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Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Secrets, Spoilers and God, I'm GOOD!
News update.
Okay, what first?
Most of DANNY-IS-GOD.com is now up and running. What you've got now is what you're going to have for the next couple of months as I urgently need to get back to editing.
That said, I have added captions to the original manuscript pages so you can now actually identify what you are looking at. And the original MS start to Volume 1 – "It was August" – is now finally there.
We have also put on the first secret website, for DANNY Volume 2. Those who own Volume 1 can now use their password to go and read the first 28 pages of Volume 2.
There's lots of shouty warnings on this (well, one shouty warning) which would seem unnecessary, common sense and all that, but, as any of you who have been following the recent Harry Potter media circus will have noticed, spoilers are a real problem, and even journalists (the New York Times, yet) are not above opening their fats mouths and belching it all out, no matter how often they've been asked not to. So, please, if you access these pages don't go public with the content and please, please don't give the password out to all and sundry. If they want to read the secret website let them buy their own bloody book.
So what does DANNY-IS-GOD.com have to offer?
Just about everything.
It's got full histories on all the books, how they are structured, how and when they were written, photos of the original manuscripts (with captions), an archive of articles on the books and writing, photos of all the book covers, a full history of its short life with Citron Press, photos of some of the original Citron publicity, photos of the Orkney book launch, a huge novel-length extract from Volume 1 FREE, and now available to read on-line as well as the PDF version, a FREE short story, Nothing But a Negro, a forerunner to DANNY, details of The Minor Works, a very comprehensive review section with everything from reader and Amazon reviews to press reviews and features, including the deathless and funny Keswick Reminder story, a DANNY fan photo gallery, the DANNY fantasy film cast, a biography of me linked to a longer biography over at www.ChanceryStone.com, and lots of other stuff that I can't even remember. Enough for a fun day out for all the family anyway.
On the other two websites, www.THIS-IS-HARDCORE.com now has a really cool little 'blue' movie with a difference on its landing page. Nothing on the site yet, you'll have to wait for that, but check out the movie. It gives you a little taste of what is to come, if you'll pardon the pun. It took Mr Scratchmann about a month to Rotoscope this little gem, frame by painstaking frame.
www.ChanceryStone.com now has, as previously stated, a longer biography of me. It's about 8 pages long and talks about isolated parts of my childhood. I find it rather strange, to be honest, since I'd sat down to write a more detailed biography and that's what came out. But, that said, it's got a certain quirky charm and, who knows, you might learn something about me.
That's all there is on there for the time being. There will be a nauseatingly comprehensive photo gallery eventually, with lots and lots of photos of me looking young and gorgeous, and with all the ugly photos ruthlessly edited out. Such is the power of doing your own publicity. Can't beat it.
Discovered a couple of new fans recently, further afield than normal, so welcome to them, and thank you to everyone who wrote (on Blogspirit and by e-mail) praising the new website. Your cheques are in the post.
Kidding aside, it's always great to hear from fans. You slog away day after day, post all this shit up and then… nothing. So it's always reassuring to know someone is actually reading it, and appreciating it. God, I'm so needy.
What else? Got a national mag waiting for Volume 2 coming out. They actually e-mailed us the same day the newsletter went out to say they wanted a copy, on PDF if necessary, so they could include it in the October edition of their mag. God, if only I could get more of them as keen as that.
And, speaking of newsletters, if you didn't receive one (by e-mail) at the beginning of last week and would like to be (or thought you were) on the list then use this link to join up: Subscribe to the Poison Pixie Newsletter.
We cleaned out our e-mail lists recently and bunched three of them together. Our Mail Chimp then did his stuff and deleted a few more. If you have been inadvertently deleted (sorry!) then please re-sign up. It's a one-click unsubscribe, so you don't need to worry about getting loads of stuff you don't want. If you don't want it, lose it.
That's about it, I think.
In between waiting for the Art Department to photograph, load, Flashify, redo tables, fix glitches and hiccups, go off to Life classes, go off to teach marketing and generally faff about, I have been reading Volume 3 and 4.
