the ramble dump
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
A Nice, Refreshing Pot of Tea
Winnie Brum likes her tea. And she's not the only one. There are few things better than a brew to start, sustain or end your day. There's something about tea, you see--something about how it can be so bland and unassuming, yet so refined in taste. It's something hot yet refreshing; something comforting and familiar; something that unfailingly hits the spot. Whatever you need it for--as a drink, as a break, as a friend--your cup of tea is there for you.
And, of course, I speak of tea with milk, and sugar if you really need it. Milky yet strong. That's when tea works best, in my personal tea-drinking opinion.
Many people resort to the teapot in stressful situations.
The practice of drinking tea has an interesting history in this country. The Brits began importing it in the seventeenth century for medicinal use, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had a foothold in British culture when the aristocracy displayed the endless gullibility of humankind and were tricked into it as something fashionable. It was a fashion that ended up costing the British Empire a lot of money because we had nothing else that the Chinese wanted in return, but that was all sorted out once we won a few wars and twisted China's arm into accepting opium, to which over a quarter of China's adult population subsequently got addicted. Tea then managed to stick around in Britain long after the Empire collapsed, infusing itself irreplaceably into the everyday lives of the British population.
I have three or four cups a day, minimum.
It makes me need to piss often, but you should not let that discourage you if you haven't yet tried it. In 99% of all situations, tea will put you right.
And, of course, I speak of tea with milk, and sugar if you really need it. Milky yet strong. That's when tea works best, in my personal tea-drinking opinion.
Many people resort to the teapot in stressful situations.
The practice of drinking tea has an interesting history in this country. The Brits began importing it in the seventeenth century for medicinal use, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had a foothold in British culture when the aristocracy displayed the endless gullibility of humankind and were tricked into it as something fashionable. It was a fashion that ended up costing the British Empire a lot of money because we had nothing else that the Chinese wanted in return, but that was all sorted out once we won a few wars and twisted China's arm into accepting opium, to which over a quarter of China's adult population subsequently got addicted. Tea then managed to stick around in Britain long after the Empire collapsed, infusing itself irreplaceably into the everyday lives of the British population.
I have three or four cups a day, minimum.
It makes me need to piss often, but you should not let that discourage you if you haven't yet tried it. In 99% of all situations, tea will put you right.
Labels: halo, tea, the aberration
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Sacrifice that the Narrative Demanded
Those currently trying to access The Aberration Chapter 15 will be faced with this message:
There will, however, be spoilers for Chapter 14, so watch out for those.
Nearly all of the time, when they're not nitpicks over grammar or general attempts to improve the quality of description, these alterations boil down to something not working with the flow of the narrative. This might relate to how the story progresses from one point to the next, how events transpire, how the characters react to these events or to each other, and how those characters develop as a result of all these other things. It's a partly intuitive process: if an event feels overly contrived, or if a character feels inconsistent with how they usually act, or if anything about the story feels too forced, it sits uncomfortably in the final product. It can result in the story losing some of it's believability.
To some extent, even things like the specific characteristics of the characters themselves are not something that can be dictated in an overly deliberate way. Likewise, smooth transitions from Point A to Point B can't always be meticulously planned out--you can't account for everything until you get to the stage of actually writing it. That's why some of the Starcustard chapters ended up so long: because we set out, roughly, to cover a certain amount of ground in terms of outlined story in each chapter, and ended up requiring a lot more ground than we expected. When you're writing, you have to feel your way through the narrative, follow it a natural way so that it comes to be something you can believe in yourself before you expect the reader to do the same. That's probably why it usually doesn't work as an immersive, believable story when the author sets out to dictate the actions of some character in order to conform to a message that they are trying to convey--when the characters are reduced to functions of an idea or plot point at the expense of...well, character. (Thus: boo, allegory.)
This isn't to say that the writing process has to be something completely out of your control, or something that you have to surrender entirely to your subconscious. It obviously doesn't work like that. Control is, of course, one of the most important things in storytelling. It's about managing to strike a balance, but not a compromise, in attempting to achieve some kind of realism (or, at least, in order to make the experience real enough to be appreciated). But there are certain things that a story, a narrative, needs to be held together--the plot to frame it, the characters to drive it and the cohesion to bring everything together. Big ideas and viewpoints are all well and good, but they need to come from somewhere--they need to be grounded in a believable foundation.
These are things that seem to be true of many novels that I've read or films that I've watched, as well as presenting themselves as something repeatedly confounding when I come to write my own stuff. Hence all the revisions. Chapter 15's main problem was exposition: cramming in too much stuff I felt I needed to explain in order to get past it, at the expense of pacing, believability and narrative sense. To get anything worthwhile from a story, the reader has to be able to experience it in a way that doesn't pull them out of it every time the author feels the need to muscle their way in for some more control. There are times, I have found, when you just have to give in to the narrative--otherwise you start making compromises to the integrity of the narrative that can cause everything to fall apart.
Which brings me to Mike. Mike's fate is currently undecided. For the longest time I've been trying to determine a reason for Mike to be there; trying to feel out a purpose for him in the story. This sounds a lot like reducing him to a function, but in this sense, characters become functions of the narrative--as a part of that narrative--rather than being reduced for the sake of functioning as part of a specific plot point or any motive that might lie behind the story. This doesn't mean denying the fact that characters drive the narrative, but rather that there is an interdependency between the two that develops organically and emerges along with other things such as themes and plot.
In the case of The Aberration, the narrative is already being driven, and moulded, by Master Beef and the plot and ideas that have formed around him. Whereas Beef had always been at the core of the story, even if later themes and character developments had not yet emerged, Mike, like several other characters (including Detective Muse, Sim Hyde and the Microwave) had always sort of been attached to the story for the sake of it. Unlike these others, however, Mike's reasons for creation, and attempts to develop him beyond that, have not leant themselves to enabling his character to be continually relevant, and though over the years I've repeatedly reduced his personal story to fit in with everything else, I've never quite been able to assimilate him completely into the coherent whole. In other words, I don't know what to do with him. While I feel he's worked in a perfectly valid way as a character so far, it's reached the point that the only thing that feels natural to do is to write him out of the story, maybe able to offer one or two more hints at the wider plot on his way out.
It does sound as if he's being judged by his worth to the plot, and to some extent this is true. But as already explained, the Mike's character has to relate to all the other aspects of the whole. The characters drive the story or narrative, which is the sequence of events. The plot--what the story is about--is something that, in this case, has emerged as these characters have been driving the story. Narrative, plot and character have all formed in a mutual sort of way. But Mike has ended up the odd one out. I could invent new story just for the sake of keeping him in the picture, but there's no point in having a character perpetuated in this way. His character, failing to resonate in the same way as the others, would require his own plot, if he was given any plot at all, and his story would be irrelevant.
With regard to killing off characters, a similar thing happened with the character of Mars in the early chapters of Starcustard, though in his case it was more an immediate demand of the world as we'd constructed it, rather than simply having no place for him in the story after that (although we may not have done anyway). In our excitement of plot we'd inadvertently pushed him into a situation that there was simply no way around if we didn't want to contradict everything we had already said.
The character of Mike has suffered rather from a lack of direction, in terms of plot and character. Many of the characters in The Aberration have ended up treading narrative backwater at various points in its history, causing me to re-evaluate and revise repeatedly in order to sustain it (most significantly when it was in its Manifesting Surreal iteration, consisting of mounting absurdity and about to collapse in on itself). As a result, though it's been far from easy, the narrative has begun to form into something that feels at least somewhat coherent. Unfortunately for Mike, for the time being at least, he is no longer a part of it.
As a final note (and a little hint at other things): although on the level of plot Mike's (apparent) death does nothing but remove him as something with no further use, on the level of the narrative--which can incorporate things like, say, meta-commentary--the very necessity of his removal may yet itself function as something more significant in terms of the wider narrative picture. If you follow that, I'll leave you to try and figure it out once you start getting a sense of what that wider picture is. Until then, the important thing, in terms of what this post has been getting at, is that this function operates as a valuable extra feature of the narrative, but does not exist at the expense of narrative integrity as a whole.
Edit 23/07/08: some slight rephrasing due to a confusion between the concepts of 'plot' and 'story/narrative' (I got them the wrong way around).
This chapter is currently being revised. It will return, massively improved, sometime soonish.Anyone who visits this site with any kind of frequency will know that I have a tendency to go back and repeatedly edit the stuff I've already uploaded, usually one or two months after the fact. In the past I've offered various specific, long-winded reasons and excuses for each time I've done this, but I won't go into any specifics about Chapter 15 here. Its sparkly new edition will be posted along with the horrendously delayed 16 in the not-too-distant future.
There will, however, be spoilers for Chapter 14, so watch out for those.
Nearly all of the time, when they're not nitpicks over grammar or general attempts to improve the quality of description, these alterations boil down to something not working with the flow of the narrative. This might relate to how the story progresses from one point to the next, how events transpire, how the characters react to these events or to each other, and how those characters develop as a result of all these other things. It's a partly intuitive process: if an event feels overly contrived, or if a character feels inconsistent with how they usually act, or if anything about the story feels too forced, it sits uncomfortably in the final product. It can result in the story losing some of it's believability.
To some extent, even things like the specific characteristics of the characters themselves are not something that can be dictated in an overly deliberate way. Likewise, smooth transitions from Point A to Point B can't always be meticulously planned out--you can't account for everything until you get to the stage of actually writing it. That's why some of the Starcustard chapters ended up so long: because we set out, roughly, to cover a certain amount of ground in terms of outlined story in each chapter, and ended up requiring a lot more ground than we expected. When you're writing, you have to feel your way through the narrative, follow it a natural way so that it comes to be something you can believe in yourself before you expect the reader to do the same. That's probably why it usually doesn't work as an immersive, believable story when the author sets out to dictate the actions of some character in order to conform to a message that they are trying to convey--when the characters are reduced to functions of an idea or plot point at the expense of...well, character. (Thus: boo, allegory.)
This isn't to say that the writing process has to be something completely out of your control, or something that you have to surrender entirely to your subconscious. It obviously doesn't work like that. Control is, of course, one of the most important things in storytelling. It's about managing to strike a balance, but not a compromise, in attempting to achieve some kind of realism (or, at least, in order to make the experience real enough to be appreciated). But there are certain things that a story, a narrative, needs to be held together--the plot to frame it, the characters to drive it and the cohesion to bring everything together. Big ideas and viewpoints are all well and good, but they need to come from somewhere--they need to be grounded in a believable foundation.
These are things that seem to be true of many novels that I've read or films that I've watched, as well as presenting themselves as something repeatedly confounding when I come to write my own stuff. Hence all the revisions. Chapter 15's main problem was exposition: cramming in too much stuff I felt I needed to explain in order to get past it, at the expense of pacing, believability and narrative sense. To get anything worthwhile from a story, the reader has to be able to experience it in a way that doesn't pull them out of it every time the author feels the need to muscle their way in for some more control. There are times, I have found, when you just have to give in to the narrative--otherwise you start making compromises to the integrity of the narrative that can cause everything to fall apart.
Which brings me to Mike. Mike's fate is currently undecided. For the longest time I've been trying to determine a reason for Mike to be there; trying to feel out a purpose for him in the story. This sounds a lot like reducing him to a function, but in this sense, characters become functions of the narrative--as a part of that narrative--rather than being reduced for the sake of functioning as part of a specific plot point or any motive that might lie behind the story. This doesn't mean denying the fact that characters drive the narrative, but rather that there is an interdependency between the two that develops organically and emerges along with other things such as themes and plot.
In the case of The Aberration, the narrative is already being driven, and moulded, by Master Beef and the plot and ideas that have formed around him. Whereas Beef had always been at the core of the story, even if later themes and character developments had not yet emerged, Mike, like several other characters (including Detective Muse, Sim Hyde and the Microwave) had always sort of been attached to the story for the sake of it. Unlike these others, however, Mike's reasons for creation, and attempts to develop him beyond that, have not leant themselves to enabling his character to be continually relevant, and though over the years I've repeatedly reduced his personal story to fit in with everything else, I've never quite been able to assimilate him completely into the coherent whole. In other words, I don't know what to do with him. While I feel he's worked in a perfectly valid way as a character so far, it's reached the point that the only thing that feels natural to do is to write him out of the story, maybe able to offer one or two more hints at the wider plot on his way out.
It does sound as if he's being judged by his worth to the plot, and to some extent this is true. But as already explained, the Mike's character has to relate to all the other aspects of the whole. The characters drive the story or narrative, which is the sequence of events. The plot--what the story is about--is something that, in this case, has emerged as these characters have been driving the story. Narrative, plot and character have all formed in a mutual sort of way. But Mike has ended up the odd one out. I could invent new story just for the sake of keeping him in the picture, but there's no point in having a character perpetuated in this way. His character, failing to resonate in the same way as the others, would require his own plot, if he was given any plot at all, and his story would be irrelevant.
With regard to killing off characters, a similar thing happened with the character of Mars in the early chapters of Starcustard, though in his case it was more an immediate demand of the world as we'd constructed it, rather than simply having no place for him in the story after that (although we may not have done anyway). In our excitement of plot we'd inadvertently pushed him into a situation that there was simply no way around if we didn't want to contradict everything we had already said.
The character of Mike has suffered rather from a lack of direction, in terms of plot and character. Many of the characters in The Aberration have ended up treading narrative backwater at various points in its history, causing me to re-evaluate and revise repeatedly in order to sustain it (most significantly when it was in its Manifesting Surreal iteration, consisting of mounting absurdity and about to collapse in on itself). As a result, though it's been far from easy, the narrative has begun to form into something that feels at least somewhat coherent. Unfortunately for Mike, for the time being at least, he is no longer a part of it.
As a final note (and a little hint at other things): although on the level of plot Mike's (apparent) death does nothing but remove him as something with no further use, on the level of the narrative--which can incorporate things like, say, meta-commentary--the very necessity of his removal may yet itself function as something more significant in terms of the wider narrative picture. If you follow that, I'll leave you to try and figure it out once you start getting a sense of what that wider picture is. Until then, the important thing, in terms of what this post has been getting at, is that this function operates as a valuable extra feature of the narrative, but does not exist at the expense of narrative integrity as a whole.
Edit 23/07/08: some slight rephrasing due to a confusion between the concepts of 'plot' and 'story/narrative' (I got them the wrong way around).
Labels: i am the ramblemaster, rabbit-hole theory, starcustard, the aberration
Friday, February 29, 2008
Happy Birthday, Master Beef
This whole thing was a disaster! Maybe if he looked into his new costume he would find help. NOOOOOOOOOOOO! It was a fluffy pink bunny costume rented from WarrenWorld Theme Park! The best thing he could do was to take a sharp turn left and go through the girls' bathroom.
It was five years ago this month, I realised, that I wrote the first parts of that Halo parody and put it on that legendary website which had been forged by the minds of two fourteen-year-old geniuses. In personal terms, that's a hell of a long time. Over a quarter of a lifetime ago, in fact. (Fat Man In Tweed proper had its second birthday sometime last week.)
Not only does this mean that the character of Master Beef, conceived by my fourteen-year-old mind, is five years old as well (and I'm still using him); it also means that I've been posting stuff online, under this guise of 'writer', for just as long. And I keep asking myself: why?
