Jack Rollins's Blog, page 9

My new #Kickstarter campaign: Kill For A Copy

Hi everyone. It’s been a while, but I wanted to give this very important update.

I’m doing it again!

Last year, with the help of a generous group of supporters, I not only launched the novella The Séance, but started up Dark Chapter Press. Since then I have worked hard to build the presence of this small press and very soon, Dark Chapter Press will launch its first ever horror anthology, Kill For A Copy.

17 horror writers have assembled to create a collection that is by turns chilling, brutal and darkly humorous. And the best part? I managed to get master of horror, Shaun Hutson, to provide the foreword.

Kill For A Copy is going make a big splash with Mr Hutson’s involvement. But the really nice part of it is that this anthology features first appearances by some unknown writers who will, first time out, claim that connection to Shaun Hutson.

This time around, the goal is much more ambitious and with good reason. Dark Chapter Press already has a great reputation for you know… actually replying to the writers who submit work, giving guidance and support, rather than leaving them hanging on for a reply. Now is the time to go a step further. We need to build a reputation for paying authors a professional rate and in order to continue to grow, we have to market more precisely.

The initial funding goal will enable all of the authors involved (except me) to take a professional per word payment for their stories, and will also allow me to advertise Dark Chapter Press’s publications through top UK horror magazine Scream.

With several projects in the pipeline this year, Dark Chapter Press is about to step out of the shadows and make its presence known not only with horror writers, but with many more horror readers worldwide.

Of course, while all of this is going on, I continue to write, and the next stages of the Dr Blessing Legacy claw their way ever-closer to your bookcase.

In the meantime, friends and strangers came out to bat for me before, I hope you can support this ambitious new project and, as I always ask, tell your friends, family and followers to jump on board, too by forwarding this link http://kck.st/1EJHzDV and sharing this post.

My thanks as always,

Jack Rollins

The Cabinet Of Dr Blessing By Jack Rollins

Jack Rollins:

A lovely, thoughtful review of “The Cabinet of Dr. Blessing”. Many thanks Melissa and let me assure you I’m working hard on the next instalments of Dr. Blessing. You are going to love what comes next!

Originally posted on 53bryanm:

The Cabinet Of Dr Blessing

By Jack Rollins

First of all I`m very upset with Mr. Rollins…he hasn’t finish the series yet, it was like someone pulled the rugs out from under me, the book has been building and building then you turn a page and it is continued in Part 4.  Damn, the story is written so well that you are drawn into it at the very beginning and when you think you have it figured out it goes into a totally different direction.

It is a new twist on a very old story line which I didn’t think could be done.  The creature is hideous and deadly something only a parent could love.  And that is Dr Blessing’s downfall, that and his dedication to healing the sick.  The story takes place in Victorian London told in the old penny-dreadful style which I love and makes the story even…

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Review: “Aftertaste” by Kyle M Scott

Today I finished reading Aftertaste on my Kindle app. Before I tell you about it, there are some things you should know, first. A disclaimer, if you will.

Kyle and I got connected through social media sometime last year, as we discussed writing with other authors in cyberspace. Finding much in common we’ve built up a friendship and I have read, I’m pretty sure, all of his currently available work to date. He and I both feature in the anthology Carnage: Extreme Horror. However, my opinions are my own and just as sure as Kyle would tell me if he thought I’d written a stinker, I would tell him the same. This is an honest review, based on my interest in horror fiction from the reader’s perspective and from the angle of a fan of Kyle M Scott’s work so far, as opposed to his friend or collaborator.

I hope you’ll read on and hopefully look up more information from the links I’ll pop on below, so you can take in a range of views on this story. Or, what the hell? Just take my word for it.

Here goes…

The town of Plainfield is where we lay our scene, a small, quiet community in Ohio. The main strip is filled with family-owned, traditional businesses, until one day, a fast food chain sets up store and becomes the novelty place to be for the town’s inhabitants.

Almost immediately, things take a sinister turn; the chronic stomach problems, the strange behaviours, the disappearances and the unstoppable gluttony of the fast food joint’s patrons.

