Catmachine

Earlier this week I went to the launch of a book: Conform to Deform: The Weird and Wonderful World of Some Bizzare a history of the notorious indie record label that sprung out of the mind of the teenage Stephen Pearce at the beginning of the eighties. While there I realised that Some Bizzare had been a huge influence on my musical taste and personal aesthetic, ultimately contributing the mental DNA of whatever it is that makes me me. Quite fittingly this happened by stealth. It all started when I got into Soft Cell in 1981. For some reason (well I was on holiday – a school trip to the USSR) I completely missed out on the summer of Tainted Love and my introduction to them was their far more subversive follow up single Bedsitter . Before long I'd become an obsessive as was so often the way with me and the completist in me led me to seek out the Some Bizzare album , a compilation LP (which I seem to recall may have had a "Pay no more than £2.99" or similar sticker on it?)...

There's a bus stop near the top of my road. Like many bus stops set near a junction I can't see when there's a bus coming until it appears around the corner, mere moments before I can get on. Before that and while I'm still standing there I'm left in a state of perpetual hope - my wait might be over at any second (this is one of the few stops in Brighton and Hove without a dot matrix arrivals indicator). I may have been standing there shivering in the cold or rain for what seems like forever but my delivery from that uncomfortable state is at hand and could be with me in an instant. It is after all something completely beyond my control so I'm not interested in second guessing it and am happy enough to just wait it out and let it happen. What I don't understand is those people who walk up to the corner and stare off down the main street where they can see for a least a kilometre that the bus isn't coming. They're basically dousing the fires of hope i...

At this time of year there's less sun that usual in the northern hemisphere especially at such high latitudes as the UK. We're higher than you realise here - if you draw a line due west across from Land's End you don't hit New York as the sign there might have you believe. You hit the northern half of Newfoundland in Canada. New York is more in line with Madrid. But I digress. There are less sunlit hours here in December but sometimes the sun is more in evidence. Walking along the seafront as I do in the morning on the way to work, I often get to witness sunrise itself. Sunset is often too early for me – I'm usually still working. Maybe I'll try and catch it this weekend.  Of course I don't look directly at the sun, and that's not just because I'm being well behaved. This is one of those warnings that you don't actually need like "don't set fire to your hand" or "don't bang your head against a brick wall". Any attempt ...

Wernigerode, European Tour 1995 Wendi fought her way free of the dream. It had been one of those nightmares, the irrational ones that could upset her for hours after waking up. She'd had none since the band had spent a month in Devon the previous spring and she had been hoping that they'd been banished forever by her strange experiences back then. But no. As familiar as the face of a school bully after the summer holidays, the dark red despair froze her brainstem as she struggled to open her eyes, move her limbs or do anything to escape its grip. There was shape to one side of her and she fancied it was Peter. He was speaking to her but none of the words made any sense. He shook her by the shoulder. "Hey, wake up. We're here." She ripped her eyes open. The dream's logic hung about her head in a cloud and a whimpering sound emerged from the back of her throat. Where the fuck was she? None of this made any sense. Shapes moved in front of a blinding white darknes...

The world around us largely consists of what we expect to see in it.When presented with something brand new, our brains first have to decode the signal that they get from the eyes. The picture passes through the first level filters where edges, shapes and colours are detected and assigned. After that the filters applied rely on our knowledge, memories and experience. It's only after that processing that an identity is assigned to the object. I am looking at a clock. When we're children a lot of what we see is still new to us so our sensitivity at detecting the unusual and never previously encountered is very high - a child walking into a familiar room where just one thing has been changed will spot that change almost immediately. However, as we get older we take a lot of the world as read. In particular we know our homes extremely well and it's unlikely we actually look at anything in them properly very often. This is where my glasses come into it. I wear glasses or contact...

I've always had trouble coming up with the titles for stories, especially novels. I never thought of a satisfactory title for the first novel I wrote in around 1990 (near future science fiction, the dates of some of the events in which we've now passed) and for a long time my debut novel Comeback (an urban fantasy) was known only by the working title of Genie in Underland . This is an obvious reference to Alice in Wonderland , a book that at first glance does have some similarities to Comeback and was very probably an influence (subconscious or otherwise) - as a child the Alice books were amongst my favourites. Both have a female protagonist who enters a mysterious subterranean realm in pursuit of their goal. Both journeys start with a memorable descent – Alice's rabbit hole and Genie's escalator – into a world where the normal rules of logic have been waived. And I'd say the central characters do have some traits in common. Not that Alice is the equivalent of a c...

Firstly the disclaimer: yes, I know what dreams are likely to be in reality. No need for any "well actually" here as this is not a psychological treatise, it's a flight of fancy. A stream of consciousness. So please indulge me. There's nothing quite as frustrating as having an involving and fascinating dream only for the details to evaporate rapidly on awakening. The emotions linger around the head affecting the mood like the perfume of someone fascinating who's just left the room before you got to properly talk to them at a party. Your only chance if if they return - you can't follow them because you might get lost. Besides, what if they're busy? They're bound to be talking to someone else. And you don't want to bother them. Although to be honest I can't remember the last time I went to a party. When this happens with dreams you simply have to comfort yourself with the effect they've had on your mental state. If you're lucky it...

