Three stories from me and many more in this excellent anthology of speculative fiction. Unauthorized Departures, edited by Rick McGrath, from The Terminal Press.
Somnambulance Driver
Three stories from me and many more in this excellent anthology of speculative fiction. Unauthorized Departures, edited by Rick McGrath, from The Terminal Press.
The San Juan Capistrano Swallows Day Parade was held during a rare March downpour today. We didn't stay to see the whole thing, having worn non-waterproof hoodies.
This pair stood out with their spectacular horses.
Publishing science fiction can be a mad scramble between getting it in print and it starting to come true in real life.
My recent story "The Burn Out" (in Fission #3, available here) features a pop star. But he's not the story. Like many rich young musicians, he uses something to keep his edge sharpened, and like many rich young musicians, it's the younger female fans that provide it to him.
In his case it's a combat soldier implant.
The unit was optimized for combat soldiers in shock—like after a bullet wound. It instructed the sympathetic nervous system to shut some things down and dialed other things up to compensate. The telemetry package monitored the activity of the ganglia. Gully Foyle said, and this sounded like much more fun, that the upgrade allowed the user to experiment with changes that beat anything you could get out of a needle.
Because anything that changes the human body or brain is going to be used for porn first and recreation next.
For our hero, use of the technology ends about as well as can be expected, and that's coming from me, the person who hates the trope "there are some things man was not meant to know."
Evergreen Meme |
Anyway, in the grand tradition of the Torment Nexus, the kind of technology referenced in the story has been invented and is being openly bragged about.
You should be able to get it on the Dark Web within a year (winky smiley) but you oughta read my story before you use it.
I’m a fan. I became a fan when my musical taste came on-line in late 1971—which I think of as “The year Led Zeppelin IV was released.” Since then, fandom has occupied most of my time, energy, and money. Any attention span I have left over, I spend writing. Sometimes I combine the two, as I did in my story “The Burn Out.”
Fission # 3 |
I was born at the
wrong time to absorb the British Blues Boom as it happened. Tons of Sobs,
Free’s first album from 1969, was on my Must Buy list as I worked backward from
’71. On the list also were Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. All the heavy rock bands
worked the same Blues coalface back then, and the similarities between Truth
(Jeff Beck’s first), Led Zeppelin I and Free’s Tons of Sobs are
plain. The band slams through such classics as the barnstorming lust
locomotive, “The Hunter” (Albert King)
and the deathbed macho boast “Goin’ Down
Slow” (St. Louis Jimmy Oden, via the
Howlin’ Wolf version). Free’s sound is raw and aggressive, testosterone-laden
sweat flying from the speakers.
Free comprised
four white British teenagers (15-18 at the time of recording) and it seems
bizarre that they should attempt songs with lyrics begging the listener to
write the singer’s mother and tell her the shape that he’s in (and moreover,
that his health is fading and he needs forgiveness for his sins). They do, they
pull it off brilliantly, and a lot of that credibility comes from the
guitarist, Paul Kossoff, who effortlessly soars through the solos with a
gossamer-light feel underlying a snarling attack that rages continually against
the dying of the light.
Koss, 17, almost certainly did not know that he himself was going down fast. He was dead inside eight years.
I never saw Free
live. The ban split up when Kossoff’s drug problem became too hard to handle.
Koss made efforts to get clean but never got back to full health. I bought his
solo album, Back Street Crawler
(1973) but despite its solid white blues feel, and a guitar sound like heavy
whipping cream poured over double chocolate cake, something about it seemed
off—it conjured up its own title, let’s put it that way.
When I heard that
electric folkie John Martyn had taken the faltering Kossoff under his wing in
1975, I was elated. I put aside my anti-folk bias and ventured to Leeds to see
them play together. I went with a friend. As we neared the auditorium in the late
afternoon, we heard an inordinately loud Marshall-amplified Les Paul. The
rehearsal/sound check was underway. Koss was the only person who could produce
those sounds from a guitar, and the realization stopped me in my
tracks.
“Probably just a
roadie,” my friend said, urging me along. I was 16 at the time and that is
still the most cynical thing anyone has ever said to me. I assumed I’d hear
more that evening, so I moved on without objecting. My assumption proved to be
incorrect.
I wasn’t a big
John Martyn fan. I knew his Solid Air of course, and “I’d Rather be the
Devil” (Skip James) but I had little interest in a man who was perpetually
drunk and had what we nowadays call a “problematic” relationship with women. He
was a rowdy folk singer accompanied on this tour by an even rowdier stand-up
bass player (Danny Thompson) and a drummer (John Stevens). I didn’t know, going
in, that shenanigans had started much earlier in the day. Koss had already got
himself punched by the offended boyfriend of a girl he coveted, followed by a beating from Martyn himself for lying about the incident backstage. But I
heard about all that much later.
