Andrew Shanahan's Blog, page 2

Three Odd Little Stories

Long-time readers will know that most days I do a Starter for 10. This is a ten minute writing exercise where I start with a blank page and then come up with whatever weirdness comes into my head. Occasionally, I even do them live on TikTok and you can watch me jiggle as I type.

@shaniswriting#LIVEhighlights #TikTokLIVE #LIVE just a guy with a paunch tapping on a keyboard. Scroll on by. #paunchtype #dadbod [image error]Tiktok failed to load.

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It’s always been a useful process and I recommend all writers to do it, because it 1) reminds me that I’m a writer and 2) helps me to loosen up. The added bonus is that sometimes I get something of use out of it - a sentence, a character, a germ of an idea which then goes onto being something bigger.

I thought I might share four of the odder recent ones with you. I’d love to know what you think in the comments or replies.

HOUSE RENOVATION

Photo by Shridhar Vashistha on Unsplash

The door creaked. The floor creaked. The walls and furniture creaked. Attempting to go to the toilet during the night would elicit the outspoken wooden moans of an entire forest. The drive had a pothole in it that was so deep that it swallowed an entire milk float, which we had to get the tractor to winch out. The garden was infested with a version of Japanese Knotweed which is resistant to commercial grade pesticides, fire and prayer. It is also an irritant.

The plumbing, I’m… I’m actually not sure that I’m ready to tell you about the plumbing yet. They say that time heals every wound, so I anticipate being ready to talk about the plumbing during the next geological age. I will say just this on the subject of the plumbing. On the first morning I span the rusty hot tap in the kitchen and it fell off. I span the other tap and it awoke the brass section of a primary school who had somehow been trapped in the walls. I don’t know the exact details but it sounded like the trombonist wanted to murder the bugles and was attempting to do so with blunt force of sound. After listening for an entire minute, the tap gave a shudder and several vinegar stroke humps and then a shrew fell into the sink. I don’t want to talk about the plumbing.

The only reason that we are stood here now is because of the attention, care, energy and verve of you – our team of builders, plumbers, electricians and carpenters. That you would so freely give your time to this project speaks volumes about the sort of people you are. I have been proud over this incredible 3 day period to work alongside you. In total we have had more than 300 people who have given help to renovate this farmhouse. I am forever in your debt. There have been too many instances of the generosity – I think of Colin missing his wedding to help out. I think of Janet bringing us the curtains from her own house. I think of you all.

Now, we must talk about the difficult thing. I appreciate that when you were initially told about this project there may have been some mention of a home for abandoned children with cancer. Talk focused on this when we said that we just wanted 3 bedrooms and that the sauna would be suitable for them. I don’t think this will come as too much of a surprise when I tell you that there are actually no children. No cancer orphans. That’s why I’m not letting you in through the gates, which were kindly donated by Lowestoft Farm and Gate Supplies. We thank you for your service and wish you well, but please get off our land.

SHAKE IT

Photo by Allec Gomes on Unsplash

Shake it and see what happens.

They took it down from the shelf, it was large enough that they both needed to grab an end. Close up, it looked even weirder. The two metal ends were made of a dark, almost clammy metal that folded in on itself with an intricacy that defied the solidity of the material. How had someone carved such intricate designs into such a solid surface? And what did the curlicues and loops represent. When Michael looked at it, he could almost imagine that he knew what the figures were, but they seemed to shift under his gaze so that he couldn’t quite pin down their meaning.

The two metal sides were about the size of a house fan, but the two lengths of glass tube that ran between the metal was completely clear. It seemed thick and at the bottom of the two tubes were what looked like dead flies, scattered along the lengths.

The boys placed the device on the ground. Later on, after everything that happened, neither of them were completely clear about why or how they knew the thing as a device – as something with a function, or a purpose. It just did. Alan hissed as one of the metal wires along the back scratched the back of his hand. It drew a thin line of red on his hand and he instinctively moved to lick it.

Go on, shake it.

Alan wiped the back of his hand on his shorts and took his place on the device’s right side. Michael squatted by the left. Together they placed their hands on the metal sides and lifted it an inch from the ground. A shaft of light burned into the room as the sun emerged from behind a cloud and the change in contrast made both the boys blink. Then they shook the device.

At once, the wires on the back of the device extended. They turned in all directions like a dowse and then lengthened and drove themselves into the ground. Michael and Alan looked at each other, fear writ large on their faces – both wishing they had never shook the device. There were six wires driven some way into the ground and both boys felt the device assert itself and they realised that it was now supporting its own weight.

Then it emitted a noise. Michae remembered it like a sigh, “a dusty long sigh” he said. But Alan thought he heard a single shout, like a person in a far-off room getting angry. As one they stepped backwards and drew together for the comfort of another human’s touch, even if it was just their shoulders meeting. The machine jerked three times, a spastic uncontrolled lurch which made them jump where they stood. Then slowly the two metallic sides rotated in opposite directions. Michael gasped as the two glass tubes cracked and sent flecks of a powdery substance and minute shards of glass across the floor.

