The Living Suitcase

And whenever I need lifting…

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:26:02 +0000

John Osborne at Opium Magazine’s London Lit. Death Match

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:56:11 +0000

Days and Nights

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:36:06 +0000

I’ve been busy with things. The teaching, and I have stuff to read for other people. Writing for the Nervous Breakdown and for Clarion. I have a birthday coming up which fills me with both anticipation and dread. I haven’t been writing all that hard, have let the narrative threads for the novel unravel. Am becoming aware of what I have taken on again.
There are good days and not so good days. Nights of little sleep. Dreams, like the one last night, of a great tidal wave in the distance, in the future, and its devastation—flotsam and broken toys and scraps and terror already in the past, lapping at my feet.
Today I will weave a dream. A digital bridge to take me from here to there. Murky sludge of the true-facts world far below.

‘You look like terrorists,’ said Al. ‘I wouldn’t be seen on Queens Boulevard with either one of you.’

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:23:08 +0000

Hooked? Go to www.thenervousbreakdown and check out my first post.

Writing Life: Criticism – Constructive or Destructive?

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 03:16:13 +0000

Almost every writer can vouch for the value of writers groups and workshops. For many, a weekly or monthly session with your group, whether online or in the flesh, can provide a welcome respite from the solitude that comes with the writing life. In addition to sharing ideas and experiences with fellow travelers, deadlines can be surprisingly galvanizing: being forced to prepare your piece for workshopping can provide that much needed motivation and focus.

But along with the benefits of writers groups is the danger of losing your mojo because of some ill-judged feedback on your work in progress. Being able to tell the difference between constructive and destructive criticism is crucial to going the distance in this game…read more here.

GN Braun scratches an itch

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:50:02 +0000

“Okay. You’ve finished your first short and you think it’s the bomb. Your mum likes it, your girlfriend likes it, and your best friend (a rabid Stephen King fanboy) says it’s rad! You post it up under notes on your FaceBook page and all of a sudden you call yourself an author when in reality you are still a writer.
Of course, you totally disregard the fact that spellcheck nearly implodes when it runs through your piece, and you have no idea if that semi-colon should in fact be a comma or not.
This is fine, as you aren’t bothering anyone but your immediate circle of family and friends.
But then you go the next step.
You start up a fanpage for yourself, stating that you are an author. You search for submission places and you find some obscure internet e-zine that is run by ex-hippie/LSD tragics, and they like your short. That’s good. They too ignore spellcheck and run it as it is. Suddenly you are a ‘published’ author. Technically.
Now you start sending out invites to ‘like’ your fanpage…way too many invites.
Then comes the daily (and sometimes many times a day) messages and status updates and all the rest. All of a sudden, your friends list drops radically and you find yourself blocked by 75% of the Western World.
Oooops…”
And there’s more where this came from here.

Lion Man lives.

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:24:14 +0000

My new story in great company at LegumeMan Free Press. .

A Million Versions of Right by Matthew Revert

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:55:49 +0000

The stories in Matthew Revert’s A Million Version of Right lurch along at a gravitas-defying rate. From the Freudian psychosis of the title story to the outrageously self-reflexive “Bookmark That Didn’t Work,” Revert’s Antipodean styling is a shot in the arm to weird writing everywhere.

If you are reading this review then you probably already know what Bizarro is—a dream of the weird made flesh by a group of US small press publishers working out of Portland and Seattle. Dr Seuss of the Apocalypse. Kafka meets John Waters. However, Revert has said that his writing is less bizarro in the uniquely American sense of what’s weird, and more absurdist in the Down Under irrealist tradition. Spike Milligan of the Wasteland, perhaps, or Dante meets the Wiggles. There is a sweet-natured under Capricorn sensibility to these stories that somehow escapes categorization. They flatulate affectionately in the general direction of the Bizarro tradition while clearly influenced by it. Take the sadistic tradesman birthed from the guilty ejaculations of a lonely son. Or, in “The Great Headphone Wank,” the day-job drone paid to yell obscenities at troubled walls to test their emotional fortitude. To my mind, the funniest, most acutely observed piece in the collection is “The Bricolage Scrotum”—in which the small community of Yandish Muff is torn apart by a battle between the radical Scroats and the anti-Scrotum status quo. Yar—this stuff is not just Bizarro, not just weird, but has the balls-to-the-wall vision of a potty-mouthed Pynchon, or an early Kotzwinkle, and owes much to Spike Milligan, who haunts every page.

Between the fart jokes and wank fairies, talk show hosts called Blimey Stinksnatch and nightmarish Whovilles formed entirely from faeces, AMVoR delivers a side-splittingly adolescent yet superbly crafted commentary on 21st century absurdities such as the ankle-biter industry, which fatuously diagnoses the child Angela with ‘what was known as Fast Body.’ And a band-aid covers a multitude of over-servicing sins in “Power Blink.”

“‘ In the case of exceptionally mild injury, such as what we’re facing with Patrick here, the process is wonderfully redundant, carried out none-the-less to the utmost precision.”’

In “The Bookmark that Wouldn’t Work,” a researching Big Wig is awarded the annual P.I.S.S prize (Performance in Scientific Studies), which ‘he dedicated to the memory of the good men and women who died for the dream.’ ‘Production on commercial bookmarks’ we’re told, ‘began immediately.’

AMVoR leaves no plastic dog turd unturned as its scarily recognizeable characters scuttle about popping each other’s junk, reading books entitled “On Why I’m Cumming’ and glued to the sounds of one hand wanking. Seems that according to the gospel of A Million Version of Right, if you’re not cumming or wanking, or at the very least hoeing into a welt-burger, you’re nobody. Funny that.

In Jobs we Anti-Trust

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 23:05:56 +0000

Here’s the thing. Will the next tablet manufacturer to take on Apple have to come from outside the puritanical US? First Apple bans boobs in Robert Berry’s Ulysses Seen, then black-blocks a gay snuggle in a comic version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. The historical ironies aside—Joyce’s Ulysses was banned from publication in the US because of That Wank Scene—iconically speaking, Apple seems to have forgotten which side of the Edenic hedge it’s on, and that is a wholly different fall from grace. Chomp: is that a worm in my app store or are you just pleased to fleece me?

Patti. nuff said.

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:34:15 +0000