Long time no listen to my drivel.
It’s nothing dramatic, just lots of boring day jobbing sucking up my time and soul. Still trying to find a new job, not holding much hope for that honestly but I keep soldiering on nonetheless.
Personal and work life aside, my consumption of product in terms of media is pretty great recently. My ascension to escapist sci-fi incel is complete haha. I’ve been watching farscape recently to give the expanse a rest because the seasons are short and I was running out of them now I can’t say which I like more because farscape is sort of more silly but I feel more connected to the characters and their chemistry. 
But I love the expanse for the realism and story but I love farscape for the characters and the puppets and all the physical effects which are literally Jim Henson puppets. So this is like sesame street in space except not aimed at children even remotely haha.
I would kill to see an escape of sesame street with Rygel haha.
Wait is Jim henson sesame street or muppets? Are they the same thing???
So I’m hooked on that and there are four seasons of like a billion episodes so I’m set for stuff to watch while I lift heavy things and grunt. My product consumption is set and I’m excited for next product.
On the book front I didn’t notice I did this but I actually stopped reading the Parker the books when Richard Stark stopped writing them for like twenty fucking years for some reason haha.
Just totally an accident. But I started reading his nineties books now and they’re pretty solid. They haven’t dipped in quality at all, the first one was not my favourite style of his books. I notice that he has like two styles of Parker books and considering the subject matter it doesn’t surprise me that it has these limitations. You either get a situation where Parker is just finishing a job and it went right or it went wrong then someone betrays him or it goes wrong and the rest of the book is him trying to deal with the new development and get away with the money.
Or my personal favourite where it starts with Parker getting the job and then spends forever autistically setting up the job only for it then to go wrong from some unforeseen circumstance which he then has to deal with and get away with the money. I like these ones purely for the great build up and excitement. I tend to think the first style is just laziness, where he can’t be bothered to come up with a clever heist so he just skips it and gets into the meat of the story which he’s great at and the action is always really great. But it’s just a way of getting the heist out of the way, I see why he does it because normal people are bored by ages of tedious planning and setup. But I think we’ve established I’m far from normal.
The first book is actually the peak of the first trope, a heist goes really badly wrong, his wife betrays him and shit gets fucked up haha. Watch the movie Payback if you can’t be bothered to read the far superior book. The book wasn’t about heisting, even thought here was a heist in it. It was about Parker being this unrelenting force that was going to get what was his nomatter what. It was setting up this character that would step on the devils dick to get what he wanted.
But the second book is what gave shape to the mythos in my opinion because it’s all about that anal setup, like half the book is about him getting this truck which he is used for like a few seconds to block off the view from the road in this armored car heist. But it was just this fantastic build off to an amazing pay off that really set the tone for the rest of the books as well establishing new characters and worldbuilding.
The nineties era books (I’m not sure what era they’re actually set in because Parker and his pals haven’t aged it seems) the first is the epitomy of the first kind, the book starts where they’re in the middle of the job which goes right. But then they’re betrayed and shit happens, looking back it was ok, not amazing. The next book I’m on now is like a mix of both kinds which is weird.
It starts with the action at the end of a heist that goes sort of wrong because Parker is climbing out of a wrecked car but he has the money and he gets away leaving one guy there stuck in the car. 
The real story comes in where this guy had another job set up which now falls on Parker when this guy dies. So we have all this good set up which pleases my autism all while shit from the previous job is encroaching on the latest job. So he’s really mixing it up with this one. That and he brings back a few fan favourite characters from the roster, not my favourite characters, I really want to see Grofield and Handy Mckay come back and I’m saving the Grofield books for when I finish the Parker series. I really wanna see Grofield because he wasn’t in good shape in the last book, as far as I remember he’s missing a few of his fingers. But it’s not like Stark really gives a shit about continuity I mean he brought back Ed Mackey from being literally dead without even an explanation. I guess he just forgot.
I mean I was planning to read all the Parker books again in graphic novel format but I can’t find a good place to pira- I mean buy them at an affordable and price from a reputable source.
Come on! Richard Stark is dead he doesn’t care if his books make money. I mean fuck, pirating these books about a master thief is some ultimate irony surely. The closest I come to being Parker is downloading comics for free and possibly lots of movies and games if I was a pc master racist.
So yeah content, finally some content and it doesn’t totally suck, yeah well ok it kinda does but it’s fun to write and until my unusual form of writers block passes it’s really all I can muster. My inspiration is in short supply right now and I can only church out ironic crap. But I think I’m gonna just throw all my other books either up for free or onto muddy boots so it at least gets out there and maybe makes some money. 
I hope is that my ultimate punishment is that the worst book I’ve written, the zombie book I wrote as a joke gets put up as a humiliating netflix show.
One can only hope.
See you…
–
A little boy with a blank expression stares off into the distance as his head is lathered and shaved in preparation for his training.
