Return to planet fiction

This blog is devoted to my thoughts and ideas about the stories other people tell, but I got some of my own. 

I've always written fiction, and still do. I'm halfway through a series of three novels about Auckland that I've been working on since 2015, and I'm probably going to drop that soon and do the pulpiest thing imaginable, because I can't get a story featuring Wulf Sternhammer fighting Hannibal Lecter in 19th century Aotearoa out of my head.

I do have a chronic lack of interest in these things once I've finished, and have made extremely little effort to get anything published. It's not just that I'm bored with the stories when I'm done with them, it's that the endless hustle that modern authors need to do to promote their own work just looks fucking tiring.

But I can publish whatever the fuck I feel like on this blog, so why not showcase a couple of things? My conviction that they are embarrassingly bad is no excuse.

The Man From LOVE is a short novel written a few years ago and was a vain attempt to try and update the James Bond template for a new century, replacing the usual sex and violence with tactical empathy and smarter solutions, while still keeping as much kung fu as possible. I also tried to throw in The Meaning Of Life for shits and giggles. It didn't really work, but at least I fucking tried.

This is the Man From LOVE:

#1. It all starts at the movies
#2. No shot
#3. All you need is dance
#4. A night off from saving the world
#5. Dinner with the Goodsons
#6. Cleaning up afterwards
#7. How to sign up
#8 A virtual certainty
#9. All will be well
#10. Wrong
#11. Don't look now
#12. Dealing with it
#13. Metaphysical manipulation for fun and profit
#14. Run fool, run
#15. This is not normal
#16. The man in the moon
#17. A nice glass of red
#18. The Trevor situation
#19. Left behind
#20. There is no Trevor
#21. This is not you
#22 Cross country
#23. Good morning
#24. Lost with the fairies
#25. Alone
#26. Fighting and fucking
#27. The House of Good
#28. How the world works
#29. Everything is everything
#30. Cool

Therapeutic Skin Jobs is a short novel written more than 15 years ago for a laugh. It was the direct result of an unfortunate fan fiction phase, but I still have loads and loads of Doctor Skin stories bouncing around in my head, and I even let one escape a couple of years ago. It felt good!

This is Therapeutic Skin Jobs:

#1: It's All About You
#2: Wake Up Call
#3: Going Back On His World
#4: We Don't Talk About Love
#5: All Sounds The Same
#6: Wet
#7: Push It
#8: Just Another Saturday Night
#9: Kinky Space Pirates
#10: Home Again
#11: Burn It All
#12: Off The Beach
#13: The House Of Everything
#14: Getting Older, Getting Faster
#15: History: Now
#16: A Night In
#17: Where You Belong
#18: Hello Again
#19: Together Again, Never Apart
#20: Come On
#21: Escape into Infinity!
#22: Don't Go Anywhere
#23: Fight!
#24: Second Verse, Same As The First
#25: Getting Away With It All
#26: Destination Unknown
#27: Green Light Go!
#28: Here We Go Now
#29: It's All About Me

Yeah, but all I really want for Christmas is books

It's not even the physical books that my loved ones give me every Christmas, no matter how pretty they actually look. It's the time to sit and read them, in relative peace and quiet.

Because there is always a moment on Christmas Day when the kids have run themselves down, and everybody else is full of food and other indulgences, and there's nothing else to do except sit and relax, and crack open a new book or two.

Like most years, I know what I'm getting this Christmas - a collection of the Slow Horses novellas, because I burned through the main novels way too fast; and this year's 2000ad annual, which is a gift to myself, bought months ago, received weeks go, and left unread until today. I got the one with the retro Bolland cover, of course, and even glimpsing that before needlessly wrapping it up and putting it under the tree was a solid dose of willpower.

We have a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old in the house, so Christmas is obviously all about them, but it's also worth taking a moment for myself, and indulging in the latest adventures of Slough House and Judge Dredd, because that's a big part of what the holiday season is all about.

Merry Christmas to all, and borag thungg, Earthlets!

All I want for Christmas is a Battlestar Galactica jacket

The advertisements in the back of the old Warren comic magazines used to freak me out in a weirdly specific way, but I still haven't ever wanted anything in life as much as I want one of those fucking beautiful BattleStar Galactica jackets.