The original answer is obvious enough: I'm just playing around. That's what we were doing with Fod, and the myriad other websites that myself and the Artist Formerly Known As Olli created. That's what I've been doing ever since, with the boardfics as well as the websites. Whatever grand schemes I might stumble upon along the way, and however carried away or excited I might get about some big story or idea, in the end I'm doing it because I enjoy it. That doesn't mean I'm treating it trivially -- in fact, I put a lot of work into it, and probably take it all too seriously -- but ultimately this website is a hobby. First and foremost, it's a way to entertain myself, while at the same time being personally meaningful and fulfilling in the same way that any other hobby might be. I get to reap the personal benefits, whatever they may be, of exploring my own thoughts, performing amateurish experiments with the 'craft' of storytelling and nudging together a few other ideas.
The point of this website as an attempt at exploring myself and the world around me is a conclusion I at least sort of arrived at already. But this doesn't explain why I need a website to do it. Couldn't I do all this in private journals? Another obvious answer here which I've already given in previous ramblings is that by putting it online, I get to put it out there for everybody to see. I like to entertain others with this stuff, and maybe some distant reader somewhere will find something interesting about it beyond that, even if it's really not good enough to achieve publication anywhere else. That is the best and worst thing about the internet: you're free to post whatever crap you want.
The other thing about the internet is that you have a certain level of anonymity. Even if I put my name on every page, I remain mostly hidden from view. It's a weird position to take after admitting that I want people to see what I've written, but I'm actually more comfortable with it being read by silent strangers than by my friends, many of whom still don't even know this place exists. It allows me, as a ridiculously self-conscious person, to maintain this illusion of being alone with my thoughts, paradoxically aware that at the same time it's out there to be seen. This is why, on those rare occasions that some random person sends me a friendly message about the site, I find myself slightly unnerved.
Besides these floating few, however, and as much as I get paranoid about plastering my copyright over everything I post, it's probably another self-imposed, happy illusion to imagine that I have much of a readership at all. But Fat Man In Tweed has its benefits anyway. Being able to publish things at all makes me feel more productive, but posting online, specifically all on one website, gives me a focus point for my efforts. As a 'project', it feels more substantive and it gives me a place to bring my thoughts together. With the serial fictions like The Aberration, I get to conduct an ongoing exploration of my own version of ideas (in theory also leaving it there to be considered by others), and then, in areas where I feel like being a little more explicit, I can toddle over to this blog and write about it here, along with all the other stuff I've been thinking about. A lot of my more ponderous, recent blogposts tend to end on something of a triumphant note, not because I've made some important new philosophical discovery, but because I feel like I've been able to work through something on my own and come to at least some sort of conclusion.
Ever since its inception, I've been conscious of Fat Man In Tweed as more of an entity in itself than other website I've worked on. And because of that, it has turned into something else. All this going back and forth and cross-referencing myself could in part just be me dwelling in my own egotism, but the effect of having Fat Man In Tweed as a focus point for all these things, leading to everything sort of bouncing off each other, will hopefully mean that something will eventually begin to resonate in some kind of meaningful way. On a personal level, at least, I'm finding that this is true already, bringing to clearer attention those things that are really preoccupying my mind. The website, it turns out, can function as a nucleus of personal thought in unexpected, interesting, and maybe even useful ways. For all it contains, it's proving to be a worthwhile medium for expression in itself.
Labels: bananas and laxatives, boardfic, excerpts, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, webtechnical
Friday, September 28, 2007
The Fight Unfinished
I'm not getting Halo 3. Not any time soon, at least. The reason is simple: I don't have an Xbox 360. The problem with following video game franchises is that they are so ridiculously expensive. If you're lucky, you'll get one or two games out of one console. Then the industry will have advanced enough to require the next generation of consoles, and sometimes franchises will switch which series of consoles they play on to make it even more complicated. This latter point is not the case with the Halo series, but it was with another favourite of mine, Oddworld. Either way, however, that's £30-40 dished out for each game these days, on top of the cost of whatever mercilessly progressing technology is required to play it. This may be a reasonable price for what you're getting, but that issue aside, the endeavour remains gorgingly uncheap.
I wish I was getting Halo 3. I want to splatter higher-definition aliens. I want to experience that familiar and solid gameplay at the next level, as well as enjoying all the exciting new stuff. I want to see how the story ends. In many ways, a post about Halo 3 is pointless, because I haven't played it and therefore can't praise or bewail things all that much. But I thought I'd share my reasons for why I liked the first two games, which I hope have made it through to the third.
Originally, I couldn't have cared less about Halo. I would happily have chosen a PS2 to get my hands on the next Tekken game, but my brother persuaded me that we should go for an Xbox because that had the next Oddworld instalment. On Christmas Day, I waited impatiently to play it, and was unimpressed with Halo and the Star Trek aesthetic of the people behind bland control panels in the Pillar of Autumn opening sequence. Captain Keyes placed his blocky fingers thoughtfully at the chin of his barely moving face in utmost seriousness, and I laughed.
But when I gave it a chance, it was a lot of fun to play. Halo succeeds as a solid game because it's not overly complicated - it essentially provides you with lots of aliens to eliminate - but what it does, it does extremely well. It feels well-rounded and the campaign battles feel well-matched and satisfying, with very few encounters that will spike your irritation too much. Depending on the level of difficulty, it's often challenging but almost always enjoyable.
The aesthetic of the game also contributes to this feeling of a happy balance. The universe of Halo is a clunky, colourful one; slightly cartoonish, but perfectly capable of introducing darker themes and creepy places. The best example of this is probably how the walls end up smeared in copious amounts of brightly coloured alien blood. It's a bit like the Harry Potter of the video game world (in more than just popularity and hype, although perhaps for the same reasons): it never ventures too far in any direction and is arguably not all that innovative in terms of its medium1 nor of the story itself, but while critics have accused both franchises of a certain mediocrity in this respect, as I already said about Potter, I think this criticism sort misses the point: in what they're trying to do - creating an entertaining and immersive experience - they succeed. And, in Halo's case, I think it exceeds. Halo hasn't marched forward in innovation, but it has expertly refined its medium, striking a successful balance with all the things it deals with.
Given that many elements of the story are pretty generic, there must something else that gives the story itself some interest. Like a Potter book, the plot is immersive enough. The story in the games themselves is really a bare minimum, but in the franchise as a whole they have a pretty good mythology going. Without knowing the ending, I don't know if it all leads to a satisfying conclusion, but so far it's been intriguing. What I find most appealing about the story, however, is exactly how they go about it.
Amidst all the generic sci-fi stuff, coupled with its unusual aesthetic, the series' story does have a few of its own unique quirks that, if nothing else, serve to give it character. I'd highlight characters like 343 Guilty Spark and the mysterious Forerunners with the novelly cryptic nature of everything about them; and then the thematic use of religious symbology and imagery in everything about the Covenant. If the Halo series attempts to make a point, the most interesting one for me is how the Covenant, in their religious conquest, wrap everything they say and do in terms of poetic, religious language. The series may or may not have anything against the religions of our world per se, but they bring this aspect of religion - and general language use - to stark, transparent ridiculousness. It's not subtle (none of the thematic devices in Halo are) and it's an almost cartoon-like dimension of the Covenant, but it's still an effective view, if perhaps oversimplified (those Elites must be extremely gullible by nature), of how these things can work.
Just to address the portrayal of religion in general: it's not clear to me if any other point against it is being made. With the story drenched in so many references and symbolic allusions, especially with the Covenant, you'd think maybe there might be, but if this is so, really everything is too morally black and white (aliens vs. humans) to be an accurate representation or allegory of any one religion or of religion as a whole. The Covenant is categorically and blatantly evil - even when the Arbiter is introduced in the second game, that's really only to chronicle his escape from the Covenant's illusions and mental clutches rather than to balance their portrayal. Thematically, at least following this particular line of thought, while it offers some simple, effective illustrations, you can't go very deep with Halo before you hit that cartoon factor again.
I think the structure of both the narrative and the gameplay was better in Halo than it was in Halo 2. The first game has garnered many accusations of being repetitive, and a good portion of the levels are done backwards later on in the game. Gameplaywise, this didn't bother me much, because I thought the rearrangement made it fresh enough. Storywise, it gave the narrative a nice symmetrical structure. It begins with the escape from the exploding Pillar of Autumn, and the game ends with a return trip to the ship's creepy ruin, made all the more creepy because we'd seen it before in better conditions (then, of course, followed by an amazing countdown finale). The unexpected appearance of the Flood in the middle of the game really adds to it in this way, transforming both the story and the gameplay despite the level repetition.
Halo 2 was a bit messier. The introduction of the Arbiter's storyline was interesting, but I don't think it quite worked in some ways. For one thing, I always found the Elites more menacing when they weren't speaking English, and while this might be narratively important for showing some sympathy towards Elite-kind, they seemed like more of a threat during gameplay, somehow, in the previous game. I felt there was generally a slight increase in the cartooniness of the proceedings, especially with the appearance of the Prophets and Gravemind. Halo 2 also lacked the narrative structure: the ending wasn't half as interesting and was, of course, notoriously abrupt. The opening attack and the appearance of the Flood had been done before, and though I did like the civil war stuff, and it was generally a solid game, it didn't achieve quite the same balance as its predecessor.
Despite some slight shortcomings, however, the sequel shared many of the original's positive attributes, and both games are excellent. In gameplay, they're good--extremely good--at what they do. Combine this with Halo's quirky (albeit slightly cartoony) character, and it makes for an appealing series of games. Probably some of my fondness for the series comes from the familiarity I gained when I chose to explore it for that certain parody, but weird sentimentality aside, Halo has a lot going for it. If anyone wants to buy me a copy of Halo 3 along with an Xbox 360, feel free.
See also: Master Beef vs. Master Chief 2007.
1 Halo is a pretty straightforward shoot-'em-up; Rowling's writing is technically nothing amazing in any artistic or linguistic sense, but as an entertaining and absorbing read, it's very successful.
I wish I was getting Halo 3. I want to splatter higher-definition aliens. I want to experience that familiar and solid gameplay at the next level, as well as enjoying all the exciting new stuff. I want to see how the story ends. In many ways, a post about Halo 3 is pointless, because I haven't played it and therefore can't praise or bewail things all that much. But I thought I'd share my reasons for why I liked the first two games, which I hope have made it through to the third.
Originally, I couldn't have cared less about Halo. I would happily have chosen a PS2 to get my hands on the next Tekken game, but my brother persuaded me that we should go for an Xbox because that had the next Oddworld instalment. On Christmas Day, I waited impatiently to play it, and was unimpressed with Halo and the Star Trek aesthetic of the people behind bland control panels in the Pillar of Autumn opening sequence. Captain Keyes placed his blocky fingers thoughtfully at the chin of his barely moving face in utmost seriousness, and I laughed.
But when I gave it a chance, it was a lot of fun to play. Halo succeeds as a solid game because it's not overly complicated - it essentially provides you with lots of aliens to eliminate - but what it does, it does extremely well. It feels well-rounded and the campaign battles feel well-matched and satisfying, with very few encounters that will spike your irritation too much. Depending on the level of difficulty, it's often challenging but almost always enjoyable.
The aesthetic of the game also contributes to this feeling of a happy balance. The universe of Halo is a clunky, colourful one; slightly cartoonish, but perfectly capable of introducing darker themes and creepy places. The best example of this is probably how the walls end up smeared in copious amounts of brightly coloured alien blood. It's a bit like the Harry Potter of the video game world (in more than just popularity and hype, although perhaps for the same reasons): it never ventures too far in any direction and is arguably not all that innovative in terms of its medium1 nor of the story itself, but while critics have accused both franchises of a certain mediocrity in this respect, as I already said about Potter, I think this criticism sort misses the point: in what they're trying to do - creating an entertaining and immersive experience - they succeed. And, in Halo's case, I think it exceeds. Halo hasn't marched forward in innovation, but it has expertly refined its medium, striking a successful balance with all the things it deals with.
Given that many elements of the story are pretty generic, there must something else that gives the story itself some interest. Like a Potter book, the plot is immersive enough. The story in the games themselves is really a bare minimum, but in the franchise as a whole they have a pretty good mythology going. Without knowing the ending, I don't know if it all leads to a satisfying conclusion, but so far it's been intriguing. What I find most appealing about the story, however, is exactly how they go about it.
Amidst all the generic sci-fi stuff, coupled with its unusual aesthetic, the series' story does have a few of its own unique quirks that, if nothing else, serve to give it character. I'd highlight characters like 343 Guilty Spark and the mysterious Forerunners with the novelly cryptic nature of everything about them; and then the thematic use of religious symbology and imagery in everything about the Covenant. If the Halo series attempts to make a point, the most interesting one for me is how the Covenant, in their religious conquest, wrap everything they say and do in terms of poetic, religious language. The series may or may not have anything against the religions of our world per se, but they bring this aspect of religion - and general language use - to stark, transparent ridiculousness. It's not subtle (none of the thematic devices in Halo are) and it's an almost cartoon-like dimension of the Covenant, but it's still an effective view, if perhaps oversimplified (those Elites must be extremely gullible by nature), of how these things can work.
Just to address the portrayal of religion in general: it's not clear to me if any other point against it is being made. With the story drenched in so many references and symbolic allusions, especially with the Covenant, you'd think maybe there might be, but if this is so, really everything is too morally black and white (aliens vs. humans) to be an accurate representation or allegory of any one religion or of religion as a whole. The Covenant is categorically and blatantly evil - even when the Arbiter is introduced in the second game, that's really only to chronicle his escape from the Covenant's illusions and mental clutches rather than to balance their portrayal. Thematically, at least following this particular line of thought, while it offers some simple, effective illustrations, you can't go very deep with Halo before you hit that cartoon factor again.
I think the structure of both the narrative and the gameplay was better in Halo than it was in Halo 2. The first game has garnered many accusations of being repetitive, and a good portion of the levels are done backwards later on in the game. Gameplaywise, this didn't bother me much, because I thought the rearrangement made it fresh enough. Storywise, it gave the narrative a nice symmetrical structure. It begins with the escape from the exploding Pillar of Autumn, and the game ends with a return trip to the ship's creepy ruin, made all the more creepy because we'd seen it before in better conditions (then, of course, followed by an amazing countdown finale). The unexpected appearance of the Flood in the middle of the game really adds to it in this way, transforming both the story and the gameplay despite the level repetition.
Halo 2 was a bit messier. The introduction of the Arbiter's storyline was interesting, but I don't think it quite worked in some ways. For one thing, I always found the Elites more menacing when they weren't speaking English, and while this might be narratively important for showing some sympathy towards Elite-kind, they seemed like more of a threat during gameplay, somehow, in the previous game. I felt there was generally a slight increase in the cartooniness of the proceedings, especially with the appearance of the Prophets and Gravemind. Halo 2 also lacked the narrative structure: the ending wasn't half as interesting and was, of course, notoriously abrupt. The opening attack and the appearance of the Flood had been done before, and though I did like the civil war stuff, and it was generally a solid game, it didn't achieve quite the same balance as its predecessor.
