DANNY by Chancery Stone

CULT FUCKTION!

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:38:57 +0200

Still stuck on Cult Fiction. I've spent a small fortune on e-bay buying jewellery because of how stuck I am on Cult Fiction. I've read about films and dead babies in boxes and listened to narcissist (I'm finding them everywhere – that's focus for you) Austrians who keep their daughters locked up in basements because "she was enjoying herself too much" and "was not obedient". I could just about grasp that one, but not why he'd then fathered 7 children by her. Perhaps it was a punishment. "I'll show you you can't go out partying, my girl. Have some children – that will smarten your ideas up."

But I digress.

I think it would be fair to say that never in the history of my own writing have I ever had problems like this before.

It's tempting to believe it's just the old pointlessness thing. You know, the negative swamp of 'everybody hates me, think I'll go eat worms'. But, hell, I've experienced that before, time without number. You go into the slump, you mope about, you get grumpy, then angry, then you face up to the fact that no-one owes you anything and you stop feeling sorry for yourself, get the work done and move on.

But this motherfucker. Jesus, it's like drawing teeth, only not as much fun.

What I'm experiencing is an odd combination of having nothing I want to say along with a bad-tempered 'Oh fuck off and die.'

I had a glimpse of insight a couple of weeks back, when we went to see Nicholas Roeg (film director, for those not conversant) talking with his long-time screenwriter.

It wasn't exactly disappointing but, as Max said today, I didn't feel as if I actually learned anything.

Roeg was defensive answering his questions, old friend or no, and we didn't really get much out of him. Paradoxically, he was better with questions from the audience, but there wasn't really enough of them to draw him out. I think maybe if the evening had been allowed to run a while longer we might have hit more pay dirt.

But it did make me wonder what exactly was making him so defensive and eventually I came to the conclusion that he was probably just plain sick of 'justifying' his work.

It's not that his friend was asking him difficult questions, but I think he really didn't want to be boxed in by how people liked to categorise him, and he markedly didn't want to tell people what to think about his work. In short, he made the films and it was up to you what you got from them.

I feel that something similar is happening with me and DANNY.

I'm getting sick of writing clumsy big clues to nudge people in the right direction, and I'm absolutely sick to death of trying to give people a 'handle' on it so they won't be scared away or completely baffled by what they're (not) seeing.

This is the real root of my disgruntlement. Why the fuck am I spending all my time trying to make my work look non-threatening and more 'normal' (read mediocre) when the very last thing I want my work to be is non-threatening and mediocre? I suddenly feel very bolshie about having to explain everything all the time: You don't get it? You can't be bothered taking a risk on something unknown? Fine, then fuck off and buy something from the New Age section.

See? This is not good. This is what is called a conflict of interest. I'm supposed to sit down and write something that every fibre of my being is crying out 'No, no, NO' to.

Which is why I'm getting nowhere. And why I should give this to Max to do. But I despair at the copy he writes for DANNY. He makes fabulous visuals, but when he's writing copy the man can't leave hyperbole alone. He loves to smack 'em between the eyes, and he is positively cruel to adjectives. It always comes out sounding like a trailer for a Joel Silver movie but with more sex. Either that or it's full of punning humour. Christ, it's not a fucking Carry On movie, you know.

I know I'm being beyond difficult here, downright bloody-minded and ungrateful, but I just can't seem to resolve this. I think I'm hanging onto too many things. I want to write the copy, but I don't. I want him to write the copy, but I don't.

Result? No copy.

Won't do. Will not do.

I'm only writing this blog because I'm sitting staring at the computer (forcefully stopped myself from doing anything else) and getting nowhere. I've written loads of stuff – and I don't like any of it. I figured if I wrote this blog it might crystallize something, clear my mind, and I might see a chink of what to do with this.

I'm beginning to think something drastic is called for. Certainly if I don't get something soon DANNY 1's launch in the U.S. is going to go seriously over schedule.

I think maybe I need to stop thinking of how to 'sell' it. It's obviously gone past the point of no return for me. Just done too much of it. If they don't get it by now, they ain't gonna get it and, frankly, I am obviously well beyond caring.

I think it's that that's making me feel like I'm being 'forced' to write yet another school essay on The Subversion of Genre in Chancery Stone's DANNY, or Why DANNY is Not a Sex Novel – You Thick Shit.

I think maybe in order to get me interested I need to give myself something challenging to do with it. It may not be recognisable as "An introduction to The DANNY Quadrilogy" when it's finished but at least it will be finished.

So (sighs heavily), anyone up for the all-new Cult Fucktion – Seven Steps to Screwing Six-year-olds?

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Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.

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 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.

Deprestrogen - and How You Cunts Can Cure It

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Wed, 7 May 2008 22:20:00 +0200

Between Taschen catalogues crammed full of tits & ass – and one book on penises – magazine supplements pointing out how my 'female brain' can't 'understand' men, and various films and TV where my sex gets to strip and scream, sometimes together, I seem to be surrounded – sunk in – just how irrelevant I am.

Then this afternoon I come across this article headlining on IMDB Is There a Real Woman In This Multiplex?

And a very good article it is too. A woman after my own heart.

But, there's no doubt about it, besides me and her, there seems to be precious few of us yelling about the sheer misogyny of who we are 'supposed' to be.

With the exception of getting to fend for ourselves – albeit for less money – women's lives have definitely got worse. The suffragettes could have saved themselves a lot of hunger-striking, and the women's libbers a lot of underwear. They did fuck all in the long run.

Sure, they don't marry us off to old men these days (unless you're a royal or from a fundamentalist religion), but otherwise women's lot is definitely worse than it was in your mother's day – or your grandmother's.

Think about it. We get to work, but we don't get to have a career. Some women try it, and even pull it off up to a point, but they pay a price for it that men never do.

Career women are selfish, unfeminine, ball-breakers. Even other women don't like them. They're hard, unfeminine (can't stress that often enough), cold, mean, heartless, greedy, ambitious, warped, unnatural. They treat their families appallingly, depriving their husbands of masculinity, belittling them by association. (How can a man be a man if his wife earns more, works harder, and commands more respect?) They neglect their children, putting their four-wheel drives and blackberries before everything else. They produce narcissistic, neurotic, driven children and mincing, suicidal homosexuals. Even delinquents. And serial killers.

Career women have broken down the very fabric of society, producing a generation of latch-key kids who don't know how to cook and who smoke crack.

This, of course, is because it is all women's fault. No matter what it is, it's women's fault. No matter what's gone wrong with the world – we done it.

I'd like to believe this was a new thing, part of the general malaise of modern life, because it would make my argument look so very shiny, but actually it's a very old thing; it's just got more comprehensive, that's all.

This is the list of the things that used to be women's fault:-

1. Infidelity. If he did it, it was because he was bored (because she didn't make enough effort), or because she'd 'let herself go' (his beer belly/baldness is never an issue), or she was a shrew (you don't pick fault with men – ever), or bad with money (women's families come first – always), etc, etc, etc.

If she did it, it was because she was a slut. Or because she was a slut. Or maybe even a slut.

2. Bad children. She didn't bring them up properly – end of conversation.

3. Bad husbands. If he hit her she provoked it. If he hit the children she'd brought them up badly and they'd provoked it. If he fucked the children it was for the same reasons as number 1 – see Infidelity.

4. Bad housekeeping. She was a slattern, a lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing who'd rather stand a the street corner yakking than polish her step.

And that was it, pretty much. In other words, anywhere you could go wrong would be domestic. It was up to you to keep the house running sweetly. If the house wasn't sweet it was your fault. Your domain; your fault.

Now look at how that list has grown. Here is a list of the things that are now women's fault:-

First – all of the above. Nothing's changed. Women are still considered guardians of home and hearth and custodian of everybody's feelings – even the cat's. What's more, now it isn't just your relatives or neighbours that are going to judge you – now it's everyone. Complete strangers on TV, the media – 'experts', every one – are all pushing into your home, pointing out all the things you should be doing – from taking care of your husbands 'feminine' side, to making sure your kids get enough vitamins to get them into Mensa.

On top of that we now have to worry about being essentially flawed, something that needs 'fixed'.

