Chancery Stone - Saving the World From Mediocre Writing

Happy birthday to you… happy birthday to you-ooo… happy birthday dear Danny, happy birthday to you. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

Yes, Halloween today but, more importantly, Danny the man's birthday.

There were 1,466 unique visitors here this month, paying 2,514 visits and between them they read a staggering 57,893 pages.

Yes, you read that right. Are they reading some of the archive articles three or four times? There's 85 blogs on here. You do the math.

However, that's not the point. The point is I've sold roughly 600 copies of DANNY. The other 1400 are causing undue pressure on my ceilings which is making my wardrobe doors jam (no, I'm not kidding and yes, it is scary). I now need to go buy a plane to plane the doors to let us wear clothes and not run around nekkid, frightening small children. This kind of behaviour is appropriate on Halloween, but what do I do tomorrow?

It will cost me at least three or four pounds to buy a plane – money I can ill-afford. I am a struggling artist, and I CAN'T EVEN GET IN MY OWN GARRET. It's full of fucking books.

What I need is the other 866 'unique visitors' who came to visit this month (and I find it very hard to believe all 600 happy DANNY owners are reading this blog – some of them were old ladies, for Christ's sake) to go out and BUY A BOOK. And you need to buy it direct from Poison Pixie so that all of you, I repeat all of you, can continue to read more of the riveting, unbelievably gripping and terrifyingly involving novel that is DANNY.

If you buy it from Amazon Poison Pixie makes a loss.

Yes, you read that right. That is the reason Volume 1 is being re-priced - to allow for Amazon nicking all the, ha ha, money we make.

Quite aside from it being very bad business to make a loss I need to make some money from DANNY (we're not talking a Porsche habit here) in order to produce more DANNY.

Trust me, I've spent my whole life downshifted to such an alarming degree I am guaranteed entry to heaven on the grounds of Ongoing Penury and extreme Living Without Nothing. True, we no longer eat soup made out of bacon, yoghurt and onions (no, not making that up either) for three days. But those days may yet come back.

I've suffered for my art, my ceilings are suffering for my art. Look at all the free entertainment you get here. It's time to enter in more fully to the DANNY experience. Just buy the damn book, will you?

Okay, I know, you need incentive so I'm going to give you it.

As it is Halloween and Danny's birthday I am in a generous frame of mind. What's more, I believe so strongly in the wonder that is DANNY that I am going to put my money where my mouth is.

I have twisted the arm of Poison Pixie's board of directors (and trust me, it needed twisted – they were not in favour) and have sweet-talked them into giving away an outrageously generous excerpt.

Yes, as a special birthday treat Poison Pixie is offering, for a limited time only, a great big fat free excerpt, 295 pages long, from DANNY Volume 1. That's the first third of the book and longer than some authors' full-length works. It is also longer than the first (1998?) Citron edition of the book.

The downside is said directors (who shall remain nameless) have put so many ramifications on it (just look at the copyright notice madness running through it if you don't believe me) that I am more or less on borrowed time here. Unless it proves its worth as a marketing tool to encourage new readers it's coming right back off again.

So run. Run now. Get it quick, while it's still legal.

Go over to the temporary website (I apologise for the lack of juicy substance on here – Mr Scratchmann is working on it even as we speak) and download your free mini-version of DANNY right HERE. Turn off your doorbell and settle down for a good Halloween read. Maybe by candlelight.

If, after you read it, you have no urge to find out what happens next that's fine. You must seek enlightenment elsewhere. But if you get hooked (and it gets a whole lot more addictive and warped in the other two-thirds) then tootle off back to Poison Pixie and BUY THE DAMN BOOK. Save Our Ceilings!

Have you got the point yet?

Happy Halloween.

P.S. What do you think of the new pic? This was taken a (good) few years ago when I was working as a dancer. Sadly you can't see it here, but I am in a gold sequin bra - which was, as I recall, two sizes too small for me - a pair of tights, a blonde wig and a pair of strap-on angel's wings. It was taken in a photographer's studio – they were his props – and I was photographed against a giant spider web. I've got hundreds of photos like these. Look forward to a gallery of them on the new web site.

