Please Keep Me Burning

(This is a sort of journal entry)

* Moving to London has been put back a month. Now happening from August.

Today I am full of energy and excitement about my roster of projects. Everyone who knows me knows that I am full of fear that all my efforts will amount to nothing, that I am too different/out of step to ever hit a vein of positive audience reaction, but when that isn't holding me back, I have so many things going on. Let me report:

1) First of all, I'll revamp my website soon - probably only when I'm in London, as I'll be living with cool techies who can help me. The website will draw most of the projects together under the banner of 'cross genre pollination', and the theme of mixing up established seams of creativity. My longterm idea is that the smaller ones will be available as self-published small books, stamped with the logo and credited to an array of different pen names. I don't know how I'm going to do this yet, but I'll probably bypass barcodes in favour of keeping them 'underground'. If I have any success with them, I'd also be in favour of publishing other people's diabolical experiments through this medium.

2) 'The Prowl Log', which is a guide to various Autobots written like a retelling of The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, will be website only, as publishing this in book form is a bad idea.

3) 'X-Plicit Language', which will collect all my poems about superheroes, in particuar the X-Men, *will* be put into small-book form, when I have enough of them, but I won't be selling it on the basis of it being an X-Men tie-in.

4) 'Crumbs of the Sun', which is about my brief time in Africa, will collect as some of the more interesting photos, *some* of the Africa poems in 'I'll Show You Tyrants', and plenty of new pieces. I'm not happy with how conventional a book of travel writing is, but people seem to respond very well to the Africa poems (they're an easy way into writing mags,) and I'm sure I can play with the genre somehow. No rush.

5) 'Death of a Cyclist' will collect all the Dunthornes I've written, as well as others I've seen around the place, if I get permission from the authors, and from Joe Dunthorne. It will either be littered with crude drawings of cyclists meeting their ends, or, if it's thick enough, will double up as a flickbook movie of a cyclist perishing. Maybe two - one at the top, one at the bottom.

6) 'Faerotica', at the moment, is just two faery erotica stories - one by me, and one by K. Again, there's no rush. If I, or anyone else, produces a decent story in the genre, I'll throw that in, and keep doing so until I have enough for a another small-book. I also have a couple of photos from the naked calendar shoot which will supplement the stories, and could probably throw up some naked faery images pretty quickly too.

7) 'The Girl Who Wanted To Hammer Metal' will be more general erotica. At the moment, it's a file full of filthy poems and stories by me and K. I will hold fire until I can think of something that makes this collection stand out more - something to do with the cool title. ~Quizzical showed some interest in this project, and I may ask her to provide illustrations. The cover and blurb will lie about it being a spy thriller.

8) 'The Senses Mutiny' is a big project. There are about 20 poems in it at the moment, but I'll be adding to these slowly, as ideas come to me. It's a poetry collection in the form of a multi-voiced novel about every b-movie disaster imaginable happening at once, and how we learn to cope. I think it's good enough to keep adding to until I have a collection I can send to a proper publisher.

9) 'Strays' is currently just where all my non-project poems go. Everything that wasn't intended to be somewhere else. This includes most of my published pieces - 'The One Where The Cake Ignites', 'Survival Kit', 'I get to', 'Harriet Just', 'Kosher Cajun' etc. It's another one worth saving for a different publisher, as I think the number of pre-published pieces will be an attraction. It's all a bit bitty and incoherent at the moment though.

10) 'Manley & I' is the project I sweat most over. It began as my undergraduate diary - now it's a futuristic prison escape story, full of sketches, collages and diagrams, and draws on books like Dr. Jonathan Miller's 'The Body In Question', the Reader's Digest Book of Birds, Max Ernst's 'Une Semaine de Bonte, as well as the stories of Alex Obelensky, Norfolk shipping disasters and the Stanford Prison Experiment, plus dashes of X-Files erotica, Beast Wars, Care Bears, The Prisoner, global warming and various other sources.

11) Scapegalllows is a cool name for a band, so it's the name K and I will record under. I have enough songs to make two albums, which we'll probably call 'Loveless Yet Practical Alliance' and 'Echolocation'. I have no idea what might be on the front. I need to finish the lyrics and structure to 'Orwell Isn't Spinning In His Grave' and 'I Will Set Morrissey On You'.

12) 'Spitfire & Shuriken' is in flux, and may become 'Flying Deviants'. So far, it's been a combination of comic and poetry that went down well with some people and confused others. The main obstacle is that I draw the panels very slowly and inefficiently, it takes a lot of work to make even one page look right (since it has to sit somewhere between the laws of leaving a poem space to breathe and packing a comic strip full of action,) and I generally don't feel up to the challenge of drawing the whole thing. So my current proposal is to change it to an audiowebcomic, supplemented by pictures. Short episodes can be scripted, recorded and podcast from a site which adds character data, still keeping a strong poetry element, but adding a lot more of an odd sort of comedy to the mix. K and I have scripted half an episode so far, but it looks like it could work.

What are my chances? I have no idea. I know for certain that I can complete projects when I want to - I've finished two full length novels before, plus loads of short stories and websites in my teens, put out and sold a nude calendar, designed a bunch of minor anthologies and helped produce, thus far, six issues of Fuselit. I know also that I *am* capable of making stuff other people are interested in, since I've had items published and occasionally get surprising emails and messages from impressed people (who I go on to alienate by spending ages replying and then sounding like an arrogant twat.)

On the other hand, I have less time now than ever before, and certain projects - 'Manley & I', for instance, and any attempt to lay down my songs on tape or gig regularly - have been ongoing for nearly half a decade, which would suggest that I am also very capable of *not* finishing what I set out to do. And there's the fact that others are clearly capable of arousing ten times as much interest and admiration with a third as much of a body of work as I produce, which suggests that I should stop being so absurdly ambitious and settle on making one or two things that are brilliant.

So, yeah, I have no idea whether, in the long term, I'll be able to do what I intend to do. But it's still exciting, and it's what I was born to do, even if the end result is a disappointing waste of a minor talent.