Only a couple of days ago I actually read on Yahoo news that women were twice as likely to get depressed as men (nooooo…) and that 'they' (the scientists) didn't know why, but that it was possibly (read probably) hormones.

Jesus Christ, yes. Why hasn't someone told us before? It's the depression hormone. All us women are fitted with a neat little depression gland that secretes Deprestrogen. It's probably behind our tits.

Men don't have hormones, you see. Nope. They have this unique biology that runs on something else, just not hormones. It can't be hormones, you see, because they're a woman thing. Because women have ovaries and wombs and shit like that, and they have these hormones that just gallop into the blood at random moments and suddenly – snap – we're engulfed in Deprestrogen, which makes us cry and rant and eat chocolate. Because men never cry, or rant or eat chocolate, never mind do anything irrational.

Where the hell do these cretins get off with this shit? Although it's been recognised for a long time that negative thought patterns are the most likely factor in depression, and that cognitive therapy is the most successful method for treating it – with no chemicals, hormonal or otherwise, involved – they are still spouting piffle like this.

Why is it that whenever anything a woman says or does is considered unacceptable that the mental illness/chemical imbalance, you're-just-a-mad-bitch crap starts pouring out?

Because we're flawed, that's why.

That's what the modern woman has attained that her mother and her grandmother and all the others before her never had – the 'proof' that you are a fundamentally flawed, genetically irreversible disaster area.

See, before we had the cure-all of the 'Women's Movement', women were still considered inferior – actually, physically, like blacks having longer arms and a sense of rhythm.

When we got the vote, and the 'right' to work our asses off for less pay and no real promotion, it became politically incorrect to consider a woman as inferior. They could be smart enough, they'd proved it by fitting all those little wires on the circuit boards for half of men's wages. The scientists had to stop talking about their inferior biology and their smaller brains.

But the horrible fact was the inferiority theory didn't go away. It's like all those people who think taking Sambo and gollies out of children's books stops racism.

Newsflash – it doesn't, it just diverts it somewhere else.

And our 'somewhere else' is our flawedness.

And now all you cheery chappies, male and female, who think feminists are angry lesbians, are sitting shaking your heads, sneering at what mysterious 'flaws' these might be. Like the blacks, the women get it too easy. Everybody bends over backwards for women these days – they get all the best jobs, and they get to wear skirts (oh, the envy).

Okay, let's just look at some of these silly, irrelevant, too-much-fuss-over-nothing-typical-women flaws we've acquired along with our 'rights' and votes. Here's a short list, roughly in order of fear and loathing.

1. Fat. Women are fat, fat, fat. Unless you are a size 0, you are FAT. Nowadays a size 10 or 12 (that's a 6 or an 8 in the U.S.) is likely to be referred to as 'round' or 'curvy'.

On what planet?

The average British woman is a size 16. Ms Average is even bigger in the U.S., and yet a size 12 is 'curvy'? By what standard? Why, by the standard of how in error women essentially are. It's nothing you can fix, you're just wrong.

Women have a genetic predisposition to fat. For a start we have an extra layer of it. Nature thought it would be useful for us. Nature was WRONG.

Not only that, but we put it on easily. Pregnancy, menstrual fluctuations – hey, those good old hormones that make us depressed. Wouldn't you just know it? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

2. Hair. Unless it's on your head, it's wrong. Body hair on a woman is just wrong. It grows there? That's our point: you're flawed. 'Real' women (i.e. sexy, desirable women; the only real value women have) have smooth legs, arms, faces – skin in general. Flawed, wrong women have hair in their underarms, on their legs, their faces – hell, even round their nipples. Goddamn freaks.

And don't even start us on hairy snatches. To quote the internet, ewwwwwwwwwwwwww….

See? Even the internet in the immensity of its wisdom, knows hairy snatches are just wrong.

3. Smell. Everything about women smells. Especially their crotches. Women's crotches not only smell but their smell varies throughout the month, getting more or less pungent according to how moist it is. Which also varies. Smelly and moist? Dear God, does it get any wronger?

4. Wrinkles. Women wrinkle, age, go grey. It's a disgusting lapse of taste. Real women (i.e. sexy, blah, blah, blah….) are smooth, pre-pubescent, scentless, hairless, and forever chestnut/flaxen-haired. If you're not – you're wrong.

And that lot's just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even touched on tit size, bleeding (that's beyond wrong, that's repulsive), emotional instability, showing off, dressing 'badly', frigidity, sluttishness, eating disorders, excessive shopping, drinking and shoes, relationship problems, failure to raise child geniuses, male emasculation… The list is endless.

The simple fact is your mother and grandmother just didn't have these problems. Mothers were expected to get fat, go grey and adopt the 'peenie' (that's an apron to you, not a sex organ) as soon as they popped their first brat.

A pre-consumerism mother aspired to a weekly perm and a pot of cold cream as her beauty care. She shaved her legs, and anything else that sprouted, with her husband's razor, and her muff was her own. Only sluts meddled with their pubic hair and no-one saw your big sensible, comfortable, sane cotton pants anyway. The only things they waxed were floors and furniture and they didn't have thrush every two minutes from tight nylon underwear and vaginal deodorants.

Yes, we women, we've never had it so good. Now we have so many products to choose from, so many solutions to fix ourselves.

Roll on the next great new Celebrity Beach Nettle and Rhubarb Soup Diet. I need to be perfect. And I need it now.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

Well, at least I didn't turn into a daffodil...

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:06:27 +0200

I've been in the land of the insane this week. Or at least the seriously disturbed.

I managed to catch a cold from a teller in Asda's (and what was worse, I knew I would and was too socially programmed to ignore my instincts and go to another till). Hardly had said cold took hold than I came down with some odd bastard species of cystitis. Feeling shivery, spaced out, in pain and incredibly tired, I down-tooled on Cult Fiction (that poor thing is blighted, I tell you) and decided to move away from the computer and do something else.

'Something else' turned into me buying books on narcissist families and immersing myself in the 'madness' that was my "family of origin" as psychiatrists love to call it. (As opposed to your family of rental, or your family of adoption for the day, perhaps.)

In the strange ways of the universe, I have no idea exactly how I came to the narcissist thing. I know I was looking at books on shame on Amazon and I'm guessing one of them sneaked in there. It rung a bell because I remember my brother throwing it into the mix of Ways My Sister is Insane and Therefore My Parents are Not, and My Life is Unchanged… No, Really.

They tell me some narcissism is healthy, but it crosses into pathological narcissism when people can't empathise with other people. There's even some division of thought on when a narcissist morphs into becoming a psychopath – but, hey, they're all the same in my book.

Kidding.

Still, it wasn't comfortable and I do kind of wonder what drove me to do it. You'd think maybe having a little festival of Marx brothers movies or some such might have been a better idea.

I have to admit that although I still feel like crap (the sleep deprivation alone has ensured that) I do feel better for having read them (three of them in a week). But has it helped any?

Yes and no. I do seem to be a rarity in the heady world of Children of Narcissist Parents, in that I recognised early on a lot of the things that others seem to take a lifetime, or two, to spot.

I seem to be even rarer in that I dumped mine, realising that they would never be any use for anything. One of the books I bought actually spends around half the time telling you how to "deal" with these madly abusive parents so that you can have a "relationship" with them.

I think that could probably be adopted as the new definition of insanity to replace the 'doing what you've always done and expecting different results' maxim currently in use.

Of course, it is a form of doing what you've always done, but what they advise is changing your usual behaviour for new behaviours that create a different, supposedly less mad-making interaction with said narcissist parents.

And I say, Why, God, why?

I will never, ever understand people wanting to hang onto families that don't – and, worse, can't – love them. Why would you do that? What in the name of all that's holy are you getting out of the relationship if they don't love you, don't even really know you exist and recognise you solely as a way of off-loading their bad feelings about themselves onto you?

So, any of you fellow Children of Narcissist Parents™ (let's trademark that), if you feel you can argue a good case for why you are hanging onto a dead but painful relationship that still gives you endless grief no matter how much you adapt your 'behaviours', tell me about it – I'd really love to know.

So what of me then? Did I see myself writ large on every page?

