John Heron Project

— Daddy?
— Mm?
— Why is it raining?
— Well, the flowers and the grass need to drink and stuff.
— Daddy, why is it raining?
— Well. Um. It was sunny yesterday, so I suppose it’s the rain’s turn.
— But Daddy, why is it raining?
— Um, well, the wind blew and the sky turned grey and the rain came.
— Daddy! Why is it raining?
— [sighs] Conditions of atmospheric pressure in the air high above us necessitated the precipitation of clouds of water vapour into droplets of water which then fell to the earth below.
— Oh. Daddy?
— Mm?
— Why is it raining?
— The clouds needed a wee.
— OK.
[short passage of time]
— Wood?
— Darling?
— Are you aware that our son has just caused a panic in the park playground?
— Uh, no?
— Did you tell our son that the clouds were urinating on him?
— Uh, no. Why?

Think of the Polar Bear.
Oh, won’t someone think of the plight of the Polar Bear?
He’s minding his own business out there
On the tundra, unassuming, innocent,
Viciously carnivorous, scooping fish out of ice holes,
Tearing luckless marine mammals to bloody fatted shreds,
Nuzzling his snout happily in the gore
(A scene that should make the most hard-hearted among you go, “Aw”).
He doesn’t deserve this, when lands the helicopter
And ptyew he gets his arse pumped full of tranquiliser;
Tripping his fuzzy white nuts off,
Too addled to swipe a paw the size of an excavator blade
And take off the head
Of the chinless wonder
In the parka by Prada
Giving him a hug for the news team’s cameras.
He tries to snap, he fails,
A woman’s voice out of shot says, “Aw, how cute.”
He doesn’t understand. He’s a Polar Bear — he doesn’t know English.
Still, small mercies.

Think of the Moose.
Oh, won’t someone think of the plight of the Noble Moose?
The tourist steps up to the happy-go-lucky
Goofball of the animal kingdom
And puts a baseball cap on the moose’s head,
And an arm around his neck.
Caught on video:
The surprise on the tourist’s face
When the moose breaks his arm with a single well-timed
Swipe of those vast branchy antlers,
Bears him to the ground,
Walks deliberately back and forth,
Pressing hard with his two-ton frame
Until the man is one with nature,
And by “nature” I mean “mud,”
Squishy, runny, viscous.
When the rangers arrive with the rifles,
Keeping their distance, looking at him like he’s a monster,
He looks up, still chewing leaves,
As if to say, “What?”

Think of the Hippopotamus,
Gambolling merrily in the hollow,
Having a fine old wallow
Never dropping a grudge until he’s run you down and
Reduced you to chunky salsa in
Trash-compactor jaws;

Think of the Badger,
Wise, absent-minded, paternal Badger,
Who’ll take your hand off
If you get too close;

Think of the Monkeys,
Cute little rascals,
Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, saying nothing
Because they’re too busy stealing your stuff and defecating on it,
Masturbating outside your bedroom window,
Trying to bite you and give you rabies.

Think of the Comedy Animals.
Won’t someone think of the plight of the Comedy Animals?
Won’t you spare a single thought for the Comedy Animals?
Do you think they wanted to be Comedy Animals?
Do you think they want to be your cuddly toys?
Do you think that’s respect?
Do you call that admiration?
Do you want us to settle for being your comic relief when we only ever longed to be your heroes?

Further to the great piece by Chuck I linked yesterday, my other Jet Pack compadre Will has been concerned by recent moves in the publishing industry towards a model where writers provide content for free to editors who charge people for it, simply for the privilege of being published and the admiration of the public.

Will, quite reasonably, thinks this is not cricket.

In Neo-Feudal Content Creation a week or two ago, he wrote:

The notion is that the free economy created when everyone is publishing solely for free, writing just for the privilege of being read, investigating simply for the mad props of being in the know, will be the end of scarcity and that this will be great for the people with the microphones and speakers, who charge people to stand within earshot, and great for the open-mic talent, who write and speak and sing and report in exchange for a turn on stage. What’s unclear here — what’s still scarce in this model — is what these artists are eating and where these journalists are sleeping. How are their bills paid? Can they eat fan mail and send their Google Analytics data to their landlords as rent?

Which is a fair point.

Yesterday, he added more to the mix.

[The idea is to] do it because you love to do it. Be excited, and use that excitement. It’s a wonderful and useful message — a psychic pry bar. Good stuff.

