Fan Fetishisation

My novel started as fan fiction. I wanted to write horror stories and I was seventeen and I didn't want to do the leg work to actively create my own character from scratch. But I knew of a character, quite low profile, not as well defined to modern audiences that I thought I could make "mine". What were originally going to be the adventures of John Constantine, Hellblazer became Doctor Occult due to a scheduling error at the fan fiction website I posted at. I was told I couldn't use Constantine-- even after having a cover done up!-- so I had to come up with a last minute replacement.

And Doctor Occult would do.

So yeah, I, like many before me, started writing in the creative favela of fan fiction. I wrote 35,000 words, and I loved it. This was me writing what I wanted to write: Horror. I hadn't been fully able to do so before but I thought this was pure and unadulterated. I did things I always wanted to do with the genre. And sure, I was influenced by Supernatural and, of course, DC Comics-- so there were cameos from The Shade, The Spectre, Madame Xanadu-- but it was mine. I did things with the character that hadn't been done with him before. I told a whole new story in the context of him.

... Which isn't exactly right, is it?

I mean, I wanted to become-- and I still do!-- a serious writer. A writer on the up and up. And I always thought that fan fiction was something to look down on, and yes, I think it still is, but E.L. James is a millionaire for her Twilight fan-fiction trilogy Fifty Shades..., and all she did was replace vampires with bondage. I mean come on, honestly? Honestly? So my roots in fan fiction aren't the stigma I always thought they were. Yes, they're a bit embarrassing, but so what? My closest friends know I did it, and they were just "yeah, okay, moving on," about it, so I can't fault that reaction.

I tried getting back into it at the tail end of 2011. It was what actually energised me  into writing original content. I wanted to wrap up some stories from a few years ago (I took a massive hiatus after starting my new job) but the excitement petered out. I started strong, wrote like a beast... but then the enthusiasm died. I didn't want to write about Green Lantern. I wanted to write about... something for me.

When I was in America, travelling via trains from Point A to Point Z to all Points in-between I had a journal I was scribbling furiously in. This was... 2010. 2010, a year that was both horrifically unkind to me but also the start of a lot of new, too. I was building a world in my notebook, and a name occurs again and again in my notes. Richard Faraday. And there weren't mentions of his wife Scarlett, she was a later addition, but this was the man I could write stories around. He was a mix of the Winchesters and The Doctor, horror and science fiction rolled up, all my favourite kind of adventures just waiting for him to experience. I wrote about all the characters you find in Books One and Two, you find everything out. He's there. He was whole. And all I had to do was write him. Come 2012, I did just that.

So anyway, if you've read my blog this year you know I just committed to writing. I did what I wanted, and I did it well, I think. 

The stories started out as horror, pure and simple. But as I wrote I found things changing. It became a homage, perhaps a pastiche, to my childhood, and maybe to yours. There were no capes or superpowers. There were spectral private detectives. Odd, numerically inclined mystery men. Every other character was based on the shows of the sixties that had a short revival during the mid-nineties during reruns and have now found a home on ITV4. I'm talking, as you well know, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Prisoner, The Professionals and so much more. Book Two is full of it. Department S, Jason King, Captain Scarlet... it's insane. And you probably won't see them like I do. You'll maybe recognise a name. You might feel fleeting familiarity with one character. But everyone has their origins somewhere. And I've taken them and I've twisted them and placed them within the context of my mythology, and I love it. Book Three is going to be even worse. My novel has become a place for my influences to come out and play. Supernatural, Night Stalker, Doctor Who, Angel, The Wire, The Man from UNCLE, Fringe, Moonlight, True Blood, et al, just dancing wildly to the beat of my drum. Their stories become something new, and then the question is asked... what next? Where did Illya Kuryakin go? What next for Patrick McGoohan's Number Six? Whatever happened to Jason King? And things get bigger and bigger until what can really threaten them other than the end of reality?


I have a plan now. I know where the novels are going, loosely. Getting Book Two out there is the most important thing at the moment, but I want to think beyond that. So, the plan. Three novels-- potentially four-- published by Summer 2013. A pitch in the hands of Image Comics by the same time, based on my novel series. I'm already talking to an artist. I want this stuff to be in the hands of people who come from the same place as me, that's always been the goal.

Wish me luck.

House Cleaning

So this is my second post of the New Year. Huh.