Not yet read DANNY? The price for Volume 1 will be going up soon, soon, soon, so if you need a copy check it out now at http://www.poisonpixie.com/bookshome.htm before it's too late, or grab a copy on Amazon (if you must) here.

Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans

There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.

This column is better than Ripley's Believe It Or Not. But it's true, cakes have a gender. I have proof.

First a little scene setting.

On Tuesday, i.e. two days ago, our books finally came back from the distributors.

They promised us Tuesday delivery before noon. You guessed it, come noon, no books. Finally at two o'clock, a buzz comes at the entry phone. "I have a delivery for one Max Scratchmann," says the somewhat mystified English voice.

"Ah," says I, "four pallets of books?"

"Yes," he says, the relief evident.

I traipse off downstairs and there is a fucking enormous Christian Salvesen truck trying to back into our residential 20 mile an hour speed bumped road. We had requested a tail lift truck because we have no fork lift, or warehouse, or any other damn thing – hence the driver's perplexity. He doesn't do many deliveries like these in a week – or a year.

Anyhow, he decides to enter into the spirit of the thing, bless him. I'm standing there watching him fork lift these fucking enormous pallets onto the tail lift thinking, "Fuck me, we are never going to get these upstairs. We'll still be hefting these Sunday."

Meanwhile, I discover later Mr Scratchmann is thinking, "Fuck me, these are smaller than I thought. Piece of piss." And breathing sighs of relief. See, there is the glass half full/ half empty in action. I'll leave you to decide who was doing which.

Oh, and I should just point out that it rained non-stop Tuesday, and it was torrential. I have 140 cases of books, ten books per case, each weighing 13.65 kilos, or some such arm-breaking weight, to unpack and heft up two flights of stairs, preferably before they turn into papier mache.

Mr Christian Salvesen to the rescue.

I am fully expecting him to dump them on the pavement at the tail gate, like any good delivery man, and entirely block the pavement for at least two days. But no, he brings them down our skinny little path, where they wobble precariously (with all three of us leaning on the back to get them over the lip of the pavement) rather like a Disney hippo in a tutu, before they heave their way right up and come down like a ton of bricks at the step.

I am effusive in my thanks. The rain has gone off, for a wonder, and he has brought at least one pallet up to the door. The man is a fucking saint.

But there's more. He brings the next pallet up behind it. Meanwhile I'm furiously unwrapping giant cling film and the million and one pieces of paper that say, Poison Pixie, Glasgow, ETA to be advised (it wasn't), Tail Lift Required and the numerous obscure numbers that always abound on these things. There's huge coils of vicious green plastic strapping being whipped off at dangerous speed. I have to get these things in before it rains again.

But then something happens I can't believe. Mr Christian Salvesen takes his jacket off and joins us.

Yes, you read that right. He's in the door, hefting two boxes at a time. So is Mr Scratchmann. Stone is doing them in ones, of course. Feminine weakness rears its ugly head. I'm telling you, you wouldn't catch my mother doing them in ones, but I just never got her competitive gene. I prefer to let men have the glory on that one. I figure if they're too busy proving superior strength I get to supervise and give orders. And that, ladies, is how you beat the Glass Ceiling. Ah, you get your money's worth here.

Anyway, my gob is so smacked I'm frightened to speak to him in case I break the magic spell. He's chatting away, asking about the books, if we have a shop, how long they'll last us, joking about the loft floor needing to be reinforced (he was right about that one) and I'm smiling and laughing and wanting to kiss him.

We are rattling through these. I'm getting nervous, asking him if he's alright for time, not wishing to seem ungrateful. But no, he's happy as a mud boy, and helps us unpack the lot. Doesn't take the pallets away, but is most apologetic about it.

Afterwards I'm signing his docket and joking with him, asking if I should put down that their delivery man was the best ever. Well, at least he thinks I'm joking, but if he'd wanted a glowing testimonial on there I'd have written it. Half way through the last pallet the rain came back on, so never was I so glad for random acts of kindness.

