Marc Nash's Blog, page 53

Dear Author, Dear Reader

Had some interesting online conversations with other writers this week and been surprised by their stance.

When it comes to the relationship of author and reader, I honestly don't believe there are, or should be any demands made of a reader. The author on the other hand, is compelled to make their book entertaining. For what is reading but a pleasurable form of entertainment? Of course a book can also educate, or excite emotion and engage thought. But its primary purpose is to entertain, in order for a reader to devote a few hours of their life to read that book.
The book makes demands on its reader, hopefully engaging them to stick with it and read it all the way through. But the author has no right to demand anything over and above what the words themselves do.
I don't believe any reader is obliged to write a review, as much as it might help the author. Nor is the reader obliged to 'like' a book by clicking on a button. The reader isn't obliged to finish a book. Or even begin to read any book having downloaded or bought it. This seems to me to happen more these days, as some readers scoop up lots of free titles and then may sample them all before deciding on just one to read and ignoring the rest. Seems an eminently rational way of making your consumption decisions to me, especially at no cost to yourself.
If a reader is so engaged with a book that they are then moved to want to engage further with it, in the form of a review, or a 'like', or even starting up a conversation directly with the author via social media, then this is a huge bonus for the author. But there ought not to be any expectation of any of it. The reader undertakes every aspect of reading as a voluntary act. Same thing in their reactions to the book having finished it. If the reader is moved to want to support the author they have just read, then they will, in whatever manner they opt to do so.

Of course there is a chicken and egg situation about the visibility of an author's book being partly dependent on reviews and likes and retweets. But the reader is not responsible for any book's visibility, unless they choose to contribute to that. Books have always been partly dependent on word of mouth. Readers can still talk to their friends and recommend your book without them formally committing 200 words to a review, or liking on Facebook.

Authors, if you agree with me, please join in debate via the comments. Readers, I would love you to participate in any debate too, but I make no demands of you to do so! 

Seven Songs - 7 songs er with the number 7 in them

I was going to do a chart counting down 10 songs each with a number between 1 and 10 in their title. But when I considered number 7, there were so many good songs I couldn't pick one, so decided that it needed a chart all of its own.

1) White Stripes - Seven Nation Army
A great primal swamp-blues riff made this song eminently chantable at gigs and festivals. It's not the bands' fault that football fans across Europe adopted it so it was heard on the terraces proclaiming parochial allegiances. Even heard at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.



2) Culture - "Two Sevens Clash"
1977, celebrating the close musical links between punk rock and reggae music both as protest music. Even Bob Marley recognised the synergies with his song "Punky Reggae Party". Ah, halycon days...



3) The Clash - "The Magnificent Seven"
The Clash were always open to exploring different musical styles and having relocated to the USA (despite singing "I'm So Bored With The USA" in 1977), here they dabbled with dance music that was sweeping NYC's clubs. Not their finest moment in this humble correspondent's opinion, but it was the opening track of that magnum opus "Sandinista" triple album which did more than anything to raise awareness of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua who were trying to resist the might of US black ops and desytabilisation. Triple albums, remember them? Wouldn't happen today with everything downloadable and disposable. If it did, discs 2 and 3 would merely be remixes of disc 1.

4) Wah! - "Seven Minutes To Midnight"
One of the late, great John Peel's favourites, I never really got Wah!  This song takes an awful long time to get going and is a bit shouty-preachy for me, but there you go. Synchronise watches...



5) The Herbaliser - "Return Of The Seven"
I love this, with the Western theme spliced with a Japanese musical motif to acknowledge the "Seven Samurai" origins of the "Magnificent Seven". Just has a real urgency to it.



6) The Kills - "Dead Road 7"
Can never decide if I like The Kills or not. Still, decide for yourself



7) Portishead - Seven Months
Great atmospheric music soundtracks for imaginary films and Beth Gibbons' voice so full of emotion. yep, all in all just another Portishead song really...

Basildon Bond - Friday Flash

I got your latest letter. As it always does, it helps speed up time for me, by structuring the eternal hours of nothingness in here. Several days reading it over and over, thinking about every last word on the paper. Gauging the surety of the handwriting that can betray falsehoods like a polygraph can. A week or so maybe composing the response inside my head, taking me up to the time when I qualify for my paper or stamp allowance. To say nothing of the night time nourishment, the sustenance under the sheets.

For you may credit we only have our swapped words, that I have no sense of what you look like since you have never sent me a photo, let alone visited me in the flesh. But you have ceded me one physical impression of you. For your scent infuses the paper on which your letter is written. Transferred maybe by your fingers dancing across its tissue behind the pen, or maybe when you fold it to slip into the envelope and bring the gummed strip to your lips and lick it to seal both your words and your essence inside. Until I set you free, inhaling both word and musk deep inside me.