Despite some slight shortcomings, however, the sequel shared many of the original's positive attributes, and both games are excellent. In gameplay, they're good--extremely good--at what they do. Combine this with Halo's quirky (albeit slightly cartoony) character, and it makes for an appealing series of games. Probably some of my fondness for the series comes from the familiarity I gained when I chose to explore it for that certain parody, but weird sentimentality aside, Halo has a lot going for it. If anyone wants to buy me a copy of Halo 3 along with an Xbox 360, feel free.
See also: Master Beef vs. Master Chief 2007.
1 Halo is a pretty straightforward shoot-'em-up; Rowling's writing is technically nothing amazing in any artistic or linguistic sense, but as an entertaining and absorbing read, it's very successful.
Labels: halo, harry potter, i am the ramblemaster, language, morality, oddworld, tekken, the aberration, videogames
Friday, July 20, 2007
Amelia's Notebooks
The Aberration Chapter 7.
Amelia really does have that many notebooks. I've never seen them myself, but she has mentioned them more than once. She has lots for all different kinds of things and thoughts and ideas. I wonder if you could assemble all the contents of her brain with those notebooks, like a sort of psychological biography with a split personality. I know that the black one is for Starcustard. I am sure at least one of them contains a list of the children she has yet to eat.
She is not here right now, so I can get away with saying these things for at least another eighteen months.
Underneath that Sherlock Holmes reference is a considerable amount of truth. I lack the notebooks of both fictional and factual Amelias, but the same sort of process goes on in my brain when I'm trying to write a story. Things like sciencing and philosophising and most probably detectiving too all require very analytical approaches to be of much use. Storytelling, however, is the opposite. You can get ideas from all over the place, and while they might all share the same theme or have something in common, you're still left with the task of making something coherent out of what is essentially arbitrary. Whatever reason you might have for including something, whether as a plot device or to represent something or just because you thought it'd be cool to throw in, they're still only there because you put them there.1 There is therefore a great deal of Detective Muse's making stuff up as you go along.
As I've mentioned before, The Aberration has been a continuous struggle to try and achieve this. I started off with a couple of Halo parody characters, included a few more things just because I thought they were interesting enough, and then over the years the story has repeatedly run out of steam as I've tried to figure out where to go next or what relation any of it has to anything else. Its current form is very different from its earlier iterations, in which the aim was basically just to fill it with weird things, because I've got stuck and had to go back and change things constantly.
I've finally mapped out something that's a bit more coherent than it used to be, by mentally rearranging and adding to and editing the thing until it's formed something I can actually go somewhere with. But does all this arbitrariness, the fact that everything included is ultimately an arbitrary decision, mean that stories are empty? Well, as tA has shown, there's actually a limit to how arbitrary everything can be before it falls apart. It has to have some coherence, and even if the story works by its own internal logic or requires some suspension of disbelief, the logic still has to be there, and any kind of sustainable logic has to be based at least in part on reality.
Fictional stories are, for the most part, contrived. And creating the illusion that these things aren't arbitrary is all part of the craft. But reality plays its part, and the further a story drifts from it, the less believable it will be. This doesn't mean you can't include fantastical elements in your world's internal logic, and as Holmes points out and Detective Muse echoes in this chapter, improbability is not the same thing as impossibility. But that internal logic needs to be solid.
So where does this leave the meaningfulness of a story, beyond its entertainment value or simple emotional engagement? That internal logic, however sustainable or believable it might be, could still be considered arbitrary. Can you use a story to analyse or demonstrate something? Can you show, say, the personal, social or political consequences of certain circumstances being brought about? Or present a moral lesson or a warning? You can't scientifically analyse a work of fiction any more than you can analyse a dream (albeit a slightly more focused dream). But if the logic behind the story is reasonable enough, you can suggest. You, as the author, can throw light on an alternative interpretation; your interpretation. Conclusions drawn from a writer's own fictional world -- by the writer and reader -- can never be truly objective, but they can offer some balance of thoughts and ideas. In the end, you can't really conclude anything with a story. They can only offer questions. They can offer a new perspective, one that will always be open to criticism but is not necessarily without its worth. That, to me, is part of what it's all about.
And, as in the case of tA, things like fat men in tweed or talking microwaves or a man dressed in a mutated sort of rabbit costume, even if they were included out of complete arbitrariness to start with, can still become something suggestive or figurative in the context of their function in the story. And who knows, maybe there was already some subconscious significance to them.
So Detective Muse has a point, even if Mr Holmes might disagree that it applies in entirely the same way to his profession. Don't diss the improbable, don't diss the ridiculous, and don't be too quick to diss the arbitrary.
1 Which is why allegory can seem so manipulative.
Amelia really does have that many notebooks. I've never seen them myself, but she has mentioned them more than once. She has lots for all different kinds of things and thoughts and ideas. I wonder if you could assemble all the contents of her brain with those notebooks, like a sort of psychological biography with a split personality. I know that the black one is for Starcustard. I am sure at least one of them contains a list of the children she has yet to eat.
She is not here right now, so I can get away with saying these things for at least another eighteen months.
Underneath that Sherlock Holmes reference is a considerable amount of truth. I lack the notebooks of both fictional and factual Amelias, but the same sort of process goes on in my brain when I'm trying to write a story. Things like sciencing and philosophising and most probably detectiving too all require very analytical approaches to be of much use. Storytelling, however, is the opposite. You can get ideas from all over the place, and while they might all share the same theme or have something in common, you're still left with the task of making something coherent out of what is essentially arbitrary. Whatever reason you might have for including something, whether as a plot device or to represent something or just because you thought it'd be cool to throw in, they're still only there because you put them there.1 There is therefore a great deal of Detective Muse's making stuff up as you go along.
As I've mentioned before, The Aberration has been a continuous struggle to try and achieve this. I started off with a couple of Halo parody characters, included a few more things just because I thought they were interesting enough, and then over the years the story has repeatedly run out of steam as I've tried to figure out where to go next or what relation any of it has to anything else. Its current form is very different from its earlier iterations, in which the aim was basically just to fill it with weird things, because I've got stuck and had to go back and change things constantly.
I've finally mapped out something that's a bit more coherent than it used to be, by mentally rearranging and adding to and editing the thing until it's formed something I can actually go somewhere with. But does all this arbitrariness, the fact that everything included is ultimately an arbitrary decision, mean that stories are empty? Well, as tA has shown, there's actually a limit to how arbitrary everything can be before it falls apart. It has to have some coherence, and even if the story works by its own internal logic or requires some suspension of disbelief, the logic still has to be there, and any kind of sustainable logic has to be based at least in part on reality.
Fictional stories are, for the most part, contrived. And creating the illusion that these things aren't arbitrary is all part of the craft. But reality plays its part, and the further a story drifts from it, the less believable it will be. This doesn't mean you can't include fantastical elements in your world's internal logic, and as Holmes points out and Detective Muse echoes in this chapter, improbability is not the same thing as impossibility. But that internal logic needs to be solid.
So where does this leave the meaningfulness of a story, beyond its entertainment value or simple emotional engagement? That internal logic, however sustainable or believable it might be, could still be considered arbitrary. Can you use a story to analyse or demonstrate something? Can you show, say, the personal, social or political consequences of certain circumstances being brought about? Or present a moral lesson or a warning? You can't scientifically analyse a work of fiction any more than you can analyse a dream (albeit a slightly more focused dream). But if the logic behind the story is reasonable enough, you can suggest. You, as the author, can throw light on an alternative interpretation; your interpretation. Conclusions drawn from a writer's own fictional world -- by the writer and reader -- can never be truly objective, but they can offer some balance of thoughts and ideas. In the end, you can't really conclude anything with a story. They can only offer questions. They can offer a new perspective, one that will always be open to criticism but is not necessarily without its worth. That, to me, is part of what it's all about.
And, as in the case of tA, things like fat men in tweed or talking microwaves or a man dressed in a mutated sort of rabbit costume, even if they were included out of complete arbitrariness to start with, can still become something suggestive or figurative in the context of their function in the story. And who knows, maybe there was already some subconscious significance to them.
So Detective Muse has a point, even if Mr Holmes might disagree that it applies in entirely the same way to his profession. Don't diss the improbable, don't diss the ridiculous, and don't be too quick to diss the arbitrary.
1 Which is why allegory can seem so manipulative.
Labels: allegory, fat men in tweed, halo, i am the ramblemaster, science, starcustard, the aberration
Saturday, November 18, 2006
A Foreword In Hindsight
When you begin a story, you don't really know in which direction it's going to go. Well, I don't. And it can take a while for things to start to come together and for ideas to solidify, and sometimes I'm left changing something over and over and over because every single time there is something I'm not satisfied with. Every time I'll say, 'This is it! This is the absolute final version!', more recently prefixed with the word 'hopefully' with as much emphasis through italics, bolding, underlining or capitalising as I feel my desperation warrants, but then a week or a month later I'll want to go back and change it.
This has been a chronic issue with one story in particular. But then, that's what I get for deciding that I want a story revolving around a character called Master Beef. Why have I been so intent on writing a story about Master Beef? It's been causing me to tear my hair out at various points for the last three years, and with each revision there's been something that I'm just not happy with; something not quite right with how I've written it.
I think...I may be mad. How it's even got to this stage, I do not know.
But now I can honestly say things are finally starting to come together. As I have discussed at intolerable length before, the various components of The Aberration have come from all over the place, but now everything feels relevant, coherent and properly part of the whole, although it has taken a long time for it to be this way.
It is still a story about Master Beef. It has always been a story about Master Beef, and it always will be. There are still one or two characters shamelessly based on people I know that I just thought it would be cool to include. There are also still gratuitous references to a certain video game. There are still these ideas from all over the place, but everything finally feels as though it's starting to properly come together, and although I most definitely do not have it all completely figured out yet (where would be the fun in that?), I think I'm ready to present this story more or less as I want it to be.
I'm not going to lie and say that I won't go back and make some more changes if I see the need to, but whereas with previous revisions there have been feelings of, 'Gngh. It's not great, but it'll do,' thus leading to further revisions later on, this time...I'm just about happy with it. So go read it again!
And here's Chapter 6. It's odd that for so long I've been striving to get Beef just right, basing it on some perception of the character that never was in any previous version of him. But I think I've finally nailed it.
This has been a chronic issue with one story in particular. But then, that's what I get for deciding that I want a story revolving around a character called Master Beef. Why have I been so intent on writing a story about Master Beef? It's been causing me to tear my hair out at various points for the last three years, and with each revision there's been something that I'm just not happy with; something not quite right with how I've written it.
I think...I may be mad. How it's even got to this stage, I do not know.
But now I can honestly say things are finally starting to come together. As I have discussed at intolerable length before, the various components of The Aberration have come from all over the place, but now everything feels relevant, coherent and properly part of the whole, although it has taken a long time for it to be this way.
It is still a story about Master Beef. It has always been a story about Master Beef, and it always will be. There are still one or two characters shamelessly based on people I know that I just thought it would be cool to include. There are also still gratuitous references to a certain video game. There are still these ideas from all over the place, but everything finally feels as though it's starting to properly come together, and although I most definitely do not have it all completely figured out yet (where would be the fun in that?), I think I'm ready to present this story more or less as I want it to be.
I'm not going to lie and say that I won't go back and make some more changes if I see the need to, but whereas with previous revisions there have been feelings of, 'Gngh. It's not great, but it'll do,' thus leading to further revisions later on, this time...I'm just about happy with it. So go read it again!
And here's Chapter 6. It's odd that for so long I've been striving to get Beef just right, basing it on some perception of the character that never was in any previous version of him. But I think I've finally nailed it.
Labels: halo, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, videogames
Friday, October 13, 2006
Some Good, Old Fashioned Silliness
Back all those many years ago in 2003 when I decided 'I want to write humour', it quickly developed into a marathon of ridiculousness, which escalated millionfold. Funny equalled absurd. Overarching plot was not a main concern.
These days, it's no longer a case of 'I want to write humour'. It's back to, 'I want to write a good story', in which, when I can manage it, humour in whatever form (be it through parody, satire, irony, surreality or whatever) is just another layer in the whole thing. Sure, the end product could have any one of those things (and that whole period of seeking to write in that way definitely made a lasting impression on my whole writing style), but they're not ends I specifically aim for.
Some of my older online stuff (i.e. pre-FMIT) really was just me being as weird, surreal or downright silly as I could get it. The best example of this is most definitely the collaborative effort Agaffa, which had a minimal plot that was really quite hard to follow, and chronicled the exploits of two pretty horrific characters with other things happening mostly as vague background noise. Although Cholesterol the fat, talking monkey will forever have a place in my heart. And then there's The Manifesting Surreal, the previous incarnation of the current Aberration, the premise of which was quite simply as the name suggests: things got weirder and weirder until everything started to fall apart.
These days, as I said before, it's a little bit different. A greater focus on story (or at least on more tangible ideas rather than just a load of random stuff thrown together) has also meant that, in an unintentional sort of way, the stories are slightly more... grounded. Probably just as surreal and odd, but in a less overtly and forcefully outrageous way.
Over the years, The Aberration has changed. Starcustard started out with a tongue-in-cheek feel to it that is still evident, but turned out quite different to anything we would have expected. City of Anarchy is still weird, but the focus is now what has grown into a fairly complex plot.
But, see, now there's Jesnails. Which will be parody, satire, surreality, irony, absurdity and, quite frankly, as much crazy stuff as the concept allows while still being coherent enough not to fall apart. We would be lying if we said we weren't, at this point, here to present the profoundly silly, freakish and bizarre in the most flamboyant and shameless way possible.
So it's all very well for me to say that I've moved on from all that silliness, and I can talk about big concepts, ideas, themes and thoughts until the cows return from their trip to the moon, but really I haven't moved away from it at all. Jesnails is a refreshing reminder of that. And it is something still present in everything I do, reminding me never to take things too seriously, because some things just aren't worth taking seriously.
Jesnails 1875, Part I.
These days, it's no longer a case of 'I want to write humour'. It's back to, 'I want to write a good story', in which, when I can manage it, humour in whatever form (be it through parody, satire, irony, surreality or whatever) is just another layer in the whole thing. Sure, the end product could have any one of those things (and that whole period of seeking to write in that way definitely made a lasting impression on my whole writing style), but they're not ends I specifically aim for.
Some of my older online stuff (i.e. pre-FMIT) really was just me being as weird, surreal or downright silly as I could get it. The best example of this is most definitely the collaborative effort Agaffa, which had a minimal plot that was really quite hard to follow, and chronicled the exploits of two pretty horrific characters with other things happening mostly as vague background noise. Although Cholesterol the fat, talking monkey will forever have a place in my heart. And then there's The Manifesting Surreal, the previous incarnation of the current Aberration, the premise of which was quite simply as the name suggests: things got weirder and weirder until everything started to fall apart.
These days, as I said before, it's a little bit different. A greater focus on story (or at least on more tangible ideas rather than just a load of random stuff thrown together) has also meant that, in an unintentional sort of way, the stories are slightly more... grounded. Probably just as surreal and odd, but in a less overtly and forcefully outrageous way.
