Saturday 31 May 2014

Alt Out: A new short story

A new short story of mine has been published by Kate Bergdorf at The Virtual Review.  'Alt Out' is inspired by Isaac Asimov's series of 'Black Widowers' short mystery stories (only without the indirect male chauvinism); I plan on writing more and already have the rough plot of the next story worked out.

Raw Concrete, a builder in the metaverse, has been outed as an alt.  The only problem is, he doesn't know what it is that gave him away.  Can you work it out?

Sunday 25 May 2014

Twelve Pet Shop Boys songs expressed as charts, diagrams, etc

A bit of fun.  As you might be aware, I've been a huge Pet Shop Boys fan for 25 years.  Lately, I've seen a lot of these charts/graphs depicting popular songs, but none so far for PSB; I decided it was my job to correct that!

Below, 12 of the boys' hits are depicted.  Some are easy to identify; some are less so.  Can you guess them all?

1.


2.


3.


4.


5.


6.


7.


8.


9.


10.


11.


12.



Answers

1. Can you forgive her? 2. Domino dancing 3. Heart 4. I don't know what you want but I can't give it anymore 5. I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing 6. It's a sin 7. Love is a bourgeois construct 8. Miracles 9. Opportunities 10. So Hard 11. West End Girls 12 You only tell me you love me when you're drunk

Sunday 18 May 2014

Farewell Dave

I heard yesterday evening that Dave, a very close RL friend for 25 years, died during the week.  Dave was an immensely talented pianist and an enormous influence on my thinking, and along the way turned my passing interest in Pet Shop Boys into a love affair that continues to this day.  He opened my eyes to their cleverness at around about the time that Behaviour was released, playing me a ten minute extended version of Being Boring, the song in the video below.  I've never known anyone who filled every minute of his life quite as he did.  Dave, I will really, really miss you.


UPDATE 28 MAY: I'll be attending Dave's funeral in Brighton on Thursday... and I just found out Pet Shop Boys will be playing in Brighton the same day.  Beautiful serendipity.

ANOTHER UPDATE 30 MAY: My brief eulogy at the funeral yesterday.

There's a list that I keep in my head.  These are people other than my family who've had a profound impact on the way I think and interact with the world.  It's a very short list.  It's in chronological order (Dave would want to know how it was ordered).  And Dave is in position two, the second person I met to really shape me.

To say that Dave had an impact on the development of my character would be a monumental understatement.  He taught me to be critical, responsible and informed.  He taught me to think for myself and to rely on myself to get things done.

He also taught me a lot about music, in particular - as we've heard - dance music.  At the time that I met him 25 years ago, Dave was a big fan of the Pet Shop Boys.  He would talk about Pet Shop Boys quite a bit.  He would buy everything that they brought out: the albums, the singles, the limited edition twelve inch vinyl, the rare Japanese imports; he had the lot.  I've been a fan ever since.  It was a gift to me, that music.

And I mention this purely because there's a nice serendipity going on today that I thought might make you all smile.  See Dave wasn't a particularly religious man, but he did love life and he did love the universe, and if you got him in the right mood, he could be quite philosophical.  We used to talk about this quite a lot.  I once said to him that, every now and again, I catch a glimpse of 'it' from the corner of my eye.  "Oh yes," he said, "and it's bigger and more complicated than either you or I can comprehend."

Well, Dave, the universe is giving you one last knowing wink.  A couple of days ago, I learned that the Pet Shop Boys are playing right here in Brighton this very day.  That's not happened in years.  And if he was here, of course, he'd roll his eyes at me, he'd tut and he'd shake his head.

Sleep well, old friend.

Saturday 17 May 2014

Paraffin Winter

I recently finished reading ‘Paraffin Winter’, a novel written by Peter Chowney who I knew for over a year in Second Life and whose reading of excerpts therein whetted my appetite for the complete novel.  Since I drone on about leaving feedback for indie authors a lot (see more droning about that issue here) I thought it was time to lead by example.  Here is my review.


Last year, I read 11/22/63, a novel by Stephen King about a teacher who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination.  One of the things that stuck in my mind about that book was King’s observation that the very first thing a time traveller would actually notice about visiting that period was the smell.  Nostalgia, one of the most potent influences on public (and, therefore, political) opinion, often overlooks such unpleasant sensory artefacts of everyday life in ‘the good old days’.  Nobody begrudges anyone the warm glow of nostalgia if it makes them happy, but sometimes failing to remember some of the not-so-nice aspects of the way things were can render invisible some of the more nice aspects of the way things are today.