The two sides rotated in a smooth turn that brought them through an entire revolution, when the tubes were once more somehow complete. Two thick tubes, supported by the metal sides. The wires lengthened again and brought the device back in line with the shelf and slowly slotted itself away, amongst the rest of the apocrypha, two more dry flies languishing at the bottom of the tubes, thinking “go on” and “shake it”.

GREEN SHARPIE

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

…it said “Time is the enemy you find obt more” in this jagged green Sharpie writing and then there was a QR code, which also looked like it had been created with the same Sharpie. The mysterious instruction was in one of those clear plastic A4 envelopes with the white punctured side so you could clip it in a binder. It had been ziptied to the railing next to the traffic lights and I just managed to get a hurried photo of it before the lights changed and the cars started to move.

Up to the office car park and squeeze in next to Karen’s red Fiat. Make a cup of tea and sit at my desk. There was a lot to do today. There were emails backed up from the bank holiday and a small stack of post-its. It all added up to hours of my day chasing customers, leaving messages, small talk, repeat.

I got my phone out for a little hit of rage dopamine before the day was stolen. As I keyed in my PIN I remembered the sign. I opened it up. The thing that really irked me was that the plastic envelope had been orientated so that the opening was at the top – surely, you’d hang it upside down so that it had some protection from the rain? And why would you hand-draw a QR code? There’s no way that would work.

I pinched in on the image. The ziptie had been positioned in holes too close so it cinched the envelope together. The whole thing was a design atrocity. I posted it on r/designgonewrong with a flippant title “If you’re going to be mental, at least learn the rudiments of design”. I went to close the image but as I zoomed out the camera superimposed a URL across the photo. I zoomed out more, shocked that it seemed like the QR code was actually working. That was so weird – a hand-drawn QR code?

The URL didn’t seem formatted. It didn’t begin with http or www it was just a list of numbers and characters. My finger hovered over the link. I didn’t really have time to waste today. I pressed the it said “Time is the enemy you find obt more” in this jagged green Sharpie…

REGINALD REGAL

Photo by Tetiana Bykovets on Unsplash

There was a short fanfare, blown on twelve horns of burnished gold and then nothing happened. Or at least nothing visible happened immediately. The children were captivated watching towards the double-doors that had the word “Workshop” written in a fine brown calligraphy over the top. What they were not expecting was for Reginald Regal himself to descend from the ceiling, lowered in some manner of harness.

“Greetings! Greetings!” he warbled as he gracefully descended into the middle of the group.

“Reginald Regal!” one of the children cried and pointed - soon they were all marvelling at this wizard of confectionary appearing amidst them. One of them tried to hug him, but Reginald used his mighty cane to prise the child away.

“Someone needs to collect their infant. But well met and good health to you all. I’m so pleased that you’ve made it and that you are in actual fact – here. Or rather, there. I am here. But maybe, perhaps, you too – would like to be here?”

Reginald skipped lightly to a series of steps that corkscrewed up to a sort of multi-coloured pulpit where he could see the entire group and they could see him.

And what a curious fellow he was – tall, exceedingly so, made all the taller by the large top hat that he wore on his head. He was dressed foot-to-toe in a sort of gold taffeta material that made him seem like he was put together from sweet wrappers. If his hat and suit were strange then the three ties that hung from his neck were all the stranger, especially as they seemed to be covered in chocolate smudges. His face was thin and long, with a lopsided smile that seemed to imply that he knew where the bodies had been buried and it was up to us to find them.

“Hello children, hello grown-ups, hello grown-downs, hello adults, I’d like to welcome you all to the place you’ve heard of where your brains have already been inside their imagination trains – but now you see you’ve arrived at the real destination station. All should disembark! Disembark I say!” and with that he placed a purple whistle to his lips and blew a shrill sound. He then crunched the whistle up, as a cast of normal-sized workers filtered in through the double doors bearing silver platters of immaculate and uncanny treats.

“Hello grown-ups, grown-downs – all, we’ve got a taste sensation for you – put it in your gobs and chew, chew, chew.”

The children and adults reached out and swiped handfuls of the chocolates from the trays and started to stuff their mouths with them.

At once they started to spit them out, some into their hands, others onto the floor and all their faces displayed the grimace of a foul taste.

“But Mr Regal – these are dark chocolates!” I shouted as Billy wretched by my side.

“But of course! Nearly 110% dark chocolate – a flavour so dense and heavy that it could stun a rhino!”

“But dark chocolate is horrible!” Billy cried.

“Ok, Grouchy Pouchers – escort that child and his grown-up from Reginald Royal’s Boutique Chocolate Workshop – they’re clearly milk chocolate people.”

B of the Bang Audiobook is Live!

I’m very pleased to say that the B of the Bang audiobook is now Live! You can go and download it by clicking on this link here. I’ve screenshot a bit of the sample below so you can get an idea of the quality and if you think you’d like it or not (NSFW, bit sweary).