Over the years, The Aberration has changed. Starcustard started out with a tongue-in-cheek feel to it that is still evident, but turned out quite different to anything we would have expected. City of Anarchy is still weird, but the focus is now what has grown into a fairly complex plot.
But, see, now there's Jesnails. Which will be parody, satire, surreality, irony, absurdity and, quite frankly, as much crazy stuff as the concept allows while still being coherent enough not to fall apart. We would be lying if we said we weren't, at this point, here to present the profoundly silly, freakish and bizarre in the most flamboyant and shameless way possible.
So it's all very well for me to say that I've moved on from all that silliness, and I can talk about big concepts, ideas, themes and thoughts until the cows return from their trip to the moon, but really I haven't moved away from it at all. Jesnails is a refreshing reminder of that. And it is something still present in everything I do, reminding me never to take things too seriously, because some things just aren't worth taking seriously.
Jesnails 1875, Part I.
Labels: agaffa, city of anarchy, i am the ramblemaster, jesnails, starcustard, the aberration
Friday, July 21, 2006
Freakshow
So, dragons.
Dragons like to do everything on a grand scale. Flamboyant, ambitious and perhaps a tad egotistical, they love to be the centre of attention. Or so it is according to the Chinese zodiac.
One day I'm going to create my own zodiac, probably, and those born on the exact date and the exact time as myself, with the same name and characteristics, will be the great ones. But for now, I'll stick with what we have, and with that, I'm probably more in line with my supposed Western sign, Scorpio.
But I noticed an interesting thing about dragons.
And, inevitably, it's to do with writing.
To come from a seemingly total otherdirection: why do I write?
No...that's too big a question for just yet. How do I write? Cinematically. This is something I've realised quite recently, especially during the bigger, more action-orientated events in a story. Even if it doesn't always turn out that way in the end, the approach is cinematic. I get an image in my mind's eye, sometimes a very specific image, literally looked at from a certain angle, and I try to put it into words. In City of Anarchy, there's Hermes being launched into the sky as a building explodes underneath him, for example; Chimaera in SciBoard Fiction forcing the snout of the shotgun into the top of the alien's head and firing; or vehicles being hurled into the air and thrown into buildings as the fat men in tweed pursue the Mini Cooper down the street in The Aberration.
But why do I write like this? To impress? To turn to the audience and go, 'Look what insane and spectacular stuff I can make happen!'
I think I'm guilty of this even more than I realise. I do tend, I'll admit, to get a bit carried away. When I first posted City of Anarchy I had people going 'Is this story going to give me nightmares?', and while I was staging a zombie versus pirate fight in SciBoard Resurrection, the climax of which was a hundred barrels of gunpowder and rum igniting and tearing the pirate ship apart, I was too busy having altogether too much fun with it to realise how over-the-top it was, and ended up having someone commenting, accompanied by a shocked-looking smiley, 'My dear God. Not afraid of spectacle, are you?'
So is that all it is? Spectacle? Am I some sort of literary showman, with trailers and posters and general enthusiasm, trying to gather an audience to witness this showcase, this freakshow, that I have brought before the public?
It's that dragon thing, in a way. Eccentricity and flamboyancy. Showing off. Being the centre of attention, which all writers love to be, even though some might pretend otherwise.
But then, while I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some delight in people responding with pop-eyed smilies when I present the absurd, the dark or the unusual, entertaining other people is actually a very small part of it. It's much more selfish than that. I do it to entertain myself.
Picture, if you will, a dark and eerily-lit laboratory. Its centrepiece is a large slab, upon which lies a dormant creature of freakish qualities; and somewhere to the right is I, the mad but nevertheless genius scientist, cackling maniacally and bringing down a giant lever with all my force. Impressive lightning effects ensue, and the monster becomes alive. I shriek with glee at that which I have created.
Enthusiasm, sometimes demented, is needed to bring ideas to life, whether it's being curious about or taking interest in some line of thought or image, or throwing yourself full-force into a concept or hypothetical world, either way exploring it and seeing what interesting things you can find.
This is why I write. This is what I love about writing. It can be figuring out a way of telling or presenting a story, through the way I use language and the way I construct different scenes and situations, or it can be examining what-if scenarios: what if there was a universe with giant slugs that wore wigs and slippers? What would happen if such an aspect of history was changed in this way? Fat men in tweed as seemingly inhuman, terrifying monsters...weird, eh?
Entertainment. Imagination. Perspective. Causality, history, humanity.
Exploring, experimenting, seeing what happens. Making something good out of it, and making something interesting.
Dragons like to do everything on a grand scale. Flamboyant, ambitious and perhaps a tad egotistical, they love to be the centre of attention. Or so it is according to the Chinese zodiac.
One day I'm going to create my own zodiac, probably, and those born on the exact date and the exact time as myself, with the same name and characteristics, will be the great ones. But for now, I'll stick with what we have, and with that, I'm probably more in line with my supposed Western sign, Scorpio.
But I noticed an interesting thing about dragons.
And, inevitably, it's to do with writing.
To come from a seemingly total otherdirection: why do I write?
No...that's too big a question for just yet. How do I write? Cinematically. This is something I've realised quite recently, especially during the bigger, more action-orientated events in a story. Even if it doesn't always turn out that way in the end, the approach is cinematic. I get an image in my mind's eye, sometimes a very specific image, literally looked at from a certain angle, and I try to put it into words. In City of Anarchy, there's Hermes being launched into the sky as a building explodes underneath him, for example; Chimaera in SciBoard Fiction forcing the snout of the shotgun into the top of the alien's head and firing; or vehicles being hurled into the air and thrown into buildings as the fat men in tweed pursue the Mini Cooper down the street in The Aberration.
But why do I write like this? To impress? To turn to the audience and go, 'Look what insane and spectacular stuff I can make happen!'
'Woah,' said the detective.
I think I'm guilty of this even more than I realise. I do tend, I'll admit, to get a bit carried away. When I first posted City of Anarchy I had people going 'Is this story going to give me nightmares?', and while I was staging a zombie versus pirate fight in SciBoard Resurrection, the climax of which was a hundred barrels of gunpowder and rum igniting and tearing the pirate ship apart, I was too busy having altogether too much fun with it to realise how over-the-top it was, and ended up having someone commenting, accompanied by a shocked-looking smiley, 'My dear God. Not afraid of spectacle, are you?'
So is that all it is? Spectacle? Am I some sort of literary showman, with trailers and posters and general enthusiasm, trying to gather an audience to witness this showcase, this freakshow, that I have brought before the public?
It's that dragon thing, in a way. Eccentricity and flamboyancy. Showing off. Being the centre of attention, which all writers love to be, even though some might pretend otherwise.
But then, while I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some delight in people responding with pop-eyed smilies when I present the absurd, the dark or the unusual, entertaining other people is actually a very small part of it. It's much more selfish than that. I do it to entertain myself.
Picture, if you will, a dark and eerily-lit laboratory. Its centrepiece is a large slab, upon which lies a dormant creature of freakish qualities; and somewhere to the right is I, the mad but nevertheless genius scientist, cackling maniacally and bringing down a giant lever with all my force. Impressive lightning effects ensue, and the monster becomes alive. I shriek with glee at that which I have created.
Enthusiasm, sometimes demented, is needed to bring ideas to life, whether it's being curious about or taking interest in some line of thought or image, or throwing yourself full-force into a concept or hypothetical world, either way exploring it and seeing what interesting things you can find.
This is why I write. This is what I love about writing. It can be figuring out a way of telling or presenting a story, through the way I use language and the way I construct different scenes and situations, or it can be examining what-if scenarios: what if there was a universe with giant slugs that wore wigs and slippers? What would happen if such an aspect of history was changed in this way? Fat men in tweed as seemingly inhuman, terrifying monsters...weird, eh?
Entertainment. Imagination. Perspective. Causality, history, humanity.
Exploring, experimenting, seeing what happens. Making something good out of it, and making something interesting.
Labels: boardfic, city of anarchy, excerpts, fat men in tweed, i am the ramblemaster, starcustard, the aberration
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Irregular As Clockwork
Back in February, Amelia and I went through all the old Starcustard chapters, most thoroughly the first, and picked out and changed lots of bits with awkward syntax or phrasing (admittedly, they were mostly mine), so it was all nice and improved for the FMIT launch.
However, writing Chapter 6 these past few weeks, we've found we've had to go back again and take out or change a few more things, only this time for different reasons.
There are ideas that don't seem to fit so well now that we've defined the Starcustard universe a bit better. For example, we got rid of teleporting, which was briefly mentioned in a quick description of the slavekid card catalogue, because that makes things too easy.
There are also things that, in the context of the chapter, are so minor that they've merely been mentioned in passing, but that could potentially lead to some pretty sloppy plotholes if we don't see to them. The example of this that we found this time round we did actually try to sort out in Chapter 6, only to find out that the idea just didn't work, so we had to cut it out completely.
And then there was a single word we had to get rid of because we'd used it when we had a much vaguer idea of where that aspect of the story was going. While working on the sixth chapter, we had a long, deep conversation about where the story is going way beyond where it's at now and more than we ever have before, ranging from doctors to darkness and wide story arcs. And so we've had to go back and change this one little word, now that we have a clearer picture.
They were all very minor changes in the context of the chapters we've published so far, but all of them could have caused problems or huge differences as the story advanced. That's one of the main features of a system where each chapter is published when it's finished and you don't know where everything goes next. You have to constantly go back and edit what people have already read. If you're lucky, this is just minor things.
But then sometimes it isn't. I think there are few stories that have undergone as many drafts, redrafts and recreations as The Aberration. After their 'final' redraft for the FMIT launch a few months ago, I was supposed to leave those first few chapters alone for good. However, this week, as well as the usual syntax proofreading and some almost invisible minor changes, I've gone back and made more slightly bigger changes.
Minor TA spoilers follow.
The first isn't especially exciting, but here it is just so you don't have to go back and read it all again. The type of metal Beef encounters, which started off as copper-coloured, then went to shiny and silver when I posted it online, and then to green, is now back to copper-coloured. These changes happened for various reasons that I can't really go into as I kept changing my mind about things, but now (I think) I'm finally settled on it.
The second is the addition of the strange clock as the object they find inside the porcelain woman. For the past few months it's been a boring, bleeping sort of object that has mostly just been there as a more credible replacement for the note that they find in the old Kommingle version of the story. I just thought the clock would be more interesting. If you want, you can go and read Chapter 2 to see its new ending.
Hopefully, I can leave those chapters alone now. Poor things. But, you never know.
You can expect an extended Chapter 5, though. That'll be posted along with the new chapter in the not-so-distant future.
Before that, however: City of Anarchy.
(And yes, I've been going through that, too.)
One final note, harking back to the beginning of this post: Starcustard has a new opening track! As grateful as we are to friend Lonkey for coming up with Fleetwood Mac's Albatross at the last minute almost two years ago, we've decided it didn't sit quite right as the opening track (and also I personally now loathe it after all those M&S Food adverts), and replaced it with... Mystery, by Kelley Stoltz (some guy Melia found).
However, writing Chapter 6 these past few weeks, we've found we've had to go back again and take out or change a few more things, only this time for different reasons.
There are ideas that don't seem to fit so well now that we've defined the Starcustard universe a bit better. For example, we got rid of teleporting, which was briefly mentioned in a quick description of the slavekid card catalogue, because that makes things too easy.
There are also things that, in the context of the chapter, are so minor that they've merely been mentioned in passing, but that could potentially lead to some pretty sloppy plotholes if we don't see to them. The example of this that we found this time round we did actually try to sort out in Chapter 6, only to find out that the idea just didn't work, so we had to cut it out completely.
And then there was a single word we had to get rid of because we'd used it when we had a much vaguer idea of where that aspect of the story was going. While working on the sixth chapter, we had a long, deep conversation about where the story is going way beyond where it's at now and more than we ever have before, ranging from doctors to darkness and wide story arcs. And so we've had to go back and change this one little word, now that we have a clearer picture.
They were all very minor changes in the context of the chapters we've published so far, but all of them could have caused problems or huge differences as the story advanced. That's one of the main features of a system where each chapter is published when it's finished and you don't know where everything goes next. You have to constantly go back and edit what people have already read. If you're lucky, this is just minor things.
But then sometimes it isn't. I think there are few stories that have undergone as many drafts, redrafts and recreations as The Aberration. After their 'final' redraft for the FMIT launch a few months ago, I was supposed to leave those first few chapters alone for good. However, this week, as well as the usual syntax proofreading and some almost invisible minor changes, I've gone back and made more slightly bigger changes.
Minor TA spoilers follow.
The first isn't especially exciting, but here it is just so you don't have to go back and read it all again. The type of metal Beef encounters, which started off as copper-coloured, then went to shiny and silver when I posted it online, and then to green, is now back to copper-coloured. These changes happened for various reasons that I can't really go into as I kept changing my mind about things, but now (I think) I'm finally settled on it.
The second is the addition of the strange clock as the object they find inside the porcelain woman. For the past few months it's been a boring, bleeping sort of object that has mostly just been there as a more credible replacement for the note that they find in the old Kommingle version of the story. I just thought the clock would be more interesting. If you want, you can go and read Chapter 2 to see its new ending.
Hopefully, I can leave those chapters alone now. Poor things. But, you never know.
You can expect an extended Chapter 5, though. That'll be posted along with the new chapter in the not-so-distant future.
Before that, however: City of Anarchy.
(And yes, I've been going through that, too.)
One final note, harking back to the beginning of this post: Starcustard has a new opening track! As grateful as we are to friend Lonkey for coming up with Fleetwood Mac's Albatross at the last minute almost two years ago, we've decided it didn't sit quite right as the opening track (and also I personally now loathe it after all those M&S Food adverts), and replaced it with... Mystery, by Kelley Stoltz (some guy Melia found).
Labels: city of anarchy, starcustard, the aberration
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Status Report!
The stalled traffic allowed Sofia and the Agents to run across with ease, one or two of them even taking the opportunity to throw up their legs and slide stylishly across car bonnets.
'And once again the Agents proceed with their task with startling appreciation for aesthetics!' Sofia said, already some way ahead.
So, I started City of Anarchy Chapter 4. Two weeks ago. I haven't written any more since, but I have plenty of valid academic excuses for that.
Amelia's been doing bits and pieces of the next Starcustard chapter. I haven't done any yet, but: fear not! I will.
Before any of that, however, I will be working on The Aberration. For the next chapter, I'll be introducing some stuff that I've had in my head for so long I'll have to blow the dust off before putting it to use. Be excited. Lots will be happening.
Unfortunately, exams are a priority at the moment, and I probably won't be doing much else until they're over with.
One final note: no, the strange message on the front page isn't just me being weird again. Apply your brains to it, dudes. See what happens.
Labels: city of anarchy, excerpts, jesnails, starcustard, the aberration
Thursday, May 18, 2006
The Manifesting Surreal (A History of Development: Part 4)
This blog was always meant to function as something of a behind-the-scenes feature, providing extra stuff for anyone who wants it, but mostly for me to entertain myself with things related to my projects, influences and interests, giving me some space to think and enthuse about what I like doing, showing some of the things that lead up to the finished products put on this site and elsewhere.