I wave him off, blowing kisses and offering to bear his children, and then we have to take all the pallets to the dump. Three car loads, including the 800 feet of giant cling film, and a small tree-full of notes to carrier – not to mention the vicious green whiplash straps. They could sell those as severe bondage toys.

Off we go to the Household Waste Recycling Centre. Tip, to you and I.

There are no words to express how much I enjoy this activity. It's a great place.

Hidden in a concealed entrance that jumps out at you rather like a highwayman with an odd sense of humour, and causing sudden braking in front of large fishing industry trucks with massive cranes and huge hooks that narrowly miss you pulling past, you swerve in and have to stop within three feet in a bay beside a huge blue dumpster.

These dumpsters are goldmines. You could kit a house fifty times a day out of one these things. There's everything in there – all going to waste. The downside is you're not allowed to throw yourself bodily into the debris, and they're manned nowadays, so no sneaky rummaging.

If you ever want to see first hand what is wrong with Western culture that's the place to do it.

We were there repeatedly over the course of three days.

First we had to clean and floor the loft for the books to go in.

Clearing the loft (of other people's left behind junk) was a revelation. Our best find was a kid's 1950's cot mattress covered in wonderful pixies and fairies – cute as hell. Our worst (and that was a tough one) was a kid's (worn) bra that looked like it had been stashed about 1984.

As we found a 70's porn mag in the other loft (yes, we have two – it's complicated), it does make you feel it was hidden up there. After all, why would you put your bra in the loft? And if it was hidden it can only mean it was stolen, and if it was stolen it can only mean…

You can see where this line of thought is leading.

Such is the joy of clearing out the lofts of rented houses.

Mostly though it was old wood. Masses of old wood. And each day we went to the tip and saw huge flat screen TVs, sofas, beds, children's cots, tables, a sink, kitchen units, tables and chairs without number, lots of wood – I mean decent sized clean wood, not the cupboard door sized melamine shit we were throwing out. I reckon you could self-build a house and then furnish it out of those skips. In a day.

And the real horror is – you're not allowed. Because it's 'dangerous'.

Dangerous as in it ruins the economy, no doubt. And D.F.S. Sofas definitely wouldn't like it if you got one for free instead of being in hock to them for two years.

Anyway, this still doesn't explain the sex of cakes, but I'm getting there.

After we took the pallets to the tip, wasting wood (we couldn't even find a bonfire to donate them to – how tragic is that?), we decided to call in at Tesco's.

We've made our way up the store and I am very tired. I have been up since eight and, as readers of this column know, I do NOT get up at eight, or anything even approximating eight. In fact, so traumatized was I by the eight thing that at eleven I had informed Mr Scratchmann he'd have to stand duty as I was going to nap on the sofa. Which I did. But I was still tired. I'd humphed 140 cases of books and thrown pallets about like a navvy, and all on very little food.

So here I was dragging my feet up Tesco's aisles when Mr Scratchmann decides to look for dried apples.

I was too tired to ask why the fuck he wanted dried apples I just said, Try the baking department and dragged my leaden legs round there.

And here I discovered the sex of cakes.

I know this may not come as a shock to anyone French who is used to genderising (if that's not a word it should be) doormats and candles and filing cabinets, but for the rest of us it's a fucking revelation. What is more it is a revelation that explains the entire history of sexism.

Yes, I'll repeat that, in case you didn't get the full significance of what I am about to tell the 1,184 of you who are reading this right now.

I AM ABOUT TO EXPLAIN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF SEXISM. And it's all about cakes.

Now there's a line you never thought you'd read.

So, I am in an early morning rising induced coma. This means I am standing like a Duracell Bunny out of steam staring at desiccated coconut wondering why it is.

Why is coconut? Why desiccate it? Who first thought to desiccate it? How? Did he leave a coconut on the stove top and say, "Fuck me, wife, I've invented Bounty"?