I knew Koss would
not come on stage until the encore, but John Martyn kept me interested in the
meantime. He played an acoustic guitar with a pickup taped across the soundhole
as well as a contact pickup taped to the body. The signal was fed to an Echoplex effects box, producing a
hypnotic, pulsing reverberation
above which he played chords and melody. Married with his famously slurred
voice, the effect was hymn-like and meditative, an effect that was shattered
every time a song ended and the band recommenced swearing at one other.
Eventually, Paul
Kossoff appeared, swigging from a bottle of Crème de Menthe. The bottle was
half empty and Koss made a strenuous effort to finish it during the set.
Together the band played three songs.[1] I was delighted to hear
him play live but I noticed a significant deterioration between his playing
during the sound check and the post beating, post liquor evening performance.
He had less than a year to live. Koss died on 19th March 1976. He
was 25 years old.
There are two stories out there giving a cause of death. The book Heavy Load claims “Unconfirmed reports have Kossoff picking up some pills before the all-night flight ‘off some dozy bird who was hanging around’.” No source for the information is given in the book.[2] Later, it presents this version:
“Paul’s death certificate read cerebral and pulmonary edema. Drugs didn’t appear to be in his system. Sandie, Paul’s girlfriend at the time, says drugs are what led up to the tragic conclusion that day but did not cause his death on the flight. ‘No one told us that you should not fly with a blood clot condition for about a year,” says Sandie. ‘And after his heart attack and the blood clot in his leg…I think the altitude moved the clot to his lungs’.”[3]
A second book, Free at Last, elaborates on the first claim. Bandmate Terry Wilson is quoted as saying,
“Paul was on his way out. He'd died earlier; his heart had stopped, about a year earlier in England when we were back there after the first record. Paul was in the hospital and they brought him back and told him if he ever did drugs again he wouldn't live.” Wilson goes on, “There were times when Paul had so many friends around who just wanted to comfort him. […] I walked into his room and he had a couple of his friends there that brought some barbiturates and some other stuff. I walked in and was so pissed at the girl who was there. Her name was Leslie I think, but went by the name of Dale. […] A day later we were on the plane going to New York to play Atlantic Records the new album when Koss died—from the very drugs Dale or Leslie or whatever her name was scored for him. It turned out he had gotten heroin, valium and Seconals from her.”[4]
I have participated in various fandoms ever
since that late 1971 musical fangirl awakening. Whether it was Led Zeppelin, or
Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I’ve long been immersed in fan culture and hung out
with the fans. The realization that a fellow fan may have killed a hero
of mine really frosted my cookies.
I understand a
fan’s dedication to the object of their fandom. The word is a shortened form of
‘fanatic’ after all. Anyone who has observed a weeklong argument on social
media over whether a Star Destroyer could defeat the USS Enterprise
knows that fandom is serious business, and anyone who has seen a young girl in
tears outside a concert hall because she got to touch the star’s hand knows
that emotions run sky high. I was 55 years old when my current crush answered a
question of mine on a fan forum, and I told everybody who would listen that
he’d written back to me. I didn’t wash my eyes for a week. I’m quite aware what
a fan will do to get close to a star.
Write what you know, they say. To get the bad taste out of my mouth, I wrote a short story about a tween fan who gives a gift to the member of the boy band she most admires but then has to watch helplessly as the gift puts him on a self-destructive path . I’m a science fiction writer, so the gift is not a drug, but a technology.
That story, “The Burn Out,” is featured in Fission #3 from
the British Science Fictions Association (BSFA). The online anthology is
available to BSFA members and the print
version can be obtained from Amazon right now.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_Leeds_(John_Martyn_album)
accessed October 15th,2023
[2]
Heavy Load: Free by David Clayton & Todd K. Smith 2nd Ed., 2002
p 248
[3]
Ibid, p 249
[4]
Free at Last: the story of Free and Bad Company by Steven Rosen, 2001 p 168-169
Led Zeppelin's fourth album is untitled. It's known as IV or Four Symbols, or Runes, or Zoso (one of the 'runes' looks like those four letters, stylized). Back at the time of release, Atlantic sent out type blocks with the symbols on them so the album could be listed and correctly typeset in the Hit Parade charts, but that was of no use to punters, who still couldn't pronounce it. Let's call it IV.