The original TV show was a cheap and cheerful rip-off of Star Wars, but they still had some terrific production designs - the Cylons and their slivers of ships are shiny, gleaming death, while the thrusting vipers flown by the colonial pilots is an aesthetic that extends to the way their helmets follow Egyptian lines, and their hair flows in full 70s glory. And their brown denim jackets with the gleaming golden buckles were just so fucking cool.

To be honest, if I could have any piece of clothing from the show, it would be those glorious chunky boots the battlestar's warriors trod about in, but I salivated over those ads for the jackets in the back of those magazines for years, and I remain convinced I would look so cool in one of them. Especially with those golden buckles.

You can get cheap cosplay versions of the jackets on ebay easily enough, or even a vintage one from the 70s for a few hundred bucks (and a few hundred more to send to this part of the world). They don't look quite as cool as they did in those long lost advertisements, but they are still so tempting. I'm sure I would look great. 

Doctor Who and the hole at the centre of everything

The single greatest magazine ever is obviously the Radio Times Doctor Who 20th anniversary special, because it came out in 1983 when I was eight years old and absolutely obsessed with all things Doctor Who, and this was my first great guidebook to that strange and sprawling universe.

I devoured that magazine, (well, a local version of it anyway, which didn't mention the Radio Times but was otherwise identical), and literally read it to pieces. I still have it today, but it's missing the first four pages and the last four pages, which disintegrated in my hands over the years. It had an episode guide running to the end of the Fifth Doctor era in the last dozen or so pages, and whenever I think about particular eras of classic Doctor Who, I think about how they were laid out on the particular page in that guide.

It was also the first place I ever heard about the missing episodes - the ones that got junked by the BBC in one of the most short-sighted decisions in the history of entertainment media. Crucial episodes in the history of the show, starring the first two Doctors, wiped from history because nobody in the 1970s thought anybody would ever want to see them again.

The list was well over 100 episodes long in 1983, and has been slowly whittled down to 97 over the years, as some surprising finds have been made. But there is still a hole and the very centre of this 60+ year saga, one that is very, very likely to always remain unfilled.

Of course, nerds fucking abhor a vacuum, so they have filled in these gaps with recreations and animated versions of the missing television. The soundtracks are still out there, voices and sound effects disembodied from the images they should be welded to, and there are hoards of tele-snaps that give an idea of how it looked. And, of course, the scripts survive, and all the lost serials have been novelized  into much-loved Target books decades ago.

But the weird thing is that while I celebrate the finding of any new footage - getting to see the fight  in the TARDIS between the Doctor and his doppelganger at the end of Enemy of the World was truly thrilling - I somehow like the incompleteness of it all. T the idea that it's a collection that will never be completed, always out of reach, always not quite there.

If they found all missing 97 episodes in a defunct TV station in Nigeria tomorrow, I'll be the first to sit down and glory in the Power of The Daleks, or the fun of the Myth-Makers, or even the stodginess of the Savages. But I also don't mind this void at the centre, it's part of the long and weird story of Doctor Who, as much as knowing the production codes or who played all the companions. 

It's something that has always been there as long as I've known the names of each storyline, a constant nothing.

I do feel that part of the reason I'm not bothered is that I grew up reading comic books in bits and pieces - I would never get whole runs of things, and even comics I was getting on regular basis would constantly miss issues, so you fill in the gaps as best you can, with whatever you can.

And seeing the Tomb of the Cybermen for the first time when it unexpectedly turned up in the 90s, the version I had in my head after reading the Target book was more grandiose and slick than the thing we got. I certainly don't regret the opportunity to see it, or any lost episodes, but it's not the end of the world. The Doctor wouldn't let that happen.

Twin Peaks taught me everything I needed to know about life

Oh sure, Twin Peaks is full of the darkest evil in all creation, as metaphysical creatures use human beings as their playthings in increasingly cruel ways, but these are always balanced out by the lightest, neatest little moments.

And Agent Cooper's advice to Harry in the original series - that every day, give yourself a present, don't plan for it, don't expect it, just give something to yourself - is so clear-eyed and smart, it is obvious that it'll always pay off if you follow it.

It doesn't take much - it might just be a chocolate bar or a break from some mind-numbing task - but even on your worst days, do something nice for yourself. You always deserve it, and it makes all of life just a tiny bit better.

The lesson learned: Give yourself a present every day. You'll never regret it.