Thanks go to the peerless Chris Devon for narrating it with his usual panache (“it’s pronounced panash Chris”) and joie de vivre (I don’t know how that’s pronounced, Chris). Also, a huge measure of thanks to the audiobook checking team who played a blinder and found loads of bits that Chris, the bloody idiot, had fucked up.

Anyway, I’m really happy with it and I think it makes for a fantastic listen, but ultimately that’s for you to decide. I've got five copies of the audiobook to give away simply for replying to this post and I’ll put your names in a hat (not the Hat of Death, I’ll use the Hat of Audiobook Winning) and message you. Terms and conditions probably apply, but let’s not get bogged down with legalities.

Buy signed copies of my books

On my long list of things to do in this business of becoming a full-time writer, has been sorting out my online offering. Increasingly, I’m getting people saying that they’d love to buy my books but they are frankly terrified of Jeff Bezos achieving critical mass and swallowing the entire notion of money, so they don’t shop at Amazon. Which I totally get.

As part of that I’m trying to do more of selling direct to you, dear reader. In due course that will mean doing a print run of my books. For now, it means I get author copies from Amazon and sell them to you. The nice thing about that is that Bezos gets less of a cut and I can personalise the delivery a bit more and add some extra things in. Things like signing the books, homemade bookmarks, random drawings, fingerprints and loose bits of DNA from when I packed your order while eating a sandwich and coughing.

Anyway, if you would like to buy a signed copy (hardback or paperback) of any of my books, then they’re all linked below. I’m also excited to tell you that I’m working with one of my favourite artists to bring you a limited edition t-shirt in the not-too-distant future. Whatever next? A Jodrell Bank tea towel? Maybe…just maybe.

NB - at the moment these are UK only, but only because I haven’t figured out the shipping for anywhere else in the world. If you don’t live in Blighty (poor thing) then add a comment and say where you’d like them going to and I’ll figure it out and message you the price. Thanks!

BEFORE AND AFTER

Ben Stone is terrified. He's terrified because he weighs 601 pounds and needs his right leg amputating. He's terrified because a crane will shortly lift him from his fourth-floor flat and lower him 44 feet to an ambulance waiting below. He's terrified because he hasn't been outside in nine years and he doesn't know who will look after his beautiful dog.

He needn't worry though, because the world is about to end.

Paperback - click here to buy

Hardback - click here to buy

FLESH AND BLOOD

Ben Stone is sick to death. He’s sick of all the endless hatred since the wraths arrived. He’s sick of trying to find a refuge for him and his dog Brown to live out what’s left of their lives. But most of all he’s just sick. As Ben’s cancer spreads he’s left searching for a source of hope and warmth at the end of the world. Unfortunately for Ben it’s just started to snow...

Flesh & Blood continues the story of Ben and Brown from the #1 bestseller Before and After, which is now in development to be a major motion picture.

Paperback - click here to buy

Hardback - click here to buy

B OF THE BANG

All across London, billionaires receive an emergency alert from specialist extraction company B of the Bang. A nuclear missile is inbound and society's elite have less than 70 minutes to reach the bunkers. As they head for the exits, it's your fault if you get in the way.

From the bestselling indie author of the modern classic Before and After, B of the Bang is a satire of wealth, power, lobsters, inequality and why you shouldn't flush wet wipes down the toilet.

Paperback - click here to buy

Hardback - click here to buy

Read The Original B of the Bang First Chapter

The original draft of B of the Bang was very different, I thought you might enjoy reading the first chapter. It made my wife dry heave, which I always think is a compliment.

B of the Bang - Chapter 1

Nana Edna had been in the cake for two hours and she was at breaking point.

She could barely feel her toes because the orange flight harness that sat under the stupid poofy ballgown was too tight and cut off the blood supply to anything south of her ribs. The extra-wide seatbelt that pinned her to the seat inside the cake was fastened too tight and rubbed against the tops of her thighs. The worst of it was that the entire cake smelled of Richard. Three weeks ago, she’d smiled as the malodorous props master had explained how the cake was built, how it was driven and she had endured an entire five minutes of his thoughts on why the battery placement mattered so much for a bespoke vehicle of this type. She’d nodded convincingly as he’d explained it was a highlight of his career to drive her 15 metres across a sound stage in a ridiculous remote-controlled cake.

“What a dull career you’ve had then,” she’d said in the confines of her head and smiled as the young man had had the audacity to request the inevitable selfie and had then slid his arm around her shoulders, depositing an almost-visible smudge of body odour. When you look at the picture he took, which later became quite famous, the face of Nana Edna was the sweetly-beaming visage of the icon who had sold more than 100 million cookbooks and taught the world to bake. What you couldn’t see in the selfie was that in her head she was imagining using a toffee hammer to crack Richard’s teeth one by one.

“Ok, we’ve got five minutes. Let’s go for rehearsal again,” came the voice of director Trevor Sant, from a small speaker by Nana Edna’s feet.

“Edna – you good?”

