DANNY by Chancery Stone

 

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:-

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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.

 

Here, at last, as promised, is your news blog.

Are you all sitting on the edge of your seat?

Course you are.

Well, I was going to leave this till last but you'll all cheat anyway and skim down the blog to find it so I might as well give it to you now.

The launch date for DANNY Volume 2 is 31st October 2009. Only kidding. Calm down.

The launch date for DANNY Volume 2 is 31st October this year, 2007. So you only have four more months to wait till nirvana, and I, at last, get to launch a book on Danny's birthday.

In fact I'm going to set a precedent and launch every book from now on on the 31st of October. So look forward to Volume 3, part one, Skull Island (sounds like an episode of Pirates of the Caribbean – curse those Disney imitators) on 31st October 2008. If I work very hard I might be able to give you both parts simultaneously. But don't quote me – no telling what unexpected horrors I might trip over in the course of editing.

No price is fixed for Volume 2 yet as we are still getting quotes and sourcing print in places as diverse as Poland, Korea and China – my personal favourite as the firm there is called Royal Printing of Beijing. That just looks classy on a fly leaf.

It's going to be considerably dearer to buy from Amazon (probably in the region of £24.99) as we are pricing it correctly this time to cover their 'margin'. It will be substantially cheaper to buy from us (only around £16.99 - £18.99). We are competing very favourably in the market place and charging exactly the same price as similar, slightly smaller book/s from Penguin, a much bigger firm than us, so please, no complaints about the price.

To mark this auspicious occasion the new Poison Pixie Publishing web site goes on-line today (with the existing name unchanged). This is the first of four new websites, each of which has a domain name of its own.

The new site features the prototype DANNY Volume 2 so that The Great Object of Desire can be printed out and stuck up on your pin board/wall/fridge – all helps to make it real, folks. You can even mark the date on your calendar. We will probably be featuring a countdown of our own, ticking the days off, so look out for that.

The new site also features the Volume 1 free extract to read on-line, so no more waiting for boring PDF downloads, and, of course, it lets you read exactly as much as you want. There are synopses for the new book, and an inaccurate page count (it will, most probably be longer than 998 pages), but we are still not sure how much, if any, of Volume 3 we are including, so that will be revised as we have more concrete data.

There is also full details of Max's new book, Theatres of Dreams, which is a limited edition (hand-numbered, a hundred copies, I think) collection of the artworks taken from an exhibition he recently had at the Belmont Cinema here in Aberdeen. He has a video wall playing tonight at a rock gig at the Peacock Visual Arts Centre and then another one-man show (static art) at The Aberdeen Arts Centre in January 2008.

He seems to have a constant stream of new things going on - I can't bloody keep up.

Illustration 101 is still selling outrageously well. So well it makes me nervous. I keep waiting for the bubble to burst. But it shows no signs of halting, so no complaints.

While at the Belmont he managed to accrue yet another daring art thief. I'm not sure quite how he does this. For some reason whenever he exhibits his work someone always tries to steal it.

The Belmont exhibition was in the café bar, a large space with plenty of wall to spread yourself out on. Apparently a woman came up to the bar and asked if she could buy one of a triptych called See Thru Walls (Yes, inspired by my blog of the same title).

This featured Vincent Price in X-ray specs in two end pictures with an 'invisible' middle picture only featuring clear glass in a frame. The woman wanted to buy only one Vincent. The barman told her the piece was only up for sale as a triptych. She went away. A little while later he saw her try to take it off the wall and leave with it. He 'apprehended' her, as the euphemism goes, and she apologised and gave it back, saying she'd taken it 'by mistake'.

Some while later (not quite clear on this as we got it third hand) the barman noticed it was missing from the wall. Fortunately they have CCTV cameras and they checked the tape. Sure enough, there was our daring art thief making off with her booty.

Now, the real fun in this story is that the woman was a stall holder at the large weekend Arts & Crafts fair that's in the street outside the cinema. The barman not only recognised her but knew her stall. Staff were dispatched to 'politely' tell her she had been caught on film and that if she returned The Missing Vincent no more would be said. She denied involvement, but next day The Missing Vincent was found posted through the cinema's letterbox along with a note (and now it gets like Fawlty Towers) saying that it had been taken in "an error of judgement" and it was being returned. She finished it with the word, "Sorry." Classic stuff.

So, Vincent was returned to his place of glory and Mr Scratchmann has another art-loving madman anecdote to add to his collection.

At his very first exhibition, some years ago in London, he had every single piece of (three dimensional) art damaged in a supposedly trendy, up-market gay bar in Soho by 'souvenir' hunters. And this was stuff glued down. Quite what, exactly, all these gay men were going to do with doll's shoes and little gem stones and cut out fairy figures (yep, it was about fairies – the flying variety, not cruising) I really do not know. Gay men appreciate art. Another myth up the spout.

Other news.

DANNY has been put onto Google book search, as has 101, but at the moment they look like dogs' dinners. Google is even slower than Amazon (I wouldn't have believed that possible) and they've managed to botch two lots of submissions. We finally gave in and sent them the submissions on disk, so some day, around 2015 maybe, it should appear on there in a format that looks half-professional. DANNY Volume 2 will also appear in due course.

Three more new web sites are also in the pipeline. The first up will be the comprehensive DANNY-IS-GOD.com. This is currently live, but there is no content except for the landing page. This will be exactly what it says on the tin – a site devoted solely to The DANNY Quadrilogy. And a quick little note on that.

The correct word for a four volume book is a quartet. The more academic terminology is a tetralogy. The first makes DANNY sound like a sleazy four piece cruise ship band (and now… roll of drums… The Danny Quartet – I don't think so). The second, correct or no, is meaningless to 99.8 per cent of the population.

The one I have chosen to go with is, believe it or not, not my invention, but the invention of Twentieth Century Fox who 'incorrectly' used it to describe the Alien Tetralogy. And can you blame them?

So, what is good enough for Fox is good enough for me. Anyone who doesn't like my use of a 'not real' word may write to Fox and let their displeasure be known, because you'd be wasting your time telling me. You know how I feel about pedants, don't you?

Moving on… DANNY-IS-GOD.com will feature exhaustive details of all the DANNY books, including the original photographs that inspired the characters and photo albums of the real-life places and locations featured in the book. We hope, eventually, to go back down to Cumbria and photograph the real-life Hope House and the village of Crosby, Brixby's real-life equivalent.

DANNY-IS-GOD.com will also feature the secret web sites. These will be sites intended solely for owners of each volume to find out more about the upcoming volume/s. They will be password locked to prevent spoilers being released on the web, or elsewhere, and to help keep the excitement for those readers coming new to The DANNY Quadrilogy.

For example, if you own Volume 1 you will be able to access the Volume 2 web site and read an extract from Volume 2 along with features on the plot of both 1 and 2. Presently I can't offer this kind of material because people, being people, will read what they are not supposed to read, and do what they are not supposed to do, and the more malicious among them do... you know, malicious spoilery kind of things. For shame.

DANNY-IS-GOD.com will be followed by Chancery-Stone.com which, like DANNY-IS-GOD.com, will be dedicated to everything you ever wanted to know about me, plus, probably, things you didn't. Obviously there will be some cross-over information between the two.

Lastly, we will have THIS-IS-HARDCORE.com. This is still very much in the story board stages, but will be a site dedicated to the 'deeper' issues (eek) of DANNY i.e. it will discuss everything from child abuse to pornography and all the other 'nasties' in between. It will be strictly 18 and over with a highly offensive visual content – so, paradoxically, you should give this one a wide berth if you're only here for the man-on-man action and the subtext of DANNY is of no concern to you. The complexities of morality will only baffle you - walk away, walk away…

What else?