A word I always liked was wordsmith, because it implies that there is a craft to writing stories. Like all crafts, there is more than just the finished product. There's the creation side of things, working the language and, in a more broad sense, the themes and ideas to create something interesting and readable. But there's also me trying to develop as a writer, hopefully improving and honing my skills, and it's nice to acknowledge some old stuff too, examples of me 'as a writer' at an earlier stage, some of which I think have played an important part in the development of my writing. This is especially the case with Bananas and Laxatives, which I look back on now with a strange fondness, as it was my first venture into writing for an online audience, and paved the way for everything that followed.
So I'd say that, considering all of this, making lots of long posts just to show a load of old stuff is a pretty good excuse in itself, as far as this blog is concerned.
And so now, after that rather lengthy introduction, it is time to move on to the final part of this series, in which I acknowledge lots and lots of ideas which, for one reason or another (some reasons being more obvious than others), haven't made it into the current version of The Aberration, including alternative events and lost chapters.
Warning: there will be some spoilers for Chapters 1-4.
Part 4: The Manifesting Surreal
The microwave-chiselling scene has remained the first scene of The Aberration throughout its many incarnations, although it has been altered slightly over time.
I have now left the Big Orange File, and delve into a black folder containing drafts and notes for both Kommingle and Fat Man In Tweed projects. This draft, dated 17/12/03, exists in faded ink on an A5 piece of scrap paper under the title, 'And fools seldom differ ... continued...'. As a result of a strange conversation on the bus journey to school with my friend Olli one day, we invented a wizardly medic sort of character dressed in white called The Mediator, who went around diffusing various unpleasant situations by healing the injured and reasoning with people. At some point, I decided it would be a good idea to write a story involving both The Mediator and Master Beef. And Fools Seldom Differ was its title, and a couple of drafts involving The Mediator were written before I wrote the microwave-chiselling scene.
However, it soon became apparent that the two characters existed in totally different worlds, in totally different genres written in different styles, and were generally too different from each other to be in the same story. The Mediator was therefore dropped, although Olli and I did have plans for a new Mediator story after Agaffa. In the end, however, both of those collaborative stories fell through.
I continued to write the Master Beef story from the microwave-chiselling scene, under the working title of Master Beef. One thing I notice about the original opening scene was that Beef's immaturity was once again emphasised. The next bit of writing jumps ahead a month and a half to the start of February 2004, in another scene that shows Beef going about normal, everyday activities in an unusual way, but here it develops into an almost creepy eccentricity.
This scene was never included in the published chapter. The immaturity and silliness to Beef's character that was put in place in Bananas and Laxatives was being emphasised a little too much. Even in the earlier, more slapstick version of the story that followed, while Beef often conducts himself in an unusual manner, his actions aren't so explicitly, flamboyantly and deliberately odd.
What followed took a while to get written. Nothing more was done for another month. This list of dates, covering only the first Winnie scene (without Winnie's car journey, which was only added for the FMIT version much later on) shows how sporadically I worked on it after that: 08/03/04, 20/03/04, 17/04/04, 23/04/04. I didn't finish the first chapter until half way through May. This extremely slow progress, a mixture of not knowing what to write next, not knowing how to write it, not really knowing what the story was about, and procrastination, is a habit I have sustained to this day.
The character of Winnie was borne out of her brilliantly onomatopoeic name. I remember suddenly thinking of it, rather randomly, at the end of a Games lesson, and telling Olli about it in the changing rooms, saying, 'Wouldn't that make a great name for an old lady?' I remember him giving me an odd look and replying, 'You are so weird.' The decision to use her in the story was immediate, and I was thinking about it for the entire bus journey home.
The story became The Manifesting Surreal sometime between April and May, when I finally decided on something beyond it simply being a story about Master Beef. The new idea behind the story was that the lives of Beef and the people he comes to know gradually become stranger and stranger as weird things start to happen and reality begins to fall apart, starting with the smashing of the strange and beautiful porcelain woman shown to Beef by Phil the tramp.
However, not all the events that followed and escalated into insanity were a result of the porcelain woman's destruction. One of the biggest changes I made to this story a few months ago when I was rewriting it for Fat Man In Tweed was the complete removal of the daytime TV show Sit Down, Stand Up (named after the Radiohead song), and the subsequent court case, because by the time The Manifesting Surreal had become The Aberration in 2005, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep what was largely Mike's story relevant to the direction of the rest of the story. That whole story arc exists now as a small performance from Mike in the pub.
The original Chapter 2 began with Beef and Winnie already sat in the studio audience, just as the show starts, Beef having acquired a spectacular hangover from the previous night.
The opening act was none other than a cameo appearance from Miss Darley, the eccentric corporate millionaire adversary from Agaffa.
One of the earliest ideas I remember having for late on in the story was Miss Darley returning in a concert which Beef and Mike would hijack, for reasons explained in the footnote of this post, getting just as infuriated as she did with the studio audience when they refuse to adore her.
Mike was originally introduced giving an awkward performance not vastly different to the FMIT version of Chapter 2, although while in the FMIT version his performance peters out miserably and he's replaced by another comedian, the outcome in the television studio was much more violent.
The original version of Chapter 2 was much, much longer than the current version, and flowed about as well as a tube full of custard, because of a much lengthier scene in which Phil meets Winnie and Mike meets Beef for the first time (and it definitely ended up being one of the weirder random moments, with Winnie becoming almost psychotic)...
...and then there was the lengthy BBC News report recounting most of the chapter so far and what the rioting biddies did next.
Ah, the Vigibiddies. They were another idea just to demonstrate the escalating surreality, and I had even planned a scene in which they would continue their purge of talentless scum by invading a football match, that Beef and the others would be watching on TV on the pub, like a tidal wave. But even before the story became The Aberration, I decided (largely due to the review of a friend) to edit the chapter and cut their story short. The altered version of events, bringing an end to the Vigibiddies, went as follows:
The continuation of Mike's storyline was that he handed himself in to the police to try and explain everything (after the news report had informed him that he was the one being blamed for starting it all). In the Chapter 3 that made it to Kommingle, the chapter starts with Mike in court.
The court case, probably the most surreal sequence in the whole thing, ended with Mike being exiled under pain of death, with forty-eight hours to pack his bags and leave. Meanwhile, in the bookshop, the only part of this Chapter 3 that survived in any way, Beef encountered a slightly different character to the strange man with the ponytail...
There was another Chapter 3 that didn't make it to Kommingle, which I decided to drop at around the same time as I scrapped the Vigibiddies, primarily for pace (the court case was originally going to be Chapter 4), but also for other reasons. Following on from the chaotic second chapter which ended with the ominous message from inside the porcelain woman, the original Chapter 3 was a dazed, lethargic sort of chapter with a complete change in mood and in climate. And it took place...on a sunny beach.
This was to lead on to Beef building himself a giant sandcastle for his own protection that he could stay in to avoid whoever was going to come after him. Phil wasn't allowed to go inside. Beef was strangely out of character in this chapter. Not only had he reverted to the weird child-like character seen in incarnations past, but he was thinking and worrying too much about the message from inside the porcelain woman. Normally, Beef doesn't seem to care about or take seriously anything that goes on around him, and the extent to which something that would have just been seen as a completely unthreatening note by most people was being treated so seriously and ominously by both Phil and Beef here. I blame the lethargic mood I was in when I wrote it.
The main event of the original Chapter 3 that ended up getting pushed back to the current Chapter 4 when I scrapped it was the arrival of Amelia. Beef was going to find her as she was washed ashore unconscious (a nod to The Plaid Identity, a story by my friend Amelia Chesley, upon whom the character is based), and then taken back to either Beef's or Winnie's house and placed in bed until she woke up, while the others came up with theories about who she was and how she came to be washed ashore, including the suggestion that she was perhaps a deformed mermaid. I think even then I had planned to have her as a detective character, because the real Amelia had mentioned her love of Sherlock Holmes. I planned to have her assume her role as detective once she woke up through diary entries written in the style of Sherlock Holmes speculation or a film-noir style monologue as she tried to establish where she was and what had happened to her. (Amelia actually replaced another character idea, Cath Cathington, who was also a detective, but far more annoying.)
One idea I briefly considered to follow up the court case and this mysterious girl they'd found was for the group to be pursued by a carnivorous caricature of the gutterpress that would relentlessly harass the group, with the unconscious girl in the bed adding fuel to their speculation. This was another product, like the Vigibiddies invading the football match, the House of Commons attack, the Mini Cooper being chased by the fat men in tweed, the pub that only plays Gregorian chants, Winnie with her tea and so on, of me trying to give the story lots of typically and stereotypically British things and turning them on their head.
I could talk lots about how it took me a long, long time and several different ideas before I settled on an opening for Chapter 5, but I think it's about time I brought this whole obese thing to a close. If you've made it all the way through, I salute you! It was at least interesting for me to go through all this old stuff and relive all the memories, even if it wasn't for anybody else.
A word I always liked was wordsmith, because it implies that there is a craft to writing stories. Like all crafts, there is more than just the finished product. There's the creation side of things, working the language and, in a more broad sense, the themes and ideas to create something interesting and readable. But there's also me trying to develop as a writer, hopefully improving and honing my skills, and it's nice to acknowledge some old stuff too, examples of me 'as a writer' at an earlier stage, some of which I think have played an important part in the development of my writing. This is especially the case with Bananas and Laxatives, which I look back on now with a strange fondness, as it was my first venture into writing for an online audience, and paved the way for everything that followed.
So I'd say that, considering all of this, making lots of long posts just to show a load of old stuff is a pretty good excuse in itself, as far as this blog is concerned.
And so now, after that rather lengthy introduction, it is time to move on to the final part of this series, in which I acknowledge lots and lots of ideas which, for one reason or another (some reasons being more obvious than others), haven't made it into the current version of The Aberration, including alternative events and lost chapters.
Warning: there will be some spoilers for Chapters 1-4.
Part 4: The Manifesting Surreal
The pie exploded in the microwave. Master Beef carefully took out the sticky mess (or at least what remained on the dish) using some theatrical oven gloves. He enjoyed his mess (it was burnt apple flavour) and then commenced in removing the rest of it that plastered the inside walls of the microwave with a chisel. Once happy that he'd achieved something, to reward himself he went to the fridge to get another pie.
Master Beef wasn't your ordinary individual. In a world where beings like him exist, it is hard to define 'ordinary'. There were many odd and occasionally agitating mannerisms of Beef (most notably his undiluted immaturity), but it had been decided (by the Board of Deciders) that perhaps his most striking feature was his rather outspoken fluorescent pink rabbit costume.
One day, Master Beef had decided that maybe his appearance was slightly too comical to be taken seriously, so he added a touch of the military by allowing himself some large green boots, a reflective visor to replace the rabbit's facial features, and a shotgun. They wouldn't call him comic to his face now, at least.
He returned to chiselling his microwave.
The microwave-chiselling scene has remained the first scene of The Aberration throughout its many incarnations, although it has been altered slightly over time.
I have now left the Big Orange File, and delve into a black folder containing drafts and notes for both Kommingle and Fat Man In Tweed projects. This draft, dated 17/12/03, exists in faded ink on an A5 piece of scrap paper under the title, 'And fools seldom differ ... continued...'. As a result of a strange conversation on the bus journey to school with my friend Olli one day, we invented a wizardly medic sort of character dressed in white called The Mediator, who went around diffusing various unpleasant situations by healing the injured and reasoning with people. At some point, I decided it would be a good idea to write a story involving both The Mediator and Master Beef. And Fools Seldom Differ was its title, and a couple of drafts involving The Mediator were written before I wrote the microwave-chiselling scene.
However, it soon became apparent that the two characters existed in totally different worlds, in totally different genres written in different styles, and were generally too different from each other to be in the same story. The Mediator was therefore dropped, although Olli and I did have plans for a new Mediator story after Agaffa. In the end, however, both of those collaborative stories fell through.
I continued to write the Master Beef story from the microwave-chiselling scene, under the working title of Master Beef. One thing I notice about the original opening scene was that Beef's immaturity was once again emphasised. The next bit of writing jumps ahead a month and a half to the start of February 2004, in another scene that shows Beef going about normal, everyday activities in an unusual way, but here it develops into an almost creepy eccentricity.
The doorbell rang.
'Good biddings!' exclaimed Beef, heaving the front door wide open.
The visitor, quite startled, forced himself to recover. 'Um...er...um,' he began. 'S...Special delivery for'--the man glanced at his clipboard--'M. Beef?'
'Yesyes,' said Beef, 'that's me. Bring it in, bring it inwards, take care to chip the paintwork!'
The delivery man again looked at him blankly.
This scene was never included in the published chapter. The immaturity and silliness to Beef's character that was put in place in Bananas and Laxatives was being emphasised a little too much. Even in the earlier, more slapstick version of the story that followed, while Beef often conducts himself in an unusual manner, his actions aren't so explicitly, flamboyantly and deliberately odd.
What followed took a while to get written. Nothing more was done for another month. This list of dates, covering only the first Winnie scene (without Winnie's car journey, which was only added for the FMIT version much later on) shows how sporadically I worked on it after that: 08/03/04, 20/03/04, 17/04/04, 23/04/04. I didn't finish the first chapter until half way through May. This extremely slow progress, a mixture of not knowing what to write next, not knowing how to write it, not really knowing what the story was about, and procrastination, is a habit I have sustained to this day.
The character of Winnie was borne out of her brilliantly onomatopoeic name. I remember suddenly thinking of it, rather randomly, at the end of a Games lesson, and telling Olli about it in the changing rooms, saying, 'Wouldn't that make a great name for an old lady?' I remember him giving me an odd look and replying, 'You are so weird.' The decision to use her in the story was immediate, and I was thinking about it for the entire bus journey home.
The story became The Manifesting Surreal sometime between April and May, when I finally decided on something beyond it simply being a story about Master Beef. The new idea behind the story was that the lives of Beef and the people he comes to know gradually become stranger and stranger as weird things start to happen and reality begins to fall apart, starting with the smashing of the strange and beautiful porcelain woman shown to Beef by Phil the tramp.
She was in porcelain shards all around them. Fractured bits of body in a range of different shapes and sizes; bits of leg, bits of arm, bits of torso, bits of head... a painted eye stared sorrowfully at Beef from about half a metre away.
He squinted. Near it, a smallish, rectangular piece of paper floated about in the gentle breeze. Pushing a gasping Phil off him, he crawled over to it, and snatched at it before it could escape, accidentally crumpling it as he did so. As he uncurled his fingers, the paper unfurled on his furry palm.
Phil walked up to him, and crouched behind him, peering over his shoulder at it.
It said, in what they hoped was just red ink, and in big, bold letters:You broke my wife.
Now you shall pay...
However, not all the events that followed and escalated into insanity were a result of the porcelain woman's destruction. One of the biggest changes I made to this story a few months ago when I was rewriting it for Fat Man In Tweed was the complete removal of the daytime TV show Sit Down, Stand Up (named after the Radiohead song), and the subsequent court case, because by the time The Manifesting Surreal had become The Aberration in 2005, it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep what was largely Mike's story relevant to the direction of the rest of the story. That whole story arc exists now as a small performance from Mike in the pub.