I can't sleep, so I've just spent the past hour cleaning up the Labels on this years' posts. I got a bit lax, and I don't think that should stand. How am I going to be able to find things?! GODAMMIT! No, but seriously, it helps, I think, to have things very clearly labelled, in case I want to look at all of X. Also, I completely forgot I had given up reviewing episodes of Supernatural with Episode 2. Ha. Good times. Go find it! It's under the Supernatural Label!

"Hell, or Hidden?"

I'm writing a lot of ideas down recently, filling up a book with them, just so I can have something to look to when I have a moment. There's the obvious stuff, the stuff I always turn to when I'm thinking... the Tunguska Impact, for one, that whole incident fascinates me so it's an idea that I mine when it's appropriate... science, as a whole, is a well that I go to every now and then-- mad science, real science, speculative science, anything like that. Of course, due to my bastard novel, I'm now fascinated with looking at anything in regards to angels and demons and monsters-- but that could also be because I'm a big Supernatural fan. So yeah, I'm working on lots of stuff right now, have lots of ideas fermenting, and below are two projects that I'm bobbing in and out of.

The most important to me, right now, I think, is my screenplay. I've written it before for coursework but then I, uh, well I lost it. I lost the piece and it's probably somewhere in my room or on a computer or a memory stick, but as I can't find it I'm rewriting and expanding on it from memory. It's a bugger, because I was really happy with it (but not happy enough with it, I guess, to save it anywhere memorable, buh) but this is giving me a chance to just do it straight off again, without having to keep looking back at what happened before. If it was memorable and striking it stays, but obviously, if I can't remember it in the first place it can't be very good. So that's how I roll today with this.

The second most important (after getting my novel rewritten after the edits come in) is this stupid little science fiction story I have in my head involving the edge of the universe and the end of all time but it's stupid and hard to write because there has to be internal logic to it and the first big stepping stone is the fact that there has to be space ship that can run for billions upon billions upon trillions of years without hitting planets or just falling apart but that just doesn't make sense so I'm stuck thinking. Phew. There's also the engine idea I had, which is intrinsic to the second (there's more than one, ugh) "twist" to the story, but like I said, it needs to be worked on.

Supernatural S1E2 - "Wendigo"

"Wendigo" was quite a good episode, more of a re-pilot just in case you missed the first episode-- you can tell, either way. The exposition is all there again, and the threat clearly outlined after a certain point. And it's scary. It is. You get the creep factor even as you don't see the monster-- and as I pointed out last time around, the fact that you don't see the Wendigo itself (hell, you don't even see it until the last fifteen minutes).

In fact the episode sets itself up early on with the dream sequence that has a major shock that you don't see coming, because it just makes sense that Sam would be there in the cemetery. That shock came from nowhere and I loved it, because it's just... it sets up shop, I think. Supernatural is, as Eric Kripke intended, a horror film week to week, and the structure, the context I guess, is the underlying Winchester subplot. These guys tell great stories, and the characters are really well defined, that you don't care.

So the story mirrors the Winchester's situation perfectly-- a sibling is missing, and needs to be found. Dean seems to notice this, and needs to solve it, but Sam doesn't care. Sam, to be fair, is a complete bastard in this episode, not wanting to babysit, but it's understandable because he's just lost Jess and now their father is leading them on a wild goose chase. That would make me angry, I'm sure.

I like how in the earlier seasons the show really knew its demographic. The young folk always, eventually, believe Sam and Dean, but the old guard, the older generation, they always view them with disdain, and of course, again, rightly so. These guys are running around with fake IDs and causing trouble, people seem to be dying as soon as they arrive. I like that. Sure, as the series as a whole progresses that eschews, but right now it's fitting, and you can't help but enjoy it. It gets more obvious next episode, with "Dead In The Water" and the Sheriff a) being the cause of the ghostly lake and b) trying to protect his family and c) trying to get the Winchesters to leave.

Again, characters are well-defined by their actions-- Sam is angsty still, he takes... well, he's never unangsty, and Dean is a cocky sonofabitch, the fact that he's wearing biker boots to hike into Blackwater Ridge, he's eating M&Ms as supplies, his bravado in the face of the guide, Roy. In the earlier episodes, in fact, it feels like Sam is shortchanged in the character building department, because he's so well defined by his loss of Jessica and his need to find John. That's it. Dean, meanwhile, is fun, he's bouncy, and he's not buried under the broodingness that later becomes him. He's the comic relief to an extent, and with the overarching plot being so damn depressing, it's required.