“Cool as a cucumber, Trevor. Enjoying my time in pastries, you should come inside sometime,” she heard the reluctant grunt of the director’s laugh and she smirked to herself in the darkness of the cake.

Beyond the cake lay the sound studio, a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of London. A vast, bewildering space with doors large enough to admit a jumbo jet. It was a state-of-the-art location with built-in lighting rigs, flight towers, CGI capabilities and thousands of cameras, all fitted and ready to use. Somewhere in the eaves of the building lay the production gallery that Trevor currently inhabited, modern smoke alarms prevented him from vaping, so he was holding a carrot from the food table between his fingers like a cigarette. On the bank of screens in front of him he was monitoring the concluding moments of the first half of the Champions League final, but with a seasoned eye he was also tracking the shots of the various performers who were scattered across the sound stage. He took a drag on his carrot and wished it was a cigarette, or better yet a gigantic, skunk-stuffed joint, or maybe even a delicate glass crack pipe…no, it was perhaps a little early in the evening for squirrel. Later, perhaps.

Back in the dawn of time, Trevor’s idea for this advert had been to produce a Busby Berkeley-esque visual feast which would see a number of dancers dressed as benefits-related items such as pound coins, cigarettes and job centre signs and these would all be spinning around the various ingredients of a cake. The whole mixture would end up in a bowl before the reveal of Nana Edna whose radio-controlled cake would break through a Baking on Benefits show logo before hitting its mark, whereupon Nana Edna herself would fly out of the cake like a fairy godmother and deliver her line to camera. Throw in the remix of I Need A Dollar, a glitzy smile or two and the most ambitious live advert that had ever been attempted could wrap and the 18 million morons watching could go back to being anaesthetised by Chelsea versus Man City.

Trevor had regretted having the idea every day since.

It wasn’t just that the shots were complex, or that timing a live advert featuring 70 performers and an equal number of production staff, coming at the break of a live sporting event was the stuff of logistical nightmares, it wasn’t even that the show they were attempting to promote was a calculatedly offensive, hollowed-out husk of an idea that had superannuated eight series ago. It was Nana Edna. The doyenne of the doily, the narcissus of the non-stick pan, it was her that had made the whole experience rank among Trevor’s worst experiences in television, and given that this included four years directing puppeteers he felt that he had some scope for what constituted a bad time in television.

Of course, Nana Edna was outwardly sweet with everyone. Of course, Nana Edna was a legend who had almost single-handedly invented television cookery. Of course, she was a one-woman multi-million-pound industry of TV programmes, cookery books and branded mugs, rice cookers and oven gloves. But she was also one of the biggest sexual predators that Trevor had worked with, and that included his four years working with puppeteers, a sub-genre of people who make a living from putting their hands into orifices. Trevor shuddered again as he remembered the first evening rehearsal where he’d leant over to adjust her mic and she’d grabbed him by the cock, her withered hands squeezing with a power that suggested that she probably didn’t have to ask her husband to open jars for her. “Oooh, cool as a cucumber,” she’d leered, as if she was testing the ripeness of a courgette in the veg aisle.

“Floor manager, cue cake please and flight tower. Dancers to start positions please – this is our final walk-through, save your energy please everyone, this is just to hit marks and test the talent release again.”

Trevor watched from on high as the dole cheques, sugar cubes, cigarettes, blocks of butter and spoons rotated without energy across the stage. For the first time, he dared to imagine the end of the advert, it loomed before him like the finish line of a marathon of shit. Maybe there would even be a few industry awards for attempting something ambitious, rather than just letting the geeks spray CGI everywhere. He wouldn’t insist on awards though, he’d settle for it all being over and a well-earned lost weekend with lots of delicious crack.

“Cue the crack,” he said into his headset. “Cake, cue the cake.”

He watched as the cake sped into position and stopped exactly where it should. The cables from the flight tower followed along, spooling out the line as needed. As the soundtrack of I Need A Dollar swelled to a climax, all of the dancers pointed towards the cake and with a modern take on jazz hands they indicated the top of the cake, which opened seamlessly. Trevor released a pent-up breath of tension. Nana Edna emerged looking triumphant in a giant ballgown with a large wooden spoon as her wand. The internal logic behind her role as a fairy godmother was confused, but it largely stemmed from the fact that they needed to dress the vicious crab as something. Edna raised both of her arms and with more than five decades of presenting experience, her eye found the centre of the live camera.

“Mixing bowls are on the dole - let’s bake with benefits.”

Trevor let the old bag hang in the air for twenty seconds longer than necessary as she mugged for the camera, knowing that with every second the harness was probably disappearing further up her arse crack.

“…and cut! Good work everyone – return to position, nearly showtime.”

Nana Edna looked furiously towards the gallery as she was lowered once more into the cake and took her place on the bucket seat inside.

“Great work Nana Edna,” Richard exclaimed. “If you could just fasten the seatbelt then I’ll take you back to position one.”

“Yes, yes, I’m doing it Richard,” Edna snapped. “Give me a minute.”