God, they're good, even unedited.
God, I love this book. And Volume 2 is just reaching that delicious stage of suddenly metamorphosing into a cohesive whole.
I actually picked up courage 2 nights ago, while getting the extract for the secret website, to have a skim through it in reader mode. It's about a month (I think – must be) since I was working on it last and I'd forgotten a lot of the changes and corrections I'd made, so they come at you fresh, as it were.
God, it's good. (Just can't get tired of saying that.)
No, seriously, it's good. I shock even myself with my brilliance sometimes.
I find myself reading 'new' lines thinking, Fuck me, did I write that? That's a great line.
Sometimes I think there's more to this being a conduit to God thing than I realise. If it is true, you do realise what this says about God, don't you? Obviously not as anti-sex as the Christians (and the Muslims and the Jews, and the…) would have you believe.
I'm beginning to have a sneaky suspicion that Volume 2 may actually be a better book than Volume 1. Never thought I'd hear myself say those words. But it just has a certain something. It's sharper, tighter, more focussed.
Even although you don't have a clue where it's going (nothing changed there, then) you know it is going somewhere, and probably somewhere bad at that. It has a real depth to it, a more obvious sense of hiddenness. I think. I hate trying to define abstract feelings, sensations.
I think you can sense it even in the 28 page extract on the secret site. Have a look yourself and see what I mean. Can't you just feel something heaving under the water there? Like some ancient sea monster hundreds of feet down in the darkness, a great amorphous shape slowly surfacing underneath the unwitting humans above.
I've read too many fairy tales.
Anyway, not sure if it's news or not, but I have a slow, steady surety growing that Volume 2 is a worthy addition to the oeuvre after all, and might just knock the almighty One off its perch.
Have fun.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
19:25 Posted in Blog , Books , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
If I Tell You a Secret, Do You Promise Not To Share...?
Hi, just showing my face so you know I'm still alive.
DANNY-IS-GOD.com is two-thirds built, enough to go on-line, so we should, disasters-not-occurring, be putting it up by Friday… or so.
It is enormous. I reckon you could sit and read it for a good two or three hours and still not be through it. It is truly the definitive DANNY one-stop-shop.
If you are familiar with the old site (the 'pink' site as it is known here) you will have seen some of the stuff before, but a lot of it has been revised and updated and there are interesting little notes and asides sprinkled throughout which (hopefully) makes it more entertaining.
For example you can now read the true story of the foul Post-it note. And discover who told me to "show not tell" and which esteemed journal claimed that DANNY "does a disservice to the people of West Cumbria". Yes, I have named names. Not, I hasten to add, out of a desire to name and shame (that's just an added bonus), but because I got tired of never knowing myself which one of the fuckers said what. I went to the filing cabinet and looked them up… for YOU, dear reader.
I am so sweet I risk poisoning myself.
The photo gallery side of the site is still somewhat weak as we have been so busy getting the written content up that the necessary photos and scans have not yet been done, but they will be. Just check it out from time to time - you will find new stuff being added all the time.
Still, already you can see DANNY's various book jackets, some of the original Citron Press stuff, pictures of the DANNY fantasy movie cast and pictures of the original manuscript. Okay, at the moment it's just the boxes, with teasing glimpses of the Stone scrawl, but the actual, original hand-written pages will be yours in time.
What else?
Oh yeah, a deleted blog that previously only saw 24 hours in the real world has been re-edited and made it in into the article archive – The Fifty Foot Dream Lobster Versus The Evil Limpets, which I have included, uncomfortable as it makes me, because I think it comes closest to revealing the true heart of DANNY as I perceive/wrote it. Not sure if it will baffle more people than it illuminates but it's there – take from it what you will. And, of course, it does finally explain what the Fifty Foot Dream Lobster actually is.
The secret websites will not be present initially as we are having problems trying to decide what to put in… or not.