Yes, pretty much. It's disconcerting and unnerving to see family scenarios, nearly all set in America, that might well have been played out in the Henery household. To discover that your parents are nothing but a psychological stereotype and that your own behaviours are nothing but bog standard reactions to that behaviour is completely underwhelming. Looks like none of us are as original as we like to think.

Conversely, it's also comforting: to know that you haven't imagined it, to know that you haven't exaggerated it, to know that your realisation that it wasn't 'normal' is immensely reassuring, in a depressing kind of a way. Depressing because you wonder how human beings can be so dumb. This has always been my problem with my family. After a lot of hurt and rage you start to see it in a more detached way and you realise just how breathtakingly dumb their behaviour is (if only it was so easy to see how dumb your own behaviour is).

Take but one tiny example off the stock-pile of my parents' greatness.

My mother had a thing about stuff. She couldn't part with it. She was, and is, a truly bizarre mix of someone who will kill for stuff and who equally well doesn't give a toss about stuff. She's like some ancient biblical painting of good and evil having a wrassle over a man's soul.

My mother couldn't give you anything. No, I don't mean emotionally (that was a given), but she actually couldn't hand things over. This meant in practice that when I went food shopping for the family I had to buy four of everything, because she couldn't cope with the insecurity of not having her share. This also meant there was a rule that you only ever ate your piece. You couldn't have an extra one because four were bought and the four were designated to each individual. If anyone (and it didn't happen often) accidentally ate my mother's piece then she would go deadly silent.

This wasn't a sulk, it was a glacial withdrawing. My mother could be silent for weeks at a stretch if she felt slighted. If it was very bad she would use someone else to communicate – you know the old joke, "Go and ask your father if he wants his supper" when he's sitting right there.

None of this was comic, understand. It was deadly serious. Trust me, a mother who was already 99% absent going for the full Monty was no joke.

This problem with giving also meant she faced a terrible dilemma in any other sphere where it might be required of her. She couldn't give presents. She had two techniques for dealing with this: 1) give very cheap, freely available presents so that she didn't feel that anything 'special' was being given and therefore she wasn't, by implication, being somehow deprived. Or 2) take the present back.

My mother regularly took clothes and dress fabric back off me after it was bought, on various grounds, such as "It's too old for you" (green lurex, Chinese pattern satin, some nice pastel psychedelia), or in the case of clothes: "You never wear it", or that good old stand-by – no reason at all, just take it.

I didn't truly see a pattern in this until I was in my early teens and witnessed it operating outside of my relationship with her, giving me some much needed perspective on what was actually happening.

One year when we came back from a holiday in Czechoslovakia, my mother brought home with her a present for a work colleague. That was unusual in itself, my mother had no woman friends and didn't give presents. I don't know whether she had promised this woman something, or it was a game of one-upmanship, but a present was duly bought, a fancy-worked copper-coloured bracelet.

Now, it's important to understand here that my mother never wore jewellery, neither valuable nor costume. When she went out at the weekends she'd wear large, glitzy 60's/70's earrings, that being the fashion then, but otherwise, no jewellery, ever.

Now she brought this bracelet home, took it into Centre 1 (tax office) where she worked and that was that.

I have no idea how I learned this, but I assume I asked her how her friend had liked the bracelet. My mother confessed she hadn't given her it. I have a feeling she either said something odd here, or I somehow twigged it, but I realised for the first time how absolutely insane her behaviour was. Never, ever, would she wear this bracelet (and she didn't), but she was physically unable to give it over to this woman.

I have a feeling she told her she had forgotten to buy her a present or that she'd lost it. I remember her confessing that it was still in her work drawer. I remember her rationalising it: that the woman wouldn't like it, it would be wasted on her, she'd never wear it. Ironic given that it was brought home and put in my mother's jewellery bowl where it languished, unworn, but safe from the horrible fate of being given to another.

My mother never even attempted to overcome this problem. In fact, I don't think she even recognised it was a problem. This, of course, being the problem with being a narcissist – you don't have a problem.

In practical terms this meant that my mother gave me nothing, from cuddles and kisses (awwwwwwww….) to reassurance, compliments, advice, help, presents, not even the bare necessities.

The only clothes my mother could bear to give me were school clothes – so I lived in school clothes. My mother never touched me and disliked being touched. My mother couldn't give help or reassurance, always telling me instead that I didn't need it. My mother was afraid of sickness and avoided the sick room with a repugnance that was almost obsessive, thus meaning that if you were ill you were on your own. Presents meant the cheapest thing she could buy at the newsagent at the last moment and leave in the bag, or wrap in some old 10-sheets-for-10p Xmas wrap. Any request for help, disguised as advice-seeking (the only way you could get her to notice your problem), was always met with a strange and subtle bragging about how she didn't need what you were asking for so she couldn't advise you on it.

My mother was superhuman, beyond perfect. She didn't get ill, have period pains (her periods were well-nigh invisible, so low-profile did she keep them), she always beat everyone at everything she did or died trying.

She's still like that now. When I was in Orkney I started having what I thought was pre-menopausal symptoms. I decided to phone her up and ask her about her menopause. I hadn't had any contact with her for years but we'd been briefly brought together by Max's dad – an aberrant guilt-trip I should never have allowed myself to be sucked into, but that's another story.

Anyway, in the course of the conversation my mother told me that her menopause had lasted only around a year, with virtually no symptoms, and then it was over – painless and a piece of cake. In fact, a typical old Mary Henery I-am-de-greatest summation.

The truth was, though, that this time I could remember some facts that she seemed to have conveniently forgotten. She had, for example, at least once bled non-stop for three weeks. So badly, in fact, that my father had asked me to try and talk her into going to the doctors. Completely unheard of in the shamed and repressed Henery household to actually voice such a squeamish horror, and from my father at that – that's why I remembered it.

She had also conveniently forgotten that she'd had headaches so severe that she'd once been reduced to tears. It was the only time that I ever recall seeing my mother cry, and it was sufficiently shocking that it was carved into my memory.

Oddly, she remembered the headaches when I reminded her, but she had no memory of the crying, only that she'd had to go to hospital for brain scans – a fact about which I knew nothing. Secrecy was our other great fun family game.

But the fact was, even in her seventies, my mother was still acting out Perfect. It was far more important to her that she be seen as indestructible than that she should share anything with me that might help me. There was no mother/daughter bond and never would be, she was too busy winning an imaginary game of one-upmanship with me.

Such, dear friends, is the life of a Child of Narcissist Parents™.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

Brigitte Bardot - One Suicide-Bombing, Motherfucking Racist Bitch

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:35:00 +0200

I'm reading tonight that Brigitte Bardot is up for the fifth time – yes, you read that correctly, fifth – for "inciting racial hatred", said "racial hatred" being, apparently, a dislike of Muslims and, specifically, the influx of Muslims into France.

As an animal rights activist she doesn't like their habit of slaughtering sheep for religious festivals, but I am also 'reliably' informed by the same news bulletin that she "published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the "Islamisation of France"."

Waaaaaaay! Go long, Brigitte, go long! You've got to admire that. Not just the Muslims but throwing in the gays and the unemployed too. I like someone dedicated to their dislike, irrational or otherwise.

There seems to me to be something deeply ironic in the fact that she keeps finding her ass in court (the prosecutor is quoted as being "a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot") when the internet is wall to wall – or ether to ether perhaps – hatred of just about every kind, colour and depth you can imagine, but nobody seems to be doing very much to stop any of that.

Could it be (say not so) that it's easy to target Ms Bardot whose fat, rich ass is up there for all to see – and line their pockets with. I mean, on the inciting racial hatred front, a mad Frenchwoman (and let's fact it – that's what we think of her, isn't it?) who lives reclusively with her cats, wittering on about animal rights, isn't exactly going to whip up a feeding frenzy of Nazis, is she?

Can you see Brigitte storming through her retirement community on her Zimmer frame, yelling for the partisans to take to the streets and lynch them a few towel-heads?

So I think it's alright for Brigitte to whip up racial hatred?

I don't know – do you think it's alright for the National Enquirer to whip up Britney hatred? Or the world and his dog to whip up fat hatred? How about Eddie Murphy's hatred? I think Norbit pretty much whips up fat and women hatred. How about taking Norbit to court?