“Everything ok?” Trevor asked over the speaker. He looked up at the screen showing the football and saw the referee bring the first half to a close. The screen displayed the score and the channel cut almost immediately to the adverts – they were clearly keen to maximise the time they had for the lucrative adverts. Three minutes until showtime.

“I didn’t appreciate being pegged out like washing on the line, thanks Trevor,” Edna said with venom.

“Sorry Edna, you were perfect, but we’re just making sure that lighting have got all the cues they need, only one more time now then you’re free as a bird.”

“Right, I’m strapped in Richard, take me back.”

“Ok, but…” Richard said.

“Also, Edna – could you just repeat your line for me please?” Trevor asked. “It should be, “They’ve got mixing bowls and they’re on the dole, let’s bake with benefits.” Are you ok to do it just like that? Not a big deal but otherwise the producers will be on to me.”

“Of course, Trevor – anything else you want to heap on the shoulders of an 85-year-old woman before you leave her dangling in the air like a Germolene-scented kite?”

“Edna – the sensor isn’t showing the seatbelt is quite done up,” Richard’s nervous voice cut in.

“Right! OK! There! Is that it? Is it done now? Ow! I clipped my cunting leg!” Edna screamed, her voice sounding alarmingly high pitched in Trevor’s ears.

“Sorry Edna, it’s still showing as unfastened, health and safety won’t let me move the cake until the light is on.”

“Here! It’s done! Can you see that? It’s always health and safety with your generation, isn’t it? You should be the healthiest and safest generation of all time, but you never seem that healthy or safe do you?”

Richard saw the light come on indicating that Edna’s seat restraint was locked and quickly reversed the cake to its starting position, braking a little too sharply as it reached its mark. A loud thwack emitted from the confines of the cake. Trevor quickly checked the internal cake camera and with joy he saw Edna grimacing, holding the back of her head.

“Richard! Fuck! Be careful!” he said, failing to contain the merriment in his voice.

“Sorry Trevor – it’s…”

But Trevor never heard what it was. As if in a dream, he looked at the monitors and saw his stage on the TV. He’d spent so long looking at the scene on the monitor that it took him a fraction of a second to appreciate that this view was now also repeated on the live TV screen.

“They’ve…thrown to us early,” he said and nausea, misplaced hilarity and monstrous, monstrous fear queued up to be the first emotion to be recognised in his mind. “Action?” he shouted into the microphone. “ACTION! GOD! PLEASE LET THERE BE ACTION! EVERYONE DO THINGS!”

********

In a sitting room in a semi-detached house in Fulham, Brenton lay on the nausea-patterned carpet and wished for the thousandth time that they had a TV you could fast forward. Everyone in his class had TV that you could fast forward. Dan Reems said that his TV automatically skipped the adverts if you just said, “TV skip adverts”, but then he had also said that his dad was an airline pilot and earned two million pounds a year. The beer commercial on TV finished and Brent looked at the screen. It was showing a large stage and some gaudy glitter curtains. Even to his 10-year-old eye something about the scene was off.

Brent lifted himself to sitting and scooted his bum closer to the TV, earning a “down in front!” shout from his dad. What looked like a cake on wheels was poking out of the front of gold sequinned curtains that were rapidly closing. Some dancers were on the screen and they were looking around uncertainly. One was walking in a showbiz fashion towards the cake, when he reached the cake he flipped the curtains over the front of it and stood with his legs apart and his hands on his hips in an attempt to obscure whatever it was.

“You clumsy fuckwit!” came a clear voice over the screen. Brent felt that he knew the voice, but he couldn’t quite put a name to the clipped tones of the woman. He scooted even closer to the TV, some primal instinct in him sensing that what he was witnessing was important. The dancers started to spin and jump about the stage, but it all seemed disjointed, like they didn’t know where they should be. The pepper pot dancer didn’t appear to have her costume head on. Another fell over, but styled it out by rolling and scrambling to her feet. Suddenly a song started in the middle of the track at such an ear-shattering volume he could see some of the dancers recoiling because it was that loud. The voice returned.

“I don’t care if you did have to wait until some retard from health and safety gave you the green light. I’ve been sat in the darkness, smelling your fetid stink for two hours and I’m sick of it. Shut up Trevor. I’m sick of it all. I’m sick of sitting cramped in this ridiculous cake. I’m sick of Trevor…I said shut up. We haven’t started filming the series yet and I’m already sick of the contestants leeching off the production budget and their pity-party stories about boohoo poverty and boohoo dead mum. Richard – let me tell you - yours is the generation of excuses and reasons why not. If the financial vampires that are on this show could simply put as much work into getting a job as they do into thinking of reasons why they can’t work, then they wouldn’t have to moan about wealth inequality, they could simply be wealthy. Shut your fucking gob Trevor, you know it’s true.”

The song was getting even louder and most of the dancers were now shaking their hands in a circle. Without warning the cake lurched forward from where it was semi-obscured between the curtains. It seemed to be held in place by something, but suddenly it got free and vaulted forward. It happened so fast that it clipped one of the dancers dressed as a cigarette, who tried to spin out of the way, but still ended with one foot trapped under the cake. Brenton noted with respect that they still managed to do a singular jazz hand though, even as their other hand clawed to pull their foot free.