This is how your mind goes when you are tired and easily distracted. When you are waiting for some idiot who decides to look for dried apples, when you are tired. And just as you can easily be distracted by the history of desiccated coconut so can you be entranced by interesting snippets of other people's conversation.

I am anyway. One of those people that loves surreal overhears, but sometimes you get more than you bargain for. Like the sex of cakes.

I am in my coma. Next to me there is a small boy. I have not really absorbed this small boy. He simply is, like the coconut is. I only notice him when he wants a large chocolate birthday cake mix. I notice him because I have a hatred for adults (a hatred, I tell you) who say to children, "What do you want, Reginald?" then proceed to tell Reginald, in ways from the sublime to the ridiculous, why he can't have it.

I have a question for said parents, aside from why did you have a fucking child? Why ask the child what it wants if you do not intend to give him it? What are you? A fucking sadist? A psychopath? Mentally defective?

And don't any of you half-baked whingers out there, who have children, try to pull the 'Oh, children ask for impossible stuff' shit with me. I've heard you. I've watched you. You fuckwits. You sad, enfeebled little closet dictators. You mental cruelty neurotic child-rearers. They ought to sterilise you.

And this one was a doozie. A prime example of a woman who ought to have her tubes tied. And you'll be happy to know she was a well-heeled, middle class, well-educated fuckwit. Love 'em. They're my favourite.

So… I have transferred my scant sleep-deprived attention from coconut to child because I hear those magic words, "Don't be stupid, you can't have that."

"Why not?" asks Reginald reasonably. They always do, poor bastards, it will take them years before they realise Mum doesn't really mean What do you want? when she asks "What do you want?"

Oh, says Mum, and you're going to like this, "I meant little cakes, that one's too big to fit on the shelf."

That is a classic. Too big to fit on the fucking shelf? How the fuck did she think that up? Do they do classes in this shit? It's in a packet, for Christ's sake. All the packets are the same size.

Anyway, Reginald, with the optimism of youth, perseveres in trying to find 'little' cakes that will pass muster. And sure enough, within minutes, he does.

And then I hear this line. And I'll just take time out to point out this woman is, at least, twenty years younger than me, a whole different generation. Much more modern and up-to-date than I could possibly be. A whole fucking different outlook from ancient, dated, old me with my traditional values handed down from my mother and from her mother, and her mother………………………………… till we die of boredom.

Young, hip, post-feminist, middle class, educated mother says, "No, you can't have those, they're girls' cakes."

At this point I left.

I took myself right the fuck away before I kidnapped Reginald as an act of humanitarian kindness to stop him from being further headfucked by this featherbrained apology for a human being.

I stood round the next aisle in the baked beans and vented on the moronic cretin who was single-handedly putting back the, ha-ha, 'Women's Movement' two hundred years or so because she thought her son would… what?

You tell me. What, exactly, would happen to her son if he ate 'girls'' cakes? Someone please define girls' cakes.

After a few minutes I ventured round to see what the heinous cakes were that would somehow, in the alchemy of their baking, make this woman's son grow a cunt. These were indeed magic cakes. Did you know Tesco's sold cakes that could change your gender? Or perhaps render any male who eats them homosexual?

Oh, I was in for a further treat.

I hadn't seen said cakes, being of too fragile a state to stand and listen any further without beaning her. But there they were. And a more innocuous item you could not imagine.

They were indeed 'girls' cakes', being marketed at young girls with a cartoon pre-teen of the tomboy variety that you see on Xmas gifts in Woolworths. Said tomboy was called Tracey. Maybe she was from kid's TV. I wouldn't know. But it was a box of standard fairy cake mix with pink icing and letters that read T.B. Or some such.

That was it.

Fairy cakes with pink icing and coloured initials. Those were the potent cakes that were going to change this boy's gender, make him doubt his sexuality, confuse the poor four year old so badly he would be able to tell his psychiatrist in years to come, "Yes, I first knew I was queer when mother made me eat those Tracey Cakes. They were pink, you know… with initials."