Oh, that doesn't count, that's entertainment. Well, for all you know Brigitte laughs her guts out when she's writing bad shit about Islam – is she not allowed to be entertained?

I'm only asking because I wonder why she isn't allowed to vent her spleen on a group's blood-thirsty religious practices when it's okay for everyone on the web to hate an individual for markedly bloodless brolly-bashing. I know if I was standing before God I'd rather take my chances on justifying whipping up hatred against slaughtering sheep than hitting cars with brollies.

Unless, of course, it was the old testament God. In which case I'd recommend telling him you rounded up every whoring little slut from here to Memphis and the hell with a few sheep. I'd say the old testament God is more in line with the Muslims any day, and it surprises me he hasn't struck Brigitte down before now – the fat slut (two strikes right there).

Am I the only person in the world that finds it odd that Brigitte indulging in a little reactionary (or heartfelt) disgust for the ways of Islam is prosecutable, but that Islam strutting around, often in someone else's country, screaming the odds about our behaviour (those slutty women again) and inciting just about anybody to take up arms against the infidel, doesn't seem to find itself in court?

Oh sure, if they build a few bombs, get a gathering of local dentists (why do they always seem to be innocuous dentists? Is it a sadism gene?) to talk about the next suicide mission, we whip their asses into court, but talking, or even writing about it? I don't think so. We have to respect their religion, you see. Doesn't do to offend someone's religion.

Well, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an offended religion. I've seen some damn antsy papists in my time, and some downright vicious protestants, but an offended religion? Not in my lifetime.

What I can't stand about this is the rampant double standard.

Let me give you a very specific personal right-on-your-doorstep example.

About a year after I came to Aberdeen I was in a thrift store. It didn't belong to a high street charity; it was just entitled Charity Shop on the sign. It was a big, clean shop with lots of donated goodies (it still is – it's still there, thriving away). Behind the counter was an 'Asian' man of indeterminate origin, but he looked Middle Eastern, not Indian or Pakistani. I paid no particular attention to him, being drawn, as usual, to the jewellery cabinet. I asked to see a couple of pieces and he stood talking to me, perfectly affably and politely friendly.

He went into the back shop after a while and I realised I could hear an odd tape playing in there – odd because it was part in Arabic and then in English.

After a while of eavesdropping it became apparent that what I was listening to was a translation, rather like a French lesson – écouter et répetér (listen and repeat for those of you who hated French). I, being me, and always caught on oddity, started concentrating on what was being said and discovered a whole new world I wasn't sure I had ever really believed in until that moment – me being a good woolly liberal and all.

This was a 'sermon' by a religious leader. He was extolling young men to be careful in their 'ministry', when trying to follow the ways of Allah, that they were not seduced by the women of their 'enemies'. He actually used the word enemies. He wrote a whole imaginary scenario for his keen young disciples, visualising them finding these poor women wandering the streets, 'orphaned' by combat and suggesting that they might take them in out the goodness of their hearts – but that they shouldn't. They should beware of this "temptation", because their 'enemies' had sent these dangerous women in amongst them, to lead them into sin and vice, so that they would stray from Allah.

Now, putting this into a real world context, what he was actually saying was, "In our 'holy war' you will find women, destitute, traumatised, wandering homeless in the streets without help and family. You should ignore your natural human tendencies to be a good Samaritan, because remember, your enemy will attempt to seduce you, because, let's face it, he's Satan. So don't be kind, and don't do good, because your enemy doesn't deserve it. And, anyway, enemy women are sluts."

Such is the magnanimous heart of religion. Founded on moral principles my ass. Anything that extols unkindness to people in need is neither good, charitable, nor godly. Unless, of course, he is that old testament God that we all fear so much – the wrathful, punitive one that always seems to want you to "take up thy word and slew mine enemy". Why doesn't he slew his own enemies if he's so damn powerful?

But the long and the short of it was that's where the money was going from anything I or anyone else bought in that shop. The bloke in the shop was perfectly nice and affable, but he still considered me the 'enemy' and that as a woman I'd be likely sent to try and seduce him and other good Allah fearing men off the path of righteousness. If I was in pain or distress he wouldn't lift a hand to help me – his preacher had told him not to. And he was listening to this bilge masquerading as righteousness in full hearing of a shop full of (at that moment) white people (aka 'enemies') like myself.

He obviously saw nothing wrong with that. After all, he was just practicing his religion and he has a right to that.

But what I want to know is this – why doesn't he, or the many like him, find himself hauled into court with Brigitte Bardot for "inciting racial hatred"? Perhaps because he's not famous and rich?

No. That would be wrong.

After all, he wasn't fat.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

100 Reasons Why I am a Genius - no, really...

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Wed, 9 Apr 2008 20:05:00 +0200

In the strangest of strange places right now. I'm chiefly engaged in writing new features for Cult Fiction to make it an "all new, all singing, all dancing" kind of publication.

So far, I have a new bio of me which confesses to my ownership of The Dirty Club – a child sex club that isn't nearly as perverse as it sounds, or is possibly more perverse than it sounds, depending on your point of view – then I have the Will I Like DANNY? 'criminal profile' i.e. a Cosmo style (not) listing of Are you the 'typical' (there's no such thing) DANNY reader? Then we have the Read a Good Movie feature which is a list of the 'if you like X movie, you'll like DANNY' variety and, last of all – at least so far – a feature entitled Subverting the Genre, about how DANNY subverts just about any genre you care to name.

And that's as far as I've got.

It's a strange place because I'm doing something I've never really done before – I'm using me as my Perfect Reader. We've had so many misfires with DANNY publicity that we've decided to throw caution to the winds and model the perfect DANNY reader on my likes and dislikes, the places I'd go (IMDB & Amazon, pretty much), things I'd see and do.

The only real basis we have for this breathtaking strategy is our most 'successful' fans share a remarkable similarity of taste in 'fiction' to mine, and our most 'unsuccessful' fans have had preferences and tastes where I'd never venture in a million years, so we figure, walk towards me and away from them and we're heading in the right direction.

Hey, it's a plan – the best one we've had so far – so don't knock it.

We've been sitting on advertising campaigns for IMDB & Amazon for ages – too scared to spend the budgets in case we cock up, or they are not the right place – but we've got to let go some time and that would be now.

Or, at least, after the 4th of July when DANNY Volume 1, the Revised Edition, officially hits the US.

It will be available here too, by the way, should you want to read The Version With More Commas as I've come to think of it. Truthfully, it will be a slightly better edition: easier to read, more graphic cover, better design generally, plus, of course, it may have some of the original beginning reinstated.

Still not entirely sure on that. After all, I cut it out the first time – must have had a reason. Personally, I think I just got the Must-Have-Striking-Opening-Scene disease and went a little nuts when I was editing it. But we'll see.

So, what other news? Well, the free extract of Volume 3 is up and running finally. You can read this via the Secret Site portal on Danny-is God (you'll find the link down below). Unfortunately it still has bold type on the first page because Mr Scratchmann has been doing a load of commissions in the US (he recently placed an online portfolio on the i-Spot after deliberating on whether he should for a mere 10 years). He was immediately inundated with work, which was nice, but which came on top of a load of commissions in the UK.

Still, never complain about work – you never know when it will dry up again. I will, however, keep chivvying his ass about getting it fixed to make it a more comfortable reading experience.

I, for my part, have decided finally to put the DANNY Elite Discussion Board (not sure it is a discussion board, but can't think what else to call it at the moment) on a whole new site, which is at neither MySpace nor Livejournal but is, instead, on Blogger, a Google site. And here is The Dirty Club.

It has been named in memory of the above-mentioned child sex club which I, disappointingly – (once again, or not) – ran as a child, and which got me into no end of trouble. Now, as then, I am going public, but we will definitely not be indulging in any actual sex, just talking about sex and its ramifications as viewed through DANNY – and other academic-sounding and fun polemics, of course.

As you can see, you have to be a member to get in and we will set up a page on DANNY-is-God in due course to let you join up.

The very rigorous testing will involve truth drugs, eyeball scanning and an oath of allegiance to the Lithuanian flag, plus some indisputably filthy hazing rituals and the sacrifice of your first child or a small pet – whichever the phase of the moon proscribes.