Winnie just smiled at him, and leaned forward in her armchair. 'Ah,' she said suddenly. 'I almost forgot to tell you.' She fumbled around in her cardigan pockets and pulled out two slips of card. 'I've been invited to the television show, Sit Down, Stand Up, to be a member of the audience. I'm allowed to bring along a friend. Would you like to come?'
Beef had never heard of it. 'What is it?'
'Oh, it's a daytime show, usually where talentless idiots come up on stage and have to make a bunch of stubborn old people - that'll be us - laugh. They get things thrown at them if they're too rude, or make fun of our age, or just aren't funny. Well?' She proffered one of the tickets. 'We get to use placards.'
'I want to see what it's like to be an old person,' declared Beef. 'I'll do it!'
The original Chapter 2 began with Beef and Winnie already sat in the studio audience, just as the show starts, Beef having acquired a spectacular hangover from the previous night.
The theme tune played.
Master Beef had his head between his knees. He groaned.
Winnie was boogying in her seat. 'Sit Down, Stand Up! Don't be mean or we'll squash your brains!' she sang, along with all the other biddies.
Beef groaned again.
The opening act was none other than a cameo appearance from Miss Darley, the eccentric corporate millionaire adversary from Agaffa.
Some of the audience idly clapped as a smart-looking bespectacled woman with a shortish, blonde haircut and a business-like suit several sizes too large came on.
'Right, you old sh--'
'Daytime TV!' interjected the host.
Miss Darley sighed. 'Very well,' she said, primly. She cleared her throat. 'Right, you old farts!'
This was met with a chorus of discontent from the audience.
'Farts my arse!' declared Winnie, raising her 'DAMN ROOD' placard.
Beef groaned louder.
'Shut your f--'
'Daytime!' insisted the host.
'--faces!' snapped Miss Darley.
Several of the audience started to hurl rotten food they'd brought from home. A lady with a green rinse went as far as throwing her chair, which had previously been attached to the floor.
'Be silent!' demanded the comedian. 'I am funny! Hilariously so! You shall all laugh at my never-ending wit!'
Instead, they all laughed at the tomato that had just hit her square on the forehead.
'Hahahahahahaha!' went Winnie.
That is, everybody except Master Beef, who groaned some more.
'Freaking bitch!' yelled the green-haired woman, throwing another member of the audience at the stage.
'Daytime!' shrieked the host. 'Bloody freaking daytime!'
'Hangover!' Beef snapped back. 'Bloody mega-freaking HEADACHE!'
'Freaking crones!' said Miss Darley. 'You haven't heard the last of me! I don't need you, you ancient bastards! You'll pay for this...' Her voice faded as she was dragged away by security guards, of the type usually only hired for problematic chat shows.
The entire show was later erased of all sound and replaced by a single monotone due to the general laziness of the people who sort out these things, and their lack of knowledge as to whether or not 'freaking' was actually a swearword. Due to the show's inaudible nature, ratings plummeted and hundreds of letters of complaint were sent to both the production and television companies. The show was then axed and replaced by Live Croquet!, extreme daytime sport.
Later, when Miss Darley was asked to issue a statement to the Daily Insignificance, she was reported to have said, 'Do not underestimate the Darley power!', cackled maniacally, and then suddenly flown off in a monstrous dirigible, with thunder and lightning striking all around her.
But that was all to happen later.
One of the earliest ideas I remember having for late on in the story was Miss Darley returning in a concert which Beef and Mike would hijack, for reasons explained in the footnote of this post, getting just as infuriated as she did with the studio audience when they refuse to adore her.
Mike was originally introduced giving an awkward performance not vastly different to the FMIT version of Chapter 2, although while in the FMIT version his performance peters out miserably and he's replaced by another comedian, the outcome in the television studio was much more violent.
The green-haired one snatched Winnie's 'DAMN ROOD' placard and threw it at Mr Mike, who flung his entire body to one side in overreaction. Rounds of vegetables followed and, whimpering, the comedian evacuated the stage.
Beef started shaking Winnie vigorously to try and shut her up, screaming himself.
The sparkly host made his way up amidst the audience, tracked down the green-haired woman and punched her hard.
The whole studio fell silent, including Winnie and Beef. Then the irritable old man who didn't approve of Mr Mike's name stood up and punched the host. A riot broke out.
Winnie wanted to join in, but Beef wanted to quietly slip out, so he dragged the excitable old lady away with him, her arms and legs fighting furiously but in vain to stay. 'SQUASH THEIR BRAINS! SQUASH THEIR BRAINS!' she repeated, along to the familiar tune of the opening theme. She was obviously malfunctioning, concluded Beef. It happened to all the good folk.
The original version of Chapter 2 was much, much longer than the current version, and flowed about as well as a tube full of custard, because of a much lengthier scene in which Phil meets Winnie and Mike meets Beef for the first time (and it definitely ended up being one of the weirder random moments, with Winnie becoming almost psychotic)...
'My tea isn't weakly brewed!' protested Winnie, outraged. She stormed into the kitchen. 'The cheek of it!' came her voice. 'You want more teabags? I'll give you more sodding teabags!' A half-packet of biscuits was thrown angrily into the room, scattering them everywhere, and causing all three men present to flinch. Winnie then emptied all the teabags she had into the teapot and, with most of them spilling all over the worktop and floor, she shoved the pot into the sink and filled it with cold water from the tap. 'ANYONE FOR A CUPPA?!' she shrieked.
Mr Mike hurriedly retreated into the safe cracks of the sofa, with Beef not far behind.
'Yes please,' said Phil, oblivious. 'It's freezing out there today.'
Winnie threw the teapot at him.
'Can't we all just get along?!' screamed Beef, as Phil stumbled backwards and Winnie appeared again. 'What has got into you?'
Winnie's bottom lip wobbled, and tears started streaming from her eyes. 'You said my tea was weakly brewed right in front of Mr Mike!' Now he won't think much of me, will he?' She scampered over to Mike, who retreated further into the sofa. 'You think I'm pathetic because my tea is weakly brewed, don't you?' she said, tearfully.
...and then there was the lengthy BBC News report recounting most of the chapter so far and what the rioting biddies did next.
The camera cut to a street with a hair-rinsed crowd marching down it, with some of it spilling into the nearby driveways and smashing up property.
'...A group of elderly people, dubbed by the locals as the Vigibiddies, has been rampaging the streets on a mission to "cleanse the world of talentless scum"...'
The camera cut to a line of bloody-nosed, black-eyed people sprawled out across a polished floor.
'...And an unidentified woman has attacked the House of Commons. Those assaulted say she has green hair.'
Ah, the Vigibiddies. They were another idea just to demonstrate the escalating surreality, and I had even planned a scene in which they would continue their purge of talentless scum by invading a football match, that Beef and the others would be watching on TV on the pub, like a tidal wave. But even before the story became The Aberration, I decided (largely due to the review of a friend) to edit the chapter and cut their story short. The altered version of events, bringing an end to the Vigibiddies, went as follows:
The camera cut to a skirmish between the same biddies and the police.
'Police were called in to resolve the situation.'
The camera cut to a line of bloody-nosed, black-eyed people sprawled across a polished floor.
'...And a green-haired freak of nature has attacked the House of Commons. Reportedly able to uproot fixed studio chairs with ease, the super-strong woman has been successfully captured and is currently being examined by the country's top scientists.'
The continuation of Mike's storyline was that he handed himself in to the police to try and explain everything (after the news report had informed him that he was the one being blamed for starting it all). In the Chapter 3 that made it to Kommingle, the chapter starts with Mike in court.
The short, fat judge, appropriately named Judge Tubby, made her fat way to her stand, demanding, 'Quiet!' and hitting several things and people with her judicial hammer as she did so. 'All rise and whatnot!'
The middle-aged jury, having just made themselves comfortable, grumbled their way to their feet.
'We are here today to once again save the Universe from trouble-makers by locking them away with lots of other trouble-makers. Today's idiot is Michael Jerblarg, who goes by the alias of "Mr Mike".' She readjusted her judicial wig. 'Prosecution, do your bit.'
'Clearly,' said Mr Pencil-Thin Prosecution, making his way to the front, '"Mr Mike" is a devious second identity created to try and fool us all.'
'Objection!' objected Mr Defence. 'That's just stupid!'
'Overruled.'
'Clearly,' continued Pencil-Thin, 'Mr Jerblarg insists on having one criminal haircut after another.'
The jury muttered in agreement.
'Don't you listen to them, dear, you look lovely!' Winnie shouted from the back.
'Objection!'
'Overruled.'
'I'd like to bring Mr Jerblarg to the stand for a round of sly interrogation whereby I ultimately trigger his demise, Your Honour.'
'Very well,' said Tubby. 'Mr Jerblarg, get over here.'
'Hold this,' said Pencil-Thin, handing Mike a chunky leather-bound Bible. 'Do you, Michael Jerblarg, take this Bible to be your lawfully wedded wife?'
'What?!'
'Objection!'
'Overruled,' said Tubby. 'Mr Jerblarg, you must swear on the Bible to ensure that you're telling the truth.'
'How does that work? And this is much more than just swearing on it!'
'I like to make sure the people present in my court are really truthful.'
'But--'
'Clearly,' said Pencil-Thin, 'the man must be guilty.'
'I'm not!' said Mike. 'I do, I do, I do!'
'You may now kiss the Bible.'
Mike reluctantly did so.
The court case, probably the most surreal sequence in the whole thing, ended with Mike being exiled under pain of death, with forty-eight hours to pack his bags and leave. Meanwhile, in the bookshop, the only part of this Chapter 3 that survived in any way, Beef encountered a slightly different character to the strange man with the ponytail...
Beef made his way to the science fiction section with his hands in his furry pockets, positioned himself comfortably in front of the shelves, and scanned the colourful novels several times over before selecting the one with the most dramatic cover, replacing it on the shelf, and picking up a less crumpled copy.
There was a bleep and a burst of static.
Beef looked around, but could not identify the source. 'Hm,' he said, turning back to the books.
There was another bleep, this time much closer.
Beef carefully edged his way around the shelves until he was behind the one he had just been examining, and found himself in the crime section.
To his surprise, something did a clumsy forward roll across his path. It appeared to be a security guard, albeit a skinny one. It disappeared again with another blast of static.
Beef shrugged. He purchased his book and left the shop, feeling the chill of the winter once again. He didn't notice the security guard appear again, watching him go, whispering into his radio.
There was another Chapter 3 that didn't make it to Kommingle, which I decided to drop at around the same time as I scrapped the Vigibiddies, primarily for pace (the court case was originally going to be Chapter 4), but also for other reasons. Following on from the chaotic second chapter which ended with the ominous message from inside the porcelain woman, the original Chapter 3 was a dazed, lethargic sort of chapter with a complete change in mood and in climate. And it took place...on a sunny beach.
The sea lapped playfully against the shore, its salty white spray bringing forth soggy seaweed and various bits of crab.
...a horrifying crash...
'Goodness me, it's busy today,' observed Winnie, scanning the wide strip of sand.
The orange sun burned in the cloudless, pale blue sky, scorching everything below.
...porcelain shards all around them...fractured...
'It'll be the weather, Winnie,' said Mike. 'We obviously aren't the only ones after salt and fried skin.'
Winnie chuckled. 'True. Let's set up over there, by that fat, tattooed couple with the yellow parasol.'
...bits of torso...bits of head...
'Come on, you two,' she said to Beef and Phil, who had been silent all morning.
Mike walked down the concrete steps and passed the fatties to their designated spot. He unfolded the chairs he had been carrying under his arm and angled them so they would receive the full blast of the sun. Then he sat himself down. Five minutes later, the others arrived.
...a painted eye...
Beef and Phil dumped their chairs in the sand without a word, still lost in their own thoughts.
...now...
Winnie seated herself by Mike and placed her picnic basket by her side. 'Emby?'
...you shall pay...
'Emby?'
Beef shivered and hugged himself.
Mike watched him, his expression changing into a slight frown at his odd behaviour.
'Emby, dear?'
Beef raised his head slowly.
'I brought you a bucket and spade, dear, if you want to use them. Do you want to eat now?'
Beef shook his head. Mike watched him as he picked up the bucket and spade and walked off to a small patch of ground that was free. He made a small mound and patted it smooth. He stared at it contemplatively for a moment, and then continued to build.
This was to lead on to Beef building himself a giant sandcastle for his own protection that he could stay in to avoid whoever was going to come after him. Phil wasn't allowed to go inside. Beef was strangely out of character in this chapter. Not only had he reverted to the weird child-like character seen in incarnations past, but he was thinking and worrying too much about the message from inside the porcelain woman. Normally, Beef doesn't seem to care about or take seriously anything that goes on around him, and the extent to which something that would have just been seen as a completely unthreatening note by most people was being treated so seriously and ominously by both Phil and Beef here. I blame the lethargic mood I was in when I wrote it.
The main event of the original Chapter 3 that ended up getting pushed back to the current Chapter 4 when I scrapped it was the arrival of Amelia. Beef was going to find her as she was washed ashore unconscious (a nod to The Plaid Identity, a story by my friend Amelia Chesley, upon whom the character is based), and then taken back to either Beef's or Winnie's house and placed in bed until she woke up, while the others came up with theories about who she was and how she came to be washed ashore, including the suggestion that she was perhaps a deformed mermaid. I think even then I had planned to have her as a detective character, because the real Amelia had mentioned her love of Sherlock Holmes. I planned to have her assume her role as detective once she woke up through diary entries written in the style of Sherlock Holmes speculation or a film-noir style monologue as she tried to establish where she was and what had happened to her. (Amelia actually replaced another character idea, Cath Cathington, who was also a detective, but far more annoying.)
One idea I briefly considered to follow up the court case and this mysterious girl they'd found was for the group to be pursued by a carnivorous caricature of the gutterpress that would relentlessly harass the group, with the unconscious girl in the bed adding fuel to their speculation. This was another product, like the Vigibiddies invading the football match, the House of Commons attack, the Mini Cooper being chased by the fat men in tweed, the pub that only plays Gregorian chants, Winnie with her tea and so on, of me trying to give the story lots of typically and stereotypically British things and turning them on their head.
I could talk lots about how it took me a long, long time and several different ideas before I settled on an opening for Chapter 5, but I think it's about time I brought this whole obese thing to a close. If you've made it all the way through, I salute you! It was at least interesting for me to go through all this old stuff and relive all the memories, even if it wasn't for anybody else.
Labels: a history of development, excerpts, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration
Sunday, May 07, 2006
The Transadventural Romp (A History of Development: Part 3)
Some more old stuff relating to that Beef character. Once again, you may find it interesting, you probably won't.
Part 3: The Transadventural Romp
There was some overlapping with Bananas and Laxatives and the numerous short-lived and ill-fated stories begun in the second half of 2003 that I tried to put him in.
In the summer of '03, he featured alongside characters from various older stories in a pretty awful sequel to the original Agaffa called JunkJargon, but the less said about that the better, especially as it has no bearing on The Aberration whatsoever anyway.
The first story I began with Master Beef as the central character after B&L, and which could probably be counted as the real roots of The Aberration despite how different it is, was I Am The Superlativest! The original premise of the story was simply, a new story with Master Beef, and the same was true of most of the Beef stories leading up to TA. I had no clear plot in mind, but I wanted to have Master Beef in a new story where the quality was significantly improved from B&L.