The song finished and a big grotesque silence emerged into the chaos. The dancers remained in place, terrified smiles plastered to their faces. Just off screen there was an ominous creaking noise and Brent saw a tower of scaffolding fall to the ground and crash onto the studio floor, narrowly missing the cake. As it fell, several wires were pulled taut and some of them snapped under the strain and poinged off-screen.

Just as it seemed they would all break, the one final wire emerged from the cake, attached to half of Nana Edna, who had finally reached her breaking point. As she was ripped out of the cake, a torrent of blood sprayed from where her legs used to be, coating the cake, the floor and the dancers nearby.

A title came on the screen: “Baking on Benefits – starts Wednesday at 8, only on ITV.”

Brenton turned to his dad who was on the sofa, his face stuck in a rictus of wide-jawed disbelief.

“Dad, please can we watch that?”

The Best of "I Will Literarily Kill You"

One of my favourite marketing efforts is that I offer readers the opportunity to be killed (or unalived as we have to say on the more squeamish of social networks) in my next book. It’s a scheme called I WILL LITERARILY KILL YOU.

I had to make the “literarily” aspect explicit, because I had this horrible waking dream that there might be a string of random actual deaths of people on the list and a wizened detective (probably played by David Mitchell) would put it all together and see it as the ultimate double-bluff and then I’d be caught and put in the chokey.

I should probably talk to someone about my epic ability to catastrophise.

Anyway, IWLKY been really popular and it has been useful for me, because although I make a living coming up with interesting things, I do suck at naming characters. I mean, I named a dog Brown, after all.* So it’s been a great resource to have a series of names that I can draw on at any point and then know as a bonus that it’s going to be a cool thing for someone to show their friends: “Check it out - this is the page where I get decapitated!”

One of the things I ask on the form is whether anyone has any particular ways that they would/would not like to die, because I’m not interested in upsetting anyone. I love it when people sign up because their answers are often hilarious, honest, weird and make me think that my readers are the greatest people on earth.

I thought I’d share a selection of their answers with you.

If it involved a beaver in some way I would not be sad. Isn’t that a wonderful philosophical statement. Who could be sad if a death involved a beaver in some way? Anyway, if you haven’t already, you can sign up here: www.iwillliterarilykillyou.com and if you’re an indie author who might like to join I Will Literarily Kill You then drop me a message and let’s see if we can collaborate as I’d love to get more potential victims (fictional) on board.

*Semi-interesting footnote. Ben Brown is my cardiologist who I admire deeply because I maintain that he saved my life. I gave him a copy of the book and told him that I’d sort-of named the characters after him and I think he was *officially* weirded out. It was really rather awkward.**

** File this under: “I don’t know why I’m so odd and say these things”, but this was the same cardiologist who was explaining to me in a consultation that one unwanted side effect of a particular heart condition was that it can cause the heart to grow quite significantly.

“It worked out ok for the Grinch,” I replied.

“Ye-… sorry, what do you mean?” he said, as his train of thought smashed through the sidings and destroyed a school.

“The Grinch,” I replied, now uncertain that this was a point that I wanted to be making out loud. “His heart grew three sizes in one day and he had a terrific time. There was a book about it.”

“-” he said.

I gave him a moment to collect himself.

“I’m a consultant cardiologist and I can tell you that if The Grinch’s heart had grown three sizes in one day then he would have died an agonising death.”

“Right,” I said. We moved on. Take note “Dr” Seuss.

Live Reading Of "I Want You To Write A Letter"

Happy weekend, one and all! I thought you might enjoy this live reading of me reading I Want You To Write A Letter so here it is.

Also, I made myself laugh doing this sketch, which was based on me doing precisely what it outlines in real life. Ow! (IG version / Tiktok).

Want to help me proof the B of the Bang audiobook

Welcome to 2025! I’ve got big things planned for this year (two books, TWO! 2!) and one of the first exciting things to get sorted is the audiobook of B of the Bang which has now been produced by Mr Chris Devon, who did such an amazing job of narrating Before and After and Flesh and Blood.

I now find myself needing to proof the audiobook in quite a short space of time and the best way to do that is to get a bunch of us to work our way through it and create a snagging list of things that Chris can re-record. It’s things like checking whether brands and names are pronouced correctly, listening for clicks, farts or Amazon delivery drivers ringing the doorbell.

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Just missing an audiobook…

Would you fancy helping? You’ll get full access to the audiobook and I’m hoping that with a few volunteers you won’t have to listen to hours of recording, although you may well want to because it’s blooming good. Then you simply add any mistakes to the joint spreadsheet and Chris does his thang.

Fancy it? Just drop me an email to ajshanahan AT gmail dotcom and I’ll get back to you with some instructions. If there’s loads of people who want to help I may have to draw names from a hat (not the Hat of Death), but that would be a nice problem to have I guess.