I won't lie to you. You're like heroin to me. The smack of you wears off a little more each time I take to my bed with you. I develop a - I won't say tolerance- well let me explain it like this; Your scent reanimates me. I reclaim my own reek as I reinhabit my body gone numb in here. As my blood begins to course through me again, it pushes your fragrance to the periphery. I have to choke it all the harder towards the end of the fortnight when you have been almost wholly evicted from my nostrils, full of the stink of me. I have to beat my limp meat so far more fiercely because you are barely present to me.

Does that shock you? It shouldn't really. How else did you imagine me using what you send me? What I want to know is whether I provoke the same response in you back there in your rinky-dinky house behind its trim white picket fence? Do you inhale me up from my clumsily chiselled letters on this cheap [a[er that rips and tears beneath the furious notching of my nib? Is your brain filled with the spice of me? That prison stench of tobacco, fear, blood, shit, semen and sweat? Does the tang of me flow around your bloodstream? Do you run your tongue over the letter seal to taste my sputum where I originally licked it sealed? Do I, incarcerated here on the other side of the country, force you to choke your own sex? I doubt it somehow.

Words and thinking see. I appreciate how your letters stimulate that at least. Something someone said in Group Therapy set me thinking. I probably completely misinterpreted what was being said, but that's what the likes of us in here do. We take things for our own purposes, run with it, put our own stamp on it. Once the notion took hold of me, I zoned out the rest of that particular session. See I'm the one behind bars and yet you have erected your own little cage for yourself. Where you can lock up your dark parts of the psyche. Safely leaving you clean on the outside behind your picket fence. It's through me, through this correspondence that you can look on that pustulant, shrivelled soul in the cage. Poke it. Make it flinch and dance for you when you choose to set the cage swinging on its hook. All through your association with me.

But I won't dance for you. You can't prod me. You need to take your own suppurating heart out of the cage and let it breathe and expand. Let it see the light and either embrace it or try to extinguish it. For that is what the darkness inside means. If something is outside me, it isn't mine, so I just seize hold of it, take it into me and make it mine. Unless I simply am not interested in possessing it. I can help you break your heart free of its restraints. If you follow me. Do as I tell you to do.

Cos seems to me you want it both ways. The thrill of associating with me, hard up against the utter security of me being held at arms length confined in prison. What would it be like if I broke out? If I came to you and solidified the fantasy? Tearing you away from your rinky-dinky house as the getaway car smashed down the picket fence as we sought to outrun the cops. Would you happily join me on the lam?  Always be you having to go out to buy us food because I had to lay out of sight, never sure if the customer in the queue behind you was a plain clothes cop waiting to jump you? Would you happily reload my semi-automatic as we shot our way out of a police cordon? Cos I don't believe you want any of that at all. Cos either I'm stuck here for life, kept apart from you, or that would constitute the only reality for us to be together.

So here's the test. Here's how we can be eternal cell-soul mates, even physically removed from one another. Here's how you pledge me your undying love, that dark heart that I know beats within you.  And which attracts you to me. I will kill a man in here, choke him with my bare hands, or shank him with a knife. But only if you tell me to. You tell me which one out of a choice of men I'll give you, the manner of despatch and what trophy you want me to take and mail you as proof. This will be our exchange of eternity rings. Do this for me, and our scents will be forever commingled in our nostrils. I won't have to trust to receding perfume on writing paper. Whenever I have my own reek in my head, there you will be too.

The Town That Caught Tourettes

Last night Channel 4 televised a fascinating 1 hour documentary called The Town That Caught Tourettes.  It concerned a small rural community in New York State where a dozen or so teenage girls had all suddenly within a short space of time come down with a Tourettes-like condition of uncontrollable physical and verbal tics. In a very measured presentation, it considered all the possible causes that could underlie such an outbreak, given that you can't transmit Tourettes Syndrome and that this particular set of symptoms were like Tourettes but not actually the disease itself (so the programme's title itself wasn't quite so measured). It might have been interesting to see clinicians present the reasons why their ailment wasn't considered to be Tourettes itself.



Essentially, because all the girls went to the same school, their parents wanted answers as to whether there was something environmental that had precipitated the spate of symptoms in their daughters. The school was rigourously tested but nothing detrimental was found. Erin Brockovich also became involved when it emrged there had been a train crash some years before 5 miles away and that the danegerous chemicals it was carrying might have reached the environs of the school's subsoil by this time. Brockovich's own investigative team cleared the train crash as a possible cause, but said there were other environmental issues that were of a concern, although the programme didn't detail these.

