Alasdair Watson

Had a bad day today. The football really fucked me off, and one thing got on top of another to just push my stress levels up and up. So I’m home after a session at the gym, working, with Shane MacGowan on the stereo, and candles lit. Add a good whiskey and a handful of chocolate covered coffee beans, and the world seems a much better place.

Giving me chocolate covered coffee beans is a great way to get me to love you forever, incidentally. I adore them, but for some reason, I almost never think to buy them myself.

I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this here before, but you need to go here, and read Richard Kadrey’s Viper Wire stories. The ultra-short prose form has always fascinated me (mostly because it’s the only sort of prose I stand any chance of making work), and Kadrey’s a genius at it. These stores are hugely immaginative, massively varied, and very rich indeed. They’re exactly what SF should be – hard and fast and clever. If there was any justice, I’d be buying these in some kind of lavishly illustrated hardback on glossy stock, and Richard Kadrey would be sucking the money from the pockets of the wealthy all over the world.

It’s work like this that makes me want to write. Every time I read one of his shorts, I think “I wish I’d thought of that”. Marvellous stuff. Go.

While I had my Mac, my productivity dropped off, and I lost track of where I was with my writing. I’m not sure why. But I’ve been going through the files I transferred back from the Mac to the PC, and surprising myself at every turn with how much unused work is sitting on my hard drive. I started out intending to dust off STORMBREAK, and tidy it up a bit, for example. It doesn’t need tidying up. Somehow, I have managed to forget that I have a complete, unused pitch sitting on my hard drive. All I need to do with it is sell it. Ditto ANIMA. Complete pitch for a 48 page story, breaking into 6 8 page chapters, and parts one and two are each about two-thirds finished as script as well.

Yeah, “all I need to do is sell it” is awfully glib, I know. But for some reason, I’d forgotten that I had so many projects at the sort of stage where I could show them to people. Fuck, if I’d realised, I’d have had STORMBREAK with me at Bristol…

I also found something I wrote year or two back – a couple of thousand words of ideaspace hallucinations and chaos magic – a prose sigil that has run it’s time. Since I’ve heard nothing to make me think that the people I wrote it for are ever going to use it, I may put it up here. I may not.

Good Christ, what a god-awful piece of shit that was. You think there’d be no surprise there, but every had told me it was better than The Phantom Menace, so I was lulled into a sense of false security.

TPM was a bad film, but it at least understood that its purpose was Spectacle. There were plenty of impressive visuals scattered throughout – even when I was cringing at the dialogue, or getting annoyed with the small child, there was something pretty and new on the screen. Not so in this film – there were a couple, but nothing that really excited me. The actoors were phoning it in, at best, the special effects were frankly, dull, and at no point did the film raise even a small thrill in me. Even the much-vauted lightsabre duel at the end of it was dull. Roll on Spider-man. It has to be better.

Had a very good time indeed, hanging out with the WEF kids, and the Oni crowd. SIX STRINGS seemed to go down well, which was very pleasing. I am now quite tired, and now just chilling out with music and whisky. In a couple of days time, I have to get some plans laid for new pitches, and see about doing something with them. I want to dust off STORMBREAK and ANIMA again, for one thing…

Been a busy night. SIX STRINGS is done, and ready to give out at Bristol. My column for Friday is written. (Re-written from scratch, actually.) I’ve got this computer up to full power, with all my usual software installed and working. I feel I have Achieved Things. Good.

Thanks to the extremely clever Tom Coates, you’ll see that any links in the “New” section on this page, are now followed by a little (more…) link. This is a to Blogdex, for a roundup of what other bloggers are saying about the link in question. It’s powered by Tom’s metalinker code. I’ve kept it to just the links in the “New” section to avoid over-cluttering the page with extraneous links.

Just bought (and am now using) a shiny new desktop PC. It’s the first time in half a decade that I’ve owned one, I suddenly realise. My last one shat itself and died shortly after I moved back from Edinburgh – since then my desktop PC use has been either at the office or other people’s computers, while I’ve had a laptop and a Mac.

I’ve decided to stop using a Mac as my home computer because I bought it with intent to use OS X and learn to do all sorts of sexy unix type things, which I haven’t done. No failing on the part of the Mac, I just find a PC more useful for my daily geekwork. Mind you, I may need to turn in my geek card – I’m using XP on this box. (Mostly because I’ve never used it, and want to learn to, just to keep current on all windows versions.)

Am acquiantance of mine recommended Flogging Molly. I’m listening to MP3s now, and have just ordered their CDs from Amazon (finally got my wishlist linked up again – buy me shiny things, go on). Weird blend of The Pogues and The Levellers, and absolutely ace.

So, I’m sitting here in room lit only by candles, listening to an invocation of the demon regent Asmodeus, when suddenly this roaring noise that’s not on the CD starts up. It sounds like some of the sound effects they layered behind Regan’s voice in in the exorcist – a dreadful, bass screaming, spiking to weird whining sounds…

It lasts exactly as long as the invocation, and it was a singularly weird experience. It took me a minute or two to realise that what it actually was – my upstairs neighbour drilling something. But he wasn’t drilling before, and hasn’t drilled since…