Oh, the Minor Works.

I contacted my old typist on Orkney (Gillian – to whom all you fans owe a great debt) and she has agreed to type up all my remaining hand-written and otherwise not PC draft copies. God bless her, she's a wondrous little gem and my Personal Jesus.

The first piece I'm giving her is The Boy With the Red Hair – the prototype period DANNY - so I'll finally be able to see if it can be shaped up into something worth publishing.

Likewise she will be doing Death in Venice, the Danny in Italy fragment novella (about 150 pages, maybe), and Delaney, another incomplete novel (about 200 pages). She will also be typing up The Chocolate Woman, The Snow Queen, plus a handful of old magic realist stories that I do not have on my computer.

It very much remains to be seen whether any of it will be worth publishing, but I am certainly considering putting the DANNY pieces together and printing them as a (yippee!) conventionally lengthed 'novel'. I think Death in Venice was written during Volume 4, or just before it, so I would have to take that into consideration when publishing it so that it didn't unwittingly spoil other books.

Anyway, it's next on my agenda now that the Poison Pixie web site is up and running. Then, after that, the other web sites. And somewhere in between I have to actually finish editing Volume 2 and get it printed and publicised – a small point, I know.

Well, I think that'll do for one day, otherwise you'll all be suffering from informational overload. Think how I feel – I actually have to do it, not just read about it.

I'll just say, in closing, that Volume 2 will be available to pre-order from Poison Pixie as soon as we have a price for it. There is a good chance that it will be printed in advance of the 31st so any advance orders will be dispatched as soon as copies are available. So you better sign up soon as you can - you might just get a couple of weeks head start on the rest of the world…

 

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

Blogspirit

Soulcast

Myspace

Live Journal

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.

 

WARNING!!! MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!! Do NOT read the following extract if you have not read volume 1 of DANNY. If you have even the vaguest notion that you might like to read it some time, when you can be arsed, then the following extract will seriously spoil it for you. Think of it as watching the last ten minutes of The Usual Suspects or Seven before you watch the movie – a Very Bad Idea. You have been warned.

Seriously busy at the moment and can't spare the time to do a blog. Thought DANNY fans might appreciate this – the opening scene/s of the upcoming Volume 2. Enjoy.

 

It was a cold day in March, grey and smooth as cold water.

Danny ferreted in the side pocket of his door and found nothing. He leaned across Conley's body to the glove compartment. "It should be in here. It was in here... somewhere."

Conley felt that slow, familiar uncurling inside himself. It felt like the few delicious moments before you fell asleep, knowing comfortably you were going to do it, welcoming it, letting yourself drop into it. Only you didn't fall asleep. Instead you became drowsy with it, boneless, heavy and swollen with it, as if you had a compulsion to lie down and…

Danny said, "Here it is." He sat up again, kissed the tape briefly, then slotted it into the player.

Conley sat up straighter in his seat, suddenly and depressingly aware of how he felt. So quickly and nothing had changed, nothing at all, even though he wasn't the same person any more, not the same Danny at all.

"Alright?" Danny asked.

Conley was looking out the window. He didn't look back. "Fine."

Danny looked at him curiously, but didn't pursue it. "How long will they take to fix it?" he asked.

"What?" Conley said.

Danny laughed. "Your car. Remember your car? Remember me, Danny?"

Conley rubbed his face. "Sorry. Week, maybe a little longer."

Danny indicated and pulled into the traffic. "You going to hire a car?"

"No," Conley shook his head. "I can't be bothered."

"You mean you've got me to chauffeur you about."

Conley gave something that was almost a laugh. "What are friends for if you can't use them every once and awhile?"

"You know, it's no mean feat driving to and fro your place, Mr Conley."

"You will live in such a godforsaken hole."

"It is not a godforsaken hole."

"Smacks of cowardice, Danny."

Danny shot him a glance. "Meaning?"

Conley shrugged. "Far away from everyone."

"I can get company any time I want."

"From me? Not the height of excitement."

Danny laughed. "Reckon you're boring?" He braked and slowed to let a tractor pull out. He always did.

Conley looked at him for the first time. "All you're getting from me is talk."

"Talk's all I want." Danny didn't look at him.

"It isn't really enough, is it?"

"Sweet coming from you, Conley."

Conley heard the harsh note of irritation in his voice and looked out the window again. Danny went on, voice obviously angry now, "Is this an oblique hint?"

Conley flushed. "No."

Danny was slow to turn away from him.

Conley said, "I only meant you should have more friends, that's all."

"Share myself about a bit?"

"Yes."

Danny laughed, only quietly, but it sounded dry and cynical. Conley kept looking out the window, saying nothing, just as Danny was saying nothing. The car turned onto the main street.

They sat a couple of minutes, waiting for a haulage truck to reverse itself out, then pulled into Conley's car park.

Danny parked the car and cut the engine. He sat for a moment then said, "If my company's boring you, Conley, just say so."

"No," Conley said immediately. "It isn't that. That wasn't what I meant at all, and you know it."

Danny looked at him. "What did you mean then?"

Conley looked away. "I don't know." He shrugged. "Reassuring myself or something."

"About what?"

"You. Being here."

"Why shouldn't I be here? Where should I be?"

Conley shrugged again, uncomfortable. "I don't know. Somewhere where you could get everything you need."

Danny looked away from him and took a long slow breath. "This is about sex."

"You can't go on pretending it doesn't exist, Danny."

"For me it doesn't. The only person I fuck is myself. I told you that right at the start and I meant it. Sorry."

"I didn't mean..." Conley started, indignant, but Danny was staring at him. Another old, familiar friend, the sensation that he could see right through your head, no secrets.

Conley stopped, flushing again, thinking, All the time he was away I can't remember once being embarrassed, and now look at me, unravelling at the seams. He felt suddenly angry. "You're not worth the effort, Danny."

"Fine," Danny said. "Door's right at your hand."

Conley shut his eyes and let out a slow breath. "I'm sorry," he said.

Danny didn't answer him.

Conley looked at him. "I didn't mean to pick a fight."

"And yet you got one anyway."

"Don't prolong it, Danny, be kind to me."

Danny looked away then said, "Okay, forget it." He didn't sound happy, he didn't sound as if he meant it, but he said it.

Suddenly he unfastened his seat belt. It rattled back with a noisy speed that Conley always found unsettling. "Let's go." He got out the car and slammed the door shut.

Conley unfastened his belt and got out. Danny was waiting for him, unsmiling, at the foot of the stairs. Conley passed him and climbed ahead of him.

 

Three weeks. It had been three weeks.

Not once had Danny mentioned his family. He'd talked a little about Katherine Henderson, virtually nothing about the missing four years after he'd divorced her, and nothing about his time in hospital.

Not once in three weeks.

Conley had made tentative forays for information but Danny had cut him dead every time, without any pretence or disguise about what he was doing. He didn't want to talk about it, period.

Conley hung his coat up. Danny threw his over the chair. Conley crossed and picked it up. Danny sat down and watched him, one foot on his other knee, hand holding his ankle. "Very domesticated."

Conley knew the tone of old. He took Danny's coat and hung it up, not answering him, thinking, Well, I started it, I put him in the mood. He came back, said, "Want any coffee?"

"No," Danny said, body still poised, still watching him.

"Well I'm going to have some."

"It's your house."

Conley went over to the coffee machine and began to fill it up.

"That's new, isn't it?" Danny's voice came over to him. "I mean, new to me."

"Yes. I've had it about two years now. It makes Cappuccino too."

"I've changed my mind, I'll have a Cappuccino."