But how can I trust that message if I think the reason it’s being given to me is to keep me happy and singing and toiling in my plot of land so the guy above me can get paid out of the ad revenues for posting my work to his blog?

Why should my work be the free content of an intermediate landlord’s freemium marketing strategy? It makes me nervous that I’m being motivated to produce a lot of free content so that the tier above me can get paid for it.

I have this awful (and unrealistic, I know) image of old boys, seated in club chairs in a smoke-filled sepia-toned parlor, scheming about how to get people to give their work away for free. “Tell them the fun and satisfaction is it’s own reward!” says one.

While the sepia-toned caricature is just a conceit, I don’t think that’s altogether inaccurate. Writers are not a respected part of the publishing process (just ask my friend the sub-editor about her treatment at the hands of the newspaper that just made her redundant) and are seen as an exploitable resource, and part of that is the perception that it’s a hobbyist’s thing, a thing that people do for fun, rather than a job, a craft, a graft.

Add to that the sub-moronic Randian bullshit that seems to pervade business these days, that assumes that people at the top are the only ones that do the work, and you get a model where the craftsman has no value. The content provider makes money for you and does not get a payout. Sitting here at the cusp of absolute failure, that makes me terribly depressed.

People — my colleagues — like Will and Chuck and Becky are really great writers. They deserve to be paid for their work.

My friend and colleague Chuck has a way with words. Look, this is his way with words:

I’m here to bring the news. Seriously. It’s a newspaper wrapped around a fish, and in the fish is a bunch of stinging insects, and you open the newspaper up, and you’re like, “Oh, goddamn, this fish stinks,” and then the fish’s mouth opens, and all these stinging insects fly or crawl out, and next thing you know they’re on your hand, and they’re stinging the shit out of you, and then you you don’t even smell the fish anymore, because you’re like, “No! Holy shit! SNAARGH! Why were there angry insects inside the fish! Who did this to me?”

And then you realize. I did it. I did it to you.

What is this about?

Well, it’s about the job of writing and how us writers don’t get no respect. And that’s partly because of the chancers and the wannabes.

But writer gets some kind of namby-pamby wishy-washy artist-flavored miasma floating around it, like it’s a social identifier similar to “hippie” or “cat-lover.” Listen, I’m not saying the only qualifier for “writer” is, “I get paid to do it.” Except, it is. See what I just did there? Hah! Suckers. Seriously, you at least have to have aspirations to do this professionally, aspirations that you back up with exploration of the craft. Then, feel free to call yourself an “amateur writer,” or an “out-of-work writer,” or an “aspiring writer.” Fine. Okay. Yay for you. But don’t insult me and all the other writers who have scraped their knuckles raw climbing to our (admittedly meager) heights. Stop watering down our heady brew! Writers work really hard to be writers. Stop pretending you worked as hard.

Read the rest of his rant: A Fish Full of Stinging Insects Bites You In the Ass Arse. You owe it to me and him (but do bear in mind Chuck, along with having a good eye — he took the pic of the spider — also has a way with swear words.).

He’s completely right. I’ve completely been there.

See, thing is, the economic downturn and various family stuff means that I may have to stop freelancing and go work in an office somewhere (even the thought of which kills me — I am doing my dream job, and I have no other aspirations), and when Mrs Wood told someone recently that this might happen, this other’s response was “He’ll be getting a proper job then,” to which her (instant and correct, and I love her for it) response was “He’s got a proper job.”

I have a proper job. I am not a hobbyist. I am a professional. I worked out last week that my work has been in books that have sold a total of something like 100,000 units in the last five years. I have had my name in at least one nationally recognised magazine. I edit a magazine with a long history and a fine reputation.

I have a proper job. It’s your problem if you can’t accept that.

There’s this cliché about Welsh women
About how they’re really filthy when they talk about sex
And they have all these tattoos
And I can’t vouch for the first
But since the summer started
The layers have been shed
And at the gates of the Welsh school
The ink is there;
Butterflies on shoulders,
Dragonflies on ankles,
And here’s a fearsome black-haired nan
With a vast tangle of roses and hearts and birds
And the names of her grandchildren
Etched on her calf from ankle to knee,
And I feel sort of naked actually,
With only these half-dozen dots on my hand
Witness to a failed attempt at this
Home-made tribal framework, aged seventeen
That got all gungy and fell off.