Worldbuilding can be tricky if you're writing science fiction or fantasy. There's so much to do—the readers are unfamiliar with the background, social mores and customs of the novel's environment and as such are at a disadvantage when it comes to working out what's going on. The characters themselves are no help. They know all this stuff anyway, so there's no way they are going to be able to remind each other of what they've known for years without sounding unrealistic. One solution is to use an omniscient narrator but then if you're not careful there's a temptation to fall into the "telling not showing" trap... Convincing worldbuilding is a skill that it can take years to master. However there is a way around this if you're in a hurry. If you set the novel in the real world you can take the background as read— everyone knows all this stuff right? —and concentrate on the actual story. Interestingly there is an added bonus of using this me...

We’ve all been there. You're halfway through a biscuit, perhaps as part of a tea break. Then someone knocks at the door or the phone rings and you put the biscuit down somewhere so you can deal with this new crisis. You get distracted. By the time you've got back to your routine you've forgotten where you put the biscuit. It was a spur of the moment abandonment—stored only in the Very Short Term Memory. You retrace your steps. No sign. It's not anywhere near where you were sitting nor is it next to your cup of tea. Part of you is trying to insist that it doesn't matter. It's only (half a) biscuit. You've got a whole packet of the things in the kitchen. But that's not the point . You are not concerned with the material loss of a few grams of pastry and sugar. You are concerned because there is an unfinished process in your brain. Whatever part of you that tracks progress is in an uncompleted state, taking up memory space it can only free up by completing...

"The first thing to realize about parallel universes is that they are not parallel. It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either." — Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless I have been reading about The Mandela Effect. This is a name for collective false memory whereby a significant amount of people will swear blind that something in the past was one way whereas in actual fact it was another and furthermore there's written, photographic and filmed proof. The most likely explanation for this is that misconceptions which lead to a false memory of something are common misconceptions and that people susceptible will develop similar false memories, which they can then reminisce with each other about thereby strengthening them. A more outlandish theory—and much more interesting from a fantasy point of view—is that the people remembering things differently are now living in a different parallel universe from the one in which the memory was first...

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Here's the thing. If they ever thought about it, most people who know me might say that because I'm quiet or reserved, shy, don't make a lot of noise in groups or anything  — aloof or secretive as the people who don't like me might put it – that I would also not want to stand up in front of a load of people and talk or perform. Oddly (they might think) the reverse is actually true. For example when I was working as part of the user facing section of a department at a university every autumn the Welcome Talks would come round where we'd have to take turns to deliver a "welcome to our services" talk to a large lecture hall full of freshers. My colleagues — who were as a rule all more social and gregarious than me (I still remember that brief moment when I ended up standing there with no-one talking to me while all around people were chatting in groups at my own leaving do ) — all dreaded it. I was absolutely fine. No, more than that, I actively looked forwar...

“This will be my year!” That’s a mantra I often used to hear people repeat on New Year’s Day. Probably trying to exercise the power of positive thinking. Fair enough, I say. In the end sometimes it was their year and sometimes it wasn’t. Personally I don’t remember having “a year” or even thinking that in particular – I was cautious about tempting fate. But this year – finally – I was ready to hope for “my year” as my debut novel was due to be published. The release date had already been put back twice due to the pandemic but I was sure that 21 January 21 was an auspicious date for it to finally be released upon the world. I hadn’t counted on the pandemic coming roaring back stronger than ever and us all being in lockdown again. Of course being confined to our homes isn’t nearly the drawback it would have been in the past. People could buy the book online  from all the places people normally buy books. However, I suspect having to rely on online only promotion and sales meant sligh...

It turns out that there are a number of very real autistic traits which are not "textbook" at all – in other words recognised by mental health professionals in the official literature – but nevertheless are very familiar to anyone who has experienced them. None of these are official diagnostic criteria, but they are nonetheless real. When I was part of a group of autistic people who met regularly to share our experiences we discovered several of these that we all had in common but which hadn't even occurred to the group's NT facilitator. One was an aversion to the overuse of names in conversation. It's fine when there's a group of people as of course you need to be able to know who is being addressed but when it's one to one it just feels... unpleasant and sinister. No matter how illogical that may actually be. Another of these non-textbook traits is what I think of as the Selfishness Paradox. During our group discussions we all discovered that we had a te...

Self-help books as a genre tend not to have a good reputation as even before you open the cover of some of them there’s always a whiff of making a fast buck about it and once you get inside you find yourself flicking the pages over and over faster and faster. “Yep… knew that… yes, I know… yep… stating the bleedin’ obvious…” What a lot of them boil down to is writing common sense down and identifying the problem. That's all very well and good but most of the time I know full well what the problems I’m experiencing are, there’s nothing mysterious, no cathartic epiphanies to be had. I realise what the issue is but doing something about it is another matter (sometimes even if I kind of know what the solution is). This is why I've never found CBT particularly useful - it actually increases my anxiety. What to Do When You Can’t Move Chapter one: Check whether you’re trapped inside a collapsed building. If you are, then the reason you can’t move is because you’re trapped inside a coll...

Some of this may cover similar ground to parts of blog entries I've written here in the past but none of them quite combine the topics in this order so I thought it was worth tweaking this short piece (originally written as an update for Unbound) and making it available here. Oddly, considering the subject of my debut novel Comeback, I never thought I would end up writing Fantasy novels, Urban or otherwise. When I was younger and first expressed ambition in the direction of writing professionally, I was convinced I'd write Science Fiction. This was partly because that was what I'd mainly been reading in adulthood up until that point. And yet the majority of the genre writing I enjoyed as a child was fantasy. I can't quite remember what the first novel I read was but do remember reading C S Lewis's Narnia and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books quite early on. Other favourites included Richard Carpenter's two Catweazle novels, Paul Gallico's Jennie and - to a...