Another B&L character was also in it, now a real person.
This isn't the same Mike, though. TA's Mike came from elsewhere, as I'll get on to later, and this is just pure coincidence. He was renamed Matt more or less straight after that was written, and was going to be part of a double-act with his pug dog, Glossy. They were crap characters, and I didn't use them again. But anyway...digression! My bane...
And then began the build-up to this strange scene I'd had this idea for when I'd been writing down poem ideas...
And thus did the fat men in tweed enter Beef's world.
And then, apparently (according to the Big Orange File), I went in a completely different direction, and wrote a new opening scene.
Beef has rarely been creepier than he was here, the irresponsible and immature side to the B&L character blown up to new and scarily child-like proportions. There's quite a huge contrast between the enthusiastic, eager-to-please character here and the Master Beef of TA who is almost indifferent to the feelings of other characters (aside from Winnie). Fortunately, this horrific progression in Beef's character, which although did reappear later on, was soon stamped upon.
The next Beef-related thing that the BOF offers up is Beef the Artist. Now, this was something completely different again. What's written is a scene in which Beef stands in a white room and flings lots of paint at the walls, getting increasingly insane and violent with the paint all in the name of creation.
I have no idea what possessed me to introduce Beef to the world of art. The only other thing I had in mind for it was the single image of Beef standing on a high-up platform skirting the edge of either a gallery or some kind of big warehouse, clutching the work of art he was in the process of stealing: a porcelain woman.
Target: Gerber was the next story, never intended to be anything more than a short, but which featured Beef nevertheless.
This was where the character of Mike came from. The whole background story and how the character of Mike developed can be found here, so unusual that it deserved its own blogpost.
There is a third and final I Am The Superlativest! draft in the BOF, written shortly after the two seemingly random departures from it. It continues the theme of Beef's Beatles fandom that was put in place by Bananas and Laxatives 2 and Target: Gerber, and features another old B&L character.
...Don't ask me about that last paragraph. I really have no idea, except maybe a hazarded guess at it being the walrus himself whom they were talking to, or the return of the Crud from B&L. I honestly can't remember. Maybe it's best that way.
The last of this series of short-lived stories featuring Master Beef was Tales of Utter Normality: The Fat Men In Tweed. It was to be a story written for Kommingle, posted as a short prequel to a novel that was set in the same city, Galday Cringe (a name for a place I invented that has had many different incarnations itself), involving a character called Noreen.
The idea behind The Fat Men In Tweed was that the city had become infested with anthropomorphised rodents, and as a result the city was falling apart. A company called LoveTech had dispatched the fat men in tweed to destroy every rodent on sight. Of course, Master Beef's existence is now threatened because of his unusual attire...
After that, I went back and wrote a final chapter for the original Bananas and Laxatives in what I'd hoped was improved quality for a message board. Then, in December 2003, I began another story...
The final part, Part 4, coming soon.
Part 3: The Transadventural Romp
There was some overlapping with Bananas and Laxatives and the numerous short-lived and ill-fated stories begun in the second half of 2003 that I tried to put him in.
In the summer of '03, he featured alongside characters from various older stories in a pretty awful sequel to the original Agaffa called JunkJargon, but the less said about that the better, especially as it has no bearing on The Aberration whatsoever anyway.
The first story I began with Master Beef as the central character after B&L, and which could probably be counted as the real roots of The Aberration despite how different it is, was I Am The Superlativest! The original premise of the story was simply, a new story with Master Beef, and the same was true of most of the Beef stories leading up to TA. I had no clear plot in mind, but I wanted to have Master Beef in a new story where the quality was significantly improved from B&L.
Important trumpet tunes played in his head. As he stood proudly, hands on hips, on top of the hill, and his long ears flapping vigorously in the wind, he contemplated how great he was.
He was, in fact, Master Beef.
Another B&L character was also in it, now a real person.
'And he still thinks it's funny to make fart noises with a zip!' complained Tana. 'He's just hopeless!'
'Yeah,' said Mike, who wasn't really listening.
This isn't the same Mike, though. TA's Mike came from elsewhere, as I'll get on to later, and this is just pure coincidence. He was renamed Matt more or less straight after that was written, and was going to be part of a double-act with his pug dog, Glossy. They were crap characters, and I didn't use them again. But anyway...digression! My bane...
Still, he stood tall in his pink rabbit suit, the face cut out and replaced with a reflective visor. Admittedly, there was lots of lemon gum stuck in various places to add a decorative touch to his tatty pink coat, but he was still proud.
Much too proud.
The sun glinted off his visor, melting a nearby sheep.
And then began the build-up to this strange scene I'd had this idea for when I'd been writing down poem ideas...
'I mean, you can't even make fart noises with zips!' shrieked B'Tana.
'Mmm,' said Matt.
* * *
In the distance, several more sheep were tossed into the air. Beef ignored them.
* * *
'He's just so... so... infuriating!'
'Ah-hum.'
* * *
The ground underfoot started to shake violently.
And thus did the fat men in tweed enter Beef's world.
And then, apparently (according to the Big Orange File), I went in a completely different direction, and wrote a new opening scene.
'B?' called Beef. 'B?'
'What?' snapped B'Tana.
'Soup's ready!' Master Beef was immensly proud of his golden vegetable soup. Sure, it had odd, unidentifiable white bits floating around in it that were reminiscent of polystyrene, and it tasted, to put it mildly, like shit, but B'Tana always drank it all.
Beef made sure of that.
B sat down.
'D'you like it?' asked Beef.
'I haven't tried it yet!' said B'Tana, who had a million times before. She hated the stuff but it kept Beef happy, and Beef needed to be kept happy.
She lifted her spoon.
'Drink up!'
'Beef. I am doing!'
'Okie dokie.'
As she was watched closely, the spoon with the watery, green-golden liquid met her lips. Her facial features were suddenly horribly distorted. She spat it out.
'Too hot?'
'Something like that.'
'Blow on it.' Master Beef was always extremely eager to please. However, if he didn't he would have one of his 'tantrums', which were always best avoided.
Beef has rarely been creepier than he was here, the irresponsible and immature side to the B&L character blown up to new and scarily child-like proportions. There's quite a huge contrast between the enthusiastic, eager-to-please character here and the Master Beef of TA who is almost indifferent to the feelings of other characters (aside from Winnie). Fortunately, this horrific progression in Beef's character, which although did reappear later on, was soon stamped upon.
The next Beef-related thing that the BOF offers up is Beef the Artist. Now, this was something completely different again. What's written is a scene in which Beef stands in a white room and flings lots of paint at the walls, getting increasingly insane and violent with the paint all in the name of creation.
I have no idea what possessed me to introduce Beef to the world of art. The only other thing I had in mind for it was the single image of Beef standing on a high-up platform skirting the edge of either a gallery or some kind of big warehouse, clutching the work of art he was in the process of stealing: a porcelain woman.
Target: Gerber was the next story, never intended to be anything more than a short, but which featured Beef nevertheless.
Of course, where else would you find a fluorescent-coloured psychopath with a big, big gun? At a UK bookstore of course, always avoiding the tribes of Potter fans that prowled the isles.
Beef was idly browsing the music and biographies shelves in search for anything to do with the Beatles (he was a great fan), when he came across a small, green, hardback book. He was so disgusted that it was so small, green and hardback that he grabbed it from the shelf to see what it was looking so arrogant about. 'What are you looking so small, green and hardback about?' he demanded.
Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel
it replied.
This was where the character of Mike came from. The whole background story and how the character of Mike developed can be found here, so unusual that it deserved its own blogpost.
There is a third and final I Am The Superlativest! draft in the BOF, written shortly after the two seemingly random departures from it. It continues the theme of Beef's Beatles fandom that was put in place by Bananas and Laxatives 2 and Target: Gerber, and features another old B&L character.
Playing... 'The Beatles - I Am The Walrus.'
'Goo goo g'joob,' said Master Beef, accordingly.
'Juba juba!' insisted his eternally floating microwave, Salty Mark.
* * *
The fat men in tweed gathered around the one who was talking in a language of limited vocabulary which included the words 'blob', 'bloblob', and 'blobby', with the occasional 'blooby'.
...Don't ask me about that last paragraph. I really have no idea, except maybe a hazarded guess at it being the walrus himself whom they were talking to, or the return of the Crud from B&L. I honestly can't remember. Maybe it's best that way.
The last of this series of short-lived stories featuring Master Beef was Tales of Utter Normality: The Fat Men In Tweed. It was to be a story written for Kommingle, posted as a short prequel to a novel that was set in the same city, Galday Cringe (a name for a place I invented that has had many different incarnations itself), involving a character called Noreen.
The idea behind The Fat Men In Tweed was that the city had become infested with anthropomorphised rodents, and as a result the city was falling apart. A company called LoveTech had dispatched the fat men in tweed to destroy every rodent on sight. Of course, Master Beef's existence is now threatened because of his unusual attire...
The fat men in tweed, the Clean Sweepers™, had been given very vague orders. 'Eliminate anything under the description of a rodent, no exception.' LoveTech had fed them all the information they needed; all the statistics and descriptions. When they classified something a as a rodent, it was because what they had seen matched the descriptive data uploaded into them.
Just off the corner of Quitelong Street, after eliminating a squirrel problem on Djo Street, three tweedsters were looking keenly for their next victim. And before long, they'd found it...
* * *
Master Beef breathed in the foul-smelling air through his fur and sighed. It had been quite a quiet afternoon so far. In fact, it was too quiet. Disturbingly quiet. It wasn't the fact that the birds had stopped singing that worried him, oh no. They had all dropped silently to the ground years ago when the distinct stench of Galday Cringe finally got to them. It was something else.
Beef sighed, accurately guessing what it was. It was the absence of the screaming old ladies, the bunny bitch-fights, the exploding hamsters, the plod-plod of foot-apparel bearing Galdmonkeys, which he found oddly comforting. He sighed again. He was good at sighing, he decided.
* * *
The tweedsters analysed their prey, silently so as not to give it chance to escape.
Exessively long ears...check.
Hind feet larger than forefeet...check.
Intolerably fluffy...check.
Suspicious sniffing actions...ish.
...Locked onto target...
After that, I went back and wrote a final chapter for the original Bananas and Laxatives in what I'd hoped was improved quality for a message board. Then, in December 2003, I began another story...
The final part, Part 4, coming soon.
Labels: a history of development, excerpts, fat men in tweed, halo, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration
The Fat Men In Tweed (A History of Development: Part 2)
So why did I choose fatmanintweed.com? Where did the fat men in tweed come from? Such things would most suitably be answered in...
Part 2: The Fat Men In Tweed
So... there is this Tesco Value notepad I have, with only a few pages filled. On the first of these pages is a list of poems that never got written, bar one.
I'd walked in on my brother playing one of the Grand Theft Auto games on his laptop. The third one, I think. He was wreaking havoc with a rocket launcher in a cybercafé. I remember seeing a fat man flying up into the air. He may or may not have been wearing tweed.
I don't quite know what happened next. But then there was this idea for a poem. I'd been having lots of ideas for poems. Well, lots of images and concepts, that I liked, and wanted to make into poems.
There are seven ideas written on that first page. Only the first one got written. The third one says, Ten Fat Men in Tweed.
I'm standing on a hill. This is the image I had in my mind. I'm standing on a hill, the land vast and green and undulating all around me. And then, over the horizon, they come running at great speed. The narrative pays close attention to how they run, how their flab moves about, how the ground shakes. I start running.
Something something something something, the ten fat men in tweed. There was a rhythm to it. I remember that being part of the reason I liked it. It sounded good. It sounded like it would make a good poem. It rolled off the tongue. The Ten Fat Men in Tweed.
I never wrote the poem. But I liked the idea. It amused me. It intrigued me how you could make something like that so inhuman, and scarily powerful. How the hideous mass made it evil and repulsive. How this could all be processed in the mind, while accepting that they're wearing something as dull and down-to-earth as tweed. There was a novelty to this image, a weird paradox.
I liked it so much that the fat men in tweed ended up appearing in all sorts of places, in all sorts of forms.
-- From the drafts for the original Agaffa.
-- From The Pterry Board Epic.
-- From my GCSE English coursework.
As an image that still amuses me, fatmanintweed.com seemed only appropriate.
Part 2: The Fat Men In Tweed
So... there is this Tesco Value notepad I have, with only a few pages filled. On the first of these pages is a list of poems that never got written, bar one.
I'd walked in on my brother playing one of the Grand Theft Auto games on his laptop. The third one, I think. He was wreaking havoc with a rocket launcher in a cybercafé. I remember seeing a fat man flying up into the air. He may or may not have been wearing tweed.
I don't quite know what happened next. But then there was this idea for a poem. I'd been having lots of ideas for poems. Well, lots of images and concepts, that I liked, and wanted to make into poems.
There are seven ideas written on that first page. Only the first one got written. The third one says, Ten Fat Men in Tweed.
I'm standing on a hill. This is the image I had in my mind. I'm standing on a hill, the land vast and green and undulating all around me. And then, over the horizon, they come running at great speed. The narrative pays close attention to how they run, how their flab moves about, how the ground shakes. I start running.
Something something something something, the ten fat men in tweed. There was a rhythm to it. I remember that being part of the reason I liked it. It sounded good. It sounded like it would make a good poem. It rolled off the tongue. The Ten Fat Men in Tweed.
I never wrote the poem. But I liked the idea. It amused me. It intrigued me how you could make something like that so inhuman, and scarily powerful. How the hideous mass made it evil and repulsive. How this could all be processed in the mind, while accepting that they're wearing something as dull and down-to-earth as tweed. There was a novelty to this image, a weird paradox.
I liked it so much that the fat men in tweed ended up appearing in all sorts of places, in all sorts of forms.
ZimmaZoom™ flew across the conveyer belt, which was one of many in the massive network that ran throughout Tokyo. Of course, there were faster forms of transport: bean-shaped aircrafts flew around in the air above them, weaving their way through skyscraper tips (of which were neatly rounded as part of the Tokyo Sky-Safety Act of 2215).
Agaffa, Tokyo's notoriously grouchy elderly pensioner, sped up ZimmaZoom™ (zimmer frames were so outdated) and knocked over a dozen business people and a fat man in tweed. 'Muahaha!' she chuckled, patting her loyal machine. As Zimma (the name she gave it sometimes) slowed down, the conveyer belt passengers started to return to normal.
So Agaffa decided to reverse.
The fat man in tweed got his arm caught in the propellor in the back and he was spun round, making odd whimpers as he went.
-- From the drafts for the original Agaffa.
Not even evil horses could withstand such immense evil as this. It would break their backs and then poke their corpses mockingly. This evil: the Ten Fat Men In Tweed, forever drawn to the power of a new item of magical clothing: the Whatever Waistcoat. Tweed hats, jackets, trousers and black shoes so shiny you could see your reflection in them. Lord Winterseeson didn't know what he was getting himself into...
-- From The Pterry Board Epic.