"No problem. Want anything to eat?"

"No. No thanks."

Conley heard the sudden weariness in his voice, the abrupt change of tone. He looked over his shoulder. Danny had his head back, eyes closed. "Tired?" Conley asked, crossing over to him.

"Mm." Danny rubbed his face and opened his eyes. "Bad night." He looked up at Conley, then embellished, "Nightmares."

Conley sat down opposite him.

Danny said in that familiar dry, self-mocking tone, "And no John there to soothe me."

It was the first time he'd referred to him, even said his name. Conley felt he ought to make use of it, say something, try to bring it out of him, whatever it was, but nothing came to him. He just sat there.

But Danny went on of his own volition, "That's when I miss him most, at night." He smiled a smile as cynical as his tone had been and laid his head back again. He closed his eyes. He was gone, inside himself.

Conley knew he wasn't going to say anything else. He got up and went back to the coffee maker. He stood by it, looking back at him occasionally, but Danny remained as he was.

Conley poured the coffee and took it over. "Danny?" he asked quietly, in case he was asleep, but Danny opened his eyes and smiled up at him.

Conley handed him his cup, put his own on the table and went back for some biscuits for himself. "Lunch," he said when Danny looked at them. "Sure you don't want anything?"

"No, I had a big breakfast. The remains of a Chinese take-away."

Conley laughed. "What was the occasion?"

"A reward for having one of my serious you should get a job Danny talks with myself."

"And what did you decide?"

Danny shrugged. "Nothing, as usual. But if I don't do something soon I'll probably start thinking about buying a dog for company, or join the Women's Institute."

"I don't know how you've managed this long."

"I get lost in my dark reveries and I don't know the time's passing. Different landscape."

Conley drank some coffee and said carefully, "I'd have thought after being married you'd be lonely, more aware of it."

Danny shook his head. "One of Kathy's many criticisms." He tapped his head, "Too much time spent up here, and not enough with her. Had to suck up all my thoughts as well as my spu..." He stopped and smiled ruefully. "Still as tasteless as ever."

Conley shook his head and said, "I like the way you talk. I always have. What you see is what you get."

Danny laughed. "Not many people would agree with you."

Danny drank his coffee in silence, watching the creamed surface slowly collapse, then he surprised Conley by asking, "That woman still work for you?"

"Molly?"

Danny nodded.

"Yes. Why?"

"Married?"

"Divorced. She was divorced when you knew her. Nothing's changed."

Danny smiled. "Still holding a torch for you. She know I'm back?"

"You're not back," Conley said, knowing he shouldn't say it and unable to stop himself.

Danny looked at him and said without smiling, "I think we should talk about your sex life."

Conley put his empty cup down carefully and said, "One more apology coming up. I think I got out the wrong side of bed this morning."

"No, I think you're still in it. I think that's the problem. What's wrong, still not learned how to use your right hand?"

"I said I was sorry."

"I don't want to hear that you're sorry, I want you to tell me what's bugging you."

Conley shook his head, studied the floor.

Danny said, "It can't be the same, you know that."

"I know."

"Then what?"

There was a silence, long, itchy, then Conley blurted it out. "I still feel the same."

Danny studied his face then said, "I can't."

Conley nodded.

"I'm sorry," Danny said.

Conley nodded again.

Danny said, "This is my fault. I should never have come back here."

"No," Conley said, looking up at him quickly. "No, I'd rather have you like this than not at all."

Danny's eyes searched his face. He shook his head. "I don't think so."

"Yes. This is just a bad day. Bad week. It was just a momentary flush of greed, that's all. Now let's stop talking about it."

"You should marry her."

Conley laughed. He didn't need to ask who he meant. "No way. Not unless you never want to see me again."

"If she had you she wouldn't find me so threatening."

Conley looked at him suddenly. His voice when he spoke was thick, from somewhere deep in his chest. "But she wouldn't have me, would she?"

Conley saw him look away and felt a strange elation that he'd embarrassed him. But it was an elation mixed with misery that Danny had got so far away from him, had changed so much in the one way he still needed him, wanted him. He couldn't draw a line, it wasn't neat, but Danny had come along and laid it down and there it was. The wall. No gate, no door, no way over. Look, but don't touch.

"Want to go out tonight?" Danny's voice intruded.

"What?"

"Want to go out somewhere? I could do with some excitement. That place still open?"

"Which?"

"The one where we met Bobby boy… bless the day."

"No, long since gone."

"Where then? What's the 'in' place now?"

"Do I look like an 'in' person to you, Danny?"

"Well think of somewhere."

"I really don't know. Try the paper." Conley threw it to him from the table.

Danny spread it out on the couch and leaned over it, turning the pages. Conley watched him, looking at the long, white seam down his face, the clothes, the utter unrelieved black. "Why do you wear black all the time?" he asked abruptly.

Danny answered him equally abruptly, without looking at him, but his hand wasn't moving, and he wasn't reading. "Because I like it."

"No other reason?"

Danny turned the page. "You mean like perpetual mourning?" He looked up. "That is what you mean, isn't it? And what if it was? What's it to you?"

"Nothing," Conley said, not as surprised by his vehemence as he would have liked to have been. "I only wondered why you did it."

"I do it because I like it, because I've got a taste for expensive clothes and the money to indulge it. It's my one remaining weakness. Satisfied?"

Conley nodded. He looked at the floor then came back up, smiling. "Your temper hasn't improved any anyway."

Danny stared at him for a moment then said, "Guess I had a bad week too." He went back to his paper. "We definitely need a night out. Definitely, before we fuck up altogether."

Oh yes, Conley thought. How I wish we could. "Underwear too?" he heard himself asking.

Danny looked at him blankly for a moment then said without smiling, "Who do you think I am, James Henderson?" And he stared at Conley so hard Conley was forced to look away. "Want to know what colour it is or what? Want me to show you?" He suddenly pushed the paper off the couch onto the floor. "What the fuck is biting you?"

Conley just looked at the floor, like a child being reprimanded.

"Well?" Danny demanded.

"I hate this distance." Conley heard his own voice with a kind of horror. He sounded sulky and petulant.

"What fucking distance? At this precise moment it's about three feet."

"Between us." Conley was speaking so quietly it almost qualified as a whisper.

"Oh, for Christ's sake." Danny punched the settee. "Why don't you fucking say it? You want to go right back to where we were. In bed, between each other's legs. That's what you want, isn't it?"

Conley said nothing. He could feel his heart racing.

"Isn't it?!" Danny yelled at him.

"Yes!" Conley yelled it back, then dropped his voice, his eyes holding Danny's. "Yes it is. You win, it is."

They sat there like that, staring at each other across the table. Finally Danny took a deep breath and dropped back. He pushed his hands deep in his pockets, stretching his legs out, staring at his feet.

Conley waited. Finally Danny said, "You should have told me this sooner."

"I didn't bloody know sooner."

Danny looked up. "You've started swearing again."

Conley jerked his gaze away. "Oh fuck off, Danny." He could feel Danny watching him but he didn't apologise and he didn't look back. He sat there, grim mouthed, looking at a spot somewhere in the middle of the curtains.

Eventually Danny said, "What do you want to do?"

Conley looked up at him uncertainly. Danny clarified the remark with an immediacy that was embarrassing. "I mean, how d'you want to deal with this?"

Conley flushed and looked away again. "I don't know. How do you normally 'deal' with this?"

"Alright, then let's make it simpler. Do you want me to clear out?"

"No," Conley said. "Definitely not. Don't even think about it."

Danny held up his hand, shaking his head as if he had something irritating in his ear. "Don't start pouring your emotions all over me, Conley."