The Boondock Saints taught me everything I needed to know about life

You should never turn your back on anybody who says the Boondock Saints is their favourite movie, but even derivative trash can make a good point or two. And there is one moment in one of these movies - I honestly can't remember if it was the original or the later sequel - where the titular hitmen go on a big rant full of bullshit, with one point that always stuck with me.

It's when they say that no, they don't want to talk about their feelings. Not because they're bottled up inside or anything, but because it's none of your fucking business how they feel.

And while it may be wildly hypocritical to think this is a good point when I've spent the past 16 goddamn years writing this blog, and regurgitating any damn thought that comes into my crowded head. But I've really only touched on a tiny fraction of my true feelings about life, the universe and everything, and I remain quite happy to keep most of that to myself.

Because it ain't anybody else's fuckin' business.

The lesson learned: They're my feelings, and I don't have to share them with anybody I don't want to.

Dork taught me everything I needed to know about life

Evan Dorkin's Dork comics are so crammed with jokes and incident, there's always something to pick up on. And as much fun as things like Milk and Cheese and The Murder Family can be, it's the shorter autobiographical pieces - like the story of his time as an unrepentant soda thief, or the whole gut-punch of Dork #7 -  that contain the shiniest moments of wisdom.

Look at his short piece on how to get your ass kicked, taking some proper childhood trauma of bullying and pain, and making loads of dumb jokes out of it. Right at the end, he relates an unfortunate experience where he says exactly the wrong thing on a school bus, and everybody kicks the absolute shit out of him.

And towards the end of this beating, he sees a cute girl, and thinks that she will show mercy, and she kicks him in the fucking face.

I think about that part a lot. I'm as guilty as anybody at judging people by their appearances, and have had my heart broken by all sorts of beautiful girls who never knew I existed, but at least I've never been kicked in the fucking face by any of them. I don't doubt that they could have.

The lesson learned: Beautiful people will kick you in the fucking face just as much as ugly people will.

Preacher taught me everything I needed to know about life

A lot of Preacher hasn't aged well, but this bit of advice from Jesse's dad has. I've mentioned it before, but I'm dropping it again, because I just love the man telling his son he has to be a good guy, because there are way too many of the bad. 

It is so simple and direct, and carries the unmistakable ring of truth. Do your best, kids.

The lesson learned: There are still way too many of the bad.

Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard taught me everything I needed to know about life

Kurt Vonnegut was always full of great advice - like the never-ending merits of going out to buy an envelope; or even the basic value of being kind, babies - but I'll never forget the part in the Bluebeard book where Rabo Karabekian draws a quick sketch, because of the things it says about what we do with our lives.

Like many characters in Vonnegut's books, and like the author himself, Rabo is a former POW who has reinvented himself for a new world. He becomes a thoroughly modern artist whose work consists of simple strips of colour on plain backgrounds.

There is some real delight in realising what those strips of colour actually are, and even more so when the material he uses means they start peeling away from his expensive canvases, rendering them worthless. And the final revelation of what he's doing in that barn is incandescently good.

But my favourite part in the book is when someone challenges Rabo on the simplicity of his modern art bullshit, and he dashes off a quick photo-realistic portrait, and when he's asked why he doesn't do that all the time, he spits out that he can't. Because it's so easy.

Once again, Yoda can fuck all the way off  - doing the hard stuff, even if it ends in utter failure, is what life is all about. The attempt is the thing, not the end result, at least for the artist themselves. And if you keep just doing the easy shit, you'll never be challenged, and never get anywhere.

The lesson learned: It's no fun if it's easy.

Judge Dredd taught me everything I needed to know about life

There is a good way to describe the future shock of life in Mega City-One in a quote that occasionally comes up in Judge Dredd. As things get crazy and out of control, as they do on a daily basis in the Big Meg, somebody will point out that in MC-1, things have a way of... happening.

There's no judgement in the idea, no blame or anything like that, which is funn when the title character of the comic strip is all about that kind of thing, but it's just the idea that the world is a drokked-up place, and drokked-up things can just happen. 

And it's best not to get too torn up about it, or worry too much. They just happen, and you have to go with it, or you'll be crushed under the weight of a thousand luxury mo-pads.

The lesson learned: Things have a way of happening, man. Just go with it.

South Park The Movie taught me everything I needed to know about life

I haven't watched South Park in a few years now, I tried following it on Comedy Central, but there are now so many episodes that the new ones get buried in the repeats, and I couldn't find them

And while I would highly recommend not following many of the life lessons South Park has taught us over the past couple of decades - there are justifiable fears that the show's cynicism has bleed through into real world consequences for people who think Eric Cartman makes some good points - there is one lesson from the South Park movie that I have not forgotten since I first heard it 25 years ago.