I don't think it's the best episode, not as good as the first, and not as good as, say, "Scarecrow" or "Provenance", two episode I do quite like, but it does continue to establish the mythology. Watching from the beginning gives you a better sense of things, where the show is coming from, but that's something I'll discuss when I hit "Phantom Traveler".

6/10

Supernatural Reviews

I'm needing to keep myself focused with my writing, so I'm giving myself set aims for the time being just so I keep doing stuff. I'm working on a short film screenplay that I hope to somehow develop, and a few other projects with Mort, so that should be cool, but I'm also slowly going to make my way through Seasons One to Four of Supernatural, and hopefully, when I hit Four the Five boxset will be out. That should be fun. I'm going to write a review for each episode after I watch it, and rate it accordingly on a scale of 1 to 10. How's that for simplicity. Expect the first review ("Pilot", duh) soon. Thanks!

"The Chain" - INSPIRATION!

I'm trying to figure out what goes into my novel writing process. It's mostly music and comics, intravenously pushed into my system by amps and my eyes, and then condensed into whatever the heck my novel turns out to be like.

I have no faith in the final product.

But why should I stop? I've been at this for nearly a year now, and to stop now it just ridiculous. Sure, the plot keeps getting twistier and more insane, but fucking come on, 'The DaVinci Code'?. I think I can provide something much more less shit than that, right?

...Right?

So anyway. Music. A lot of it. Nine Inch Nails to Led Zeppelin to Tiger Lou. Not any one genre, mind. Not all of it with lyrics. Some of it could be classed as noise-- I mean, Clint Mansell's instrumental scores are immense, same as Charlie Clouser's. And God knows I love me some Combichrist (though I'll admit, a lot of their instrumental stuff-- noise-- does sound so similar... I just don't care), and Nine Inch Nails are my bread and butter-- but check out Ghosts I-IV... not what you would expect from the guy who won a Grammy with the lyric "...gotta listen to your big time hard line bad luck fist fuck...", right?

(Obviously the 'Grammy committee' weren't all "Oh, 'fist fuck'! What the music industry has been missing!", but come on. Bear with me.)

So a lot of it is music. Inspiration. Good stuff.

And a lot of it is information. Stuff I've read and I've heard or I've seen. Characters are people I know, mixed and matched and smudged together so you wouldn't recognise them. My main character is someone I saw in a low budget horror film*. I saw him, half way through writing the novel, and I was like "Holy shit, what's he doing there?" because that was my guy. That was Taylor Mahn, all flesh and blood and broken pieces of spirit, that was him right there. How am I supposed to take that?

(I took it well)

(*'Masters of Horror: Dear Woman', by the by. Damn you John Landis, you ruin me! In an alternate reality Brian Benben would play the lead role in the film adaptation of my novel.)

And then the literary references. Come on. Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, James Robinson. I owe my style to them. Heck, one's a comic book writer (they're all comic book writers, but Ellis and Gaiman have at least had novels published!) but that doesn't stop him being an inspiration (some time soon I might take a break from the self deprecation and post up a list of Must Read comics, but until then...). HP Lovecraft, even though I'm not as knowledgeable about his work as I should be (I'm more knowledgeable about the man), is a big influence, as anything with gods and monsters should be. I mean, come on:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

(That translates to "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." for those of you interested)

And then comes the television stuff. Oh, God. This is the worst. Supernatural, for instance, is not as big an influence as it looks like it should be. I started writing this before some of the major plot stuff started moving in Season Four, and I was reaaally pissed when things started coinciding. I don't want this to be fan fiction because that would just hurt, but it might appear to be, right? Not that Sam and Dean and Castiel (with a little help from Bobby) are running around trying to stop the apocalypse, right? But still, some of the characters are present (Lucifer, for one. Duh) that can cause people to point at me and say I'm a hack.

I don't want that!

(Really.)

But anyway, I'm posting this because I'm winding down from some hardcore novel writing tonight. Things are coming together. I'm prowling around the hardest scenes to write, so obviously I'm procrastinating. But soon I'll be done. I think I'll hit a year.