More details of that once we've set up the painstaking entrance exam (and I've actually written some content).

So that's my excitement for the week.

God, what a sad life I have.

Been watching Heroes and enjoying it but, dear God, it really does have fanboy coming out its ass. It's as if they sat down and thought "How can we capture that huge fanboy market out there?" and wrote an identikit story where all the fanboys get to play a part and sad losers get to have the dreaded "special powers".

As I am enjoying it, I consider myself very lucky that I saw a few episodes when it was just starting to get famous here, on the strength of which I got the box set for my Xmas. If I'd come to it from the fame end, as it were, I'd have undoubtedly run away from it screaming.

On the face of it, it seems like a nightmare scenario: geeky kids; comic artists (nooooooooooooooooooh!); Japanese geeky kids in comics (nooooooooooooooooooh!); doughnut-eating-decent-policemen-with-nasty-friends-and-adulterous-wives; cheerleaders who spend the whole thing in split-front mega-short skirts, and who look like some terrifying cross between Shirley Temple and Amber Bosoms the Teenage Slut Porn Starlet from Texas whose web cam gets more hits than Youtube, and who may regularly get burnt/beaten/broken but who never loses the curl in her hair and whose lip gloss still shimmers in 1000 degree furnace fires; evil men who have huge art collections (why?); evil English men (I would say why again but we all know it's the accent) who chop vegetables; the Petrelli brother incestuous touchy-feely thing (oh, I'm the pot and it's the kettle); the evil über-villain who absorbs power to become über-villainous so that he can rule the world and reign supreme as The Evil One Who Feels "Special".

What? You might as well put The Evil One Whose Mother Preferred His Jock Brother.

See, that's what I mean, wall-to-wall geek. But, hey, it's good wall-to-wall geek, so more power to them. I suspect that the two Japanese boys, much as they are by far my favourite thing in the show, are raging racism of the worst kind, but what the hell – we're white, right? We can say anything.

So, the inexplicable title of this blog? I wrote a piece called 100 Reasons Why I am a Genius then decided I'd never publish it, but I so loved the title I thought I'd put it on here.

Got to give you something to wonder about me in your idle moments.

P.S. The child sex club mentioned in this blog DOES NOT exist, nor has it ever existed, anywhere, ever. It is A JOKE. Tasteless maybe, but still a joke. The Dirty Club™, is a discussion forum for readers of DANNY by Chancery Stone and has nothing to do with child sex, anywhere, ever. There is no such thing as child sex.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

ADVERBLOG

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 20:15:00 +0200





http://www.cafepress.com/newdannystore

Twinks, Tweenies and Why Dan is so NOT the Man

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:15:00 +0100

So, between jobs (finished the transfer of Vol 1's MS and half-way through correcting the last pad of Delaney) and felt like writing a blog.

So, what'll we talk about then? The full horror of watching La Vie en Rose then Control one after the other? Or a comparison of the OC versus One Tree Hill?

The latter, I think.

I'm a teen junkie. Can't get enough of that teen fiction (figuratively speaking, of course. I don't read the stuff.) I love teen movies, teen TV – all grist to my voracious and unnatural teen appetite.

It has to be grown-up teen, of course – not Marybelle & Ashley, or whatever they're called.

Having watched all the series of the OC, I was looking for my next TV project – and the only other things I wanted, like Entourage 2 or Prison Break 2, were all still too dear – when the opportunity to get One Tree Hill presented itself in Tesco's. They had them cheap in the sale so I, uncharacteristically for something untested, bought the first two series.

I've just completed the first and am starting on the second. And the differences?

Hell, a whole world apart. And not just in wealth either.

First, the OC is a million miles ahead in scripting, location, characters and fashion. Secondly, it has Julie Cooper.

On the plus side, One Tree doesn't have Marissa. The joy of that is hard to replace.

I neither love nor hate Mischa Barton – she does, after all, make a fabulous clothes-horse, being so tall and thin there are no actual body parts to get in the way of drape or line. She's a sort of walking coat hanger. But her character… Dear God, the pain. If there is a more annoying Californian brat out there I've yet to 'virtually' meet her.

Marissa pouted and snivelled and flounced her way through (3?) entire series before we got rid of her. She was the proverbial Scots 'Lang dreep o' misery' (long drip of misery). She wasn't so much a drama queen as a wet sponge. For some reason whenever she came into a scene it went all soggy, like pastry left out in the rain. Even when she was smiley-happy there was something innately whingey about her.

And her on again/off again affair with Ryan… To repeat, dear God, the pain.

Ryan was the second worst thing about the OC, and his combination with Marissa just about made them The Toxic Couple to be Avoided at Parties – or just about anywhere else, for that matter. (Someday I will delight you with an essay on the semiotic metaphor of Ryan's wife-beater vest. I kid you not.)

It didn't help that he only had 2 expressions – scowl 1 and scowl 2 – and after a while of watching him schlump and sulk his Brando-lite way through another We're-so-over/We're-so-not scene with long tall Sally I would gladly have fried my brain as a welcome release from pain. They were even giving Smallville's Clark & Lana a run for their money in the most annoying Hollywood would-they-make-up-their-fucking-mind pairing. No easy feat.

Despite this being the most overused plot line in US television, and despite it annoying a large amount of viewers, they still trot it out often enough to cause motion sickness.

Yelling at the TV doesn't help either. (And yet, I do. I do.)

One Tree has been no exception to this sadly used-to-death-please-kill-it-already rule, having an on again/off again pairing between just about everybody, including the parents from hell, Mr Man-breasts himself, Dan the lug-nut head, and Mrs I-fucked-your-brother-but-I'm-innately-decent Deb.

Oh Dan, Dan, Dan – he is such a cunt, and with probably the ugliest fucking haircut that ever made it into a square-jaw soap opera. What is with that fucking fringe?

But our hero, Lucas, in One Tree, is definitely cuter than Ryan, even if he is distinctly simian in appearance. But he can act, tearing up as often as Demi Moore, with about as much expertise and glycerine beauty.

I admire that in any actor, and even more in a 'teen' boy actor. Yes, he goes at it like an old pro.

But his girlf of choice, the truly so NOT artistic Peyton (even the name's wrong)... What is with the fucking Bubble perm? The poor kid looks like she's stuck in some 80's teen flick. They've given her a leather jacket and a terribly Chloe Smallville bedroom, right down to its counterpart arty version of the Wall of Weird, but the girl does not have an artistic bone in her body.

I've known a lot of artists, some of them scatty, some shrewd; some rebellious, some conformist; some Bohemian, some frumpy, but I have never ever known one who is a cheerleader, who looks like a cheerleader, and who dates sports jocks.

I'm guessing here they thought, "Oh, off the wall. We gotta be off the wall. We need an angle, something new, fresh. She can't be geeky, gothy, nerdy, bo-ho – they've all been done before. I know, let's make a her a cheerleader."

Oh, for fuck sake, there's subverting the genre and just being plain daft. It's like casting a Greenpeace veteran as the president of the United States, or a vegetarian as the new head of the Meat Marketing Board. I mean, technically, why not? Just a job, right? But we all know it doesn't happen.

What makes it worse, is that the actress so can't handle that part of her role. Every time you see her doing something 'artistic' (bless…) she is colouring in. The poor bitch only ever gets to put tiny finishing touches, with Tippex and big, safe marker pens, to already completed projects. They are so uncertain of her talents that they don't even let her draw a big line or whack paint on a wall. I'm surprised they didn't issue her with plastic scissors to stop her cutting herself.

And what about Haley, who turned into Mormon girl? "Yes, I want to have sex with you, Nathan, it's just that it's important to me…" (soulful eyes) "I need to know you care." (I do, I do, he cries, uselessly.)

What the fuck was that all about? If they were trying to sell teens on the idea of being careful, they failed miserably. Worse, if they were trying to make it look like self-respect, they killed that concept dead in the water – and then beat it with a shovel. She came out looking like some mad, deranged frigid old-woman-teen who collected recordings of the Sound of Music and had a crush on the local priest.