The cover of IV famously shows an old building, half torn down, with a tower block visible through the demolished wall. On the remaining part of the old wall, there's a photograph of an old man in a countryside scene, bent double under a load of sticks.
Mystery has always surrounded the identity of the old man. The official story is that Robert Plant (the lead singer) found the photo in a junk shop in the British Midlands (alternatively, in Berkshire) and that's it. Fans have sometimes been unable to consider the photo as simply a found object and prefer to read extra significance into the man. The fans' stories have ranged from the photo depicting Aleister Crowley (an occultist - guitarist Jimmy Page is a student of his methods) to the photo showing George Pickingill, a farm laborer more excitingly known as the Father of Modern Witchcraft.
Good news! There has been a breakthrough in identifying the man and the photographer. The BBC is reporting that the 'original' photo has been found. I'm not sure what 'original' means in this context, as Plant must have thought he was buying the only copy. (People didn't make a lot of paper copies of photos back in the day.) The beeb describes it thus:
The figure is most likely Lot Long from Mere in Wiltshire, photographed by Ernest Farmer.
Brian Edwards, from the University of the West of England (UWE), found the original picture when looking through a photograph album for other research.
"I instantly recognised the man with the sticks - he's often called the stick man," he said.
The article shows the photo in situ on a photo album page, with three other photos taken by Ernest Farmer. The album is dated 1892 in Farmer's handwriting. The photo itself is labeled "a Wiltshire Thatcher."
Mr Edwards then set about researching thatchers from that time period, and said his research suggested the man pictured was Lot Long, who died in 1893.
Peromyscus
This is a blog. At one time, anybody who wanted to write had a blog.
In the
mid-nineties, search engines heaved into view. If someone wrote a blockbuster
piece on their Page on the World Wide Web, no one except their
mom would be able to find it. Some people who were terminally online, for
nineties values of terminally online, would visit their favorite pages and
write about them on their own page. The search engines, on learning that
someone had linked to a webpage, would be more likely to index that page and
show it to others. (Search engines ranking sites by the number of links to them
is still a thing thirty years on.)
These early
online people were logging the web, web-logging. Blogging. My blog, which
started in 2006, was also a place where I could write about music, art and
news. I could express myself to my full capability.
Blogs can
help writers in many ways
They can
serve as a base camp, establishing personal credibility and stability, as well
as demonstrating expertise in your craft. Publishers can see your passion and
commitment to your cause or genre. A long-term, regularly updated web presence
gathers more search engine credit and ranks higher in searches.
A blog is
also platform for advertising your pieces. Publishers rarely pay for press
junkets or book tours these days, and so the burden of raising public awareness
of your writing falls on you. There are not many places where you can just say,
“Hey, I got a story published. Here’s the link! Hope you like it!” I mean, try
it sometime. If you do it on someone else’s Facebook, or do it too often on
your own, you’ll get unfriended. To build an audience, you need regularity as
well as quality of output. And pieces on
blogs keep your name in the readers’ minds between published articles.
As I became
more interested in writing fiction, I let the blog languish. I took a class
from Bob Cohen and I’m following it up with a
college class on non-fiction writing helmed by Scott Hays, both at Saddleback. I’m working my way back to regularity –
updating at least once a week.
A daily
writing discipline is healthy practice for a writer, as well.
What’s my
audience? My blog gets about 27K views a month. That’s tiny, given that most of
the views will be people who clicked on a Google result, realized it wasn’t for
them and clicked away immediately. That’s why I’m taking the class right now!
Finding
Blog subject matter
What should
you write about? Writing is writing. If the plot twist in your latest story or
research on your article has you banging your head against the wall, close the
document, open Blogger or Medium or Substack or Wordpress and write a couple of
hundred words about your garden, your motorcycle engine rebuild or if all else
fails, what your cats did today.
There!
Blogging done, writing practiced, and head cleared, all in one sitting.
Taking
notes
A blog can
also serve as a notebook. You’re in Starbucks and a couple opposite is arguing?
Write a character study. Sunset is fantastic today? Describe it. Incredible
writer M John Harrison does this on his microblogging site.
Writing “story
behind the story”
As well as
publicizing stories and articles as they are published, your blog can support
the work you have out in the wild. I recently wrote a short horror story about
a plant biologist on the Welsh coast encountering ghosts of Vikings. It drew on
a trip I took to that area to study seaweed. When the story is published, I’ll
follow up with a blog post about my long-ago trip. Seaweed’s really
interesting!