All this ink,
All arrayed across the track
Fading in the sun
In honour of two dozen three- and four-year-olds
Wobbling plastic eggs on massive spoons
And clambering through tunnels
And running as fast as their little legs will carry them.
Here you are,
You I came to see
And Mrs J picks you up and drops you in the sack
And she tells you to jump.
And you will not jump.
You will not.
She holds your hand and tries to coax you
And you will not jump
And I am so proud.

Now I realise that the reason you’re not jumping is because
You hurt your foot a couple of days ago
And it hurts to jump
But I am your dad
And it’s my job to project upon you my own failures and desires.
I’m your dad.
I jumped when they told me,
But I never jumped high enough or far enough.
I wish I had not jumped.
I wish I hadn’t screwed up this tattoo.

Listen, when you’re old enough to appreciate it,
I’ll issue a finite number
Three maybe, or five,
Vouchers for sickies.
I’ll write you a note,
No strings, back you up,
Get out of Sports Day free,
If you like.

Obviously, we won’t tell your mother.

By David John Ingham, age 3, transcribed by Dad.

The Crocodile, he found a friend
And then he found another friend
And then he found his mummy and daddy
And then he ran away
And then he went to bed.
The Whale he found his Dinosaur friend
And then he went to bed.

(more…)

Dispatches from the Money-Mouth Interface: Today, we (that’s my colleagues Will Hindmarch and Chuck Wendig and I) launch Jet Pack, a gallery and maybe a storefront for our fiction ambitions. Look out for chapbooks and other stuff in the near future. Right now, though, we’re just doing the fiction.

More news as events warrant, as they say.

Ed at Robot Viking just posted an interview with me on being a game writer, and about tragedy and art and why nice-looking chairs are no good if you can’t park your arse on them. He asks about my White Wolf stuff, and MSG™, which he’s been especially nice to (I have Ed to thank for the free version getting 1200+ downloads).

As cryptozoological entities go, the Sasquatch — or “Bigfoot” if you really must — is actually a pretty straightforward sort of a fella.

I know this. Because the Sasquatch inhabits the spare room in my house.

(more…)

So the new issue of Movement went to the printers on Friday, and it had a fabulous and well-researched article about the legality of same-sex marriage in the US and Canada. Which talked about Proposition 8, and the states that do allow gay marriage, and so on.

And then the state of Iowa goes and upholds the right of same-sex couples to marry. Just when I was celebrating getting an error-free mag out there.

Damn.

Anyway, it seems that Governor Mike Huckabee (one of last year’s presidential also-also-rans, remember, and wait a minute, Iowa’s not even the state he’s governor of) is not happy about the state doing this. he says it’s “an attack on the traditional family.”

I hear this a lot. And what I’d like to ask is: for the love of God, HOW!?

I mean, will gay people (and even lesbians these days, so I hear) getting married stop straight people getting married? Will gay people adopting stop straight people adopting… and maybe having kids? Will, by allowing gay people the right to make vows and be monogamous and faithful to each other, this act promote promiscuity and polyvalent non-heteronormative relationships?

Why is it even a threat? I honestly don’t understand.

Edit: “No, Senator McKinley. I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.” It’s some Mid-Western state in the US, and it’s local politics. But that whole two minute speech has the mark of something historical. I wonder if people will be talking about it down the line. (via)

Somewhere, someone who never cared for her in better days is masturbating right now over a recent picture of Jade Goody, the woman as glowing mannequin-saint; willowy and graceful, not emaciated; luminous and iridescent, not papery.

Somewhere else, a young woman is dying. Hollowed out, eternally tired, in pain. This is not about her, not really. I can’t really imagine that she even more than half-understands the thing that has been created around her.

(more…)

I haven’t written anything that I can post here* for ages. Christmas’ lengthy bout of sickness wiped every iota of inspiration from my head, and I can do nothing more than read through my old stuff, going “why the hell can’t I write anything that good?”

Anyway, one of the things I like right now is another comic, and it’s called Nobody Scores! It makes me laugh.

If you share my sense of humour (note: not many people do), then it may amuse you. A few I particularly liked: Projectile Garmenting, Concrete Epiphany, Feel-Good Romantic Comedy of the Year, The Art of Influence, Write What You Know, Snow Days. And a great one about parallel parking.