John and the object of his unrequited love, Slim, observe the goings-on with suspicion and begin to join the dots, but as friends and loved-ones around them succumb to an all-encompassing madness, they have to re-evaluate their own morals in the face of an enemy whose very energy is derived from the corruption of civilised values.

The first thing that struck me with Aftertaste, as with Devil’s Day and Consumed Vol. 1 before it, is Kyle M Scott’s way of building up not only believable characters, but the totally credible relationships and dynamics between them. He nails the awkwardness of the single dad with the teenage daughter he both loves and fears, cultivates cliche-busting unrequited love and then knocks you for six when all of the relationships are tested as the main plot takes hold.

Fans of movies such as Invasion Of The Body-Snatchers, The Faculty and Disturbing Behaviour will certainly get a kick out of this story. There is all the gruesome dismantling of human beings you come to expect from Kyle’s work, as well as sacrifice, betrayal and even a special appearance that made me laugh out loud (just didn’t see this call-back coming). The shocks are plentiful and some of the scenes will make you grit your teeth – but that’s because he made you care – those who are particularly squeamish won’t enjoy a few particular scenes.

Slice the story open and examine its innards a little closer and you’ll find commentary on man’s capacity for evil and the ease with which one can slip into corruption. It is not unusual for Kyle to have a pop at our glutinous society, consuming resources, wealth and lives at an alarming rate, so I was not surprised to find that artery threaded through this tale. He does it well, and the characters will disgust you yet seem somehow familiar to you.

In the end, if he hasn’t put you off your dinner altogether, Kyle will ensure that you chew your food properly, right after you’ve made sure you know where it all comes from…

Another hard-core, supercharged horror tale from one of our rising stars in horror. This gets five stars from me.

Tough Bitches – The Female Touch in my #Horror #Writing @jackrollins9280

Up until recently, I’d been rather naïve on the subject of feminism. I admit this, expecting a slew of negative comments, but hopefully you’ll stick with me and get my thought processes. With the inclusion of my story Dead Shore in the Undead Legacy anthology, and my lead character in that story being a woman, I thought this was the right time to reflect upon personal experience, outlook and how that has shaped my attitude towards the women who appear in my stories.

I come from a pretty traditional family. Back when you only needed one parent to earn an income, that person was, by and large, my Dad. Mam, she reared us kids until we were all at school, then she returned to the world of work. It’s a pattern that many people will find outdated, but one that is doubtless very recognisable to kids born before, let’s say about 1988.

Within my own home, I enjoy the sparring and fun of the battle of the sexes. I like to remark upon things as though I am some male chauvinist from the 1950s, but the reality is, I cook, clean, change nappies and can do everything my partner can do, as well as she can do it. She likes to joke about how useless I am, and how long it takes me to get off my fat, lazy arse and get jobs done; I like to joke about how little she got done around the house while I was out grafting my bollocks off, letting her know how I wish I could lie on the couch all day, cuddling my sons. She loves that one particularly.

I noticed some connections on Twitter, whose profiles announce that they are feminists. I just connected with them because we appeared to tweet about superheroes and stuff like that. The feminist thing irritated me a little, because I quite simply didn’t get it.

And here’s why. I’ve been very fortunate. In every job I’ve ever worked, I have been answerable to women in power. These women had demonstrated the ability to manage, had applied for the roles, had been appointed, and their performance was sufficient that when I met them, they were in managerial roles within the organisation. These women had the respect of their peers and subordinates. Their salary matched that of their male counterparts. Some of them got promoted. There has been total equality in the organisations I have worked in – at the levels within my view, I hasten to add. It would come as no surprise to discover that the top paying roles were male, were I to investigate it further.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in my lifetime there has been equality, and not supremacy. I don’t want to subjugate and disadvantage a gender, nor would I support any movement that would seek to subjugate and disadvantage me.

