martyn44

There are many writers whose work I admire and enjoy. There are very few whose work screams at me - 'this is the benchmark to which you must aspire, you dullard.' Of my 'contemporaries' there were four, but Rob Holdstock has gone and now Iain Banks has joined Sir Terry on the not long for this world list. I like his 'mainstream' work more than I do his 'genre' work because he brings the fabulist's vision to what has become a stultifyingly self-obsessed self-indulgence over the last sixty odd years. The Crow Road is one of the few contemporary novels written during my lifetime that I can read again and again, discovering more each time. I haven't read a Booker winner that comes anywhere near its lyrical humanity and imagination. Espedair Street is pretty damned hot in my opinion too. As I say, my opinion. Yours may differ. That's life.

So, that is three out of four of my gods either erased or about to be. Manda, you take good care of yourself.

As Graham Parker once sang, what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? Today, tomorrow and every other day. We can do it if we try.

My first (published) novel 'Monkey See' has been issued by Wild Wolf, and is now available on Amazon (at least the UK version) I shall not tell how how wonderful it is because that would be crass. Besides, judgement is and always should be the reader's. It is a supernatural thriller set on Tyneside and, while one of the main characters is definitely dead, she is not a zombie.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Monkey-See-ebook/dp/B00AM1HGXQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355222775&sr=8-1

... I used to like The Mamas and the Papas. Why? Well, there was John Phillips' rather cool way with words and a melody. Then there were Denny Doherty and Cass Elliott, two of the finest voices of my lifetime of listening to popular music. Of course, the fact that my girl friend was a dead ringer for Michelle Phillips had nothing at all to do with it, nothing whatsoever... Anyway. I was listening to the radio today when one of their songs came on, singing as true today as it did back then. This is dedicated to the one I love. Of course, everything is dedicated to the one I love, and she's much more beautiful than Michelle Phillips.
Tell the one you love that you are dedicated to them. Go on. Make it so.

Something happened today that hasn't happened - to me - for a long, long time. I went all Ian Rankin. I was reading the BBC News website - as I do, a boy needs a bit more than he gets on the weather report, you know - when I came across a story from Iran. As I read it a novel appeared in my brain - who, what, why, how. And it is better than any of the ideas I have been working on since I sent Spuggie to Mr J. Onward!

Years ago, we got satellite tv for the first time. One of the channels was CMT - Country Music Television - and I watched a lot (I was having one of my periodic bouts of depression, caring for my totally mother in law - Meatloaf singing 'Objects in the rear view mirror' reduced me to tears, that was a sign) Most of it was crap, just like any other channel. Then this beautiful blonde woman appeared, singing directly into the camera, to me, a quiet song about love, and what it means to be a grown up in love. She sang my heart softly with her song. Everyone has artists who speak directly to their hearts, of their experiences and emotions. That was my first encounter with Mary Chapin Carpenter, singing 'Come on, Come on', and I was smitten. Instantly she was there with Mr Sumner as writers who spoke directly to me. I now have all of her records (as I have all of Sting's) and I have seen her perform (as I have seen Sting) Her new songs speak to me just as much as the old ones, and if that makes me a sentimental old Hector, well that's just okay by me. There is nothing wrong with sentiment (sentimentality is another thing altogether...) Sentiment is what makes us human, that and the ability to communicate with each other. I have seen Peter Green perform 'Man of the World'. I have seen the Mike Westbrook Brass Band perform 'I see thy form'. Someday I will see Mary Chapin Carpenter perform 'Come on, Come On'. Then I will be able to die happy. A perfect song.

First one in thirty years, and it felt the same - warm, welcoming, maybe a little greyer, a little thicker around the waist and more sober - a meeting of friends old and new, met and unmet, there to celebrate our love of fantastic literature (with a nod in direction of the visual version) I believed I understood the serious scientific talk (should tell you who was GoH last time I was there) but I'm in a different state now. Jaine Fenn, once I've finished this Banks, you're next. As for 'Fantasy or SF' the immortal words of Billy Joel sprang unbidden to my mind - 'Hot funk, cool punk, even if its old junk, its still rock and roll to me.' We didn't arrive as early as we'd have liked (thanks A1) and we left earlier than we had anticipated - lunch with Lizzy trumped your Sunday attractions - but all in all, we had a good time. I needed that.
Thanks, BSFG.