_________________________
*I wrote one poem that I even read at the Crunch, and which got me more props than any other thing I have ever read in public ever, only it’s so completely obscene I’d finish burning down all those bridges I started burning down ages ago. So no. You don’t get to see that one.

When I retired the MSG™ Free Promotional Edition, I found that 2,120 people had downloaded it. I’d call that a success. But that’s it. It’s gone now.

The Beta Playtest version is still out there for £3.99 print, £1.99 PDF. I finished the Executive Edition last night, and it’s now in proofreading, hopefully. More on that later.



(Edit: have updated the link to point to the EE)

io9.com is on the Gawker network. It get stupid numbers of hits. It is a website that promotes and discusses all things science-fictional and almost science-fictional. And all things geek, really.

Anyways, io9 plugged MSG™ today. So. Pleased.

Buy MSG™ at lulu.com

FREE Promotional edition (available until 25th November 2008)

Here we go, then. This is what I have been working on recently. MSG™ is a game of negotiation and conscience for three to six adults, what I wrote, designed and illustrated myself, with help from my ubiquitous partner in crime Becky Lowe and my genius colleague Benjamin Baugh. It’s the genetically modified bastard child of Naomi Klein, Chris Morris and Dilbert.

It’s an 88-page illustrated paperback book, and it’s £5.99 in print, and £1.99 for the pdf.

But for one week only, it’s available on PDF format for free.

Buy MSG™ at lulu.com

FREE Promotional edition (available until 25th November 2008)

MSG™ record sheets

Do not name him, please;
Leave him gazing from the print,
All trust.
Do not allow him to pitterpatter
In my imagination.
Let the people who care grieve,
Let the people who did not be punished,
Let me find my children and
Hold them,
So very tightly.

You might catch your breath at the idea,
Grasp the boat’s side, knuckles
Not as hard nor as pale as this
Wall of sea-borne scales
Glimmering in cold crystalline mist.
Your stomach might harden
At the premonition of hell
In the smell of sulphur and charred meat,
In the sight of bobbing, half-finished meals:
Lost men, brave men, men like you.
The dawn might darken
In the opening of this single slitted eye,
Wider than your height
And you might rise to your feet,
Barely trusting the creaking unsteady wood,
Raise your ancestral spear,
Fear that the moon-bright blade
Will not be good
Enough
To end the serpent that girdles the earth:
But since you know its hit point total,
Instead you just kill it and steal its stuff.

(more…)

Matthew James Ingham was born this morning, 12.17am.

He was 8lbs 7oz in weight, which means Becky owes us a bag of jelly babies.

Grey and yellow and grey and blue
They come in orange and purple too
It’s amazing what they can do
These days

The muck goes round and round and round
And it makes this crazy whirring sound
And it settles inside that plastic surround
In layers

And you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
Anymore

No, you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
Anymore

Well, I thought that it looked kind of nice
So I went to the showroom once or twice
And I found one that had a massive price
Reduction

The salesman said, son, you’re the boss
So I bought it and took it back to my house
And found for myself how there’s no loss
Of suction

And you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
Anymore

No, you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
No, you don’t need a bag
Anymore

(more…)

It’s a couple hundred yards to May’s house. It’s only two turns away from the main road and the tube station, but Hillcrest Road is completely different in atmosphere: small, neat houses with paths and gates and front gardens. Parked cars that never seem to go anywhere.

May pauses before she opens her front door.

— Is everything OK? says Sarah.

May looks over her shoulder at the house across the road, wonders if, just for a second, she glimpsed those same aged fingers at the edge of a curtain.

— Fine. I’m fine.

She opens the door and finds the light switch on the third try.

— Get you a drink? says May. Tea? Coffee?

— Tea would be lovely.

— Kitchen’s this way.

Coats discarded, they make for the kitchen; Sarah leans against the worktop as May empties the kettle, refills it, plugs it in, turns it on, finds a couple of mugs, teabags, the pot. And then May stops and leans forward, both hands on the counter, stares at the warming kettle. She closes her eyes and sighs.

And now Sarah is standing behind May; her hand touches the small of May’s back. May jumps, breathes in once, hard, turns around. And now Sarah is reaching up, standing on tiptoe, palms agains May’s shoulders, kissing her.

May finds herself kissing back for a moment, and then she draws back and takes three uneven, ragged breaths in succession.

— I don’t — I’m not — I didn’t —

Sarah removes her hands from May’s shoulders.