Meanwhile, a hologram in the form of a portly man dressed in tweed appeared. He plodded over to the dead body which was sprawled untidily across the ground, sat down on it, and smoked his pipe. He had nothing to worry about.
-- From my GCSE English coursework.
As an image that still amuses me, fatmanintweed.com seemed only appropriate.
Labels: a history of development, agaffa, excerpts, fat men in tweed, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, videogames
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Bananas and Laxatives (A History of Development: Part 1)
My Big Orange File, or BOF, is something of a personal artefact. It spans roughly a year's worth of writing, starting from the end of 2002 to the fruitful backside of 2003, and contains the beginnings of such, er, well-loved creations as Agaffa, Master Beef, and the G'raffe Song. This, along with a mostly-empty Tesco Value notepad containing only a list of strange poem titles and the single one that actually got written, is my starting point, as I attempt to answer... a question.
In almost every interview with an author I've read, the author gets asked, 'Where do you get your ideas from?', which has always struck me as a rather stupid thing to ask. But, whereas most authors will answer vaguely, 'Oh, from all over the place, really...', and while I make no claim to being a 'proper', published author, I'm going to attempt to answer it properly. And I'm going to do it through The Aberration, because doing stuff through examples is the best way, dudes.
Alright, yes, this is just a bad excuse to waffle at length about a lot of my old stuff, and probably the only person it's remotely interesting to is myself, but I'd rather procrastinate on a grand scale than do any kind of proper work, and as this is my blog, I can do what I like. And anyway, there are some answers to such vitally important questions as, 'Why "Master Beef"?', 'What made you pick Fat Man In Tweed as your website name?', and 'Why does Amelia call you "muffinkid"?' in there somewhere. And also: pretty pictures.
Note: this won't be in much of a coherent order, as ideas don't have a habit of forming coherently. Be warned: random tangents abound.
Part 1: Bananas and Laxatives
(From the Fod conception scripts. Olli went over the green writing to make it more legible, using an illegible font.)
Fod, started in February 2003, was another attempt, after a long line of them, at a collaborative website with friend Olli Smith. My first idea for it was a spoof of the video game Halo. I named it Bananas and Laxatives, and it was the first time I'd really put any of my writing online. It was consciously bad quality, containing gratuitous swearing and all the character mutilations and twisted ways to mess up the Halo universe that my fourteen-year-old mind could think of. The Covenant, the main enemy, became the Convent: an alliance of nuns, prostitutes, politicians and pro-wrestlers.
(Random aside: on page 299 of The Fall of Reach, one of the official Halo novels, 'Covenant' is actually typo'd as 'Convent'. Well, I laughed.)
Most chapters were accompanied by a screenshot from the game, beautifully transformed in Microsoft Paint. (Ironically, Cortana ended up with long hair in Halo 2 anyway. They obviously modelled her on her B&L equivalent, Bore-Tana.)
The line of thought when I wrote this was 'What rhymes with "Master Chief" that would be hilarious?' Of course, 'Master Beef' was the spectacular end result. His pink rabbit costume was just another result of the mounting ridiculousness...
And so it continued...
(I later used the muffin on the right of the image above as an avatar on a message board. Eyebrows were raised, questions were asked, and, well, the muffin became an integral part of my dazzling persona. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why Amelia calls me 'muffinkid'.)
343 Salty Mark, also known as The Microwave, was the result of a conversation with my brother as I was playing the final level of Halo, jumping around and throwing grenades into things. He commented on how he thought it was all very unfair on Guilty Spark and the Sentinels, because they were just trying to protect themselves. I asked how the machines had formed, not really knowing the background to the game in much detail. He replied, 'I don't know, they evolved from microwaves or something.'
We laughed.
Bananas and Laxatives was never properly completed, although I did start writing the sequel, Bananas and Laxatives 2: Fragmentation Memories, supposedly the 'third person' diaries of Master Beef chronicling the events that took place after Beef returned home. It was to feature the return of such characters as the Convent, Sam and Salty Mark, along with new characters such as Lara Schmoft, Captain Knees, a talking walrus taking residence at WarrenWorld themepark, and Master Cheese. Most of the ideas I had for the sequel were jotted down on several post-it notes that I still have. A third story was also considered, a Matrix parody in which Beef wasn't even the main protagonist, but was to die spectacularly at the end.
But...it wasn't to be, and Bananas and Laxatives was abandoned after a rather nonsensical final chapter for the original story was posted on a message board and completely ignored, revealing Halo and the events surrounding it as a huge conspiracy staged by a massive laxatives company.
And, well, I quite liked writing about the character of the hilariously named Master Beef. And so I continued to do so.
In almost every interview with an author I've read, the author gets asked, 'Where do you get your ideas from?', which has always struck me as a rather stupid thing to ask. But, whereas most authors will answer vaguely, 'Oh, from all over the place, really...', and while I make no claim to being a 'proper', published author, I'm going to attempt to answer it properly. And I'm going to do it through The Aberration, because doing stuff through examples is the best way, dudes.
Alright, yes, this is just a bad excuse to waffle at length about a lot of my old stuff, and probably the only person it's remotely interesting to is myself, but I'd rather procrastinate on a grand scale than do any kind of proper work, and as this is my blog, I can do what I like. And anyway, there are some answers to such vitally important questions as, 'Why "Master Beef"?', 'What made you pick Fat Man In Tweed as your website name?', and 'Why does Amelia call you "muffinkid"?' in there somewhere. And also: pretty pictures.
Note: this won't be in much of a coherent order, as ideas don't have a habit of forming coherently. Be warned: random tangents abound.
Part 1: Bananas and Laxatives
(From the Fod conception scripts. Olli went over the green writing to make it more legible, using an illegible font.)
Fod, started in February 2003, was another attempt, after a long line of them, at a collaborative website with friend Olli Smith. My first idea for it was a spoof of the video game Halo. I named it Bananas and Laxatives, and it was the first time I'd really put any of my writing online. It was consciously bad quality, containing gratuitous swearing and all the character mutilations and twisted ways to mess up the Halo universe that my fourteen-year-old mind could think of. The Covenant, the main enemy, became the Convent: an alliance of nuns, prostitutes, politicians and pro-wrestlers.
(Random aside: on page 299 of The Fall of Reach, one of the official Halo novels, 'Covenant' is actually typo'd as 'Convent'. Well, I laughed.)
Most chapters were accompanied by a screenshot from the game, beautifully transformed in Microsoft Paint. (Ironically, Cortana ended up with long hair in Halo 2 anyway. They obviously modelled her on her B&L equivalent, Bore-Tana.)
A violin tune that sounded like a strangled cat (if they make any noise) played as Captain PLEEEAAASE gave Bore-Tana the bad news the Convent was rapidly approaching. Bore-Tana had a tantrum. 'But I don't wanna be a nun!' she wailed.
Reveille It Up!
Meanwhile, in the cry-o-tube place thingy, Master Beef awoke. He started crying as he got out and a small man rushed to him. It was Pitri.
'It's OK, sir,' he said. 'We'll have you warmed up in no time!' He handed Beef a hot cocoa with marshmallows as he sniffled. He slurped at it.
'Why's he crying?' asked Sam, calling and leaning on the very big fragile glass window on the wall.
'It's a cry-o-tube, Sam, you dumbass!'
'Sorry Pitri. I'll just bring his health online then.'
'I suppose you should.' said Pitri.
'He needs his shield, Pitri. Give him that, if you can manage.'
'Dumbass!' Pitri handed Beef a silver tea tray. 'It will come in very handy, sir!'
'Thank you, Pitri.' said Beef. 'Thank you, Dumbass!' he called up to Sam.
'Sir, my name isn't Dumbass!'
The line of thought when I wrote this was 'What rhymes with "Master Chief" that would be hilarious?' Of course, 'Master Beef' was the spectacular end result. His pink rabbit costume was just another result of the mounting ridiculousness...
There was a knocking at the automatic door (is that bloody possible?). Dumbass...er...I mean Sam...opened it. Then they flooded in; ghostly figures in black that glided across the room and surrounded him. 'We come in the peace and the harmony of the Universe,' one sang in a high voice. 'Stay calm as we melt your...BRAIN!!!' The last word was particularly high and screechy and the huge glass panel smashed, causing Sam to fall to his doom. What a dumbass...
Luckily, the few nuns that fell through with him ended their lives with a sticky splat, but Pitri and Beef were running out of time. 'Quick sir!' said Pitri. 'This way!' The two of them ran through an automatic door (which apparently you can knock) and Beef knelt down to tie his bootlace. Pitri ran on ahead, but the nuns' echoing voices made his head explode.
'Bugger!' exclaimed Beef. Now he had no weapons and, because Pitri was gone, no shield either. The nuns had probably engulfed his tea tray. He looked back through the door window. NO!! They were using it to have a tea party! They had those cursed china toy cups and saucers too!
'Would you like some tea, Maggie?' one sang. 'Yes please!' chirruped another.
This whole thing was a disaster! Maybe if he looked into his new costume he would find help. NOOOOOOOOOOOO! It was a fluffy pink bunny costume rented from WarrenWorld Theme Park! The best thing he could do was to take a sharp turn left and go through the girls' bathroom.
And so it continued...
'Beeeeeef!' came a deep, irritated voice from one of the other cubicles. Beef plodded through the cubicles following the voice until he opened the final cubicle door and there was a head sticking out of the toilet. 'Beeeeeef! You made it!'
'What the fuck are you doing in there?'
'It's a long story,' said the captain. 'But I'll bore you with it anyway!'
After some confusion, Bore-Tana and Master Beef found themselves stuck in Gecko 4-19 with Poo Whammer and five mindless Marines. One, called Billy, had a perpetual smile and wouldn't take his eyes off Beef. 'I have new socks on!' he grinned, revealing red socks with some balloons on.
'Right, you motherfuckers, get off my Pelican! I have work to do!' The metallic ship suddenly went on a slant and the seven of them slid out of the cargo bay and hit the sandy ground hard. As Gecko 4-19 flew off, another Pelican landed and dropped off five more Marines.
'Wahoo! All right! Let's party!' The ten of them started doing the conga as Master Beef and Bore-Tana watched in dismay.
Beef armed himself with his assault rifle and followed them, keeping his distance.
He rubbed his hands together. 'Oohoohoo, this'll be fun!' He climbed in and made doubly sure that he found the turret switch while Sam got in beside him. 'Here comes Master Beef, protector of the universe that's not even worth saving!' He laughed loudly. 'Ooooooooh, it has machine guns, too!'
The tank, in all its half glory, rolled over and crushed the landscape, proudly and merrily. The three comrades sang true patriotic songs ('The wheels on the tank go round and round...') as they aimed for nowhere in particular.
'Brghgeehfghe!'
'What was that?'
'What?'
'Brhghefhghe!'
'The door, it's...opening!'
'God, no! How can this possibly be?'
'Shut up, Jenkins!'
'Brhghegfhdgfdgehghe!'
'Argh! It's on my face! It's small and brown and tasty and it's attacking me! Argh!'
'Haha!'
'Shut up Jenkins and fire your weapon! No, Jenkins, don't pick your nose again. What the--argh!'
'Hello, Mr Small Round Person! Wha? Get away from me! I don't like you! Argh!'
>>>UNEXPECTED HALT X. BLOCKBUSTER NOTICE: DAMAGED TAPE FINE $10. PLEASE VISIT US AGAIN SOON.
The Crud
Beef took his helmet off. 'That was odd.'
'Brhhghgefhehhghe!'
'What the--'
'Brghghghfhfhghfhfgmmmmmmmmm!'
'Uh oh...'
Suddenly, small, round, brown creatures came oozing through the doors.
'M...M...' Beef stuttered.
They crawled and bounced closer towards him; he armed himself with his assault rifle.
'Muffins!'
One of them lunged at his mouth and exploded in his fur.
'Oh my fuck, they're double chocolate!' He fired rapidly at them; dozens of chocolate explosions alerted more of them, and soon all six doors became muffin entrances.
He turned to the door he had originally come through. There, stood the Sarge of the previous gang, but he wasn't the old Sarge. He was...one of them. There was a strenuous fart, a constipated sounding wheeze and the mutated Crud-form Sarge lunged himself at Beef.
The shotgun was always the answer to everything.
Beef escaped while he could, running through the continuous waves of Crud, who had conveniently starting appearing since they were introduced to the storyline. Beef encountered countless muffins, Crud-Marines and even Crud Nuns. The most horrific of all, though, were the huge muffin-headed ones that stupidly fell over and exploded, scattering dozens of new muffins.
(I later used the muffin on the right of the image above as an avatar on a message board. Eyebrows were raised, questions were asked, and, well, the muffin became an integral part of my dazzling persona. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why Amelia calls me 'muffinkid'.)
Suddenly, a microwave started to hover over his head. 'Greetings!' it said in an accent that was supposed to be English but you could tell it was American. It pinged, its door flung open and a pie went flying into a huddle of nearby muffins. 'I am 343 Salty Mark. This has got out of hand. I ask you to come with me, but in the end you haven't really got a choice, because I'll just teleport you anyway. Come.'
There was some yellow ambience and the two of them disappeared.
'Beef?' came the voice of Poo Whammer on the radio. 'Beef, I've lost your signal! Beef? Beef! Haha, sucker.'
343 Salty Mark, also known as The Microwave, was the result of a conversation with my brother as I was playing the final level of Halo, jumping around and throwing grenades into things. He commented on how he thought it was all very unfair on Guilty Spark and the Sentinels, because they were just trying to protect themselves. I asked how the machines had formed, not really knowing the background to the game in much detail. He replied, 'I don't know, they evolved from microwaves or something.'
We laughed.
Then Salty Mark remembered that the Crud were lurking closely. 'We must avoid the you-know-what,' he said. 'I am not a public cafeteria and do not have enough pies for all of them!'
Beef took a book off one of the shelves.Salty Mark Snacks
The Definitive
Salt Snack Guide
'You're an author?' Beef asked.
'I prefer to think of myself as a chef, but yes, if that's what you want me to be.'
'Actually, I couldn't care less.' said Beef. 'I'm just trying to make small conversation for the hell of it.'
'Debt Reclaimer?'
'Yeah?'
'You are an ass.'
''K.'
Bananas and Laxatives was never properly completed, although I did start writing the sequel, Bananas and Laxatives 2: Fragmentation Memories, supposedly the 'third person' diaries of Master Beef chronicling the events that took place after Beef returned home. It was to feature the return of such characters as the Convent, Sam and Salty Mark, along with new characters such as Lara Schmoft, Captain Knees, a talking walrus taking residence at WarrenWorld themepark, and Master Cheese. Most of the ideas I had for the sequel were jotted down on several post-it notes that I still have. A third story was also considered, a Matrix parody in which Beef wasn't even the main protagonist, but was to die spectacularly at the end.
But...it wasn't to be, and Bananas and Laxatives was abandoned after a rather nonsensical final chapter for the original story was posted on a message board and completely ignored, revealing Halo and the events surrounding it as a huge conspiracy staged by a massive laxatives company.
And, well, I quite liked writing about the character of the hilariously named Master Beef. And so I continued to do so.
Labels: a history of development, agaffa, bananas and laxatives, excerpts, halo, i am the ramblemaster, the aberration, videogames
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