If there was an environmental cause, then I would ask why only girls were affected. Why not boys, or women teachers if it were to be gender specific? There was one adult woman who suffered the symptoms, but she wasn't involved in the school, though she lived in the community. A Doctor diagnosed the strep-related Pandas Disease and started treating some of the girls with anti-biotics to deal with their strep-throats. The girls started improving, but other doctors with a radically different diagnosis (see below) claiumed this was just as likely to be due to a Placebo effect for the girls and their parents having their view of an external cause of the condition finally being listened to and backed up. These doctors claimed that Pandas Disease is too rare for it to have suddenly burst out in such profusion.

Instead these doctors offered a diagnosis that reminded me of the Arthur Miller play The Crucible which was about a case of mass hysteria among teenage girls in 16th Century Salem as they accused their elders of witchcraft. (Incidently my son is studying this for his GCSE English, so I'm going to sit down with him to watch it). The doctors prognosticate that patient zero, (which again frustratingly perhaps we were not shown, or if we were we didn't realise she was patient zero), probably broke out into the ticcing symptoms as a response to her own internal collapse under stress and that within her small community of school and town, it triggered a mirroring response in other teenagers who had stresses of their own. This was not a conscious response, anymore than the kids were faking the symptoms for attention. But like The Crucible, it became a case of being passed on through mass hysteria, though the doctors don't call it this any more; now it is known as Conversion Disorder. There are no physical prompts or causes for the psychological/neurological effects that lead to ticcing. It's merely the power of suggestion, even when the suggestion is ultimately a negative one, but the girls were so vulnerable that it possessed them. The girls at the school who remained unaffected, were they genetically immune, or merely had less stress to cope with driving down their immunity?

All the girls and their parents insisted the girls were not under any particular stress when they fell ill. They were all 'normal' teenagers. Yet the doctors treating them for Conversion Disorder also reported an improvement in their patients through treating the causes as internal rather than external. The programme also showed a journalist who started digging into the upbringing of the girls and reported that some had indeed had troubled unbringings, leaving them vulnerable to this sort of response when the critical breaking point is reached. However, only two girls' backgrounds were portrayed on the programme and the adult women too, who reported that she'd been the victim of abuse as a child.

So there seem to be two nwidely divergent theories as to the cause, both of which claim success in the consequent treatment stemming from their respective diagnoses. I find it fascinating that we could be witnessing an outbreak of suggestive mass hysteria. In the UK there has been the incidence of 7 teenagers committing suicide within the same town of Bridgend as a version of mass hysteria or at least a collective influence. And although that is more people falling under the influence of others whispering in their ear, it shows how susceptible we can be to influences on our behaviour.

The abiding image I have was from the beginning of the show, when a teen from a completely different town in New York State was being interviewed with her mother, and her mother who later complained that her daughter's verbal tics drove her to distraction in a most unsympathetic way, was explaining her feelings with hand gestures that resembled nothing less than lower energy tics thermselves. The ticcing symptoms of Tourettes are described as pressure from the inside demanding release, so that the motor impulse of the tic is a response to the nervous system's drive and charge. The motor-neuro is intimately bound up with the emotions and while it seems it could be to do with the brain's wiring, it can also be absolutely about emotions and stresses and dealing with that kind of build up. I did feel particularly sorry for this lone girl in the town of Corinth with her condition and with her family situation. If the others in the town of LeRoy showed signs of improvement, she alas was as bad as ever.

My writing Debt To Theatre

In a strange way, theatre probably fired me into picking up my own pen (as the technology then was!) But only out of irritation with what I had seen up on stage.

Late 1970, early 80s Britain, new plays were dominated by a fistful of Marxist and Left-Wing dramatists such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths. The politics tended to come first, the characters lagging behind a poor second, as each one represented a 'position'. It was Hare's "A Map Of The World" which so provoked my ire as to make me credit I could do better at the tender age of 19.

Playwriting seemed like a decent career to try and get into, since in the late 1970s drama was flourishing and vital, both in the theatre and on television where Dennis Potter and Stephen Poliakoff were writing challenging stuff and bringing it into people's living rooms and new writers were getting exposure on BBC's "Play For Today" slot. Plays were contributing to the political debate of the time, Potter's "Brimstone And Treacle" provoking fevered national debate as to both its taste and its actual meaning.