Going back to Twitter, it was that particular social networking platform that brought The Bechdel Test to my attention. For those not in the know, here’s a cut from Wikipedia:

What is now known as the Bechdel test was introduced in Alison Bechdel‘s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a 1985 strip titled “The Rule”, an unnamed female character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

It has to have at least two women in it,
who talk to each other,
about something besides a man.

Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace.

Discovering this test made me think back over all of the female characters I have created over the years and I have to say, I gulped. I’m uncertain that any scenes I have written would pass that test.

I have written strong characters into my stories, of that there is no doubt. One needs only look at the entrepreneurial, charitable Charlotte Burton, or the athletic, kick-ass vampire hunter Mary Brigham, from my Dr Blessing stories, for evidence. The problem is, the predicaments they find themselves in are largely due to the (sometimes idiotic, and catastrophic) actions of the men they encounter. It is these women who must pick up the pieces.

Mary Brigham has been one of the most fun characters I have ever written about and I am working on a much greater story where we see her develop from the idealistic young agent we meet in Dr Blessing’s Rapture, Or, The Beast And The Bell-Jar, into a leader and potential saviour of a city.

I made the decision to stay conscious of The Bechdel Test in my writing and began to develop a zombie story where the main protagonist is a young, female business owner, who has followed in her mother’s footsteps as a business owner. Unfortunately I had to put that story on hold as it was developing into a much larger story than was required. I took a more simple idea, and wrote Dead Shore.

Dead Shore sees a young mum, Karen, who is enjoying a seaside stroll with her toddler, when she encounters some teenage boys who are messing about with a washed-up dolphin corpse. A mysterious substance on the creature causes one of the boys to transform into a blood-thirsty maniac and Karen must fight for survival with her toddler Charlie and a teenage boy she doesn’t know.

I enjoyed writing the story with the focus on this very normal, very recognisable woman. Where writing about a cop or a soldier on leave would lead the story into overly familiar territory, the aspect of motherhood and protection of children lent a different dynamic to the story. Karen has to be tough, has to be strong to survive, but she is also being forced into a situation completely against her nature. I also had the added challenge of, while making sure she wasn’t a hysterical, screaming wreck, one of those annoying Mary-Sue characters, who faces no challenges and who just copes perfectly with everything.

Anyway, not quite feminist literature, but, I think, an exciting, very different story and one which may not quite pass The Bechdel Test, but one which shows I’m getting closer.

My books and stories mentioned in this blog can be found here.

Jack Rollins ‘The Séance’ Review

Jack Rollins ‘The Séance’ Review.

‘Venus Bay’ a #horror #love story @jackrollins9280

I know, I know, it’s a little late for Valentine’s Day now, but last night I was a little pre-occupied. My better half and I found ourselves stretched out on the sofa, sharing the box of chocolates she bought me, her falling asleep halfway through Guardians of The Galaxy and me? I was just enjoying the movie, and the peace.

Yesterday’s celebrations of love for us involved our first trip to the cinema together in ages. What did we go to see? I’ll bet you expect it to be 50 Shades of Grey, but you’re wrong. Our cinema trip included a miniature version of me, our son Archie, and his first ever cinema experience was Peppa Pig: The Golden Boots.

Nothing could say more for true love than us two putting ourselves through that for our boy. And he loved it. We had a romantic lunch out together, the three of us, and Archie was on top form, flirting with waitresses, taking in all the sights and sounds, especially the coffee machine (he often pretends to work in a cafe at home, making coffee machine noises and bringing us his tiny little red cups, or imaginary ones). So he was picking up some new material for his coffee shop schtick.

When our day was finished, and the little man was away to bed, that’s when we deflated on the couch. Well, I got to deflate. Naomi? She has to stay inflated, at least for the next couple of weeks as we eagerly await the arrival of Archie’s baby brother.

Romantic massages and cheeky groping have this year given way to soothing rib rubs to dull the aches of her body’s changes and our gifts and cards say nothing about our feelings like the children we created (and of course, how she took on my oldest child, my daughter, who doesn’t live with us, but stays with us when she decides it’s not too much trouble to spend time with her dear old dad).