Paraffin Winter is set in Poole in the winter of 1963 and, if you start this novel in a state of ignorance about either Poole, life in the early 60s or, specifically, the bitter, endless, relentless winter of ’63 (the coldest of the twentieth century in the UK), you will emerge at its ending feeling like you lived through it all personally.  Painting a sensory landscape with words is a skill I freely acknowledge to be a shortcoming of my own ability as a writer, but it is a skill that Chowney drenches this story in.  Long after I have forgotten the plot details of the novel, I will recall the sense of coldness and of the grimy residue left by people’s attempts to warm themselves through this extraordinary winter.  The coal smoke; the weekly baths; the empty bottles of Double Diamond lined up alongside Ronnie Delaney’s chair as he nods off in front of a dying fire in the hearth: these and an endless supply of other period details make Paraffin Winter an incredibly immersive experience.

The plot follows first Ronnie and then his girlfriend Jenny through a complicated tangle of events that start with the discovery of a human eyeball during Ronnie’s first post-Christmas 1962 paraffin round.  Through the first half of the book, other body parts are discovered and, slowly, the story of a murder emerges.  It’s a complicated tale that draws on key political and technological events of the period, all meticulously researched.  Paraffin Winter is a novel of many layers, but perhaps the most prominent of these is the issue of social class.  This is given particular focus in the second half when Jenny, the daughter of a communist railwayman, has to join forces with Veronica, the wife of a wealthy timber importer, to prove Ronnie’s innocence of the murder.  Jenny and Veronica make a surprisingly good team, but rather than sugar-coating this alliance with the over-used gloss of isn’t-it-funny-how-all-people-are-essentially-the-same, Chowney uses it to highlight some of the insurmountable differences in perspective between these two positions.  Jenny’s hopes for the future would have made this an optimistic novel had it actually been written in 1963; as it is, the benefit of hindsight from the position of today – where the gap between the world’s richest and poorest is larger than it’s ever been – make it a snapshot of the sad naivety of the post-war period.  It’s a point underlined by Veronica’s final action to protect her husband and her way of life.

To be honest, the coming together of all the loose ends in the end did feel a little contrived to me (Catfish Collins’ apparent daily commutes from London to Poole just to keep an eye on Jenny in particular felt rather unlikely).  It’s hardly the first time I’ve felt that way about a novel’s resolution, however, and this slight visibility of plot engineering actually did very little to detract from my enjoyment of a book that is ultimately about the qualitative experience of a time and place.  If ‘time travel’ wasn’t a category of science-fiction but, instead, a genre of period fiction characterised by such vivid descriptions that you finish it feeling you should be unpacking a messy suitcase, Paraffin Winter would surely be a flagship title for 1963.

Paraffin Winter can be bought in PDF, ePub and Mobi (Kindle) formats from www.paraffinwinter.org.uk, where you'll find a website packed with detailed background information to the period portrayed for your further reading.  It's also available from Amazon.  You can listen for free to a complete reading of the novel by Chowney at www.podiobooks.com/title/paraffin-winter.

Sunday 11 May 2014

The Trace

I've been feeling a little gorged on self-promotion lately, plus it's been a while since I wrote about actually doing something in SL. I've been toying with the idea recently of doing a little inworld photography, and then I saw this post by Ziki Questi and just had to make a visit to 'The Trace', a sim by Kylie Jaxxon.

This pastel landscape of open sands and grasses and meadow flowers is like stepping straight into a watercolour painting. The soundscape of distant waves and seagulls calling is almost superfluous as you pick your way between the tiny pools of water left in the sand; turn down the volume and you would still hear them in your head.

You might even hear the squelch  of your feet and the slap of the grasses against your shins. The Trace is the sort of place in real life that you'd turn up to wearing sensible shoes but end up submitting to the urge to go barefoot, whatever the weather.

Here and there, The Trace is punctuated by wooden buildings. There are a few small homes, a potting shed, an open-air school with apples bobbing in a pale of water at the door.  Toward the water's edge, the homes are raised on stilts.  A path runs through floodland grasses to a lighthouse (press the big red button by the door - who can resist those - to sound the fog horn).

Halfway up the hill, you encounter the island's only stone building, a small, domed room with a mosaic floor and ceiling painted with angels. Outside, four sets of tables and chairs encircle a wood burner. The only thing missing is an espresso machine.

Dotted around the sim, a few other visitors make their own personal explorations, each making a physical connection to the landscape in their own personal way, such as standing still in quiet water.



With all this talk of SL being in its final couple of years (even Wagner James Au seems to think now this might be likely), it is easy to forget that places like this exist, and that they are completely perfect. There was nothing even approaching the quality of this when I joined SL... and now there is.

And, without a doubt, I couldn't have picked a more easy place to take pictures in.

Wednesday 7 May 2014

ePub update

'AFK, Again' and 'AFK, Indefinitely' are now available in ePub format.  For the moment, these can only be purchased from Smashwords, however the next few weeks should see their inclusion in the Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Blio and Apple online stores.  Both books retail for $0.99.