But while I was at University from 1983 onwards and availing myself of student thespians and free stage spaces trying to learn my craft, something happened to British theatre. The Left-Wing playwrights tried to do battle with the prevailing Conservative politics of Mrs Thatcher's government and lost; both artistically where they never managed to successfully counter her ideas and economically as Mrs Thatcher had the last laugh by demanding that the Arts had to be financially self-sufficient and severely cut the funding across the board of theatres. The BBC stopped producing "Play For Today" as the mass appeal of the soap opera began to dominate TV drama output. Playwrights didn't hang around the theatres very long, partly because it no longer offered decent rewards. Any playwright with a minor hit under their belt, soon jumped ship to TV or film screenplay writing where the money was.

I wrote stage plays for ten years after college. Not with any commercial success I have to say. Mainly produced in pub fringe theatres. But what I learned in doing so has been formative in my novel writing today. Firstly and least surprisingly, you learn how to write dialogue. Since that's pretty much all you have to play with as a playwright, Directors not liking their hands tied by too much suggested stage direction from the writer. But playwriting also asks the writer to think visually, with a limited tableau of stage scenery and props, so that you develop an ability to conjure images through the interplay of the spoken word and what has gone before. A key word that becomes motif, such as Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" or the Christmas tree in "The Doll's House".

Actors too shape the space they move and work in with their bodies and gestural language. I was privileged to attend all the rehearsals of my work and see actors doing just this. Shaping an empty space gives the writer a real insight into making images out of thin air, the relationship of a physical body in space to the emotions and the words the actor utters. This can only help a writer literally conjure images out of thin air, by thinking about the interplay of these four elements. I also got to see the creative powers of directors and set designers at work.

But watching actors rehearse, particularly in the early part of the process, opens your eyes up to another key element, that of relationship. Unless the play is a monologue, it is full of relationships being portrayed on stage. Relationships that have to be established in rehearsals; between actors who may never have met one another until they first step into the rehearsal space; relationships to their own character as they try and 'find' that character, as written by the author and to be interpreted by them and then further rolled out to find the relationships between the character and to realise them from the page of the script. There is nothing quite as fascinating as seeing these processes at work. And key to relationship in acting and I think to writing them in prose, is to think about power and status. A common acting exercise is to ask a pair of actors improvise a simple given scenario and then throughout to change their relative statuses to one another by barking out a number, where 10 is the highest status and 1 the lowest. Watch how the same scenario takes on countless different forms just by changing the power balance between the two characters. I find this an invaluable tool for when I'm writing a prose scene with two or more characters. Which character can't hold the gaze of the other, or which is flexing their fingers subconsciously... the possibilities are endless.

So theatre writing armed me with several tools for prose writing, because you always had to consider the characters on stage at any and every moment. You were forced to write fully rounded characters and how they related to one another. You were also made to think about how to construct layered images and motifs. All things at the core of writing prose.

My new novel "Time After Time" actually begun life as a stage play I'd written. The same man, the same woman, the same opening chat-up line and a myriad of different outcomes from this scenario. Tiny fluctuations in body language, a word heard in one version, but not in the next, each can contribute to a different outcome of the seduction scenario. Not dissimilar I suppose from the status impro games actors use to find their characters. But I wanted to use such a mechanism to look at how emotions can produce different responses to the same set of events and circumstances.

The Genre of "Time After Time"

Those of you who have been following my work or posts for any time now, will probably know that I'm not a fan of genre classifications for fiction. I feel it is diminishing to writer, reader and the book itself. The reader is smart enough to track down the books that they're interested in without being spoon fed categories. The writer shouldn't have to pigeonhole his or her own work to fit in with what their publisher's sales team demand. I understand bookshops have to have some notion of how to display and arrange books to aid customers in finding the authors and books they want. But there I feel bookshops could be a little more adventurous and make a themed treasure hunt of their store, so that maybe books are brought together by theme, whether notionally sci-fi, horror, true crime or literary fiction, if the theme is say Jack The Ripper. But that's for another debate really.

So why am I tagging "Time After Time" with not one, not two, not three, but different FOUR genres? Urban Science Fiction Comedy Romance . Can you call a book "Romance" if the main drive of it is murder? Well that in itself gives some indication as to why. I'm looking to subvert these genre classifications in part as much as honour them.

So let's start with Romance. It's true that the heart of the book is a series of seductions, but as hinted above, it's with dark motives of murder behind it. So possibly not the regular fare of Chick-Lit or Mills and Boon, though the seductions themselves do look at the dark arts of two people trying to get close to one another in microscopic detail. One man, one woman, the same initial meeting, and the myriad of different outcomes that can follow from that first encounter. Sort of "Sliding Doors" meets "The Time Traveller's Wife" meets "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" . Only where love clashes with murderous intent...