To some, the above will seem about as mundane as it could possibly get. To others, you will know, that under these circumstances, with a young, growing family, you sort of retreat and hibernate together.

And so, going back to my original point, today is when I get to attend to online matters and I thought I would share a little twisted love story with you. It isn’t very long, so if you have a few minutes to spare, why not join me in Venus Bay?

Venus Bay, by Jack Rollins

Jake admired the framed print featuring Jeff Rowley, appearing like a satellite in space, his yellow surfboard highlighting him against that record-breaking wave at Jaws Peahi, in 2012. That image hung in every surf bar or surf shop he had visited on his return to California, and there was comfort in that. He had returned to his old stomping grounds for that sameness; nothing really changing.

It was there in Finn’s Beach Bar, Jake decided to forge a new future and overcome the so far nightmarish year. Financial irregularities in his skateboard company brought the IRS crashing down on the place. Jake avoided prison, but hefty financial penalties saw his brand damn near down the pan.

His ex-accountant was a clever bastard; that was the internal spin Jake put on it. Then he finally admitted: William McCall hadn’t been clever at all. He didn’tneed to be. Jake had happily and dumbly signed the cheques and documents that allowed McCall to perpetrate the fraud.

Depressed, Jake admitted a moron could have defrauded him and he wouldn’t have known. Too eager to trust people. Too fucking gullible.

He gulped down another beer and a shot of Jaeger. He had big plans. He’d get a new brand off the ground. He just had to get back to his roots, back to his surfboard. Skating had become his passion, but it had started out on the waves and that poise, that balance and those shifts made him the championship skater he had become.

He would tap into that energy again and stay away from the heroin on his way up this time. He would kick these problems in the ass and make it all work out.

Then she caught his eye. The sensuous sway of her curved hips as she strolled past the tiki-bar, and her skin changing colour from red to blue, to green, as she passed each multi-coloured paper lantern, had him entranced.

She noticed too and made eye contact with him. She liked the attention and she knew she looked good.

Jake couldn’t believe his luck when this golden-skinned blonde perched herself at the bar, all cut-off jeans, lime green bikini top and wrists covered in beads, straps and friendship bracelets.

“Buy me a drink?” she asked, leaning back against the bar, using her elbows to prop herself up and push out her breasts so that Jake could not resist a quick peak.

“Sure.” Jake waved for the bartender.

“Same again for both of you?” the bartender asked.

“Sure,” Jake replied.

“I’ll have what he’s having, this time,” the blonde said. “How rude of me, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Kaprice, with a ‘K’”

Jake smiled and shook the delicate hand she offered him. “I’m Jake. With a ‘J’”

“Ah, that’s an unusual way to spell it, but I’ll try to get used to it.”

The kisses came before surnames. And the surnames came after three more rounds of beers and chasers.

“You gonna tell me why you looked like someone told you your pet dog died, when you first came in here?” Kaprice asked.

“My business got into some trouble recently. I thought I’d come back up the coast. I used to hang out here when I was a kid. Before everything got so… complicated.”

“I grew up in a little place just north of here, Venus Bay. It’s only a mile away; you probably went there yourself if you were a local kid.”

“Wow, you surfed there as a kid? It was pretty hardcore. I went up there once, but the crew was real territorial. You couldn’t get near the water at all or those guys were throwing garbage and rocks at you!”

“Yeah, it was a pretty tough neighbourhood. Nothing there now, though. There was an accident and they stopped the surfing in the bay. When the surfers stopped coming, the stores and bars closed. Turns out the surfers really kept the place going. So when they banned the surfing, the whole place went down the shitter.”

Jake nodded. “It’s pretty bad when you have to rely on surfers, huh?”

“I know. And it’s just standing there; all these homes and a couple of stores, the old pier. Everything. It’s like aliens just abducted the people.”

“Sounds kinda cool, though. I think I’d like to see that.”

“Why don’t I get us a couple of beers to take so we can have them under the pier?” Kaprice offered.