Thank yoooooouuuu!

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Ten Years Of MAN v FAT

10 years, 11 months and 8 days ago I had a curious afternoon thought and sent my wife an email with the subject heading: “Do you think this is a daft idea?”

She’s had a lot of those emails over the years.

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The idea was MAN v FAT, a project to support men with their physical and mental health. It was very much on my mind because at the end of 2014, I had just sold a business I started that had taken its toll on me physically and mentally. As a result, I was impressively overweight and wound tighter than a guitar string. I think I was around 20ish stone (~130kg) and I jiggled. A lot.

I hated how ill being overweight made me feel, so I’d tried loads of things to sort out my weight including joining WeightWatchers and Slimming World. I was shocked by how female-centric they were. I remember one meeting where after weigh-in (“Two pounds on, don’t forget to buy your new WW snack bars.”) they had a group conversation about how periods could cause weight fluctuations. I’ve no doubt that’s true, but I didn’t think it was what was causing my weight problems. So, the email I sent to Em that day was about starting something focusing on men. Why men gain weight. How men lose weight. Something called MAN v FAT*.

Initially, I started a blog to write about my experiences of struggling with my weight – a battle that has taken place over the course of my life with varying degrees of success. However, at that same time another battle was taking place in my life and that was the fact that in our house there were three males (two under seven), one female and only one toilet – a ratio that does not make for marital bliss. We had some money saved up and Emma was determined that we would build a small extension for a downstairs bathroom/slash sanctuary that would be a proper girls-only bathroom. I know that she had plans for small bowls of pot pourri, fluffy white towels and a gleaming pink toilet.

But then I ruined her toiletry dreams by explaining that the writing I was doing was reaching lots of men and their reaction made me think that this MAN V FAT thing maybe wasn’t a daft idea after all. It might actually be important. I mentioned that if we used the toilet money we could do something to support men. Men like me, who weren’t happy with their weight and couldn’t find help. I thought that it was wrong that weight loss had been framed as being almost exclusively a female-issue, despite the fact that more men are overweight and obese than women – 69% compared to 59%. I felt that it was an unspoken part of the story about male mental health and the staggering rates of suicide that we have among men. To her very good credit, Emma agreed that we should launch MAN v FAT and didn’t even cry about the pink toilet.

In the early days of MAN v FAT, I got a lot wrong. Far more than I ever got right. In fact, I have often been comforted by the quotation from Tom Watson the former chairman of IBM, who said that “the fastest way to succeed, is to double your rate of failure.” And fail I did. There was the MAN v FAT digital magazine, which had incredible reader numbers and no income. There was the trial weight loss group I ran in our local church, that ended up with ten weeks of just me and our vicar awkwardly chatting about what he’d eaten that week – so that had bad numbers and no income. Although I will point out that he lost weight, so it’s one of the few weight loss interventions to have a 100% success rate. I wrote a MAN v FAT book where the publisher gave me 25 days to turn in an 80,000 word manuscript, an experience which made me realise I never wanted to publish with trad publishers ever again.

Then, somehow, we won the weight management contract for Solihull in 2015 and all was going fantastically, until the guy who was going to deliver the contract rang me two days before it began to explain that a job had come up closer to home and he was going to do that instead. This left me, a mere journalist and idiot, facing the prospect of designing and delivering a weight loss programme despite never having successfully done it before – notwithstanding my amazing track record with vicars. I got encouragement from some friends within public health with the best advice coming from the incredible Jane DeVille-Almond who runs the British Obesity Society. Her view was that if I tried my best and didn’t kill anyone, then I’d be doing about as much as anyone else in public health was doing for men’s health.

All of that led to the first MAN v FAT Football league launching at Fox Hollies in Birmingham in January 2016. The idea I’d had was to do football leagues only for overweight men, with weigh ins adding goals to the pitch results. On the first night we were hoping for around 80 guys to turn up for an initial health check at the back of the Sports Hall at 7 o’clock on the dot. So when no one was there at 7.20 I started to get vicar-shaped flashbacks, only for a few minutes later for one solitary man to come through the doors and ask if this was where man versus fat was. I just about restrained myself from kissing him with relief. Even more so when he said that if this was the right place then someone should go and tell the rest of the 100 or so fat lads who were waiting by the football pitch. The rest is history…

A decade later and I’ve been fortunate enough to carry on supporting men’s health through working with the Men’s Health Forum. I’ve advised parliament about men and weight with the APPG working group on obesity. MAN v FAT Football has been taken to Australia and to the US. We recently branched out into rugby. Bizarrely, someone even put me forward for a knighthood. I was also added to the MAN v FAT Hall of Fame. Above it all, MAN v FAT has continued to support men. We now help more than 8,000 men at over 150 football leagues across the world. At those groups men deal with their weight, but also find community, talk about their mental health and win their battle against fat. I’m incredibly proud of the project. Even though these days I focus on writing weird stories about hope, I wish MAN v FAT and the team a very happy 10th anniversary and look forward to supporting it in the next ten years. I don’t know - maybe it wasn’t such a daft idea, after all…

*I think initially it was called something weird like How To Eat An Elephant, glad we didn’t stick with that branding.