At present they have big shouty warnings telling you NOT to read them if you haven't read the book. Trouble is, I have the feeling that if people have bought Volume 2 one of the first things they will do is go to the secret site for 3, find the password (each password is in the previous volume) and promptly go read the extract from 3.
Now, if you did this, all of Volume 2 would be ruined for you. No part of 3 can be read without ruining 2 for you. I remember the trouble I had trying to find an extract out of 3 for the old pink site. And when I did finally find and run a piece I remember one of my critics moaning it was "boring" and that she had "no interest in reading Volume 3" because it was so uninspiring.
When I had finished swearing at the crassness of that, me not being enlightened at that time (and strangely I'm still not enlightened about that – it just is crass), I thought, 'Right, that's the last time I'm going to knock my guts out trying to give them something if they are so fucking stupid it hasn't occurred to them I might not be able to give them an "interesting" extract without ruining the book for them.'
Think of all the soap mags that every week tell you what is going to happen in the soap/s and completely ruin the plot/s. I'm going to say that again – THEY COMPLETELY RUIN THE PLOT. And people love them, buy them in their droves. IMDB is full of (morons) people wanting to know what happens in films, before they've watched them, usually starting their thread with "Is this film worth watching?"
Put simply, I do not trust people.
Now, technically it's the reader's problem if they want to ruin the book for themselves, but I fear those who like to ruin it for others too. I simply do not want to be the source of plot spoilers. I know I can't keep DANNY under wraps forever. I also know that Hollywood would never do this, they'd be milking the plot twists in DANNY for all they are worth, but I am a woman of integrity, dear people, and I simply will not do it.
So, that's where I am. Do I trust you all with extracts and articles on Volume 3 (and 4), or will you all get your Volume 2 and promptly run off to "just take a little peek" half-way through reading 2 – you know, to quote another critic, "just to make sure they get their comeuppance"?
Ah, experience has made me hard and cynical.
Okay, I'm done here.
Keep your eye on DANNY-IS GOD – be with you soon.
ETA Sat 14th July:- Talk about synchronicity. Look at what showed up on Yahoo News this morning (click on following link). http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20070713/tuk-uk-britain-pot... I rest my case.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
23:20 Posted in Blog , Books , Web | Permalink | Comments (4) | Email this
Sunday, 01 July 2007
Finding God With Wayne Dyer
I'm reading a book right now called "The Power of Intention" by Wayne Dyer.
I imagine a lot of the Americans reading this blog will know Dr Wayne. For the rest of you, unless you read self-help books you may not be familiar with hm.
Dr Wayne is a self-help guru, like Dr Phil and Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williams and Louise Hay, and Anthony Robbins, and, and, and… And there's a funny old thing about that list right off – they're all American.
Why is that?
When Britain produces self-help books – and we do – they are all by psychologists and little guys doing counselling out their living rooms. They tend to be based either on standard accepted clinical thought, personal experience or hypnosis. We Brits actually have a couple of famous hypnotists, but they are as much about showmanship as they are about self-help.
And there's another interesting question – how much showmanship is in the ever-growing, endlessly expanding band of American gurus?
Americans have a history of this stuff. Since the country's inception, not so very long ago, there were guys (and gals) wandering the dusty roads pedalling Snake Oil and mesmerism, offering to connect hard-bitten dustbowl dwelling farmers with 'the other side' and offering tent missionaryism at a price.
They've been rolling with snakes and speaking in tongues, finding stone tablets in the hillsides and offering polygamous marriage as a way to get closer to God for many years now. Even to this day they set themselves up in desert camps and hoard guns as acts of 'righteousness' then commit suicide in mass pacts that make people in tinfoil hats worshipping His Holiness, The Hobgoblin of Wellington Boots, look sane.
We Brits just don't do it.
Why?
Are we smarter, less gullible? Frankly I find that hard to believe. People are people wherever you go, skin colour, race or accent aside. Dumb is as dumb does – your geographic location doesn't have much to do with it.