These kids' shows can never resist the siren call of sanctimoniousness. You never get very far into any plot line – particularly if it is dark or 'controversial' – before it sinks into a morass of judgmentalism, often throwing little things like plot and characterisation right out the window to do it. Middle American must not be upset.

But the worst thing about One Tree has to be dear old pancake-face Nathan. No, of course we don't ever notice that his face is four shades of orange darker than his neck, desperately trying to cover up those nasty teen acne bumps, nor that he can't even rustle up two expressions – just the one.

An actor straight out of Joey's smell the fart school of acting, he flounders around like a beached whale when asked to do anything not involving balls (basket, not gonad). It physically hurts me to watch him trying to squeeze out an emotion. Any emotion.

I honestly do not know how he got cast. Sure, he's tall, dark and nondescript (and somehow so gay – that teeny toy nipple ring he coyly sports doesn't help), but after that he's a total non-starter.

So One Tree Hill versus the OC then?

Entertaining enough, but some serious acting flaws, too many square-jawed TV soap stars to be truly engaging and, sadly, with nothing else to offer us as shiny and beautiful as Orange County to save its duller moments.

Anybody want to buy two box-sets?

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

And Then There Were 5

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:40:00 +0100

In the process (just started actually) of re-editing Volume 1 for the 'new' (i.e. American) edition. Oh, how I wish I'd been less of a maverick and just stuck with the literary conventions. But, oh no, I had to make it 'accessible' (well, that one sure as hell backfired). I had to write it like people actually talked and moved and thought. I had to keep the flow, the speed, the momentum.

Arse-wipe. I needed my head looked. Now I have a loft full of an edition I hate and no way to get rid of them other than by selling them one by miserly one.

Part of me wants this second edition, because I get to do good things, like reinstate the original opening, fix things I could have said better, spot little shifts in paragraphing that time has clarified – stuff like that.

But part of me hates it. I want to get on and get the rest of the books out, be done with it. Well, get on and write 5 and be done with it.

Oddly, tired as I am with all things DANNY, right now I really want to write 5. Suddenly it's become kind of pressing – and I've got a hell of a long time before I get to indulge that creative urge.

I'm doing a really dangerous thing here, have been for years – I'm fucking with the creative urge.

Stephen King and I see eye to eye on a lot of things, having (from a craft point of view) a lot in common, but the one thing I am with him on 110% is Never Fuck With the Creative Urge.

If you want to write, you gotta write. It's like needing a shit – you have to do it when you have to do it, or you are in for one very unhappy gut. Ignore it too often and you might just fuck up your gut altogether.

So I'm postponing and postponing the cathartic dump of DANNY 5 to get the other books out there, all the time aware that I might be fucking it up entirely. Bad idea.

I do a kind of trade-off thing with my psyche. I'm always saying to it, "Just hang on in there. Not long to go now, and I promise you can write 5 till your heart's content. Gives you some time to think it through. Here, why don't you write down some ideas? Yeah, take a note of that. That's good. We could use that." It's like bargaining with a sulky two-year-old – and just as likely to end in tears.

Of course, none of this is being helped by the fact that taking the MS back from Quark into my computer has lost all the italics formatting (of course – why does it do that?) and I have the option to work from my hand-revised final draft that was corrected straight into the Mac (and which is buried in the loft) or work from the Mac-converted-back-to-PC version I had been going to use, but then I have to reinstate all the italics from the paper book by hand. If you can follow that. Just writing it is time-consuming.

Out of the two options, working from my hand-corrected draft seems the 'easier' option as, at least, that's in red ink, and so not so easy to miss things and make mistakes. But either option is an added drain on time and concentration – and I've barely got the energy to get through a day's work as it is.

On top of this I've got a partially corrected edition of our 'intro to the quadrilogy' paperback 'Cult Fiction' which has been sitting out of stock on Amazon since last year because I can't get the content right.

I know some of you have ordered this from Amazon UK. I promise I am working on it and you will get it – some day. I wrote two new pieces for it which are both geared to 'Will I like DANNY?' The first is almost a social (or maybe a psychological) profile of A Typical DANNY Reader, the second a list of Movies that 'if you like this you'll like DANNY'.

They are an attempt to give strangers a handle on DANNY so that they can feel more confident buying it, but I don't know if I'm really opening it up to more people or niche-marketing it to death.

Hellish. I seem to have turned overnight (if only – it's been a long, slow decline) into an uncertain, bottomless well of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing-and-now-have-the-self-esteem-of-a-gnat. Quentin Tarantino would be ashamed of me. I don't blame him – I'm ashamed of me myself.

And I've caught a bug. Some lousy thing that makes me profoundly dizzy, falling over in shops and hanging onto the trolley like an old woman, staggering when I walk along the street, pitching on my noodle when I bend over or look up at the sky. It's accompanied by more brain fog than a-six-pack-of-Mars-bars-in-one-sitting where I spend five minutes trying to remember the word for dog.

I don't know what little fucker gave me it but I'd like to hunt him down like said dog and feed him his own testicles. Twice.

Must be my addled and dissipated life of promiscuity, bisexuality and endless (prescription) drugs catching up with me. Should never have done that porno in Rio. (No, never really did that. Did one for California though – shot in London, somewhat dully.) Hepatitis C would be easier to deal with than this.

Any other news apart from my cataclysmic moaning? Mr Scratchmann almost has an agent for his Orkney book. She's working with him piecemeal where he does a bit, sends it in and she critiques it back. Sort of writing by (very small) committee. I admire him immensely for his endurance and determination. Me, I'd probably have started a fight or thrown a hissy fit or at least a major huff by now and queered my chances. He's also tanking along doing freelance work again.

We needed the money (and then some) and he decided to send out a mailer to all his old editorial contacts and landed work within a fortnight – for the Guardian, no less. He did a piece for them (On Malcolm McLaren) then landed the commission for a monthly series. It's got club in the title but that brain fog has guaranteed I've forgotten what it's actually called. (Just asked him. Hasn't got club in the title at all. It's in the club section and is called All Ears.)

Anyway, if you read the Guardian he's in it right now. He's also got a children's book publisher interested. Somewhat bizarre, given his normal work, but, hey, what the hell.

We also got the offer to be the arts/culture presenters on a local radio station but we turned it down. I know, but it was too much work, having to go round seeing everything and interviewing people then putting the show together. But I was rather seduced by the idea of the two of us like Richard and Judy. You gotta love that.

So, that's about it. All there is to know about me and mine.

You do realise that if I do ever get as far as 5, and haven't forgotten how to write, that DANNY will actually be able to qualify as a sextet (4 single volumes and a two-parter [3]). How good is that?

The DANNY Sextet. Just can't get away from sex at all.

How droll.

Not.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

An interminably long intellectual blog of no interest to people whose homes have a number plate, and whose family tree is all on one branch

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Sat, 8 Mar 2008 21:35:00 +0100

Quitting. That's what I need to do.

Been saying it since before Christmas, but the trouble is I don't know what to quit.

Quitting is not admired. Think of all those maxims. "Nobody likes a quitter." Well, actually, that's the only one I can think of off-hand, but you know what I mean. Winning is all. Winning… well, wins.

Now, me, I believe in quitting. I come form a long line of quitters, although most of them would deny it. My mother's family in particular – quitters to a man.

None of them did conventional jobs, although they all dabbled at them. My grandfather was a trumpet-player and a wide-boy, dealing in dodgy goods on the side and black marketeering during the war. He bought and sold at auction, repaired clocks and watches, and generally spivved his way through life. He always knew someone who knew someone who could get you what you needed. Or he'd die trying.

My grandmother was a florist, with a bent for everything artistic. Their sons variously ran away from home (to Australia, no less, disappearing for nigh on 30 years), took up joinery and forestry work, travelled, lived on obscure Scottish islands and, eventually, also took off for Australia, where one of them built roads across its untarred wilderness then bought a motor home with the proceeds and drove around in the outback for a year.

My mother, for her part, gave up being a seamstress, a tax inspector and, twice, teaching. My mother could quit for Europe. In fact, she 'injured her back' finally and has lived on sickness benefit ever since.

Wasters? Not a bit of it. Every one of them has had an endless facility for making money and getting what they needed. When my parents divorced guess who got the money? And the car? And the second home?

