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LCYE Chapter 15 ‘A World of Madness’

Hola seniors and senioritas,

Had like a minor backlash from my comments about camwho- I mean cosplay girls. No but seriously, I dunno, I guess I was in a bad mood or something, when am I not amirite haha? And my disdain for normies and facebook admins had reached its peak boil. I just can’t stand these little internet nazis thinking they can tell me what I can say and when I can say it and how. Like this facebook group is their own little dictatorship, it’s just fucking infuriating talking to these idiots so I just block them when they message me with these fucking snide little diatribes about how I posted on the wrong day or I didn’t ask their permission first. Fuck you, I’ll post whenever I goddamn like, don’t like it kick me out of the group, there are only like a million more groups without you controlling them.
I just can’t stand these people with this inflated sense of self-importance. People who have zero power over their own lives using what little power they have on the internet to police others, it’s as Donald Trump would say ‘Sad’.
But anyway that’s my spiel and I’m sticking to it, still think cosplay is shit and the people who do it are just fat attention whores and you can’t copyright a picture you took of your own fat ass. Honestly that post got shitloads of traffic so maybe more of that cancer is useful.

I guess my personal life turning to shambles just has me on edge and anyone who sticks their neck out is about to get cut in one way shape or form.

Anyway that bullshit out-of-the-way, gonna get into some updates. So the contract with Muddy boots is signed, haha he can’t turn back now, totally stuck with me haha. What does that mean, well the book is going back for another edit, hopefully my cover cost will be compt, which would be nice. Not sure I’d do anything productive with the money, maybe buy another knife haha.

That’s underway, should have a release schedule soon, more people on my mailing list, kinda surprised by how steady it’s building and honestly it’s all due to the awesome cover Mike did for me. It looks spectacular in a thumbnail.

In other news people seem to love the book that or they’re polite enough to lie to me haha. Had lots of positive feedback, should amount to a lot of nice reviews, I’m also going on a zombie themed podcast soon, so that should be fun.

GS2 is coming along nicely, kinda feel like I’m rushing it a little but out of just excitement really, feel like a dog chasing rabbits. I just want to get into it and it’s shaping up really nice. You know you’re enjoying writing when it makes you smile even writing it. I might have bitten off more than I can chew characterwise but I think I differentiated them and made them giant fucking stereotype caricatures enough to make them stand out and not have them just blur into one. But fuck I’m having fun, currently lying in a hospital bed which is my coach being treated for Xcom 2 addiction, the struggle is real.

Other than that and my crippling loneliness, alls good on the western front oh and the postman just brought me my polish gwent decks, pisser.

And here, completely unconnected is an excerpt of the penultimate chapter of a novella you should have already in e-copy if you’ve signed up to my mailing list LADIES CLOSE YOUR EYES. If you wanna check out the full thing head on over to my inkitt page and if you want the full edited version sign up to the mailing list to get a free copy for your ebook reader.

Thanks for checking in.

See you…

A World of Madness

–

There was an annoying buzzing sound rattling the real wood bedside table of the Thunderbird lodge.

Some stirring under the covers.

A brown naked arm stretched out to pick the phone off the bedside table and retracted back under the warmth of the covers.

“Special agent Harriet Jageur speaking” A muffled voice under the covers said.

A few moments of silence passed as she dazedly listened to the rushed voice on the other end.

“Thank you for informing us, we’ll be in touch”

As soon as the call ended Harriet launched out of the bed flinging the covers off her nude body.

“Shit fuck shit!”

Con lay exposed under the tossed over covers naked in Harri’s bed awoken by the immediate sense of immediacy.

“What is it?”

“Banville’s been murdered in the fucking interrogation room! Mirra got away in his car, he could be in the next fucking state by now!” Harri spoke as she faced away from him quickly putting on a bra and panties that were tossed out the front of the bed. She sprang for the cupboard’s and started to dress as fast as humanly possible.

“So what now?” Con lay struck in her bed.

“Get dressed”

“We need to slow down and think this through. We have no idea where’s he’s going. There’s gotta be an APB already out on Banville’s car, they’ll turn him up.”

“Get dressed!”

“And go where?”