Before long, they had arrived at Venus Bay. The long pier, battered by the elements and untended for so long took on a sinister look that made Jake feel a little uneasy. A question nagged at Jake. “What was the accident that shut this place down?”

Kaprice sighed and said, “A few years ago I was surfing out here with Jesse, my boyfriend. You know how it was here… if you didn’t cut it as close to the pier as you could then you were a pussy and we weren’t pussies. Well, my skull cracked against one of these supports. I got out of hospital eventually. I was lucky compared to Jesse. His head cracked too, but he clung to the support he had been slammed into… he couldn’t let go, couldn’t use his legs to swim. I could only watch him drown.”

Jake reached out to touch her face. “Jesus Christ, Kaprice. What are we doing down here? I mean, you saw him drown.”

Kaprice brought the rock down on Jake’s head hard and fast; the first blow stunned him, the second blow knocked him unconscious.

When he woke, the water had risen to his chest. He tried desperately to move his arms, finding them bound tightly behind his back, pinning him to the support under the pier.

He screamed until his voice cracked. The roar of the sea all but muted his cries and even if the night was silent and still, Venus Bay was abandoned a long time ago.

Yeah, I sort of told you a lie. It’s not all that much a love story, but hey that’s the risk you take when you read a story on a page by a horror writer.

Anyway, if you did anything special for Valentine’s Day, drop a little comment and tell me about it.

If you enjoyed the story, please share the link with your friends…

The Unanswered Question of Race in Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing

Jack Rollins:

While preparing work for a maritime horror piece recently, my initial idea was to make the piece a vengeful tale of retribution against a gang of slavers whose negligence caused the death of the men they were to deliver to a slave trader in America.

Ultimately, I decided that the root of the story could be done differently, and that the story did not need to include the slavery angle. I believe that I have the skill to weave a story that is both respectful of history, well-researched enough to deliver the details that would appall (as many of my readers enjoy taking my Victorian fiction and searching for the historical kernels of truth strewn throughout) while also entertaining with a good-old fashioned scare.

But there are places I don’t, ultimately, dare to tread. I write to entertain (even if that entertainment if for people who enjoy being grossed out, horrified and downright chilled to the bone). I know that I would never go near the Holocaust in a horror story, and although I like a real backdrop to some of my stories, I knew this maritime story would have to be developed in a different direction.

As I’ve been considering this, I came upon this article about Edgar Allan Poe, which I hope is of as much interest to you as it was to me.

Originally posted on Longreads Blog:

It is seldom mentioned that Poe came of age in a slave society, in a household where slaves were present. Poe does nothing to draw attention to the fact. An account of the business interests of Poe’s foster father, John Allan, quoted by the biographer Jeffrey Meyers, notes that he and his partner “as a side issue were not above trading in horses, Kentucky swine from the settlements, and old slaves whom they hired out at the coal pits till they died.” This last item suggests that Poe might not have been particularly sheltered from an awareness of the ugliness of the system. Charles Baudelaire has encouraged the notion that Poe was an aristocrat manqué. But John Allan was a successful immigrant merchant—by no means the type of gentleman planter who stood in the place of aristocrat in the self-conception of antebellum Virginia. Poe’s aristocrats are surrounded by mists and…

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How U.S. Spies Dug Up Hitler’s Sex Secrets

Jack Rollins:

Who wouldn’t want to know that evil little fucker’s sex secrets?