Yep, mum every time. My father couldn't possibly best such an efficient quitter, eye always on the main chance. (He was crap at quitting anyway. Preferred never trying.)

You see, quitting is a much-maligned and misunderstood force for progress. People think it means giving up in defeat, retiring to your corner, crushed and ruined. On the contrary, it means the opposite. It means getting what you really want, not what society says you should have, or others dictate you 'need'.

Quitting means retiring to Belize at thirty-three. Quitting means giving up banking to became a dancer. Quitting means dumping the family/friend/lover for a life of excess and indulgence – or Spartan meditation. Whatever lights your fire.

And I need to quit.

I've needed it for a long time.

I had someone recently (on MySpace) complaining, very backhandedly of course, that my blog (on His Heathness) was too long.

You know, because you've heard me say it often enough, that I don't get this. Too long to hold your interest? Then don't read it.

Apparently, however, that's too avant garde a notion. Apparently, they have a mechanism in their heads that prevents them from simply stopping and moving on to something else; the same mechanism that leads them to leave comments (taking up more time) to point out to me that they were bored/baffled/irritated or just perplexed (poor dears) by the length of my blog.

Well, you just added another ten or fifteen minutes wasted time right there. And I assumed you had something to do, too.

This 'criticism' – which, oddly, always seems to have a thinly-veiled resentment under it – is pissing in the wind of truly epic proportions.

Think of this for a moment. How many people do you think there are on the internet right now blogging about the most banal, puerile drivel? Millions, right? How many of them only run to one paragraph before they see a dust ball on the floor and run off to chase it? Tens of millions, right? So why – why, God, why? – given this abundance of short, snappy, Janet & John blogs, are these 'readers' wasting time even looking at mine, never mind reading it? The titles of my blogs, never mind the content, should tell you all you need to know. I haven't yet written about my pet, or X-box, or why Lex Luthor making out with Harry Potter isn't 'canon' (don't worry about it – it isn't interesting, trust me).

Which takes me back to quitting. Should I quit blogging, writing at all? Is it not really me? Am I an anachronism left over from another age? Should I really have been a Georgian essayist? (Can you just see me effing and blinding my way through a critique of Doctor Johnston?) Should I do more writing, write somewhere else, lots of places?

Should I quit the web, go back to magazines, demand huge fees? Should I write non-fiction books?

Hell, if they want me to be shorter, should I go longer, weave epic works on epic subjects?

Should I drop everything and go to America, blag my way into TV? How would I fare in the writing room of the OC? (Well, I'd be all by myself since the show's finished, but you know what I mean.)

Should it be Hollywood and movies? Europe and movies? Where would my strange perverted attraction to men really fit in in that bizarre world where one half of the population has been 'disappeared' and heterosexual means tits & ass? Hell, where sex means tits & ass.

Is it up to me to fight for it? Am I too tired to fight for it? (Yes.)

Should I stop publicising DANNY? Or at least stop worrying about publicising DANNY?

If the world's not ready for DANNY then how far do I let it go? Do I finish it quietly, docilely, like the Jane Austen of cocksucking, and resign myself to being ignored – or do I get extra specially strident and demand to be heard?

What part of my life is it I need to quit?

You see, this is the really important thing about quitting – you never get anywhere without it. Never. In order to move on, move forward, you have to leave something behind. Every step in the right direction, or the wrong, involves a step away from something. Quitting, in fact.

I'm stuck and have been for quite a while, but in order to move on I NEED TO QUIT!

If only I knew what……………

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

Amy Winehouse, 2 Useless Ex-husbands and 23 Pounds of Funyun Pudge

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:40:00 +0100

She has a Jewish nose, a dyed beehive and LOTS of mascara – crazy bitch. What's not to hate?

A couple of weeks back, Maxim magazine website was running an article called The 5 Unsexiest Women Alive. Couldn't resist that gem – off I went. And, so you can enjoy the Amy (and other crazy bitch) bashing, here it is for you, Please don't show me real women, it upsets my fragile male sense of self.

So who are the five unsexiest (no, it's not a word, but a man made it up, and only dykes argue with men) women ALIVE!!!!!!!!!! (Felt that needed a good screaming headline.)

Well, it's pretty much a straight job-share between successful, older celebrities and young CRAZY (I'm really getting into this tabloid thing) bitches that do unseemly things in public.

You know, they used to lock women like this up in lunatic asylums. Nothing guaranteed to get a woman in the loony bin faster than doing things that any average bloke does of a Saturday night – you know, the drinking, snorting, public brawling kind of thing. When women do it it's CRAZY. Only now we can't lock them up any more.

Oh, wait a minute didn't we lock up Britney Spears recently? Yeah, she got in an altercation with the police when they were coming to take her children away. Wow – weird, crazy bitch. Why the hell would anybody freak when someone comes to take their children away? I hear she had some dodgy tooth brushing habits too. These celebrities, where do they get off?

And now that I come to think of it, isn't Lindsay Lohan always getting dragged off to psychiatrists, or threatened with psychiatrists, or introduced to psychiatrists, by Oprah, her father, mother, Jay Leno, President Clinton and the National Enquirer? Hell, haven't you signed the petition to have Lily Allen, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan put away as CRAZY BITCHES WHO SHOULD BE LOCKED UP AND STOP ENDANGERING THE AMERICAN WAY… OR SOMETHING.

Okay, I promise I won't use any more big letters suitable for small children. But you have to promise me that you will get a T-shirt and a marker pen, pin a picture of the Crazy Bitch Celebrity of your choice on your front and write underneath it, "I once ate 2 sponge cakes – deliberately. Now let's see you lock me up, motherfucker."

No-one will have a clue what you're talking about but we'll all know. It will be like a secret club.

Today, of course, as part of the general 'Amy Winehouse is Ruining Our Way of Life' hate spiel (remind me again – what did she actually do?) Yahoo has a headline with a picture of Amy looking like the Wicked Witch of the West (not difficult, Amy looks like a harsh Jewish Princess) with the sneery headline "So… who wants to look like Amy then?" with the not-hidden-at-all inference that no-one – I repeat, no-one – would want to look like Amy.

She's launching a fashion/perfume range, you see, and Yahoo just can't get past the fact that a drunken no-good, crazy bitch like Amy, who is no conventional beauty (but rivetingly imperfectly delicious) dares to think that young people might want to buy into some of that bad girl chic. The bitch, the bad, evil, crazy, successful, wealthy, incredibly robust bitch. (Dd we get to lock her up yet? Why isn't she collapsing under the barrage of this constant assault? After all, Britney folded, Lohan's showing cracks. Oh, fold, you crazy bitch – fold.)

We used to burn them, of course, and then we tried locking them in convents and, finally, lunatic asylums. That's what we do with 'crazy' – i.e. disobedient, mouthy, badly-behaved – women. Then we had to stop burning them, locking them up, tarring & feathering them. Now we are much more crafty. Now we burn them at the publicity stakes. Now we send packs of jackals after them to photograph their every move, post the most unflattering pictures we can find. If they're not too fat they're too thin (Kate Moss, bad, snorting not-role-model nearly-crazy-bitch anyone?). If they're not compulsively eating, drinking or snorting, they're compulsively shopping, partying or tanning (Paris Hilton, Mrs Beckham, the Ritchie girl?).

Oh, Crazy Bitch comes in lots of flavours, but it's always about excess, un-ladylike behaviour. And, of course, being very public. We really hate them for being everywhere – like it was their fault. In the case of Paris or Posh you can blame them for publicity seeking – if you really feel that publicity seeking is a terrible cruel thing to do and your small children should not be exposed to it. But Winehouse, Allen, Spears and co. are not big on hunting it out – it's more a case of them not being able to out-run it.

Nobody seems to question the validity of what is credited to the ladies as 'wild' behaviour. Male rock stars have been trashing rooms, puking up and decking people since the year dot. They're just living the rock star life – those wild guitar heroes. What about Oliver Reed, whose behaviour makes all of the girls' naughtiness together look like Noddy on an outing with Big Ears. Ah, Oliver, such a character – what a bloke, eh? Funny, I don't remember anyone locking him up, and he spent his entire life drunk, never mind a week or two. Shane McGowan – never sober. Keith Moon – don't even start.