Sci-Fi is always pretty clearcut isn't it? Takes place either in the future or in alternate reality. Sometimes it's called Speculative Fiction. Well this novel has lots of alternate realities, but all of them predicated on the world of the present, to wit, a sink London council estate, all too recognisable within our current lives. There is some time travel back from a future world into the present, but the bulk of the plot is in the here and now. The technology on show is neither advanced, nor retro as in Steampunk (itself perhaps the genre sub-category that makes me froth the most, not because I don't like such works, but because I just find it insulting that fans couldn't find such books without a separate category being created for it that at the same time suggests no other books outside it could appeal to them. It makes fans more like a cult than fans of a genre. Okay, rant over). My novel does have some actual science concepts lightly explored, Quantum Physics, Parallel Universes, Schroedinger's Cat and Chaos Theory. But are these real life scientific metaphors, for that's what they are once they are separated out from their various mathematical proofs and transposed into words, sufficient to make a work Sci-Fi?  There are plenty of non sci-fi books that resort to these metaphorical models within their pages because it suggests a way of seeing that the author is after supplying for the reader. I do wonder what the Sci-Fi community will make of my novel, whether they will count it as one of their own or spurn it...

Urban, I don't even know what the urban genre is. Books set in cities I guess, which mine resolutely is. But Urban always seems to be a prefix of other genres, YA, Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Supernatural, Steampunk, Speculative, Thriller, Mystery and even those without it in the name like the New Weird . Well mine is just, well you know, urban. Set within the environs of a built up area. And that's it. Though lots of weird stuff happens within the urban setting, it's all drawn from everyday urban living. The urban setting isn't a jumping off point into whole other worlds. Nor is it distorted by the goings on, rather the opposite, it's very robustly urban landscape shapes much of the human action that transpires within its architecture. But it's not quite that other genre version of Urban Realism either. Since this is a work of fiction and one that's playing with the trope of urbanism.

Comedy is not really a genre of fiction itself, but I proudly claim that this book is funny. I'd also claim it is Literary, but usually the critics that be refuse to bracket Literary together with comedy these days, despite the august examples of Flann O'Brien, Kingsley Amis and Samuel Beckett. But these days comedy books seem to be market s bathroom reading and light and disposable. Which is a pity, because there's a huge difference between a stand-up comic making an audience of people laugh out loud in an auditorium, armed with gesture, expression and comic physical movement and an author extracting a voluble guffaw from the reader purely by the words printed on the page. I don't know if this novel is laugh out loud, but hopefully it's at least sputter your cup of tea while you're drinking it funny.

I have always described myself, a tad reluctantly it has to be said, as a Literary Fiction writer. But I've always felt that label simply swept up all the works of literature that don't fir neatly into other categories. Jane Austen wasn't writing Chick-Lit, DH Lawrence wasn't writing Erotica, Ernest Hemingway wasn't writing LadLit or Action and GK Chesterton wasn't writing Police Procedurals or Detective Thrillers (or even Theological Detective Thrillers). They were just writing FICTION!

"Time After Time" is consciously my most mainstream commercial book to date. It doesn't paint word portraits like many literary novels. It doesn't have huge swathes of description also favoured of the literary genre. But it does possess quite a radical narrative structure, because it deals with time hopping and alternate versions of reality. So that will probably get me kicked out of the Literary Fiction club too.

Sob, will no fiction genre offer me a home for this book?

10 Songs About Time

My new novel "Time After Time" already has its own playlist of songs that soundtrack the action. But here is a chart of songs directly about time for your delectation:

1) Pink Floyd - "Time"
Possibly the most famous song about time, from the meg-selling "Dark Side Of The Moon" album. Pink Floyd were the first ban i properly got into in the sense of wanting to chase down every single recording they had ever made. That sort of collector-worship boys are eminently susceptible to. However, once punk rock came along, the tempo of Floyd's music was just to slow for my ears craving souped up rhythms. So this was time undermined by too slow a passage of time in the end...



2) The Doors - "Love Me Two Times"
The Doors were one of the few 60s band I can listen to.  I don't particularly buy into the Jim Morrison mythic status thing, and in this video it's a tad irritating that you have to wait until he stops burbling about a minute and a half in before the song starts, but it's a good'un when it does arrive.



3) MGMT - "Time To Pretend"
It's perhaps ironic that the vocal and music of this song actually do suggest the 1960s in a song full of yearning and hearking back to a more innocent age.  When this song came out in the Noughties, it was heard absolutely everywhere. But with good reason I feel.