It's not the joys of fucking your uncle, or blaming Canada for all your woes (however easy it is to pin everything on those hosers), is the line in the epic 'what Would Brian Boitano do?', telling us that he'd make a plan, and he'd follow through.

Whenever there is a big task in life, and a lot to do in a short amount of time, I think about this line, and I come up with a plan, and I follow it through. 

The biggest change in my life this year has seen me move down wit the family to my old home town, and the plan was to stay for a year before heading back to the big city. And while there have certainly be urges to change that plan, and maybe stay a little longer, we're fucking sticking with it and going back in February.

Because making plans is easy, following through on them is the vital part. Even Butters knows that.  

The lesson learned: Stick to the plan, and follow trhough. That's what Brain Boitano would do.

This is a house of McMahon: Not only, but also...

There is nobody quite like Mike McMahon in the history of comic books, and there probably never will be again. He should be worshipped.

Tom King got me again

ME: Maybe this new Tom King series won't be hot garbage. It's got some lovely art, and I do like the way he subverts the normal conventions of comics storytelling on a craft level, even if his overall stories really don't work for me. I'll try it out. 

TOM KING: Yeah, but what if the culture wars against women were actual wars?

ME: Goddammit.

TOM KING: Also did you notice superhero battles are, like, total UFC fights?

ME: I had not.

Accidentally Wednesday

Do people still accidentally get into TV shows these days? Things that you don't plan to watch, or follow in any way, but find yourself still tuning in, week after week, just to see what happens next.

I doubt it's really a thing anymore, with streaming services offering so much content that you're unlikely to stumble across something truly random, while the slow demise of broadcast television means you're not going to find it by flicking through the channels late at night, when you really should be going to bed. 

It's not like these types of programmes are quiet works of understated genius or anything, you know about the buzz that something is truly great is coming down the pipeline, usually because of the creative pedigree involved. They're the solidly mid-range shows, not awful, but not great.

The last time it really happened to me was the freakin' Vampire Diaries, where I watched some random episode at two in the morning, and then had to check out the next episode to see if Elena and Damon were okay (fuck Stefan, always), and then I was downloading whole seasons to catch up. 

I watched years of that bloody show, and none of it really stuck in my head, and that's okay.

But it can still happen. For some reason, the thumbnail for the Wednesday TV show, starring Jenna Ortega as a teenage version of the Addams Family legend, caught the three-year-old's eye, and he insisted we watch it for a while.

He got about half an hour before he got bored and wandered away, but I was just invested enough to get to the end of the first episode, and then thought I might as well see what happened in the second, and then I watched the whole damn thing.

It's not the greatest show in the world, although I can understand how other folk could get a lot more out of it than I could, as a twisted old fart watching things made for people decades younger than me. But it had enough small mysteries, a bit of charm and some crazy visual ideas, and that was more than enough to keeping me moving on to the next episode. 

(It's also got a great cast, especially on the female side, with wonderful work by Ortega, Emma Myers, Christina Ricci and Gwendoline Christie. The boys are mainly dull and forgettable and scowling, tall drinks of water all around, although Luis Guzman makes an excellent Gomez.)

I have no idea if they're making more of that show, and have no inclination to find out. It's not made for me after all. But if it pops up in my cultural feed somewhere in the future, I'll probably check it out, late at night, when there is nothing else on. Just because I accidentally got into something doesn't mean I can't stick with it.

Yoda was always super high on his own bullshit

Yoda was always such a fun character in the wider universe of Star Wars, his absurd appearance clashing nicely with his deeper philosophical nature. The bit where he whips out a lightsaber and goes to work on Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones blew the fucking roof off the cinema I saw it at in 2002, and I still call the little guy in The Mandalorian Baby Yoda, because his real name never seems to stick in my head. 

All that said, his whole 'do or do not, there is no try' speech in Empire still really fucks me off.

Partly because it's one of those things that has been appropriated by the worst fucking people in the world, to demand perfection every time; and also by the laziest fucking people on the planet, who use it as an excuse for dull apathy. 

But it's mainly because the trying is the best part, you fucking muppet. The rush that comes with the completion of a task is always fleeting, while the joy of the attempt can last much, much longer. When I do a giant jigsaw puzzle, it's is always a kick to slot that last piece in, but there is more fun in the long effort to get there. 