To my knowledge never once sectioned, any of them. Nor were they called crazy, other than as the most flattering, blokey headshaking epithet. And what wild Oliver stunt has Britney pulled? She hit a car with a brolly. Oh, and she shaved her head. Wow, scary shit. No wonder her dad wants to take her money off her – just to manage it, of course, until she gets better. Yes, poor Britney, she's losing it. Literally, if dad has anything to do with it.

Or Amy, what about her? She had a fight. With her husband. In public. There was blood. She also – and please stop reading this if you're under eighteen – smudged her mascara and looked messy.

And we won't even start on Lohan. She once went out without any pants on.

What I want to know is what were the paparazzi doing sticking lenses up her skirt anyway? Bet no-one ever dared stick a Pentax down Oliver Reed's trousers to see if he was going commando. Hey, maybe she should have hit him with her brolly, then she could have got herself sectioned and given her fortune to her father. That would have been the proper thing to do, show young women you can't just smudge your mascara in public without paying the price.

So, I'll just leave you with this little witch-burning thought, care of Maxim's delightful list on just how we women fail to be sexy, so that you can make sure you don't do this and LOSE YOUR MAN (sorry, couldn't resist one last yell).

Don't get menopausal (Madonna), don't be in a hit TV show or have a boyish figure (Sandra Oh), don't let your drug use outstrip your boyfriend's (it threatens his manhood, Amy), don't have children or gain weight – any weight (Britney), don't ever, ever wear short skirts and behave like anyone out of Sex in the City – oh, and don't get famous, rich or successful.

Feminism is dead – long live Celebrity Culture! God, I am one crazy bitch……..

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

Heath Ledger - Naked Dead Guy

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:50:00 +0100

Let's talk about Heath Ledger. It's about time.

He's dead, took too many different pills, but had the wits to die naked in the middle of the day.

Also had the wits to mix lots of interesting drugs: tranquilisers, pain killers, anti-depressants, sleeping pills – the definitive tortured artist list. How interesting, how tragic.

How pathetic.

Pathetic that he took them? Not at all. Any idea how many people take that lot every day in any Westernised country? Pathetic that we think it teaches us something about him.

It does – he was careless with pills. He was a man who was perpetually wound up and who found it hard to sleep. His performances have that odd repressed quality of something frenetic held down. It's what gives him that interesting fragility used to such great effect in Monster's Ball. The fact that he had been using cannabis all his life (yes, you all saw the – haha – suppressed footage on Youtube), but had recently given it up only ups the ante on the risk of medication overdose.

Here's a man who is hyper by nature. He sedates himself with cannabis. This works for him but he gives it up to go clean – being a father and all. He does a film role that demands a little of that old inner darkness. He's hyper, strung-up, can't sleep, can't use his usual crutch, (what's yours, friend? Chocolate, booze, cigarettes, sex?) result – he takes more and more prescription drugs, trying to get onto some kind of even keel, bingo – he's dead.

It's not rocket science. It doesn't mean he was chronically twisted forever by acting the Joker. It doesn't mean he was suicidal or tormented. It doesn't mean he was a junkie, dope-fiend loser from hell.

But, oh, we gotta build that story, we have to make something deep out of it. Suddenly Heath has to get his Dead Hat on. He can choose Dead & Tragic, or Dead & A Junkie Loser. He doesn't get to do just Dead & Fucked-up, that isn't nearly interesting enough – can't write me no eulogies on that one.

If he'd been fat & forty would he have lost the tragic card? Would he only have had the Sad Loser card then? The washed-up actor past his prime?

If he'd fallen down dead on the tennis court would he have had quite the same erotic appeal as naked on his bed waiting for the massage he never got?

It's so sexy. Yes, Heath had the wits to die a sexy death – naked, across the foot of his bed, waiting for Swedish Nympho Masseuse to turn up and deal with a real big stiffy – all the way to his feet and back.

Yes, I think it's tasteless. Tasteless and predatory and pointless. I detest the way he's reduced to a handful of filmic clichés, as if he's become his own plot in a bad B movie – Drug Fiends of Hollywood! Naked & DEAD! His Final Sleep in a NARCOTIC HAZE!

Has anyone seen pictures of the masseur/masseuse? Is he/she sexy? If you have, then of course they are. They only get to play a part in this great mythology we call 'News' if they've been screened by the casting department for The Drama of HIS Life!

Suddenly Heath's life is not his own. He has to become an urban legend for our gratification. We have to make 'sense' of it because he was too young and pretty to die and, of course, he had the world at his feet.

What makes you so sure? For all you know, in the Universe Where Heath Yet Lives, every film he made from the day of his death on was mediocre to crap. Maybe in the next ten years his career went steadily downhill until he was starring in bad sci-fi with Rutger Hauer (he too was once a beautiful demi-god with a shining future), or cheap thrillers with Malcolm McDowell (he too was once a demi-god with…) or Christopher Lambert (he too was once…) – need I go on?

The world is paved with beautiful people who don't die naked in the afternoon and whose beauty, talent, uniqueness goes slowly down the drain like some seeping banal decline. How about Terence Stamp? A man of extraordinary beauty (even now) who has just made more and more dismal films/TV (The Hunger anyone?) which don't even begin to tap the possibilities in him. See? If only he'd had the wits to die naked on his bed at twenty-five.

Living is humdrum, even for beautiful people. Dying is humdrum, even for beautiful people. Our need to turn it into some cheap Hallmark Cards tear-jerking parody of human life is nauseating beyond Chancery's Limited Vocabulary of Nauseating Things.

Heath Ledger was a talented, good-looking boy with a lot of charm and a few weaknesses, just like the rest of us.

Even if he was a drug-fiend of epic proportions it would be nobody's business but his own. If he shot up, snorted and popped on an hourly basis it would still be nobody's business but his own. Drug-taking has to be the ultimate in 'fuck off and bother somebody else' activities. Drunks piss in the streets, vomit on you, annoy you, start fights. The worst most drug addicts do is steal from their families. Annoying as hell for the families but as far as social nuisance goes – minimal.

Sure, every once and a while one mugs an old lady, shoots someone, but you're at no more risk from them than you are from the perfectly sober criminals doing the same things without the aid of narcotics or stimulants – so what's your beef? What the hell business is it of yours what Heath took or didn't take? Do you really suppose you know something about him by the medications he used?

Jesus Christ, get a grip.

On the odd day in the year you'll see me rollicking about the street with dilated pupils and an odd detachment. Stoned again. Of course. And I am. But only to go to the dentist. When I get home I even get naked and pass out over the end of the bed while waiting for a massage. Sometimes I've taken painkillers. Sometimes I take sleeping pills too.

Bingo, there I am, cloning Heath. God, we have so much in common – don't you just feel you really know me now?

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.

How DANNY Changed my Wife

noreply@blogspirit.com (Chancery STONE) — Fri, 8 Feb 2008 20:30:00 +0100

Just a quick mini-blog to ask you all to go to Waterstones' site and tell the world how DANNY changed your life – which I'm sure it did.

They want fifty words out you on the subject, which is nothing, a mere sentence or two, but quite a challenge to pinpoint all those deep and profound history-shaping moments that DANNY gave you.

Here is the link How DANNY Changed My Life and I Found God.

As you can see, some poor sod from Wales, whose name actually is Timothy Arblaster (which sounds like a character out of Lord of the Rings), managed to have his life changed by… yes, you guessed it, Lord of the Rings. As if that wasn't bad enough, he met his "future wife" (run away, run away now!) on a website (you couldn't make this stuff up), thus saving him from a life of loneliness and solitary masturbation dressed as Gandalf.

Nothing – I repeat – NOTHING you could write could be sadder than this. So, please, go along and gush till your heart's content (if anyone could gush in fifty words). I dare you all to be more and more outrageous, claim outlandish excess, say it inspired you to give away your firstborn children, taught you fisting, prostate massage, or how to lead others to Satan. Of course, you could always just tell the truth.

Whatever DANNY did for you, or to you, please go tell it to the world on Waterstones.

Go on, you know you want to………

P.S. Closing date is the 14th of Feb, so go quickly.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent 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.