Originally posted on Longreads Blog:

Earlier this week Mother Jones published a fascinating sampling from the CIA’s psychological profiles of various international figures. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services (the WWII-era CIA predecessor) tasked a Harvard psychologist with drafting a profile of Hitler’s personality. Below is an excerpt, as compiled by Dave Gilson of Mother Jones:

There is little disagreement among professional, or even among amateur, psychologists that Hitler’s personality is an example of the counteractive type, a type that is marked by intense and stubborn efforts (i) to overcome early disabilities, weaknesses and humiliations (wounds to self-esteem), and sometimes also by efforts (ii) to revenge injuries and insults to pride…

Sexually he is a full-fledged masochist…Hitler’s long-concealed secret heterosexual fantasy has been exposed by the systemic analysis and correlation of the three thousand odd metaphors he uses in Mein Kampf…and yet—Hitler himself is Impotent. [original emphasis] He is unmarried and his old acquaintances…

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17 Forever. Notes on Nostalgia, by Jack Rollins

A critical point before I get into this: there’s nothing I can say on the subject of nostalgia that would ever be as profound as the words spoken by Jon Hamm, as Don Draper, in Mad Men. The scene I refer to is one of the most perfect moments of film and TV, of all time, in my opinion.

Matthew Weiner and Robin Veith’s script really delivers in this heart-wrenching moment, where Don Draper unveils his secret weapon to advertise Kodak’s projector wheel: “Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.” He tells us that, “In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound’.”

It goes on, and I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen the scene (it has more impact in its true place in the final episode of season 1). The scene stabbed me, though, right through my heart, when I first saw it, and I will never forget its message.

A scent. An image. Someone else’s memory. A song. A movie. A TV show. These things are powerful and emotive. They open up a wormhole in time and space and in the blink of an eye, you are no longer looking at the frozen photograph, or watching the TV show; you are inside the picture, reliving the scene, or in another room, watching the TV show with someone else – the person you shared it with first time around.

As a boy I had a strong dislike of the word nostalgia. As a teenager I had a strong distaste for the notion of nostalgia. In my twenties, I convinced myself I was correct to keep moving faster than nostalgia and now in my thirties I am slower, weighted with the collected memories and possessions of a lifetime, and I cannot outrun it anymore.

Popular culture takes me back over the landmarks – 30 year anniversary of Ghostbusters – and I’m a child again watching the movie every Saturday morning, then spending days playing with my Ecto-1 and the Fire Station, warm and safe at home with family.

The Smashing Pumpkins bring out a new album and I am listening to Mellon Collie for the first time, in sixth form at high school with friends I thought I’d never part from and a confidence I thought would be forever at my command.

The problem is that many of those closest to me when I was a teenager are gone from my life, some geographically, some because we turned on each other when I decided the only way to be in life was to steamroll on and over everything, crush people and replace them and crush them and replace them. I’m sure they weren’t sitting around miserable for very long, but the point is that I didn’t care if they did. The moment you didn’t mean everything to me, you meant nothing to me.

My emergence as a writer, I mean, seriously pushing to have my work noticed over the last couple of years, has brought with it some nice surprises. Someone I thought I’d blown it with ten years ago reached out and I’m glad she did. You see, the time of my life I am transported back to more than any other, is age 17 and she was my girl!

The other day she tweeted about teaching resin casting, using some rose petals. She noted that these rose petals were 18 years old, and bought for her by me. I was amazed. She added a lovely line (I hope she isn’t going to kill me for blogging this, but hell, we tweeted openly for all to see, so I don’t suppose she will): “They are older now than we were when you gave them to me.”

That might seem like a depressing thought to some people, but not to me. Those little things, remnants of a full-on, crazy-about-each-other teen romance, have survived all this time. In that time I have been married, divorced, discovered heavy drinking, discovered I’m better at light drinking, discovered drugs, discovered I’m better without them, created 2 fantastic children with a 3rd coming along in a matter of weeks, changed career direction several times, moved my entire life away to a city, given that life up to return to a small town with the city girl who captured me, gained a stone of muscle mass, lost a stone of muscle mass, gained 2 stone of overindulgence, lost some hair, had the best nights out, had the lowest days of the low, made a fortune, drank a fortune, learned to play four tunes and come to learn that the best friends I have were made the exact same way I was, by the same people.

Yet somewhere out there, these little pieces of 1997 just hung on in.

No matter how happy you are, no matter what you have, who has you or where you are, sometimes, the ache of an old wound is going to throb through your body and drag your consciousness back to the past.