— I’m sorry, she says.

She bites her lip, catching the little ball on her lip ring between her teeth, but she continues to look straight in May’s eye. The kettle boils, clicks off.

— No, says May, don’t be. It’s really nice, but —

— Would you like to do it again?

May goes a little cold inside.

— Um.

She looks to one side.

— Yes, she says.

Yeah, I write role-playing games. So you probably know that I’m not massively proud of that, but it’s sort of fun, and it’s a crust. Anyway, every year there’s a lot of conventions and things, but only one that matters, and that’s called GenCon. And at GenCon every year, they have these awards called the ENnies, which are a bit like the gaming Oscars, only obviously slightly cheaper. So anyway, one of the games what I wrote a big chunk of, which is called Changeling: The Lost, won the award for Best Writing.

So that sort of makes me an award-winner.

That’s all.

…I still get internet abuse for saying how much I hated Star Wars, about a year ago?

And you know how a couple of days ago, I suggested that Edward Norton’s attempts to pretend he hadn’t sold out, because he was, you know, in a shitty Hollywood action movie (bit of tautology there) were idiotic?

Getting abuse for that, now. Just a few of them so far, but… you know. Great stuff, on the level of “ZOMG you’re full of shit, man! The movie really rocked! UR teh suXXors!” and so on. Yay.

Sometimes I really hate fanboys. In That Line Of Work I Don’t Really Boast About, I come into contact with a fair few of them. I think part of the reason that fanboys so often annoy me so much is less because of their uncritical devotion to stuff and more because of the kind of stuff they’re uncritically devoted to.

Because it’s almost always wholly stupid. Comic books about costumed superheroes. SHWAMs. SHWAMs based on comic books about costumed superheroes. Harry Potter. Tolkien - and don’t get me started on Tolkien. Star Trek. Star Wars, of course. The D* V**** C***. Doctor Who. Heroes. Lost. Battlestar Galactica.

In that list, I deliberately included some things that I quite like myself. I love Doctor Who, in all its glorious stupidity. Heroes is daft as hell, but fun to watch. I take guilty pleasure in the old Tomb of Dracula and Howard the Duck comics. I own a volume of 1970s Spider-Man comics (the one where Gwen Stacy cops it, since you asked). But none of these things matter in the grand scheme of things. None of these things have any real depth to them. It’s OK to like them.

But it’s not about liking this stuff. It’s about basing your identity on this stuff. It’s about having such an awful, weird sense of - oh, I don’t know - entitlement that you don’t see anything wrong in centring your whole identity around your devotion to stuff that’s lightweight mass-market bollocks, things that by design are equally as nourishing and addictive as Pringles crisps. These people think they have some sort of right to pablum, some right to abandon their lives to it, to give back every penny of the money they earned at their McJobs to the Man for trinkets and toys and DVD box sets.

Except they’re not uncritically devoted to it. But the criticism is all the wrong sort of criticism. They’ll say something sucked because that yellow robot in Transformers was the wrong sort of car, and yet fail to see that the whole enterprise was a vapid exercise in marketing wrapped around a film where blowing things up solves conflicts. Bankrupt in every way except the financial one.

It’s this weird, almost autistic obsession with minutiae and continuity rather than meaning. In fact, you almost get the distinct impression from some corners of the fanboy “community” that having the stuff and whining about it - which also comes from that same sense of entitlement. They buy everything and whinge and whine about the piddling little details, rather than taking pleasure in what they have.

And that’s the heart of it. It’s so devoid of fun. It’s all so joyless.

Sometimes, you find out a fascinating fact about the natural world and your favourite species group that enriches your life. And sometimes, you learn something you really, really find you that wish you didn’t know (link Not Safe While Eating Breakfast).

I’m not a superstitious person, but:

At school, I had locker 207.

In my first year at university, I moved into Neuadd Sibly, a tower block on the campus of the University of Wales Swansea, and was assigned room 207. Sibly Hall has another name now. I forget what it is.

In my third year at university, having survived a disastrous year in a shared house, I moved back into halls, specifically Beck House, an off-campus hall. I was sent to the Garden Annexe, room 207. The Garden Annexe was bulldozed about ten years ago.

When I worked for Mr. Breast, the phone extension on my desk was 207. I am reliably informed that Mr. Breast is still there. Only the other day, I ran into a former colleague who still works at Mr. Breast’s company, in fact, and who tells me that they’re going just fine.

