a year earlier, published in Neon magazine. I'd chosen it because of its uncanny themes, something that seemed to fit with the Halloween mood. The reading went well, and I was pleased with how it had come across. As I sat down, Reece Choules - one of the other readers that evening - leaned across the table and whispered to me: "Do you know who your writing reminds me of? J.G. Ballard."

His comment threw me at first. But, strangely, I could see what he meant. Obviously I'm not of Ballard's calibre, but the things I was attempting - the short, clearly-defined sentences; the crossover between high- and pop-culture; the use of fiction to explore concepts and theories - seemed, to an outsider, to owe him a debt. Somehow, over the last twenty years, I've taught myself to write like J.G. Ballard - without ever having read one of his books to the end.

Today marks Ballard's 84th birthday, so it's as good a day as any to renew my commitment. I now have a whole new world to explore in his novels and stories, his successful experiments and his bold failures. It's just taken me half my lifetime to get here.

From Cardiff to London: Looking Back at October

October was a crazy month: live readings, pitching panels and author interviews turned it into an impromptu tour, as I hit the road for three very different events. From the drooling zombies of Cardiff (not a comment on the local populace - I was at the city's horror convention) to the hirsute hipsters of Shoreditch (definitely a comment on the local populace), October was a month of travel, madness, and pre-packed sandwiches.

First up was our Litro Book Club event in Shoreditch. I had the pleasure of meeting Marc Pastor, author of gothic crime novel Barcelona Shadows and rabid Doctor Who fan. It's always a pleasure to meet a fellow Whovian, especially over a few pints of Meantime's excellent London beers. You can listen to me interviewing Marc Pastor here , on the Litro Podcast. If you haven't already read Barcelona Shadows, be sure to check it out.

Then came SCARdiff 2014 , as horror fans, writers, actors, producers, editors and... erm... pythons descended on Cardiff for a one-day convention. I was there to chair the Dragon's Pen Pitching Panel, at which we heard pitches from seven talented aspiring writers. But more importantly, I was there to socialise, make some contacts, and possibly imbibe some Brains (the beer, not the internal organ). A personal highlight was sharing a few beers with Litro #138 contributor Adam Nevill, whose novel The Ritual kept me well and truly spooked on the three hour train trip to Wales. As an added bonus I also met Tim Lebbon for the first time, whose short story 'Pay the Ghost' is being made into a film starring Nic Cage as I type. And who says short stories aren't glamorous?

Finally, my reading at Listen Softly London in Southwark almost felt like a homecoming. A relaxed evening that included readings from friends Reece Choules and Iain Robinson, as well as the frenetic Gary From Leeds, it proved that LSL is one of my favourite literary nights out in London. For less than a matinee ticket to the cinema, you can listen to writers, poets and performers showcasing their latest work - plus they have an excellent bar. I read from my short story 'Among the Pines', originally published in Neon magazine, a heady combination of David Lynch and the sheer horror of a weekend in Center Parcs. As you can see from the photo above, I also scared the crowd witless with my black clothing and unkempt facial hair.

Thanks to everyone who came along to all three events. I'll be taking a break for a month or two, gathering my energies for next year. Bring on SCARdiff 2015...