But the Americans do this stuff. They have TV shows, whole channels, where people 'find God'. They go en masse to seminars where they 'find themselves' in exactly the same way as they used to find Jesus, standing up, yelling, chanting and rapturous states included. (Tell me something, was Jesus ever actually officially misplaced? Is he lurking somewhere in an eternal game of Hide and Seek, with God as the perennial practical joker, just waiting for us to count to 100 and find him in the broom closet?)
I have known Dr Wayne since he was but a fledgling saint in the UK. Not personally, you understand, but through his work. Dr Wayne wrote "Your Erroneous Zones" and a book I could have sworn was called "Who's Pulling Your Strings?" but that is (now?) called "Pulling Your Own Strings".
Now, is this my faulty memory or has Dr Wayne indeed changed the title of his book to one less aggressive and more 'positive' – i.e. sanctimonious and bland?
Regrettably I am going to have to credit this change to my delightful trait of rewriting everything I read, hear or see (that's why I have learned to double-check everything, twice), as there is no proof otherwise. But if anyone out there owns an old copy of this book and it did indeed exist in another form please let me know.
I really liked "…Strings" because it was so assertive, so in your face, so unapologetic. I never really enjoyed any of the others quite so much. Worse, as time passed he began to adopt that awful sagely tone that blights so many self-help authors, that sense of sitting on high and looking down on the ants, that smug, ineffable sense of self-importance. "Yes, my child, I Wayne, Marianne, Louise am closer to God and I know thee."
In the 1960's and 70's pop psychology was geared towards anger. Anger was the cause of all evil. It was a 'bad' emotion and if we could only get rid of it we would all live in peace and light… and a haze of Happy Cake.
In the eighties, as the fashions changed, it became money and affluence that was the problem – the acquisition of 'stuff', including all the ambition and power that went with it. Through the nineties it subtly changed slant again and now it is 'ego'. Now your ego is responsible for everything. If only we can get rid of ego we will all live in peace and light… and a haze of Yogi Camomile Tea (and blue algae soup).
The one thing all these notions have in common, aside from the dictates of fashionable thought, is a completely bogus (and usually entirely unsubstantiated) belief in absolutes. Anger is evil. Go away anger. Stuff is evil. Go away stuff. Ego is evil. Go away ego.
Perversely, despite a uniform failing (and it is a failing) in these people to keep religion out of it, they all forget the basic Bible precept, "The love of money is the root of all evil."
It's no accident that this is the most misquoted dictum out the Bible, and these self-appointed gurus are just as fast to miss the point of it as any one of the ants they are so far above.
The vital difference between "Money is the root of all evil" – how most people (mis)quote it - and the actual text, is the tiny words "love of". Apply it to the gurus' ideas to see the difference it makes.
"The love of stuff is the root of all evil", "The love of ambition is the root of all evil", "The love of ego is the root of all evil."
Anger is a completely natural and intrinsically vital emotion. Without it you wouldn't just be in trouble, you'd be dead. Anger is what lets you know people have crossed your boundaries; anger is what makes you redress wrongs, for yourself and others; anger keeps you alive on a dark street when someone threatens you.
When anger becomes a problem is when you love the effects of it too much and start to use it in inappropriate ways – like bullying to get what you want, lashing out over minor infarctions, waging personal feuds because someone in your office moved your cheese.
Anger is not 'natural' in these circumstances, you just want it to be because you've fallen in love with being right. You are just aching to feel self-righteous. This is the love of anger that starts wars – my God is better than your God.
The same applies to ego.
Your ego, contrary to modern popular thought, is not evil. If it was you wouldn't have one.
Human beings develop ego (which, incidentally, only means that you recognise you are separate from others) so that they can grow up. Without ego we would all fondly imagine we were part of our mother, we would never separate. We would not only be baffled and confused we'd be well-nigh incapable of operating at all.
Many serial killers exhibit traits of not separating correctly from their mothers or families – in short, they have not developed proper egos, a sense of being separate.
Do these gurus really suggest that we should go around believing we are at one with everyone and do an Ed Gein? (Ed was completely wrapped up in his mother. He thought he was her, and she was everywoman, and he was them, so they were his and… you get the picture.)