I played U2 Pop, the soundtrack to Desperado, I remembered Thursday nights when we had finished working at Woolworths, remembered Friday nights in ‘watching’ Friends and Frasier and endless videotapes of gangster movies and overwatching The Crow. My God I had the teenage years that some kids see on TV shows and wish they had – I had that! I had that and I’m so glad that I did.

But I didn’t always feel like that about those years. Like all stupid teenage boys, when that came to an end and the pain of a thousand happy memories was too intense and too wounding, I tried to eradicate the history. If there are no reminders, there can be no pain. I started to run.

A few years later, I wrote a story called Matt Carsun: Saturnine. The story was released on a very early e-book site called nospine (where David Moody’s Autumn books first appeared, before he made it big!). Of course, I was ecstatic at my first taste of publishing and appeared in the local papers, touting the work with real naivety.

You see, the town in the story was a thinly disguised version of my hometown, and its inhabitants closely resembled friends from school, girls I had known, family members, that sort of thing. Being a horror story, some bad things happen to people in there and of course some of the local assumed I was making myself the hero of the story. That wasn’t true, as it goes, I was one of the friends, the sly one. Of course, the love interest was based on the only love I’d had at the time I was the age of those characters and one of our mutual friends took the story of that character’s kidnapping to mean that I was pining over her.

What she didn’t know, what only a handful of people knew, was that the pain described in the story was not a replication of that experienced in longing to be reunited with the inspiration for the character, but the crushing, tearing agony of no longer living with my daughter. Not seeing her each morning to have breakfast together, not eating ice cream from the tub, perched up on the stools in the kitchen, it was fucking destroying me back then.

Matt Carsun: Saturnine was in some ways an angry book, a bitter tirade against the backslapping golf-buddy system of small towns, but that isn’t all it was. It was a love-letter, a farewell note to my teenage years. It was an apology to old friends, it was a thank you for the memories. It was, in essence, a holding vessel for the nostalgia I wanted to outrun.

I’ve been tired lately. Tired and somewhat unwell. It’s been a pretty rough few months for my partner and I, but we’re making it through together. We’ve both endured real physical and mental strain and come through it smiling with the support of our family. I guess, throughout that, some armour fell off me, or I feel a little more comfortable revealing some inner thoughts in this way. Maybe I’m trying to say something nice to and about people, but I can only do it in a roundabout way, but the side-effect of that, is that it becomes even easier for external influences to stir up the aches of those old wounds again, allowing me to bathe, for a little while, in the pleasant memories of old songs, the old bike route by the oil seed fields, certain remembrances triggered when I brush the lavender bush outside my mother-in-law’s front door.

No longer afraid of nostalgia, no longer afraid that it makes a person weak, or afraid to move on, no longer afraid to accept the parts that people have played in my life – be those parts positive or negative – it is something new to accept the memories, all of them. It is refreshing to accept that those influences have played their part, left ugly scars or helped me to wipe away blemishes, and made me move in the direction I move in now, with a beautiful partner and fantastic kids and a great future to look forward to, with new memories to make each and every day.

Maybe I will pick up Matt Carsun again soon and complete that rewrite I started a while ago. Maybe it would be good to see what a few more years of wear and tear on the tyres would bring to the story.

But in the meantime, to everyone I know, to everyone I’ve met in the flesh, to those I only know in cyber-space, to even the stranger who stumbles upon this (you will have an effect when I check my stats later and see some extra people took a look today), I want to say thank you. Thank you for the memories you gave me, or the ones you will give.

I was going to link to the Mad Men clip here, but they’re all shitty quality, so you’ll have to either hunt it down, or take my word for it!

How #Batman helped my career today… @jackrollins9280

When I’m not writing the stuff of nightmares, I have an actual proper day-job. My professional background is dominated by social care roles at different levels and two years ago I changed path slightly to become a training advisor – the not-so-fancy term for an NVQ assessor, in Health and Social Care. I get to educate people, developing them professionally, using my wealth of insight and experience in the care system, and I embed functional skills including English, Maths and ICT.