A crude clownface is painted over his dull lifeless face.
Sitting before the elder clown master. The elder’s legs crossed, his eyes closed solemnly puffing on a pipe, a few bubbles coming out of the end of it as he thinks to himself.
“My young one, you are now a clown in appearance but not one in spirit, a clown does not have to smile on the outside, but in his heart there must be laughter.” The old man put his pipe to one side and leaned forward. “Once you can take this nose from my face your training will be complet-“
Before he could finish the child ripped the nose from the old man’s face, the sound it made was a ridiculous honking as he squeezed it in his little hands.
“You didn’t let me finish” The old man spat “What I meant to say was ‘your training will be complete when you can take the red nose- without it honking.” He said as he took the nose and popped it back on his nose with a loud honk.
“Now the first part of your training will be to enter that tent over there-“. The old man raised a wrinkled tattooed arm pointing towards a large tent covered in strange graffiti clown markings. Lots of ‘Ha-ha’s and ‘why so serious?’s and other edgy stuff like that.
The boy quickly began to rise without changing his expression “Hey- let me finish will ya?” The old man scowled “On your hands” He smirked.
The child looked sceptical at the old man for only a moment, not sceptical but surprised and then accepting. As if he was about to listen to a ridiculous story but been told it was ‘based on real events’.
“Only those who can walk on their hands can truly say they know how to walk on their feet.” The old man smiled. “No man in that tent walks on his feet, to do so would shame the holy ground”.
–
The orange dust settled on a road side flea market bizarre selling all manner of goods and trinkets. The merchants wore long ragged clothing and hunched to display there wares on rickety stands made from refuse metal and wood. Their hands clasped as they sharply eyed customers over their long hawkish noses.
Pookie had agreed to accompany Riki on a quick supply run for the tent commune thing.
“Thanks for coming with me” Riki said over his shoulder.
“I had nothing better to do” Pookie said as he picked up a weird nick nack of a clown with green hair and yellow skin.
He pulled the string and the doll said in a strange mechanical voice “I’m crusty the clown hahaha”.
Pookie sneered at the little doll before putting it down and saying “Never heard of you.”
Riki continued looking forward and talking as if to no one. “You must be wondering about Jersey, what’s she’s doing with a bunch of guys like us.”
“Not really.” Pookie said prodding a stuffed dinosaur toy with one of it’s legs missing.
“It doesn’t strike you as odd a young woman like that would be in the company of all these men?”
“Take a look at me guy, ya think anything strikes me as odd?”
Riki turned to look Pookie up and down and said “Hmm, I guess not.” He smirked. “But you have been thinking about her?”
Pookie was flustered for a second before he said “What, no!”
“She came to us much like you did.”
“I didn’t come to you, we’re just passing through.”
“Passing through huh? I like that.” Riki laughed. “She had nowhere else to go, the wastes churn out so many like her, no families, no friends, no hope. We’re all like that in some way, but it’s good to find others, ya know what I mean?”
“Not really” Pookie said.
“Sure” Riki laughed as he turned back around and dipped his head to smiled with his arms behind his back.
Pookie let him walk on a little further while he messed with some beanie babies he had no intention of buying. With the no money he had before he heard an off putting whimpering sound.
“Look kid, I’ve already told you, I’m not a teacher and I don’t have time for this crap ok.” Riki yelled.
“Please master, I beg of you accept me as a student, I wont take no as an answer. I’ll wait night and day out in the acid rain and the radiation, I’ll do anything.”
“Try going away.”
“Good evening sir? Maam?”
“Who are you? Some other nutjob that wants me to train them?”
Pookie sighed exasperated and decided to go over and see what was happening.
The scene was an unusual one. That weird fumer kid from before was on his knees begging Riki to train him, on the verge of tears. But more pressing was the tall gaunt man standing just behind Riki in his blind spot.
He was slim and ghostly looking wearing a weird multicolored wrapping around his head with an unusual gem in the centre. His face seemed dark and brooding despite the bright time of day. Atop his lip was a neatly trimmed pencil thin moustache and soul patch below. The look in his eye was piercing but also seemed like a chameleon looking everywhere at once.
“I have heard you are very skilled, I would like to put those skills to the test in a duel.” The man said, his voice rising eloquently, a slight tinge of accent running through his words.
“And who are you?” Riki asked defiantly.
“I am but a humble warrior mystic who wishes to put his skills to the test. I have travelled all over this world and learned very many interesting techniques, I’d like to see how they stack up to someone such as yourself.”
“Is that a challenge?” Riki smiled.
“You can call it that” The man laughed.
All the while the young fumer Brandon was looked back and forth between them in some form of incomparable awe at the two figures and the aura they gave off.
It seemed as if the air pressure changed as these two unusual men studied eachother.
–
Read the rest of the chapter on inkitt.