Actually, yes, they do. They say exactly that. Ad nauseam. Lose your ego, become one. Your ego will only make you miserable. It only leads to you thinking you are better than everyone else (why?) and this will make you ugly (how?) and people will hate you – not that we care if people hate us (oh-oh, conflicting message 108) – and that would be 'bad' (why, again?) because we are all one in God (come again?) who is everywhere (not 'lost' after all, apparently, but 'everywhere' instead), and God doesn't like ego (proof please) and ego only leads to the love of fast cars and if you wear this tinfoil helmet the Martians can't hear what you're thinking.
What is it about this muddled thinking that is so appealing to people? Is it that old chestnut – I don't understand it, it must be deep? Or is it showmanship, "Look into my eyes, look into my eyes..." Is it really just mesmerism a new way?
Certainly in this latest book of Wayne's he goes way off the scale into the lunatic regions. He barely manages a paragraph where you can discern the sense of it. I found myself reading and rereading and rereading them trying to get even a tiny grain of something tangible out of them and eventually had to come to the conclusion they actually were meaningless.
This hurts me.
I'm a staunch believer in reasoned arguments. I detest opinions stated thus, "This book was crap. I got nothing out it. Dyer is full of shit. I don't know why people buy his crap. Wot a loser."
Even if I agree with that I still despise it. Why is it crap, give me reasons. What were you looking for, why didn't you find it? Was it really his job to deliver it?
Your unsubstantiated opinions are as bad as his unsubstantiated "crap". If you have a bone to pick, be specific. Until you can tell me why it's crap I exercise the right to discount you, and your 'crap'. You are an ignoramus sir, and a rogue.
But Unca Wayne. Oh God, nothing in the book stands scrutiny, always supposing you can get a thread of rational argument out it in the first place.
I plough through page after page (I'm still at page 149 of 257) reading it dedicatedly every morning for the past week. Normally this would be a three day job. It's like pulling teeth. It's gibberish – saintly, sanctimonious gibberish of rank, unashamed Snake Oil salesmanship.
This leaves me with only one of three options:
1. Wayne is a charlatan and always has been. This means all his books are lies, an attempt to cash in, an exercise in profiteering.
2. Wayne actually believes this stuff and therefore is either a narcissist or a lunatic. This means all his other books are also the works of a lunatic and not to be trusted.
3. Wayne was an orphan and grew up in foster homes. Wayne talks about how he always held down three jobs, determined never to be poor. In other words Wayne is as much lost in his past psychological damage as the rest of us and, although he may have started out with the best of intentions, his need to field off his childhood horrors, always making more and more money, getting more and more security, maintaining his place in the guru market, means he has to keep 'developing' his line of thought, which takes him further and further into hocus pocus, 'mysticism' (the modern word for unprovable) and 'spirituality' (see mysticism).
I favour 3, much as it saddens me. Depressing as it might be, it is still better than believing he's fallen for his own hype and thinks he is either Mother Teresa or, worse, the spirit of God on earth.
No matter what way you look at it it's sad. His early work is good, particularly "…Strings", I would still recommend it to you, but this more recent work completely devalues both his original work and him as a person. Worse, it beggars a very big, ugly and unavoidable question.
If this man is so together and not only understands human psychology but is so close to God he operates at a "high vibrational energy", in the top "13%" of 'spiritually superior' people (yes he thinks he's there, you're in the 87% that he categorises as "sheep") - although he would never use the word superior because that would be ego and ego is wrong - why is the poor soul so blatantly terrified of losing the "abundance" that he reassures us is all around us, instead grimly hanging onto his position, accruing more and more wealth, spewing out nonsense masquerading as "enlightenment", quoting spurious "research" which he never details, and waving his arms in between the magnesium flashes so that we never see the man behind the curtain?
Yes, Dr Wayne W. Dyer has become the Wizard of Oz.
And poor old God is still waiting in the broom cupboard for us to find him.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads)here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
19:05 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Science , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this