One of the challenges in my work, is that sometimes adult learners can be more evasive than children. A child will tell you the dog ate the homework, but at least the child has attended to say it to the teacher. I see learners on a roughly 3-4 week cycle, setting assignments for them to complete before the next visit. I turn up after a sometimes long drive, often finding that the learner I am scheduled to see, has conveniently forgotten, or is magically ill. Sometimes they show up and they just have no progress in evidence to represent 3 or 4 weeks of funding on a qualification they chose to take.

It can be quite trying at times, to say the least.

One of my colleagues took an extended period off work at the end of last year. I had just completed several learner portfolios and so was in a position to pick up the slack. I inherited her learners and by God, what an evasive bunch they were. Those I did manage to see have done nothing or seem to have vanished in the space of a month and many more did not attend the appointments I arranged with them.

In the build-up to Christmas I entered one particular establishment and caught the eye of a staff member as I waited in reception. She was a really pretty blonde, and hell, I have to admit it, I have a thing for… well, pretty blonde women, or brunettes or redheads. Happily settled down of course, but I’m not blind! In her blonde hair was a playful streak of pink. I like the whole Ramona Flowers/Anime, coloured hair thing too, so she stuck right out. But even more striking was the Christmas sweater she wore. Within the snowflakes was a sign that has promised me excitement and adventure since I was 8-years old and I saw what the car and costume were going to look like in Tim Burton’s then-anticipated Batman movie. Yes, it was the emblem.

Now I know that the last paragraph may have put off some readers, who might think me some kind of horrible cheating, wandering-eyed misogynist. I hope that’s not how I’ve represented myself and let me balance it by saying that my partner often remarks on how fit this bloke or that one is, and one of them is her friend’s husband who has such guns of steel I think I kind of fancy him a bit. We’re good-natured about it and we’re crazy about each other; we just understand that being together doesn’t suddenly make everyone else in the world hideous. No matter how good-looking any man or woman is in this world, though, my partner knows that she is the second love of my life. The first is Batman.

Through shit comics, some shit movies, that camp old series, that seed is still embedded deep in my chest – no matter what they publish or produce now, I have read some phenomenal Batman comics over the years and I loved the Christopher Nolan movies. Every time I feel I’m past the character, I somehow get sucked back into the vortex and end up being that 8-year old again.

So, back to this sweater…

As she passed, I remarked, “Cool sweater.”

“Huh?” she asked.

“Your sweater… I’m a big Batman fan. I really like your sweater.”

“It’s great, isn’t it?” she said. “Glad you like it. I love Batman.”

My kind of gal.

I returned to this establishment earlier this week to find that again one of the staff had ducked me. The Christmas season being over, the staff were all back in their usual attire and my fellow Batman fan appeared in the background, no longer donning the emblem, but in standard office dress that suggested she was not a carer, but an administrator.

I had to return to the same establishment today and wow, today’s learner actually turned up!

Now, in order to ensure that no more time is wasted, I spoke to an apprentice administrator, a nervous, really nervous young man who I suspect wasn’t sure what he was allowed to do and what he wasn’t. My aim for the day was to deal with one person. Who is going to be responsible for training here? What is this person’s email address? Ensure everyone knows our new communication protocol and that missing visits puts them at risk of being ejected from the course.

I got the name. I got the email address. I got more than that. As the nervous apprentice considered what he was allowed to do, the Batman fan entered. We properly introduced ourselves this time and she remembered that I had commented on the sweater – remembered that we have something in common.

We discussed comics and comic-book movies for a few minutes, and I even outed myself as a horror writer. She actually hi-fived me. Now that hasn’t happened in a fucking long time if you take tiny family members and their friends out of the equation.

Then down to business – apparently she worked as an administrator in my field in a previous job and she explained back to me the problems I was having, listened to my proposed plans to tackle it and took it upon herself to be the person at this establishment who will ensure the communication is much better and, more importantly, that the learners are where they should be when they should be there.

Today I just picked me up a sidekick.