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Do Content Warnings Get On Your [REDACTED]

About two months before B of the Bang hit the shelves I was pecking Julie Gibson’s head about content warnings in books. Incidentally, if you don’t know Julie, she’s the head honcho, supremo and mastermind of The End of the World Reading Club and one of the most genuine, smart and hard-working people out there. BTW, a subscription to TEOTWRC is a brilliant Christmas gift for anyone you know who likes zombies, books, apocalypses and cool little survival gifts - i.e. anyone amazing.

The idea I was bouncing off Julie’s head was putting a content warning in BOTB. This was the one that I’d written for the book. I thought it was kind of funny in its excess, but also potentially instructive for anyone who does appreciate a warning about these things. Although I like to traumatise readers, I prefer to fall short of actual psychological scarring.

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18 Rating

In my experience the only content that people genuinely want a warning about is if anything happens to an animal. You can kill grandmas, middle class women of a certain age by the score, even children, and no one will bat an eyelid. Harm the eyelid of a bat and you’ve got major problems, buddy. I’ve written some pretty messed up things in stories but the only thing I’ve ever had people shout at me for is when they thought I was going to hurt an animal. Even the merest hint. This is why there’s a website called “Does The Dog Die?” and not one called “Does the Middle Class Woman of a Certain Age Die?”. As an aside, I outlined the premise of Gerald’s Game for my wife the other day and she had to sit down for a few minutes to recover. That’s the sort of thing that writers yearn for - a premise that knocks the wind out of a reader, it makes writing the bloody thing relatively easy.

Julie’s considered response was that in her opinion content warnings are surprisingly divisive. Those who need them, really appreciate them and would like them in more books. Those who have less need for them feel like they telegraph the story or ruin jokes. I think there’s another group beyond that who feel that content warnings are spoon-feeding those who should toughen up. This latter group see it as a slippery slope from content warnings to age ratings on books. There is also the argument that unlike films where the images are chosen for you and forced into your mind, books always have the option of toning your imagination down.

Pennywise

I’m not going to pretend that I have an answer to the question, or a view on what’s right - although I don’t believe that showing compassion is ever a bad thing. In the end for BOTB I decided that if I was going to put a content warning in then I’d add it at the end so people could find it if they wanted it and not if they didn’t. Then, in the final edits we needed to lose a page when the book was being set, so I had to cast the content warnings adrift. My hope was that the cover is the sort of garish warning that nature often gives: bright vibrant colours = danger.

Lobsters beware.

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Want To See The Characters?

I’ve just finished clearing my planning wall, so my office is now looking bare after months of having Kim Jong Un and Leonard Rossiter staring haughtily down at me. Before I cleared it up I took some photos of the different characters and thought I might share them with you, to give you a flavour of who is who in B of the Bang.

First up, it’s Bradford Alderman VIIII (Yes, I know that’s not how Roman numerals work, but does he?), Scion of the Alderman Retail Group. As you can probably tell the main driving force behind Bradford was creating a diminuitive figure who you really, really, really wanted to punch in the face. I’m offering no editorial on the personalities photographed below, but they all gave me that vibe. The big teeth guy especially.

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Next up is Coco. I used AI quite a lot to try and get someone who matched the image I had in my head and it was really useful for that. To be fair though, I never really spent much time imagining Coco, because in my head she always just looked like a foam lobster.

Greg. Greg Terde. Again I was back on the AI to try and generate the omnishambles that is Greg. I also felt like he had some of the Sir Les Patterson energy and then halfway through writing I realised that all along I was thinking of Bernard Black from Black Books and so he became the touchstone for Greg, harbinger of the apocalypse.

Did I spend rather too long googling images of strong redheaded women? That’s for me and Google to know and you to find out. Anyway, Jenny is described as a 5’7” scowl and in my head she often had a Scouse accent but I tried not to write it like that because writing in accents often just ends up annoying people. That said, I did get a Scots accent in just because I love writing in Scots. Heid! That’s funny.

Next up: Lally. No secret here really, she’s an amalgam of Beatrice and Eugenie. I sometimes feel like B/E are harshly done by. Imagine your entire life, never being able to escape your family? Sounds like a nightmare to me.

Ha! This is the only research I ever did for Margaret. I don’t know who the lady is as I just screenshot the picture off Google and never bookmarked it. I’d have loved to find more photos of her as she radiates good energy and that’s how I think of Margaret. Plus she was in a church, which is on brand for Margaret.

William McCartney. I love Leonard Rossiter’s face. He’s simultaneously pitiful, risible but also quietly magnificent.

Finally - I thought you might like to see some of the underground research I did. I have two very specific people to thank here for knowing more about the underground network than I did before, but I’ll leave their names out in case they prefer to fly under the radar. They’re thanked in the book though and they were unfailingly generous with their time.

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