Harri took in a harsh rasping breath and looked at the floor, she tensed her jaw and her eyes got moist. “This is my fault”. She paused and heaved a few more long wet breathes. “I opened his cuffs, I was too fucking caught up in all this hoodoo voodoo spooky bullshit and now someone is dead because of me! Because I forgot to lock a pair of fucking cuffs”

“This is not your fault. We need to be smart, what do you wanna do just barrel out the door and follow the sirens? You think he left us a trail of breadcrumbs?”

Harri was quiet for a moment. She closed her eyes and a few nervous tears leaked out as she stood looking a mess with her clothes hastily assembled. Buttons skew and her skirt on backwards.

An hour later she was changed into a dressing gown. Her hair pinned back sitting on the bed, her back against the back board. Calm after a steady application of coffee. A laptop on her knees as she checked Mirra’s bank records they’d had subpoenaed the moment he was taken into custody.

Con sat at the writing desk with a pair of pyjama bottoms on with no top checking flights in and out of the state and any activity in Mirra’s credit cards.

“Anything?” Harri said without looking up.

“Not much, you?”

“I have something, two flights purchased on his credit card. Two seats premium economy to Sacramento, he paid for a room in some motel down there.”

“Doesn’t seem like much”

“Not on its own” Harri looked up scornful. But then there’s a return journey with only one seat booked.”

“So you think he planned a little vacation and then what? Maybe she got sick and had to take the bus back, maybe they had a fight and he left her there? It doesn’t explain how he could kill her there, if that’s what you’re suggesting and get the body back”

“These days’ airlines weigh and record the weight of your luggage so they can charge you more, especially with budget airlines. His luggage going coming back was almost ninety pounds heavier”

“That’s a lot of souvenirs. It’s a cute theory but it could be anything. Maybe he was picking something up from craigslist, a ninety-pound paperweight.” He looked back and gave her a silly grin. “Doesn’t the airport have sniffer dogs?”

She gave him a narrow eyed look and chupsed. “They do” She paused and exhaled as she looked down at her laptop “For bombs” She took a sip of her coffee. “She’s not a bomb”.

LCYE Chapter 13 ‘Confinement’

Just gonna be a quick update because I’m up to my neck in stage hand work right now for this grand show I put on for you kind people.

Again another shout out to my new subs on my mailing list, thank you very much for paying attention to this fucking train wreck haha.
I’m really busy, I got the edit back for LCYE and I’m just proofreading it again and making the changes as well still spamming for more subs haha. But it’s coming together. I just wanted to go over it with a fine tooth comb to make sure it’s at it’s best when I convert it into a pdf/epub and send it to you lovely people.

As far as my writing is going, it’s going haha. I’m writing something a little sillier as a break. I was trying this new diet which I had to rework because I felt like a zombie and it put a kink in my weight lifting but it’s all good now. I thought I had writers block but it turned out I was just dying haha.

I dunno, this novella I’m working on is a little wet, just wanted to keep myself busy til I’m psyched up enough for GS two, or something new. It’s just not jelling as well, it’s a blast from the past, it’s sort of silly and stilted and doesn’t really represent the growth and the scope of my newer work.

But enough of me rambling incoherently.

Here’s chapter 13 of LCYE that is being proofread and will be in the inbox of hopefully everyone reading this blog within the month.

Without further ado here is Confinement

~

He fell into consciousness wide eyed and drenched in sweat. His breathe burning in his chest. He strained against plastic ties which bound his arms to the black metal struts of what seemed to be a weightlifting bench.

Was it a room?

It smelled dank, rotting wood and coppery smells of rust. It was too dark to tell.

He was lying in what felt like a dentist’s chair, his arms held down at his sides. He was restrained not only at the wrists but it felt like all the way up his arms and his legs. He had zero mobility in any of his limbs. His head equally was held in place by what felt like plastic wrap, wound tightly around his forehead. It was sticky and forming a lot of sweat but none of which allowed him any more mobility.

He felt powerless, his heart beat out of his chest for what felt like an hour of blackness and panic. Finally, when he’d given up hope of his limbs proving useful for escape he faded into despair. Taking deep breathes getting gradually shallower and more quiet until he heard someone else breathing.

A generator sprang into life, humming and coughing behind his head. A bright unshaded bulb was born cutting through the thick dark dank of what he now knew was a boxcar probably deep in the railyard. In a place no one could hear them.

An unseen scratching, and then music started to play.

“How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf)

The one with the waggley tail”

As the record was started, James felt a sharp tugging and a shifting in his seat. A feeling of falling as the hydraulics in the chair dropped him lower and then bolted him almost upright. Instantly he was made aware of what he was supposed to see.