4) Beastie Boys - "Time For Livin'"
It's not quite the momentous act of Bob Dylan plugging his guitar into an amp, but when the Beastie Boys didn't rely on samples quite as much and picked up their own instruments and returned to their punk roots, it gave all their subsequent albums a huge diversity of punk, hip-hop, rap and reggae. And I loved them for that.



5) Depeche Mode - "Question Of Time"
I was never a big fan of Depeche Mode, but the music in my novel covers virtually every style, so continuing that here in my "Time" chart, I give this a platform and let you dear reader/listener decide.



6) MosDef - "Life In Marvellous Times"
This is just such a superior song, that builds and builds and has unbelievable tension that never quite peaks. Masterful.



7) Cyndi Lauper - "Time After Time"
I've never been a fan of chart pop tunes, but while I was writing the novel and I'm not sure how, but this song presented itself to me. Of course I recognised it from the dim and distant past, because that's how ubiquitous chart songs are, you just can't avoid hearing them and how insidiously they permeate our brains. But as it goes, this song not only fitted my novel, but the fit was so perfect that it went on to become its title. And I seem to remember we always accredited Cindi Lauper some credit for being slightly subversive in her attack on pop music. maybe we were fooling ourselves. A bit light for my tastes, but I can see it's a well crafted song.



8) Funkadelic - "Everybody's Going To Make It This Time"
I do love my funk and George Clinton's cosmic madness. Yet this is a rather wistful political song about past failures and a hope that this time round there will be no casualties in the various fights for rights and freedoms.



9) Portishead - "Sour Times"
I suppose songs about time that either look back or look ahead, are prone to being melancholic, chockfull of regret or despairing hope. And this is one of those as Beth Gibbons puts a whole lifetime of emotion into her singing, while the arrangement rattles along reedily as if to suggest time's flimsiness itself. There's a different Portishead song referred to in the novel.



10) Misty In Roots - "How Long Jah"
Roots reggae's gorgeous, simple appeal to how long must they wait for the Messiah? An eternity it seems. An eternity of pain and suffering...

SlipMatt - Friday Flash

this is an 800 word extract from my new novel "Time After Time"

Even when not armed with a pictorial pocket guide to the urban archetype, you could still tell he was a DJ. He had one hand clamping a headphone can against his ear as if it were a conch shell and he was divining for an ocean of sound through it. He also had a pair of light-up rave glasses, which in his case was a double affectation. Seeing as he had an angle-poise lamp, well, poised over his shoulder. Plus that the battery in his specs had long expired, though he either hadn't noticed or just couldn't spare the time to change it over. In contrast to his changing the records on twin turntables in a blur of motion.Though effaced behind the decks, console and transmitter rig in his bedroom, his T-Shirt was of a full-sized twin-tape reel and assorted dials, buttons and analogue gauges, picked out in metallic silver against a black background. It looked like the innards of a cyborg and more alarmingly perhaps, in the dull, spectral light of the room, that they formed part of his own actual anatomy. Around his neck was a bandana, while on his head squatted a baseball capat an incline that defied gravity.It was said by those who caught rare glimpses of him, that it must have been the static electricity that surrounded him all day which held the hat fastened in place. It bore the imperative 'No Requests'. However, since the cap was perched backwards on his head, in the unlikelihood someone did advance upon him armed with a musical request, the pre-emptive prohibition wouldn't be visible to them. Therefore the headwear's broadcast could only fail in its purpose. But then the whole rigmarole was perhaps somewhat redundant. By reason of there being no one else in his box room. And, that given its dimensions, nor was there likely to be. Any self-respecting turntablists had played clubs with bigger DJ booths than this room. But then it was questionable how much self-respect DJ SlipMatt possessed.The wall mounted clock was in the shape of a record turntable, the numbers marked along its circumference. The clockface dial was what revolved, whereas its hand in the form of a tonearm stayed fixed in place. Armed with just this one pointer, the clock only counted off the hours. Which was somewhat odd for a DJ reliant on getting his split second timing right as he transferred from one deck to another, or mixed in a beat.He adjusted the angle-poise lamp so that its glare didn't flood wash his bank of monitor screens. The hacked feed from all the CCTV cameras on the estate fed into here. He clicked the bulging eyeball sat in a bloodshot sclera that was his computer mouse, in order to change the selection of cameras on his screen. Instantaneously the grid filled with sixteen new images at different slants of projection, like a Cubist painting. SlipMatt silently pronounced himself content with what he witnessed and slotted the headphones over both ears, with the headband hanging down from the back of his neck like a yoke. He started bobbing his head to the private rhythms, as he scrabbled around on the desk in front of him for something.The room itself was a garret beneath sloping eaves which ate into the habitable space. SlipMatt could only properly stand up in the very centre. Otherwise he had to hunch over. Which seldom presented any impediment, since his natural bearing was sat stooped over the electrical equipment on his desk, as if he were hoarding it into his chest. Every single square inch of flat space was submerged beneath some electrical kit or other. CDs, cassette tapes, Dictaphones, Discmans, Walkmans, mobile phones, pagers, mini-discs, cartridges, DAT tapes, spools of magnetic tape, hard drives, RAM memory, flash memory, microphones, microphone stands, cabling and a wide array of batteries of every shape and size. The embodied history of sound recording lay mummified yet uncatalogued here. If Noah's Ark had preserved the length and breadth of the animal kingdom on earth, this room was its audio equivalent. Only none of these voices were ever likely to re-emerge into the light of day, consigned to the depths by the obsolescence of their storage vessels. Some people retain their teddy bears or significant other soft toys as a link to their childhoods. Some of those teddy bears are so old they have their cotton stuffing leaking out. Electrical audio equipment were SlipMatt's cuddly toys, his transitional objects and many had their tape or other innards leaching out of them.