Tears and anguish follow.

So don't anyone tell me feminism has changed anything. Don't anyone tell me modern women are a new breed with different attitudes and expectancies. And most of all don't anyone tell me men are solely responsible for sexism, because I was there and it was a cunt that was crediting cakes with a cunt and the only man there was all for baking them and eating them and the hell with his manhood.

So tomorrow I want you all to go out and strike a blow for 'Death to Genderism' – my new movement. Undo this little fuckwit with her narrow, ugly little mind. Take your asses out there and publicly eat and enjoy something NOT MEANT FOR YOU. Boys do a Reginald, and get tanked up on pink Traceys. Girls overdose on superheroes and football stars. This is your opportunity to swallow, not spit.

Oh, and do let me know how many of you grow a cock… or cunt.

That would be a blog to die for.

Not yet read DANNY? The price for Volume 1 will be going up soon, soon, soon, so if you need a copy check it out now at http://www.poisonpixie.com/bookshome.html before it's too late, or grab a copy on Amazon here.

Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans

There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.

Enough of editing. Let's talk about something else.

Male beauty.

Now there's a meaty, controversial, closeted subject.

I recently came across this gem about DANNY Volume 1 which popped up on Google. "…At its core, Danny is about nothing more than the twisted obsession of one man for his beautiful younger brother."

This is - at least so far, no doubt it will be bettered in time – the most stupefyingly dumb one line synopsis of DANNY I have yet to read. And, believe me, I've read some doozies.

'At core' is the important part here because, of course, at core DANNY is barely concerned with beauty. Beauty in DANNY, like beauty in real life, is skin deep. Unlike real life, however, the beauty in DANNY is there as much to throw you off the scent as anything else. It's there for the characters, and indeed the reader, to embrace as an apology for any range of behaviour they choose to attribute it to. Beauty in DANNY is nothing but an excuse.

You can, of course, exactly as this reader has done, see only that in DANNY. Just as you can see only the sex. It's about obsession, it's about beauty, it's about farming are all equally valid, and equally stupid.

As with all reviews this one tells us a lot more about the reviewer than the book. If you know DANNY you know immediately that our reader only sees that, and she wants you to see that too – that's how, like the characters in the book, she creates her 'reality'.

DANNY is about beauty like Superman is about stunt-flying.

But nevertheless, beauty, and male beauty at that, is a very, very potent beast indeed.

Male beauty is not the same as female beauty – not by a long shot.

For a start it's far rarer. Female beauty has, by it's very definition, a 'feminine' quality. Beautiful bull dykes are a rare breed, simply because the essence of beauty is a feminine one.

Male beauty walks a very thin and precarious line and so very, very few men achieve it.

The world is stuffed full of handsome men. Hell you can fall over them at the supermarket. Good-looking is ten-a-penny. These are the male equivalents of female beauty. Female beauty is manufactured, simply because it is so artificial.

You take a basically attractive featured woman (i.e. with a symmetrical face and the standard placement of eye to nose to mouth ratio. A 'triangular' or heart-shaped face is best.) You then cosmeticise it. Bring the hair colour up or down, enhance the eyes and mouth with cosmetics. Dress the body to enhance or emulate the currently accepted female shape and bingo – you have female beauty.

Any half-wit with regular features and a vague colour sense can achieve it. It truly is skin-deep.

You can do the same process with a man to make him good-looking. Cut the hair, highlight, take the designer stubble on or off; clothes cut to show off his inherently good bone structure/build; a power suit, a black shirt, trousers cut to show narrow hips and long legs. Bingo! You have a good-looking man.

Good-looking, handsome, pretty (that's maybe not quite ten-a-penny but it's damn close). And it doesn't mean squat to me. On a scale of one to ten - fuck off and don't bother me.

Chat me up in the queue, make eyes at me across the room, be interested in me, use your 'feminine side' to relate to my female psyche.

Oh, fucking give it a rest. Do I look like you'd interest me? Is there any part of this fuck off face that is failing to convince you?

But beautiful men – oh dear God, the power.