There is always 'try'. I would think a 900-year-old green dude would be able to figure that one out.

Whaam!

I bought the 400th prog of 2000ad in 1985 off the shelf at a corner diary that doesn't exist anymore (the corner is still there, but it's got a McDonalds living on it now), and have read it several hundred times since then, but I was today year's old when I realised the cover was a total piss-take of Roy Lichtenstein's Blam artwork.

Lichtenstein was so full of shit - a precursor to the modern AI hacks who steal, steal and steal again, and try to pass off their theft as something new - but at least King Carlos got his own back with a much more dynamic version that Roy's stale copies, even if it took me more than 40 years to see it. 

Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot: The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

Headshot is a relatively recent novel by Rita Bullwinkel, and is everything I wanted when I started my sad little one person book club - something right outside my usual experiences, and all the more rewarding for it.

It only took seconds to choose this one when I saw it at the local bookshop at the start of last month, because it sounded fucking awesome. It's set at a boxing tournament for teenage girls, each chapter tells the story of one bout in the competition, and the stories of the girls who like to bash each other in the head.

It's such a tight structure, but the story goes to some big places, as these strange and wonderful girls think about the roads that have led them to this boxing ring, in this point of time, and their myriad futures that spill out from the Reno fights. There is almost no dialogue, although the one line where somebody gets called a fucking idiot is both the funniest and meanest thing I've read in ages.

The only men are the pale and sad idiots who judge it or are supporting their daughters. The fighters are not doing it for them, they're doing it for themselves. They are also incredibly weird and contradictory and arrogant and unknowable in the way teenage girls really can be. There is a use of a racoon-skin hat that is deeply admirable and justifiable - if everyone is wondering about that crazy hat, they're not noticing what you are really doing.

It's an absolute uppercut of a book, and I can not recommend it highly enough. Get in the ring. You won't regret it.

This is where the meat comes from

My dad was a butcher, and spent much of his working year employed at the big local meatworks, which sits on the Timaru coast. Sometimes he would take me around the place, and while he still had the smarts not to take me into the actual killing room, I still saw cows stuck in gates get a bolt to the head, and lambs that had been happily running around a field earlier in the day skinned and filleted.

It probably should have made me a vegetarian for life, seeing that kind of thing at such a young age, but it didn't. I still eat meat, and my reasons for doing so are as complex and contradictory as any other human's, but at least I know where it comes from. You should always know how the meat is made.

I often feel the same way when I read and see things that show what goes on behind the scenes of the movies I enjoy, which invariably include some pretty terrible things, and some awful people.

Like the wholesale slaughter of other creatures for my own sustenance, I'm not ignoring any of that, and certainly not condoning it, but I do have to acknowledge it, and acknowledge my own failings in saying that I can live with that, because films require hundreds, if not thousands, of people to get made, and the laws of human nature mean at least some of them are going to be complete pricks. 

It's somewhat different when it's one primary creative voice who is the shit. It won't be a problem ignoring JK Rowling or Kevin Spacey or a thousand other such dickheads for the rest of my life, and while I certainly did have some actual profound emotional reactions to comics written by Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman, I don't need to buy anything they do ever again. (I do, for all my sins, still love Father Ted so, so much, but I can attribute that show's success to Arthur Mathews, and ignore the other guy.)

It only takes a  small piece of research to get a little background and some actual context, and then you can see what you can live with. Because this is where the meat is made, and when you find that flesh is some rancid shit, you move on to a new hunting ground.

Anyway, they announced a few weeks back that they're closing down the local freezing works, the factory my father was convinced would close in 1986, and they will probably bowl the ancient factories and put up sparkling new subdivisions in the next few decades. and in 50 years time the shrieks of the ghosts of millions of dead livestock that went into that killing room might finally have faded, but it will be the place that helped show me how the world works.  

This is how the meat is made, said my Dad. Don't look away, boy.

This is a house of McMahon: Modern Dredd

Beyond the most obvious appeals of McMahon's late period Judge Dredd, with pleasingly abnormal colours and blocky, abstracted action, there is always something nice about the way it is still embraced by a British audience. He does a 2000ad cover like the first piece featured above, with wild distortion and crazy anatomy, and they instantly put it out as a tee-shirt, because it's so damn popular. This kind of strangeness should always be that damn popular.