Conley felt humiliation crawling across his skin. He wanted to yell at him, scream at him, but what could he yell? I'll love you if I want to? I'll adore you if I want to? But Danny was talking to him. Conley forced himself to listen, but he could barely concentrate on what Danny was saying, didn't want to concentrate on what Danny was saying.

"We can be friends..."

Friends? But Conley said nothing, went on staring at the floor.

"...go on being friends, if we keep it straight. Every pun intended. I want to tell you something..." Danny hesitated. "Conley, are you listening to me?"

Conley nodded.

"No, you're not. You're sitting there having a private little hate all to yourself."

"Just get on with it, Danny."

There was a silence. Conley felt sure he'd blown it, but after a moment Danny simply went on. "When I saw you at the car fair it wasn't wholly an accident. I kept finding myself driving about here, wondering if I might bump into you. I even got as far as your office once."

Conley brought his head up slowly. "Why?"

"Don't get me wrong, I had no plans for taking up where we left off. There was just a 'maybe' in my mind. Maybe it was even a 'hopefully'. I don't know. But I picked you because..." He stopped.

Conley watched him. Now Danny was taking his turn at studying the floor. He took a breath and went on, "Because I thought..." he hesitated again, looked up, "I thought with you I might stand a chance of keeping this out of it." He suddenly slid further down in the sofa and looked up at the ceiling, then said quietly, "I didn't want to make the effort to break in someone new."

"Oh… great," Conley said.

"I never intended to take any more than I thought you would give me. I thought it would be, could be, mutual. You're right, my brain's turned to soap. I told you I was trouble. I take it everywhere. No escape." His voice held no trace of self pity, not even distress. It was curiously flat, while every time Conley spoke his voice was fraught with emotion. It was a role reversal Conley could do without.

They seemed to be silent a long time before Danny said, still looking at the ceiling, "Come on, Conley, this has got to be sorted out here and now. We can't take this baby for any walks."

"Then tell me something."

Danny heard the tone of his voice, sharp and angry, still filled with resentment, and said, "What?"

"After you left her, did you have anyone else?"

Danny kept looking at the ceiling then said, "Why do you want to know?"

"Just answer the question."

"Alright. Yes."

"Sex?"

"What?" Danny frowned.

"What sex were they?"

There was another of those historic pauses and then Danny said, "How do you know it was a they?"

"Answer my question."

"Both."

"How many?"

And this time the pause went on so long Conley felt he wasn't going to answer him before he finally said, "The wages of sin are death, Conley, you know that. I came close. Won't that do you?"

"How many?"

"Still running after pain. Why does everybody run after pain? What colour of truth do you want? A ghost of, hint of colour, or a deep stain? Doesn't wash out."

"How many, Danny?"

"I don't know. I lost count."

"What?"

Danny could hear the blend of hurt and anger, very potent, very special, very dear to him.

Conley said, "How the hell could you lose count?"

"They began to meld together."

"So what made you stop?"

"A curse fulfilled itself, boring but obvious. I caught a nasty antisocial disease. I didn't even know who I'd caught it from. Too many, too close together. I had even been picking them off the streets. It felt right." Danny laughed. "No, it felt familiar. Amazing how comforting familiar can be. Tell you something really bad, Conley. I sold it out there too. To see what it felt like."

Danny fell silent. Conley prompted him, teeth almost gritted, "And what did it feel like?"

"No different. No, that's not strictly true, more passionless usually, although not always."

"You did it more than once?" Conley couldn't keep the disgust out his voice.

Danny laughed. "I'll have you know I made serious money out of it. Money I didn't need, but I made it, selling nothing more than myself, scars and all. Having me in a toilet was the pinnacle of some men's dreams." He laughed again.

"And one day, after a trip to the doctor's, you saw the light?"

"Something like that."

"And stopped?"

"More or less."

"Why more or less?"

"Because that's what it was, more or less."

"Be precise."

"Go fuck yourself, that's all you're getting."

"Why did you do it?" Conley asked.

"I don't know. Off the leash, I suppose."

Conley could hear the smile in his voice. "You were never on the leash," he said, then added, "Were you?"

Danny finally brought his head down and looked at him. "No, but it felt like it. Sometimes it really felt like it."

"Why?"

"I don't know. She made me feel trapped. It wasn't the sex. Fucking her was easy. Too easy maybe. It was me she wanted, always more of me, and there isn't enough to go round."

"I still don't understand. Why debase yourself when you didn't need to?"

"Nobody said I did. I wanted to do it."

"But why?" Conley asked again, exasperated.

Danny shrugged again, indifferent. "I don't know. I just did."

"What did you get out of it?"

"Other than money? Nothing. That wasn't why I was doing it. I did it to take something away."

"What?"

"Loneliness."

"Loneliness? A prostitute? You cannot be serious, Danny."

"Hey, don't knock what you don't understand." He tapped his head for the second time that day. "Up here, where the wild fishes roam."

Conley looked at him then said, "Now what? Another five years repentant celibacy?"

"Forever celibacy." Danny smiled. "Like a sheet of perfect silk wound, faultless, around my heart."

"What colour?" Conley asked on an impulse he didn't even understand.

Danny looked at him for a moment, almost as if the bizarre question had thrown him. But his answer contradicted that notion with an immediacy that proved whatever mad impulse had prompted it was right on course. "Pure white. Like a winding sheet. Is that what you expect me to say?"

"Play it as cynical as you like, Danny, but you still miss him, don't you?"

Danny's face chilled like something whitening with frost. He said nothing.

"Don't you?" Conley pushed, suddenly bitterly determined to get it out of him, an admission that John was still in there, alive and well, and Danny doing a slow death for him, on self destruct. If one way didn't work he'd simply try another.

Danny said slowly and carefully, "Take a flying fuck at yourself, Conley."

"What were you doing? Looking for re-enactments amongst the rough trade, determined to prove your feelings were real?"

"You fucking shut that. I got enough of that shit in Anerley. I don't need any more from you."

Danny had jumped up from the sofa and was glaring down at him. His face was chalky, making his scar stand out in sharp relief. His eyes were black. He looked close to tears.

Conley swallowed. He felt shaken by his own viciousness. He felt like he'd poked a snake with a stick to see if it would bite him only to accidentally make it bite itself. "I'm sorry. I'd no right to say a thing like that."

He got up, stood in front of him. He could see Danny's chest moving, his eyes still too bright. Danny said nothing. Conley wanted to touch him, bridge the gap between them, but he didn't know how.

He put his hand out and squeezed Danny's arm. He felt the brief, hard warmth of him before Danny pulled his arm away. "Don't touch me."

Conley felt a sudden conviction that he'd screwed it up for all time. He tried again. "I really am sorry. I was... feeling sorry for myself, out to wound, and now that I've succeeded I wish I could cut my tongue out. Forgive me."

Danny turned away from him, shoulders dropping, and Conley knew he'd won a reprieve. But Danny wasn't going to forget what he'd said, and he wasn't going to let him go without paying for it either.

Danny sat down. "I'm tired, Conley. So tired you wouldn't believe it." He looked up suddenly. "I just want to be friends. Now tell me, am I wasting my fucking time here?"

"No," Conley said, heart screaming out at him. "No."

You fucking liar.

 

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

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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.

 

Honing my craft.

Define.

You'll remember in this blog a while back me saying no-one at any level of writing could define "Show, don't tell." Well, here's another meaningless little would-be aphorism for you. "You should spend more time honing your craft."

Absolutely, all for it, if only we knew what it was.

Okay. My chosen craft is writing. Now I must hone it.

Hands up those who know what honing is, or when they last did it? Do you even know how it feels to hone?