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For more on the novel: The Origins lie in "The Terminator" movies or "How Barbara Windsor played a part in this novel seeing the light of day"
The website for "Time After Time"

How Barbara Windsor Contributed To My New Novel

Yes, that Barbara Windsor, MBE, star of the "Carry On" movies and "Eastenders" among a lifetime of roles.


Technology's a wonderful thing isn't it? Upgrades, greater speed, power, memory yada yada yada. I started my writing career in the old fashioned manner, penning my first stage play in ink on lined paper and typing up the finished version on an Olivetti portable. My first automated aide d'ecriver was an Amstrad word processor, with green monitor screen that made you feel queasy when you stared at it for too long.
When it finally died, I only had what I printed up in hard copy, since although I had back-ups, I moved on to an AppleMac computer and there was no compatibility. I think the word processing programme was called Apple Write and eventually that was supplanted by newer programmes. I still have most of my stage plays backed up on this format, completely inaccessible to modern day programmes. Try and open them and you get a whole load of gobbledygook.

One of the plays I wrote received a rehearsed reading at the Young Vic Theatre studio directed by Philip Hedley. The reading was commissioned by the then fledgling The Arts Catalyst, a body looking to bring art practitioners together with scientists in collaboration to make new works of art. I'd attended a session at the Soho Theatre with 4 scientists including Professor Heinz Wolf and an embryologist which was handy for a play I was then honing for a performance run at the Southwark Playhouse. I sent Catalyst another play and this was the one they organised the reading for. But nothing further developed, as Catalyst went on to bigger and better things such as arts performances in zero gravity and I left theatre behind as my twin boys arrived in the world and kyboshed the ability to hang out at theatre bars night after night!

And there that play would have died. Archived on a programme I could no longer access. Without any hard copies during the various house moves attended on giving birth to twins. But some years later, through the post I received a copy of my original script. With a note from Barbara Windsor saying that as she was having a house clear-out, she had come across my script and was returning it to me. Her then partner, now husband Scott Harvey had been one of the actors in the rehearsed reading which is why she had a copy of the script lying around her house. I can't remember the exact chain of transmission, but someone had told me during the rehearsed reading arrangements, when contacting Scott. Barbara had answered the phone and summoned Scott to take the call with a "it's about that strange play!" I can die a happy man now that I've had my work described by Babs Windsor as "strange"!

So I was finally reunited with my play thanks to Barbara Windsor's kindness in recognising a playwright might need a copy of their own script rather than just throwing it in the bin. And though it was when I was no longer looking to have my work staged, waste not want not and in time I came to a decision to turn it into a novel. Which will be my next post about that process.

Genesis of "Time After Time"

I love the "Terminator" movie series (apart from "Terminator 4"). Schwarzenegger makes the perfect machine with his sculpted body and wooden facial acting. Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor is truly a warrior female, who will do anything to protect her future progeny.

But there was always something that bugged me about the films' concept. Actually there were two, but the second would serve as a spoiler for my own novel so I'm not going to discuss that here. It's the other bugbear I have with the movies that became the starting point for me when I was thinking about my novel "Time After Time". In fact it even lies behind the novel's title.

                                      

In "Terminator 1"a cyborg assassin is sent back through time to kill Sarah Connor to prevent her giving birth to her son that will become the future leader of the resistance to the rule of the machines. The Resistance also manage to send one of their top men Kyle Reese back to protect her. This is where the human brain goes into meltdown, trying to pick all the logical flaws and frays that accompany these assumptions.

