Catmachine

For some reason I never kept in touch with anyone from school - bunch of sadistic bastards the lot of them ( and that was just the teachers... aah ). An unusual side effect of this state of affairs is that the people I've known the longest aside from my family are fictional. My oldest friends don't exist. Well not in this reality. I'm not talking about characters in books - they're frozen in aspic going through the same motions again and again every time you thumb their pages. Even characters in long running series of books can't really be counted, partly due to the nature of the medium. Any recurring characters in an author's works (such as the Vampire Lestat who somehow contrives to become even more irritating every single time Anne Rice churns one out) are going to be central to the story and therefore we're almost always privy to their thoughts. Real friends are always seen from the outside and we have to guess what they're thinking. Characters i...

I started writing when I was a kid. Aside from short pieces of creative writing, my childhood magna opera were comics drawn in biro. The first was about a giant called Bigfoot who was "twenty five miles high" and arrived on Earth and proceded to get into a rage. I'm not quite sure how I managed to sustain this wafer thin premise for as long as I did; perhaps by being derivative. In the Bigfoot in Space sequence he did meet Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, K9 and the crew of the Liberator... I moved on to a series of comics about the exploration of the Solar System starring Captain Dawswell. For some reason this one astronaut was involved in the first mission to every single planet. Apart from Pluto, which wasn't a planet at all (was I a bit ahead of my time there?) but which turned out to be a massive space station built by dolphins. Furthermore, flying in the face of the best evidence of the time, every single planet in the Solar System seemed to harbour some kind of li...