If we are not exactly sure how to hone, or even why we might hone, how the fuck do 'they' propose we actually do hone?

Hone -vb. To sharpen or polish with or as if with a hone.

Hone n. a fine whetstone, esp for sharpening razors.

Fine, the translation therefore is:- "You should spend more time sharpening your craft with a whetstone until it is sharp as a razor."

Useful advice for woodcarving maybe, not so great for a novel. Although I do think the world needs more razor-sharp everything. On the other hand I'm looking around me and seeing a hell of a lot of professional writing that's as sharp as a woolly sweater. I'm guessing there's not a whole lot of honing going on.

In all my sad and sorry years of being a writer I have only ever seen this maxim spouted in two places, the same two places, coincidentally, where I have also seen "Show don't tell." In the ranks of perpetual amateurs and in form letters from large publishing houses.

I once even managed to combine these two when I got an editor from a large publishing house who talked about writing with all the stunning incomprehension of someone who'd never actually done it, plus she managed to use both phrases at once.

But I like to think she was the exception rather than the rule. (If only.)

I came across "honing your skills" tonight on a sci-fi writer's blog. He/they (he was part of a writers' group – aieeeeeeee) offered forums where you could "hone your skills." Which made me immediately click on the little cross on the top of my screen with the darkly muttered words, "Oh, fuck off and die."

Talk about instantly losing your credentials and your audience. That in turn brought me up short, wondering why my reaction was so emphatic, and I realised just how often I read those words on the net and how utterly, unbelievably stupid they are.

It's like some universal panacea for the original-thinking-challenged. All these poor suckers going to their little websites, their local classes, believing that 'doing' 1,000 words every Thursday and letting Needle-head, Broadbin, Strawberry-moon and Carribbean_boy 'critique' them is somehow "honing their skills."

Sharp as a razor? I don't think so. If there was anything sharp about them they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Is it all just a question of ignorance then? Is it simply that they have not yet learned better? Yes and no. The very young may be duped for a while by such pocket catchphrases, but anyone who has been writing for more than a year or two should begin to notice what works and what doesn't. More importantly, if you're serious about writing you shouldn't have to fall back on hackneyed nonsense to express yourself. If you're not sure what the phrase means exactly why the fuck are you using it?

No, there is something a little more sneaky and dubious afoot with these cheery little phrases, and it's the form letters that give us the clue.

Why would 'the professionals' use them, if they don't mean anything?

You've just answered your own question. Because they don't mean anything. That's what a form letter is, an official statement of not meaning anything.

If a publisher never wants to hear from you again he isn't going to offer you genuine criticisms of your work. He doesn't want to get into a debate with you, he wants you to go away. So this is what he says:-

You should "buy a copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook." – Translation: Go away and don't bother me. I'm not a fucking resource.

You should "hone your craft." – Translation: I didn't read your MS, so I have no idea what the quality of your prose is. As this statement doesn't mean anything I am not actually asking you to do anything you could actually do, and therefore you will go away and not bother me.

You should "show, not tell". Translation: No two people understand the same thing by this phrase, therefore you have no idea what I am asking you to do, therefore you cannot do it, and come back and bother me.

They have a lot more of these "not legally binding" expressions they love to use, all equally vacuous, but because they have appeared on so many form letters, for so many years, amateur writers have adopted them like Pavlov's dogs learned to get food – the publishers keep saying them so they must be true.

What must be true? They haven't actually said anything. That's the point.

This is why falling over phrases like these on 'writers' sites makes me switch off – if they are so undiscriminating and gullible (or patronising and pedantic) to use this line in bull, what could they possibly teach me?

The use of any of these phrases by a writer – amateur, professional or somewhere in-between – is a sign of bullshitting, plain and simple. Sometimes professional writers will use them, but usually only on amateur writers. After all, they've learned from the masters on how to make the little people go away.

These phrases show up most often used by one amateur against another as a sad attempt at one-upmanship. Among the legions of amateur writers on the net their use is rife, screaming a total lack of genuine experience. You can hardly go ten yards in any direction, in any field of amateur writing, without falling over some 'Queenie' type (and it is usually a woman, I'm sorry to say) holding court over her disciples, captivating them with her writerly wisdom, which is supposedly based on writing erratic quantities of unedited short 'stories', seen by no-one but her net acquaintances, but which is really based on memorising as many useful maxims and phrases from 'professional writers' (i.e. manuals and articles by other amateurs) as she can.

A bona fide is as good as it sounds, to someone who's even more ignorant than you are.

I've been a full-time, professional writer for 20-odd years (can't remember and I'm not fucking working it out). I have enough writing credits to tattoo both arms and part of my chest, but you will never see a list of them anywhere.

That's not anywhere. Ever.

Why? Because parading old writing credits is sad beyond belief and a sign of rank amateurism. The only time I ever used them was when my CV was sent to magazines that had not used me before. I couldn't even tell you now who I wrote for. I can barely remember three of them… when I try hard. I tend to remember the ones I missed rather than the ones I got (thus proving you regret what you don't do rather than what you do). I rely on my human memory stick (Mr Scratchmann) to remember shit like that.

I stopped freelancing in the eighties, although I did a little briefly in the nineties – why the fuck would I want to remember what I did twenty years ago? What bearing would it have on anything? Why would that impress anyone? Other than sad amateurs, of course.

It's like the club thing. Remember Avocado (see preceding blog) with her Romance Writers of America? Well, in the eighties when I was freelancing we got the notion that it would help our credentials to join The Society of Authors.

For those not in the know this is the writers 'club' in the UK. It's one of Britain's two professional bodies, a sort of writers Trades Union. It's expensive to join, but, more important than that, you can't just get in for the asking. It has a strict professional credits system. You have to have done not only enough, but the right kind of work, paying the right level of money – no five copies and a stick of bubble gum for these mothers. What's more, it gets far more applications than it can handle and it doesn't need your money.

Well, we applied and got accepted. We were members. We belonged.

And what changed? Nothing. After the first glow of 'I must be a real writer' wore off we realised that it didn't get us more work – the quality of our work and our reputations did that. All the Soc of Auths did was cost us fees. We stayed in it for a year or two and then quietly let it slip away, unnoticed and unmissed.

You are only as good as your writing. Not your proposed writing, or the writing you would do if you weren't too busy criticising others' writing. Not the writing you'd do if you were writing the screenplay to the new Batman, not the writing you could do because you are a member of the Romance Writers of America, but your actual bona fide writing. That stuff you're supposed to be honing, remember?

Come to think of it, that's what honing might be if it actually existed – just sitting down and writing.

Rather like this now, in fact.

Fuck, I've been honing all along and I didn't even know it.

Well, whaddya know?

 

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

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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.

 

PLEASE NOTE: As the following is a long-winded tale I have assumed prior knowledge in my reader so that I don't die of old-age and you don't die of boredom. If you have not read the preceding blog, and its attached comments, it will all be meaningless. It actually is meaningless. If, however, you wish to follow the rest of us into the realms of Franz Kafka then you need to read Dragging Cassandra Clare to the Gas Chamber before you tackle this. May God be with you.

 

I am writing to you from deep inside the hole in the doughnut, seduced so far into the darkness I may never get out again. This is indeed a tale told by an idiot, full of the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

Following the Cassandra Clare epic as an interesting study of envy did not quite prepare me for the full extent of the surrealism I was to encounter, the sheer mind-boggling dimensions of this play from The Theatre of the Absurd.

This is indeed a story of envy and an envy that grows more and more uncontrollable in some parallel universe where the story of The Princess and the Pea is turned into a matter of life and death.