I am absolutely terrified of beautiful men. Good-looking men often turn me off and annoy me (I wonder sometimes is this true in reverse? Are men ever annoyed by good-looking women, or are they too knee-jerk stupid?). That manufactured, careful air, that sense of some obscure benefaction that they are bestowing on you, that short attention span shocked surprise that they often exhibit of 'Is she really not interested in me? has got to be one of the most unerotic sensations a human being ever has to suffer.

Good-looking men do not, on the whole, impress me. Neither do pretty ones, who are even more irritating. Girls with penises so we won't feel threatened. All the little fag-boys masquerading as straight so that we won't get a fit of the heebie-jeebies and run off to our girlfriends to share chocolate and nail polish.

Pretty is forgivable at fourteen – just. But any older and I'm having doubts about the women and am getting seriously cross at the laughingly-touted men.

Which brings me back, because there is nowhere else to run and hide, to the subject of beautiful men.

Johnny Depp is a beautiful man. But you know that. Even if you're not sexually attracted to him (what is wrong with you?) you know that.

I've lost count of how often I've heard his co-stars – and I'm talking male ones here – talking about how beautiful he is. He also appears to have a portrait in the attic, but that's another story.

I remember Dustin Hoffman saying of him in Neverland that he was a "seriously beautiful man" and that although he was stunningly handsome on film he was even more beautiful in real life. And that that wasn't easy.

Damn right it isn't. And that is male beauty. And I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like to possess that power. If, indeed, it is power.

Johnny Depp's girlfriends are always 'beautiful' but he overshadows every one of them.

You just know that whenever the Depp Dream Couple are sparkling down some red carpet, that the gawpers and gapers hanging onto that rope for dear life, hoping to touch a hem or two, aren't looking at his model girlfriend, French and thin and perfect. They are not looking at his co-star, lush and raven-haired and very delicious. All eyes, and I mean all eyes, male and female, are on him.

That, my friend, is male beauty and I fear it – to the very depth of my soul.

I would not like to meet Johnny Depp. I would not even fantasise in the deepest depths of my hidden secret soul about snogging him, never mind fucking him. I have never had the barest glimpse of a sexual fantasy about Johnny Depp and I never will.

Is this because I am not sexually attracted to him? Perhaps I only appreciate his beauty distantly, like a sculpture, but sexually it doesn't hit the right buttons?

Yeah, like fuck. He's a clit-stand on legs. You get wet looking at him doing fuck all. His paparazzi photos look like a dog's dinner nine times out of ten. He looks like some drunk that's slept on a bench, with his four day growth, scuzzy 'casual' clothes and old ratty woolly hat, and still your mouth goes dry at the sight of him.

And I do not know why.

That's the real rub. Yeah, sure he's got an unbelievably photogenic bone-structure, lovely expressive eyes, a charismatic way with him, all of that. But is the secret in there?

I don't know. For once in my life I don't have an answer. But I do feel it lies somewhere in mystery ingredient X. I do feel it's that 'charisma' that is the true secret. I suspect, in Johnny Depp, what we are seeing is a damn fine set of genetics coupled with an overly generous does of charisma.

Charisma explains the John Jackson Moores of the world, the men who are not technically 'beautiful' but who have that charismatic pull. It's that same pull we attribute to Satan or vampires. That sense of hypnotic power. I want to shag him now, but I know not why.

Women possess this too, but they are seldom allowed it in the same way. Women have to first match the credentials of 'beautiful' before we allow them to possess 'beauty'. Fortunately for men (now, there's a coincidence) they don’t have to meet that high criteria.

I remember once when I worked in an office a co-worker saying to me, and meaning it as a compliment, that I "Wasn't beautiful in a conventional sense" but that I "possessed a quality of real glamour."

I was dead chuffed at the time because I was a poor love-starved, compliment-hungry kid. Later though I did begin to wonder about it. There was no way I genuinely possessed the quality of glamour, because the nature of glamour is synthetic.