I don't know when I first became fascinated by flight. It may have been when a squadron of Vulcans thundered - and I do mean thundered - overhead at what seemed like touching distance away to land at nearby RAF Acklington in about 1960, but I believe I was bitten by the bug some time before that. Maybe it was all Group Captain Bigglesworth's fault. Flying machines have fascinated and delighted me for as long as I can remember and, while I'm not a TAP (Total Aviation Person) I know enough to scorn Flight Sergeant Sargeant describing a mere Mark 9 as the ultimate Spitfire. Look at a Mark 24 you ignorant little oik!
Maybe it was the story my mum told of a wartime experience, of being in North Wales and seeing an aircraft without without a propellor, and telling my father - who was stationed on the same base - and being told not to be so silly. She had only witnessed a proving flight of the Gloster Whittle E28/39 and had seen something transformatively significant.
The Spitfire is commonly regarded (here, at least) as the most beautiful aircraft of them all, largely because it is a fine looking plane and because of the romance of the Battle of Britain. War is, of course, more complex than that. While the Spitfire flying knights in armour were jousting with their German counterparts in Willi Messerschmidt's Es and Gustavs, the more prosaic Hurricane was destroying the Heinkels and the Dorniers and the Junkers before and after they dropped their bombs, and doing so at a fraction of the cost - in terms of outlay and repair (a Spitfire took three times as long to repair as a Hurricane for a similar item of damage)and in keeping their pilots alive. They did, of course, use the same engines, guns and ammunition as each other (at least until they swapped 303 Brownings for 20mm cannon in the Spitfire) They were different but both vital to the succesful prosecution of the war.
Another fighter also used the same engine, the Rolls Royce Merlin, and was originally produced by the Americans to a British requirement only for it to mutate into possibly the most important aircraft of the war - the much more next generational in appearance Mustang, the long range fighter that transformed the USAF's bombing campaign in Europe from a funeral cortege into a victory. The Spitfire, the Hurricane - together with the 109 and Kurt Tank's 190 Butcher Bird - look right in camouflage (as does the Mustang's brother in death, the P47 Thunderbolt) But the Mustang harked forward to the days of bright, bare metal with a flash of colour - a yellow nose or that highly significant Tuskegee red tail.
To my mind, however, the most beautiful and deadly beautiful aeroplane of them all is a true maverick, a throwback, a construction of wood as small as it could functionally be bolted to two of those ubiquitous Merlin engines - the Mosquito. As a piece of design it is as pure as the Spitfire, form dictated by function, while its structure made use of a resource Britain had in those years and which was underused in that conflict of flesh against metal - woodworkers, highly trained, highly skilled woodworkers. If any single thing can be said to have turned that war in our favour - other than Hitler's incompetence - it was the determination - for the first and last time in our history - to have the best possible person in every job. And some of those people were nutters in the eyes of most. In terms of contemporary warfare, the Mosquito was an absurd aberration. A committee would have look at it and curled its collective scornful lip. But it worked. It did its job better than anything else. As I say, its form followed its function and I think it the most beautiful of aircraft, in a brutal, deadly, fatal way. It is beautiful in the way a shark is beautiful, and for the same reason. It is the meanest thing in its particular valley of death, and observed from the outside it moves in a similar, sinuously effortless grace (if accompanied by the deafening roar of two Merlins) That beauty, however, takes on a different meaning - as does the shark's - when seen approaching head on. Like the shark's teeth, seeing those four Browning's twinkling in the wooden nose of the Mosquito meant one thing. You were going to be dead, soon.
The beauty of the Mosquito, like that of the Spitfire and - yes - the very similar beauty of the ME262 is best appreciated today because those instruments of death are no longer functional. Their teeth are drawn. As they should be. Their beauty is the abstraction of form without function, and we should educate ourselves by observing the artistic counterpart of their original purpose, Picasso's 'Guernica'. Now there is real deadly beauty whose form truly follows its function.

Today I emailed what I hope is the final draft of Monkey See to Wild Wolf Publishing, thus delivering a second novel to a publisher. It is said that we all have a novel inside us and - frankly - that's where most of them should stay. But now, with Whitechapel about to appear (I think) from Morrigan and Monkey See delivered to Wild Wolf I now have two novels out there with contracted publishers. Does this make me a real, proper writer? I don't feel any different and don't intend to apply for a new passport with 'Author' in the occupation. Hmmm. Whatever, as soon as I pressed 'send' I opened up my work in progress and got to adding words.

I think that is what means I'm a writer rather than whatever happens after the novels escape from my study. I haven't felt like a writer in quite some time, not blocked just unconvinced. The work looked better tonight, worth finishing. That felt good.

We all have them, those experiences that change the way we look at the world. Sometimes we remember them - Damascus, people, this is the road to Damascus! (which, in my experience, is a pretty ordinary Middle Eastern road...) Sometimes they are just absorbed, unremarked.

One of my favourite film directors - no, my favourite film director - is Andrei Tarkovsky. His work is 'serious art', very often deadly 'serious art' and I believe there is room in the world for deadly serious art as well as MTV attention span, bigger bang superhero epics, vapid chick flicks and Will Ferrell movies (although my world would be much improved by the absence of Will Ferrell movies...) Anyway, back to Tarkovsky and my damascene moment. STALKER is long, slow and painful, not least because you know that back at home is the Guide's utterly disabled daughter. So, the film is about the characters' search for redemption, for transformative magic in The Zone. Do they find it? Hey, he's Russian. Ambiguity rules, ok?

The final scene is back at the Guide's decrepit apartment where we see his virtually discarded daughter move something along the kitchen table by telekinesis.

That one scene made me look at the world in a different way. That one scene informs everything I write. That one scene convinced me that art is powerfully transformative and that, while there's nothing wrong with bigger bang superhero epics in their many forms, I want what I do to aspire to the Tarkovsky standard. Of course I'll fail, but dammit, I'm going to try.