It would be easy to imagine it was about Cassandra Clare, arch plagiarist and cunning manipulator of gullible fangirls, but it isn't.

It's the tale of the insignificant one, the lurker, the lethal eavesdropper. It's the tale of Iago, a character I know and love.

Our Iago is one Avocado. The whole of the woman's tragedy can be summed up in that one word. I might as well stop writing now.

Avocado goes more commonly by the name of White Serpent and it is in that schizophrenic disparity that her whole essence is contained - one part of her a dark, dull, fat-assed little fruit that is so flavourless everyone thinks it's a vegetable, the epitome of bland; the other a thing of elegant beauty, slim, a rare albino, feared, respected, mystical, magical – and as far removed from the pedestrian truth of an Avocado as only an internet name can be.

I lay awake last night, knowing I'd have to write this today, wondering how the hell I could do it in anything less than twenty pages, but all I could think about was why, in God's name would anyone call themself Avocado?

Why?

Is it self-deprecation taken to some insane height? It's not cute, like calling yourself Little Cabbage, say, or Petit Choux. Or ditzy, like calling yourself Carrot Top, or Potato-head. It's just cruel. It's the kind of thing a malicious parent would call their least-favoured child. "Yes, you're my dumpy little Avocado, my little fatty. You'll never be a beauty, will you? Never mind, that acne will clear up some day. If you just stop pigging out on chocolate. Dip you in mayo and put you in a BLT, my little piggy-pig. Oink-oink. Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaa…"

I'm not labouring this point just for fun. I want to show what an odd schism it reveals in her character, because it has a bearing on what happens in this sad little tale.

It begins in 2001, now six years ago. And it begins with plagiarism. Rampant plagiarism, on a fan fiction site called FanFiction.Net, in a Harry Potter fandom.

Anyone who wishes to remove themselves from the strange netherworld of the hole in the doughnut can do so right now. Because the sad truth of this entire story, the inescapable, irrefutable truth (and it's not often you can say that about truth) is that there can be no plagiarism in fan fiction, because ALL FAN FICTION IS PLAGIARISM.

It is as absurd to discuss the ethics (good Christ!) of plagiarism in fan fiction as it is to discuss the ethics of criminals stealing pens during a bank robbery.

I read a lot of whining and bitching during the fifteen, incredibly detailed pages of Avocado's defence (see second link in KL's comment, last blog). And I hear all about "the grey areas" of plagiarism.

There are grey areas in plagiarism only in a court room. In a fan fiction forum the only grey under discussion can be in levels of hypocrisy.

When I first saw Avocado's painstaking account of the Cassandra Clare debacle I kept waiting for the villain to appear. I read on and on and on and, around page twelve, when numbness was setting in, I realised there was no villain, not in the plagiarism stakes. The only villain was our sad, little consumed-with-righteous-indignation snake-disguised-as-a-vegetable.

If you could take Muriel Spark's Jean Brodie and mix her with one of Kafka's bureaucrats you would have Avocado at her purest. Lecturing "my girls" on the artistic life, telling them how it's done, "warning" (her word) Cassandra when she unwittingly errs from the set of fictional rules in Avocado's head.

Miss Avocado, darling of the literary world and member of The Romance Writers of America "for the past eight years". A fact which she just has to tell us on the first page. For why? Do romance writers understand the concept of plagiarism when the rest of us do not? Has this given her some magical insight to discern the difference between stealing characters, themes, settings, linguistic styles, phrasing, ideas, inventions, whole fictional universes (okay) and stealing "actual lines" (not okay). That's much more sinful according the Gospel of Saint Avocado. By what lunatic standard, I wonder?

And why did she need to tell us that she belongs to a club? What are we intended to measure and evaluate with that? That belonging to a romance writers club gives you wisdom, discernment, a right to judge? We should listen to her because she aspires (but does not) write romance?

Despite the deliberately-trying-to-be-innocuous little description from Fanhistory describing Cassandra as "relatively well known" (first link KL provided and which, coincidentally, is a site owned by an I'm-retiring-in-disgust admin chum of Avocado's) we can see from Avocado's own description of events that the truth is a little different.

Cassandra was, in ugly fact, already famous in her small world. Watch Avocado's green little eye balefully recording this. "I should note, here, that I had certainly heard of the Draco Trilogy... At the time, it seemed like around half of the Harry Potter authors on FanFiction.Net had Cassandra Claire listed among their favorite authors. People praised her witty dialogue; people borrowed "Draco in leather trousers." All in all, she was difficult to miss."

But, before this telling introduction, she casually mentions that she knew of Cassandra before even setting eyes on her fiction and for quite a different reason:- "I was still feeling slightly irritated at Heidi's apparent attempt to incite slashers to go over to another list and defend Cassandra Claire's right to slash. On the other hand, my ceaseless quest for Severus Snape/Sirius Black fanfiction propelled me over to join the HP_FanFiction list."

So, before she even grudgingly reads one of Cassandra's fictions she, by her own admission, is feeling resentful of someone defending her over a previous matter, in which she was not involved and was, therefore, none of her business. She doesn't even know her, but already she thinks she's getting too much attention, too much devotion, too much praise. Praise and loyalty that she, Avocado, does not have. Yes, already, right up there on page one, we see that all this started because Cassandra stole Avocado's praise. She plagiarised her praise. That's the real theft in this tale.

But, of course, it goes on, the envy ball is rolling now and anyone who understands the emotion knows that it can only be stopped by the death or misfortune of the person who invokes it.

Trouble is, Cassandra's on a roller. She writes well. She copies and extends the Harry Potter universe with wit and panache, pulling randomly, and with a certain intellectual flair, references from current pop culture. She's sophisticated and clever, within the confines of where she writes. She writes easily, comfortably, profligately almost, pouring them out, snowballing-up followers almost like a real writer.

A Real Writer. Oh-oh. Trouble in Paradise. Did Avocado miss that? Was she unaware that Cassandra had this dedicated following, suspiciously like that of a real writer? We know that she didn't. We know that already she isn't even hiding her disgruntlement and her addition of the adverb "slightly" to her irritation does nothing to disguise the emotion that she later refers to as, "I was furious-- and furious in a way that I can't even begin to explain." With not a slightly in sight. And it's not the last time she uses the word furious, or rage.

She takes to studying Cassandra's text, minutely. She gets the real books off the shelves, actually sits and compares them line by line. She's read them all ten, fifteen times, she knows them all virtually by heart. She reruns Buffy, Black Adder, notes lines. She's a human compendium of infringements, growing ever-monstrously larger.

But she has a problem. The publishers of Harry Potter, Buffy, others have a tacit understanding with fandom to overlook fan fiction. It's good word of mouth and, let's be honest, most of it is so bad it offers no threat at all to the real McCoy. What better way to spread the word? Write on. They're making millions. They don't care.

What's even more frustrating is that Cassandra puts very forthright and fulsome disclaimers on all her work stating that she's stealing. She's stealing everything and says so. Openly.

Who cares? No-one. They are ALL stealing. A point which cannot be emphasised often enough. The discussion here is not whether Cassandra was stealing but the fact that her accusers were all stealing also – so why was she singled out? For plagiarism? Oh, come on, plagiarising on Planet Fandom? You're kidding, right? Please tell me you're kidding.

But sooner or later Avocado hits pay dirt. She spots some lines from Pamela Dean, a then out of print author who wrote a trilogy entitled, "The Secret Country."

Now, it is very, very important to know and understand two things here, because this is the technical point with which envy's blue touch-paper was finally lit. Cassandra Clare ran a disclaimer, as usual, crediting the sources from which she'd stolen. In this she included "The Secret Country", by name. She said she "couldn't recall" the author's name, a fact which is belaboured to an insane degree throughout the fifteen pages of excuses for her following persecution.