If you look it up the dictionary definition runs something along the lines of a supernatural magical quality of making something more beautiful than it actually is. An illusion in other words. And the one thing I have never been is an illusion. I am not a high-heel, lipstick wearing kind of girl. Never have been. But I have always had followers, fan clubs, acolytes, people (of both sexes) desperately wanting not only parts of me, but to be me. I even have to run away from it every few years to escape it, like some kind of bizarre worshipper lime scale.

It has to be charisma (either that or I really am the Anti-Christ), inexplicable pulling power. I'm attractive, but not conventionally 'beautiful'. I am not possessed of Johnny Depp's lethal wonder-mix, but I fascinate nevertheless.

Is this why I fear him? Is he competition? Is that how I see him? Do I avoid beautiful men because I need to be the peacock?

Sadly no. I wish it was. I fear them for much more insidious, wormy, dark reasons.

I fear them because I want them in a way that feels like a hand ripping my guts out.

Beautiful men own me. They have a power in their grasp that no other human on this planet could possibly have over me.

No-one owns me. I am my own person to a, possibly for some people, alarming degree. I am certainly my own person to a very unfashionable, 'unfeminine' degree.

I remember one of my haters saying a while back that "Stone's boyfriend is as real as her book sales". I'm paraphrasing here, because I'm more interesting. But words to that effect.

I remember first being perplexed by this, wondering if this was supposed to be insulting (I felt that it had to be) then wondering why the fuck anyone would find that insulting. (I still do.)

We won't go into why this particular hater, who I imagine considers herself something of a feminist (hey, probably a post one, they're different – sexier and more man-friendly) jumped immediately onto that ancient, creaky, can-be-traced-back-to-Plato bandwagon that any woman who 'speaks out of turn' can't get a man. But definitely a post-feminist. They're allowed to be bitchy and criticise other women's appearance, weight and lovability - which is, of course, in no way sexist - while demanding equal rights.

I find it deeply ironic, but not as satisfying as it should be, that since I took up active heterosexuality at the age of nineteen I have never ever, not for one single solitary moment, been without a boyfriend.

And do I think this is good? Makes me worthwhile?

Why the fuck should I?

Have I ever brought it up before? Have I ever told you this proves something about me?

Does it?

Perhaps our post-feminist could tell us why it matters to her. Why she thinks it's insulting. Why she feels no boyfriend = failed woman.

I know it will shock her to the core, and possibly many of you reading this, but I find the permanence of a boyfriend deeply disturbing. I think I've paid a terrible price for it and one I wouldn't recommend to other women. Ever.

I want to take all the single women in the world, particularly those who actually elected to do it, and say to them "Stick with it. Don't let anyone Bridget Jones you." Needing a man is horseshit, and I'm not bullshitting you here.

I am a woman who has never needed a family, children, friends. I have chosen to live without those things. Never looked back. If only I'd had the guts to reject the boyfriend too who might I have been? What might I have done?

So I let the boyfriend stand in the way, push my career aside, dominate and dictate to me?

Oh ha, ha, hee, heee. Can you see it? Me? Get real.

The Boyfriend has done everything on my terms, and I mean everything. I stopped cooking and washing up at nineteen – that was his job. I haven't done it since. And that is but the tip of the iceberg. But it doesn't stop me wondering, in my ruthless way, if I couldn't have done more without one.

He's my one-man support team, handling my depressions, my rages, my ruthless self-determinism and on top of that he has to do all the cooking and the washing up and pay the bills and do I appreciate him for it?

Do I fuck. In fact I wonder regularly if I couldn't have been even greater without him.

I am truly the demi-god of feminism. Believe it.

Which still doesn't really tell you why I deeply fear beautiful men, but then maybe you can put that one together yourself. You'll have to, because some secrets are too dark to reveal.

And that's apparently one of them.

Not yet read DANNY? The price for Volume 1 will be going up soon, soon, soon, so if you need a copy check it out now at http://www.poisonpixie.com/bookshome.html before it's too late, or grab a copy on Amazon here.

Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans

There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.