What do I
write about? Here’s the frequency listing for the labels on the posts.
Coming soon:
Artwork for Fission #3 via BSFA website |
I am extremely pleased to let you know I have a piece in Emanations Zen (ed. Carter Kaplan) published just yesterday, October 3rd.
Emanations Zen Cover Artwork |
My story, "Cargo Cults," is an observation of an alternate reality, where South Sea Island "cargo cults" serve to bring bounty from aerial vehicles that use the landing strips. The story explores an aspect of cultural appropriation and its ramifications.
I have not had a chance to read the other stories in the anthology yet, but the list of authors is extremely promising.
You can buy Emanations Zen from Amazon today.
Everyone is invited to a Blood Fiction book signing on August 8th, 2023 at 12 noon in Orange, CA. The host is the legendary Book Carnival.
Blood Fiction Volume 2 curated by Mark Sevi--book signing |
Many of the authors featured in Blood Fiction v2, including me, Lyle Hopwood, will be there along with snacks.
Address is:
Book Carnival
348 Tustin St. Orange, CA 92866
Phone number 714-538-3210
If you've read my story, you may not want to look anything up on Google Street View. You still have a Thomas Brothers map, don't you?
If you haven't read my story, you can pick up a copy on the 8th!
The first blockbuster T. Rex record was "Hot Love," released in the UK on 12th of February, 1971.
That date neatly marks the demarcation between me being a child, about whom I can remember very little, and being a teen. "Ride a White Swan" was released in October 1970, not charting until January 1971, but to me, the two weeks between Swan moving down the charts and "Hot Love's" release were the difference between ancient history and things that happened to me personally.
As my infatuation with T. Rex grew, I worked my way through the back catalogue as money allowed. The Tyrannosaurus Rex albums - My People, Prophets, Unicorn and Beard of Stars instantly became favorites. The prior T. Rex album - the eponymously named T. Rex - took a little longer to gel with me. I preferred the early acoustic tracks over Marc Bolan's burgeoning electric guitar workouts. The direction had been obvious from the last track on Beard, "Elemental Child." In fact, if I'd had any ability to browse singles in those days, I would have heard it much earlier on "King of the Rumbling Spires," released as a single in 1969. (But there was no chance of that.)
Something changed between T. Rex (the album) and "Hot Love." Marc Bolan made a quantum leap from the worked-over-many-times fey Hobbitesque boogie of "Woodland Bop" or the harder but still ovine ambiance of "One Inch Rock." He simultaneously avoided the hamfisted-Hendrix sound of "Elemental Child" and the crosslegged chirpiness of "Woodland Bop" and landed a solid gold slab of 1971 pop.
I was intensely interested in T. Rex by that point, and bought all the magazines and weeklies I could afford to read more about Marc's life. I would have been overjoyed to see the little clip above, of Marc Bolan at home playing a few seconds of "Suneye," from T. Rex (the album). Seeing it today, after all these years, takes me back to the magazine-collecting years. In fact, I AM overjoyed to see it. What a talent, and what a sad loss that he died so young.
The clip is from the documentary London Rock, released in 1970. By the magic of the interwebs, it is available on YouTube. I hope it stays up as the whole thing is a time capsule of the era when British rock got over its love affair with Blues and started to branch out.
Arrrr! |
Founded last century by John Baur and Mark Summers, ITLAPD was first disseminated to us scurvy landlubbers by Dave Barry in 2002.
Taking part is pretty simple. You sprinkle your speech at will with Pirateisms on September 19th. You don't have to dress up or get on a boat unless you want to.
In 2014 I posted a short video of a person in their mum's car (brum, brum). It was a mildly popular, shortlived meme that I just loved for some reason. (The original write up is here.)
I'm always happy to find out what people are doing years down the line. Where's Star Wars Kid now? What happened to the little girl with the teeth looking nonplussed in the car? Have any of the people in the Distracted Boyfriend Meme gotten married to each other yet?
Anyway, we found out what happened to the person in their mum's car. He came out as a transgender man, and it made the Daily Mail.
Tristan Simmonds, who was formally known as Trish, won thousands of fans in the 2014 with a skit where he drove his mother's car on the now defunct social media platform, saying: 'I'm in my mum's car, broom broom.'
Since then, the viral star, from Huddersfield, has been updating followers with news about their life - and came out as a trans man in 2021.
In a video shared on Youtube, he explained that he had first come out to his parents in a letter followed by an emotional conversation and that they were supportive of his decision.
Thought you ought to know.