The second point is that is was commonly and freely known that Cassandra deliberately included lines of dialogue, and direct lifts, in her text as a kind of fictionalised Trivial Pursuits. Common knowledge, referred to (as you'll see if you can bear to read through it) many times by Cassandra herself. She was open about it, as in not hidden. You have got this, haven't you?

So let's look at this again, in case we're losing sight of the point here.

Cassandra steals; the vegetable who is accusing her steals as she also writes fanfiction; vegetable further steals by reading fanfiction and frequenting sites that host it. That's unimportant because stealing, i.e. plagiarising, is what fucking fan fiction is about.

Cassandra is very open about what she steals. In The Big Serious Steal she names the actual book, if not the author. A trained chimp could find the book from that information, without getting out his high-chair, but somehow, somewhere this become the raison d'etre of Avocado's campaign.

This absence of the author's name somehow proves she was deliberately stealing lines and incorporating them into her text to fool her following, which she doesn't deserve because they're not really her lines, they're Pamela Dean's lines, one of Avocado's favourite authors, and everybody mistakenly loves Cassandra and thinks she's witty, but Avocado knows THE TRUTH and so she must expose her, expose the evil-doing of stealing pens during a bank robbery, and then everyone will stop loving Cassandra, and right will be restored, and that little bit of fame will go back into the great Cosmic Fame Pool and then, just then, maybe, our self-described "lurker," mummy's little fatty, Avocado, will get her long-awaited, desperately coveted chance at fame.

She will be loved, respected, have a following. Dedicated fans will defend her right to slash, donate money to replace her stolen computers, rush to embrace her as one of their own. And she will deserve it, because she knows all the rules and she didn't steal to get where she is today, oh no…

And so it goes on.

There is a lot of little asides in Avocado's defence about doing this for Pamela Dean, her moral outrage on her behalf at Cassandra taking credit for her work. But there are two notable holes in that excuse. One, she never, ever reports it to Dean or her publisher, although she has many opportunities, and despite the fact that she herself says, "I have never read anything that so clearly screamed, "Sue me!" What few references there are to contact with Dean are in e-mails that occur after others force Avocado's hand by going to Dean themselves, something which she is noticeably very uncomfortable about.

She claims this is because of the danger of litigation, but consider this, if Pamela Dean had simply replied from the outset, as many publishers/authors do, "I don't have a problem with fan fiction" then where would Avocado stand?

Up to her neck in shit with no 'case' and no canoe.

She couldn't afford to take that risk, so instead she sneaks behind the scenes at FanFiction.Net and "unofficially" reports Cassandra to an administrator who, oddly, was not the T.O.S (terms of service) admin, although Avocado knew who that was. She went instead to an admin she knew would be sympathetic to her 'cause' and got her to approach the TOS admin with the idea already firmly in place that Cassandra Clare was Breaking the Rules.

And, behold, Cassandra was tossed. Without, notably, the right to correction or defense.

It is also very important here to point out that all Cassandra's replies and comments are on Avocado's defence and she is a model of good behaviour. Had I experienced the hypocrisy that she did I would not have been nearly so polite. I would have nailed their asses to the wall. She, however, let's everyone off exceedingly lightly and is seen asking her fans and supporters (who had various boycotts and walk-outs) not to e-mail FanFiction.Net, not to start flame wars, just to let it go. She says repeatedly that FF.Net were entitled to toss her and she does not want reinstated. She is a model of restraint and decorum. This would be the "obnoxious behaviour" I heard so much about, then.

In fact I think this calm acceptance on her part, her getting about the business of writing without letting it crush her, actually played against her. Can you imagine anything worse than 'punishing' someone like this and she treats it like water off a duck's back? The pain of that. Not only has the might of your envy not crushed her, diminished her in any way, but she has the audacity to carry on and grow, and do it with dignity.

Christ, it's a miracle they never lynched her.

Oh, but Avocado tried. She pursued her relentlessly through various fandoms, insisting Cassandra clean up her act and do things the way Avocado felt they should be done in The Perfect World of Avocado, where she reigns supreme as White Serpent, Queen of the world.

But Cassandra didn't. Cassandra stayed right on course, and I can't imagine that was easy. No matter how tough you are, any mass of people gunning for you, especially with a 'case' as flimsy and transparently personal as this one, had to take its toll.

It certainly took its toll on Avocado who, several years down the line, collapsed and was, ever the drama-queen, hospitalised.

I could go on and on for pages, quoting a million little tells, a million little dreadful flaws that fall out of Avocado's mouth no matter how hard she tries to cover them up, but I'll let the finale of the story tell itself, in all its tragic glory.

Avocado spent five years pursuing this chimera. A dedication to the absurd not found anywhere in literature, not even Kafka. During this time she received only a smattering of coolly distant e-mails from Pamela Dean, the author she was 'protecting', where Dean makes it plain that she is not interested in the 'problem' and that she has handed it all over to her agent.

Which means in Real Writer speak - Go away, little stalker, and don't bother me.

The last piece of fan fiction that I could trace by Avocado (without actively looking for it – no more of that, okay?) was on her own website and was posted in April 2006, but was written in February 2001.

I have linked it here because it is quite the most poignant of documents I have read in some time, coming to it as I did, after reading everything else. Avocado's Tragic Testimony to a Life Lived by The Rules

Avocado cannot even post a five year old fan fiction, plagiarised, as all fan fiction is, from a children's book, without breaking the narrative every four lines to give long dissertations on how she feels this bit of writing is substandard, or she hasn't achieved that, or some other sad little plea of how she is not worthy. She is the Cliff Richard of fan fiction, consumed by mock-humility, watching the world nervously over her shoulder, wondering if they will judge her unkindly.

She has apparently written nothing since then, her whole life turned into mindless pursuit of the pea she can feel under fifty mattresses, a life lived in the hole in the doughnut. Her fear of not being good enough has completely paralysed her creativity, feeding her envy of those who run, unfettered, without it until it completely consumes her. Avocado has locked herself forever into the darkness of "wanting what she's got".

And the epitaph? Cassandra Clare went on to write more fan fiction, taking her fan following with her, winning a professional contract with Margaret K. McElderry in the U.S. and Walker Books in the UK, published her first book, City of Bones, which then promptly landed her on the New York Times bestseller lists for Young Adult fiction and is currently touring the United States promoting it. All in the exact same time Avocado spent chasing her round the net, insisting she put Pamela Dean's name on her fanfic, and telling anyone who would listen how Cassandra wasn't a Real Writer - Avocado had been in the Romance Writers of America for 8 years, and she knew.

Like I said – full of the sound and the fury and signifying nothing.

And that last bit, should you wish to sue me, was plagiarism.

 

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Just completed the weekend long Word Festival here in Aberdeen.

This activity is entirely alien to me. I am not a writerly/authorly person and never feel at home in environments like these. I always find them too middle class, precious and 'refined'. There's some rarefied, almost sanctimonious atmosphere that makes me feel like a fish out of water.

Also, being such a cleverly evasive little cow, I have learned how to avoid the hole in the doughnut. This expression is stolen from David Lynch who said the secret in film-making was to concentrate on the doughnut and not the hole. Meaning that it's too easy to get caught up in the petty, unimportant stuff and forget about why you are doing your thing in the first place.

I find that these 'mixing with your own kind' kind of events can be a tremendous disrupter of energy. If you find yourself going off, even in the teeniest of ways, into worrying about comparisons with others it can descend into anything from endless speculating with "what ifs" on your own career path to outright self-loathing because you've somehow failed to live up to someone else's imaginary standard.