My dad was into numerology. He would have told me that 2 was the number of balance and union. That 0 was the figure of all. That 7 was the number of thought. Then he would have found that the numerical base of 207 (2+0+7) was 9, which is the number of completion. Meaning that 207 is a multiple of nine (it is - it’s 9×23, and 23 is a prime number, which probably means something else).

And I would doubtless have said, Dad, what does that mean? And he would have told me I wouldn’t understand, in that somewhat sympathetic way he had of telling me that I didn’t get things, and would never succeed in things.

As I get older, I find myself looking for significance in things that I never did when I was in my twenties. But what significance is there to be had from something like this? What difference does it make? In the end, it’s just numbers.

Oh, the crazy April Fools hilarity we had yesterday.

Anyway. A lot of people know this story, but I’ve been down about freelancing recently and I need to remind myself why I am doing this.

So for a while, back about seven years ago, I was the in-house writer and publicity designer for this one-horse business software firm.

The Boss calls me in. They’re getting ready the new brochure for the upgrade and he has some ideas for the design. In short, he wants the cover to have a flowchart on it.

Sorry? A flowchart? Are you insane?

And he wants it to look like a breast.

I forget my response, but it went something along the lines of: For a second there, I thought you said you wanted it to look like a breast.

Yes, he says, a breast. Like on a lady. With a voluptuous curve here and a fulsome curve here and a pointy bit here. With aspects of the software written on the arrows.

I am somewhat direct in my expression of what I think of this.

He tells me that sex sells. And that he is selling to people who own factories.

I spend the next week trying to make the flowchart look artistic and stuff… and not look much like a breast. After about three days of trying to compromise, the Boss (who shall forever after in my mind be Mr. Breast) comes in and looks over my shoulder, and says, “Can’t you make it a bit more pert?”

I went freelance not long after that.

It could get so much worse.

Anne Primavesi is a feminist/ecological/radical theologian. On 23rd February this year, she presented a talk to the SCM conference. I’ve been transcribing it so that I can put bits in Movement. It was a really long talk, and very little of it is making into the magazine. But these, I thought, seem appropriate for Easter, where we remember violence and dispossession, and the act of making something good come out of the worst of things.

Very few of the people who really need to read these three excerpts will read them; those who do will not take them seriously. But then, that’s the way with all this stuff. You only preach to the converted on the internet. (more…)

Gary Gygax died on Monday. He was the bloke who invented Dungeons and Dragons, which is a big part of the reason why I have a steady job. That’s all. Moment of silence and all that.

I worked on a game book called Requiem For Rome last year. I won’t go into the difficulties and frustrations involved, but suffice to say that I wasn’t as happy with the end result as I could have been.

Anyway. Most people seemed to like it. And it got reviewed on a blog about world history. The guy really liked it. And didn’t criticise my history once (although he does give the title of my history chapter, including the error inserted by the idiot proofreader who didn’t know Latin - in the draft it was, correctly, Ab Urbe Condita).

I meant to post this on Tuesday, but my blog got hacked. The mighty DavidK spent far too much of his own time fixing it.

1. Movement
Image budget sorted. A lot of copy in.

2. Supplement 2 (Slasher)
Done.

3. Splat! (Shadows in the Night)
Done.

4. Supplement 3 (”Darren McGavin”)
Was 35,000 words by 15th February, 2008. Now, thanks to a writer having to drop out, 47,000 by the end of March. Not started yet.

5. Supplement 4 (”David Naughton”)
Taken on because of situation above. 25,000 by 15th March. Will probably get an extension.

6. Supplement 5
Yes, another one. 20,000, May.

7. Other things on the table
A book I am going to call “Mrs Adams” which is still a game book, but a bit different to anything I have done for this client, and another book about nasty vampires and things which I am supposed to have editorial control over. I hire the writers and turn it into a book. Could be fun, could be a headache.

1. I don’t want to eat meat anymore. When the meat in my freezer’s run out, I’m going vegetarian.

2. There isn’t a TV show, or a film I need to watch, or an album I need to hear, or a book or game I need to buy. I don’t need more stuff. Besides, most of it is actually stupid.

3. I am too good at writing really unpleasant things (and I am really good at it - check out pages 29-30 of the document you can download here), and it is starting to frighten me.

That’s all.