Let's say the terminator is successful in his mission and kills Sarah Connor so she never gives birth to her son. The future therefore ineluctably proceeds on to the triumph of the machines and the extinction of the human race. Then what happens/happened to that version of the future where the machines were so up against the rack against the resistance that they needed to send back a Terminator to kill Sarah Connor? It happened in the narrative once, so it can't be uninvented. Yet the future now has no John Connor and no potent human resistance.

Second, Reese comes back and not only protects sarah Connor, but both impregnates her and dies in the earth of the past in the line of fire. So John Connor makes it to the future, but with the DNA of a father who should be one of his troops in the Resistance  and indeed in one version of history was, but yet Reese died back in the past and didn't ever make it back to the future to take up his 'normal' place in the timeline. How can he have been sent back from the future when he's already died in the past and not lived to make it into the future in the first place? Presumably time splits between two versions here, but I'll pick this up a bit later. Also, before Reese was sent back, he is fighting alongside John Connor. Yet that John Connor should not even be alive, since it is only Reese going back in time and making Connor's mother pregnant that gives life to John Connor in the first place...

The usual logical way round these paradoxes is to suggest that time is not singular, but that there are many versions of reality, with differing outcomes and narratives. These are often referred to as parallel universes and are tied into Quantum theory to explain the differing probable and possible outcomes even from the same set of circumstances. Reese says that the current reality he and Sarah are embroiled in with its implications for the future, "one possible future", but then feebly proffers that as he "doesn't know tech stuff" he can't explain it in any more detail. Well parallel universes only get us so far.

So there are many possible futures and even possible veering off of the present. In some versions the Terminator will be successful and the machines will rule the future. In other versions Reese and Sarah foil the Terminator and John goes on to lead the Resistance to victory over the machines. In a coiling of time back on itself, the strange goings on of Reese siring John or Reese dying in the past before he can return to the future to be sent back to the past are just bumped over into the next version in an infinite loop. But then if the machines win some futures and the humans win others, what does it matter? You have a chance to live in the future where man prevails, or you are unlucky and end up in one of the timelines where you become extinct. But both exist. Just hope and pray you end up in a lucky timeline. But it means the human race can never be wiped out, because in some realities it persists. Equally mankind cannot ever fully extirpate the machines, because elsewhere in a parallel universe they still rule the roost. Parallel realities show the entire spectrum of outcomes, they can never lead to a single, ultimate one.

Hence the title of the book, "Time After Time". I do try and deal with these paradoxes of time and make clear that my assassin's mission has to be successful in every version of reality, for him to wipe out the presence of the 'mother of the future' from ever existing. But chance, different timings and the like mean that there will always be other outcomes of his mission, that it can never yield the same result time after time after time.

What my book does, is draw a parallel between the mission of getting up close to  a stranger in order to assassinate them, and getting up close to seduce them. The same variables of timings, chance, circumstance, missed signals, misread signals and the like all impact on the outcome. The book is less about assassination, but more about the countless number of outcomes when a man and a woman are in the same place, at the same time and trying to get close to one another. And the humour derived from the tiny differences that can alter the outcome so radically. I also draw lightly on "The Butterfly Effect" from Chaos Theory, which can be summarised as the mere flapping of a butterfly's wings can change a whole weather pattern the other side of the world through a linked change of circumstances that build up on the back of that one tiny event. Again, I feed this principle into that panoply of words and signs a man and women display during the initial time of their suit.

And finally we return to the concept of time and its paradoxes. Time is just a human concept that helps us to pattern our perceptions (night/day, the seasons, shadows, the planets etc). It has no existence beyond our conscious mind. The Big Bang theories state that there was no Time before the Big Bang and that it only came into being at that point. Matter came into being and started moving away from the Big Bang explosion, travelling through space at a velocity measured in time and also that the material of planets started to age from that point on. Einstein came along and actually merged time with space to form our fourth dimension of spacetime, an oblique concept for most of us who can only conceive of things in three dimensions because that is how our minds have been taught to perceive and it's a good enough method for us to negotiate our way not only through life, but to be able to send rockets to explore planetary bodies beyond our atmosphere. But it it is this fourth dimension of spacetime, or any fourth dimension of conceptualising matter (as offered by recent theories like String Theory or multiverses) and our brains start to malfunction and logic breaks down, because we simply don't have the mental apparatus to be able to think in four or more dimensions. And it is in these failings in our perceptual and conceptual apparatus that allow the paradoxes of time travel to remain unsolved and to stay at the heart of films like "The Terminator" and books like "Time After Time". As Sarah Connor says towards the end of "T1" "a person could go crazy thinking about all this stuff". Did I already mention that I love the "Termiantor" film series?



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