These fits of self-pity or introverted pique never last for me, but in the past I have been distracted from myself for as long as a month or more by someone else's 'success' and I am nowadays very niggardly about time spent in indulging in such futility.

If I even catch a whiff of someone else's outlook not meshing with mine (in my 'field') I will give all that is theirs a wide berth, especially if they are famous/celebrated. Celebrity nowadays always comes with a package of the Right Way Disease – we live in a culture of Experts – so that it can be genuinely disruptive to watch the whole world dancing attendance on an ideology that feels like a cheese grater over your nipples to you.

This is as dangerous as envy gets for me, being distracted from my goals by having to run through other people's M.O.'s.

Too time-consuming and irritating by half. Avoid.

However, as part of The Global Domination plan we will be selling Brand Stone to the festival circuit so we decided to put our money where our mouths are and actually attend one. (You have to admire the boldness of that concept.)

Oh, it hurt. I felt all defensive and odd, like I'd turned the clock back twenty years. I didn't, but I wanted to grumble, "I've done my stint at this, bunch of fucking academic, self-important, retrogressive ass-wipes. I don't belong here. What the fuck am I doing here?"

Instead I psyched myself up to go along, keep quiet and listen with as open a mind as I could muster while still keeping the necessary grip on who I was and what I was setting out to do.

As it turned out it was a whole lot easier than I expected. I wouldn't go so far as to say enjoyable, but it was certainly different and interesting – in places. And the only twinge of 'envy' I got was at two billed-as-edgy male authors who wrote humorous books and who were basically rather charming and sweet - if stereotypical (beards & beer) - geek boys writing slightly dumb surrealist humour. And the 'envy'? My Mum was right, I should have concentrated on writing humour for the BBC (I did a little radio comedy work in the eighties).

It lasted all of half an hour and amused even me when I confessed it out loud. No idea where it came from, but it does illustrate my point – the 'success' of others can be an oddly alluring distraction.

The best event for us was the last one of the weekend – a woman author of children's books.

I didn't pick this one, it was Mr Scratchmann's choice. He tried on and off to get various children's projects going in the eighties and nineties, finally getting some success in 'adult' comics' (that's graphic novels, not porn). He is, apparently, considering trying again (mad fool). So I was really there to keep him company, and she turned out to be the most interesting thing in the festival for me.

She was a self-published author who had been taken up by mainstream publishing, and Random House at that.

She was like Poison Pixie in that she'd actually self-published as a business, not gone POD, and had an initial print run of 10,000 copies.

I nearly fell off my fucking seat. Christ, here, at last, was someone even more insane than me. She was madder than me by 8,000 copies. You've got to admire determination (stupidity) like that. She got, by means of a lucky break (i.e. the child of a book buyer fell in love with her book), distribution in W.H. Smith – a lucky break of extraordinary proportions.

Six months down the line she was selling 50,000 copies of her book in Smith's in one month alone. And then Walker Books took notice.

She glossed over this part of the story but I ruthlessly interrogated her till she 'fessed up on exactly how she manoeuvred this feat. I, for one, couldn't believe that it wasn't till she hit 50,000 copies that the big guns came calling (and them so shrewd and professional too) and, incidentally, all started vying with each other and thus pushed her final contract up from a three-book deal to a twelve-book deal.

We even got one good idea from her which we'd both overlooked, much to our shame, and so it was a happy day for all concerned.

But, most of all, I was struck by the fact that the only poor relative of envy that showed his face in the entire weekend was the weird childhood throwback at the 'edgy' novelists. You'd think she'd have hit my buttons. Her self-publishing journey - with no intention to belittle her, she was smart and hard-working - was a piece of piss compared to mine and yet, there she is with the Random House deal. It made me realise that I'm not at all sure I'd like the Big Book Deal, as alluring and seductive as I'm supposed to believe it. And, of course, I'm not even vaguely interested in children's books. But I'm not interested in experimental edgy books either. Ah, childhood programming, it's a powerful thing. Which brings me to…

Remember I told you a while back that I'd been trying to find books on envy on Amazon? Well, I did manage to find one, out-of-print, "The Snow White Syndrome" and another which was aimed specifically at writers and whose name I can't remember.

Well, the writers' book turned out to have very little on envy but was a bloody good book nevertheless. I am now on "The Snow White Syndrome", also, in a completely different way, a very interesting book.

It comes from the eighties and is strangely dated already. For example, not really as aware of celebrity culture as it might be, and oddly sexist in its approach to female envy.

The most alarming chapter in the whole book is where she interviews 20 celebrities on how envy affects them, and all most of them talk about is how they try to play their achievements down so as not to invoke envy.

What the fuck? Could you see a man doing that? Depressing isn't the word for it.

But here is the most interesting thing about it – I only knew two of the celebrities – Billie Jean King and Janet Leigh. Ah, the fleeting nature of fame. A book on envy that unintentionally illustrates the futility of envy - how neat is that?

However, the overriding experience of the book has been heightened for me by a weird, synchronistic coincidence that has occurred while I've been reading it. (I read in the bath every morning and at no other time – thought you might like to know that. Oh, the quirks of us eccentric authors.)

For a while I'd been watching, with a kind of half-interested eye, a strange little drama that I fell over on a hater site which was trolling my blog a while back. They were/are one of Journalfen's many sites where insecure fangirls go to avoid encountering the harsh realities of the real world by playing at big, scary roaring without being bitch-slapped.

Well, during the tedious job of going through the pages of their copyright infringements I kept seeing myself coupled up with one 'Boodith'.

The fangirls have a paranoid fear that they will be caught out in naughty behaviour so they have developed a self-censoring pet language, a baby-talk full of miss-spellings and mispronunciations. Sadly, it is incredibly easy to crack their 'code'. Sadly because you're reading it. But, nevertheless I kind of started to see a pattern with Boodith and in the follow-up days when we were checking to make sure they'd cleaned up their act I kept finding her. I looked her up on Live Journal in various combinations (I am nothing if not thorough) but there was only more troll sites in her name.

Anyway, one evening wasted in warped self-indulgence was quite enough, and I forgot about it until a good while later I started getting mass spam on Blogspirit. The spam was simply dead links, weird, meaningless shit, irritating but not damaging.

I dutifully went back to my haters' site to check if they were doing their usual "Look how smart I am" bragging, but no, nothing. However some link in there alerted me to their Wiki (a little on-line guide/encyclopaedia, for those not familiar) and there was Boodith again (and me, of course). This time some clever fangirl had said who she was - one Jassandra (or Jassie) Jlaire. It wasn't rocket science that this still wasn't her real name but I felt it was damn close - it was redolent with that 'bragging' feel again. Only I couldn't know if it was scrambled, anagrammed, referenced in some other way. I tried LJ again and I think it was there (don't quote me) that someone mentioned the title of Boodith's book.

Aha! Pay dirt.

Now, I'd realised by their 'discussions' that she had to be a fellow-fangirl and a fan fiction writer and that their hatred of her focussed on 1) her 'plagiarism' (their favourite peeve) and 2) her size. I had actually come across a picture of her linked there where several mice were tearing into her in that delicious, we're-all-girls-together kind of way that goes something like this:- "Fat cow, she's tragic, couldn't get a boyfriend." Five increasingly vindictive permutations of this follow then one says, "Actually, I feel a bit bad about making these sizeist remarks." 'Me too' discomfort half-heartedly follows until Don't-You-Make-Me-Feel-Guilty-Mouse chimes in, "I don't hate her because of her size. It's because she's so obnoxious. It's her behaviour."<