In front of him were two rows of something obscured by a tan hide tarp. They were spaced out as if they were seats on a train and behind them there was something hanging on the wall. Something that looked like an animal.

He heard breathing getting closer to his ear and then a voice he thought he knew.

“James, it’s good to see you. Are you resting comfortably?”

~

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LYCE Chapter Chapter 8 ‘The Rabbit’

Running out of things to rant about, I guess I could rant about the nontroversy of the Trump tapes, as if that even matters, the news will report on anything these days it seems. I’m half expecting the next headline to be ‘TRUMP FARTS IN ELEVATOR’ ‘TRUMP LEAVES TOILET SEAT UP’ ‘TRUMP SEES MAN SNEEZE – DOESN’T SAY “BLESS YOU”‘. It’s kind of pathetic but there you go.

Almost finished this, it’s tough keeping it on the rails, my mind just wonders into the woods some times but I tried. I’m getting there, my work is becoming much more grounded as I put more time and effort into my research. Makes me hopeful for nano to see my progression but at the same time I’m thinking I should have done much more research for nano. But fuck it, I don’t really intend to win, I just think it’ll be good to switch off facebook for a month and do some solid work like I’m supposed to.
No fucking blogs, or twitter, or internet drama or trolling, any of that bullshit, just me and microsoft word and all the other shit I use.
It should be interesting, my first nano, I’ve got a blog share type thing coming up with a fairly famous zombie author, he’s more famous than me that makes him famous haha, John L Davis IV, so that should be interesting. I doubt he took the time to read my book but I picked up a copy of his and it’s pretty serviceable zombie fare.

Anyway back to the chapter at hand and yes, quite a few references to Lynch in here, a lot of twin peaks, a little wild at heart for some reason. I think it makes for a fun read, if anyone is reading it, my reviews seem to be getting more eyes on than any of my actual work for whatever reason that is. Ok well I’ll go kill myself then bye y’all haha.

Ok as usual you can find the full chapter for zero monies on inkitt by following this handy dandy linkamabob;

The Rabbit

Cheers!
~

The sign read ‘Twin Pines Lodge’ it was big and blue. The same colour blue adorned every door in the motel set into the cream colour walls. It was a common looking L shaped motel with the office closest to the street with a few adjoining rooms connected to it. Then you had the double packed rooms adjacent, facing out towards the street. There wasn’t a pine tree in sight. Just the large sycamores spaced out unevenly behind the back building.

The parking lot was nearly empty, there was a white minivan under a car port awning on the right of the entrance. And a white Toyota parked next to the office. He pulled into a space between the minivan and a big green dumpster that was facing out into street at an irregular angle. The dumpster was next to an oddly placed patch of grass that looked like someone’s front lawn. It was edged off by a black fence around the office of the neighbouring motel that had a nice little desert garden made up of cacti and orange rocks.

He got out of the car and looked around for a second with his hand cupped over his eyes. A curtain moved from one of the upstairs rooms. James felt exposed.

He walked slowly towards the small office building at the head of the fat snake. It was a tiny building partially hidden by some overgrown bushes. He entered and right of the bat got a trailer park feeling, the floor felt temporary, made of some sort of panelling covered in a carpet. There was no air-conditioning, just a big fan on the ceiling and one on the desk next to a nodding Chihuahua. He didn’t suspect the rooms had air conditioning either.

The room felt even smaller than it looked and even James not being of an advanced height felt it necessary to stoop. There wasn’t much to see, a beaten up couch that looked like it belonged in an airport waiting room. The carpet was blue, stained and pulled up at the edges, the owner probably had a dog. There was a small coffee table between the couch and a chair that didn’t match either the table nor the couch. A few tropical plants which also stooped.

There were a few framed pictures of what looked like stock photography of Caribbean islands, Barbados, maybe Jamaica. Some religious iconography above the desk, a picture of Jesus with the catholic heart and thorns. There was a crucifix next to it, just to make it doubly holy. The rest of the wall behind the desk was covered in framed plagues relating to some qualifications in motel owning and hospitality. Awards that looked like they’d been printed off the internet with the name; Howard Blum. An alcove behind the desk lead into the back where the owner probably lived. It didn’t have a door, just a set of those hanging beads that made a noise when you went through them.

James couldn’t put his finger on it but the room smelled stale, like the smell of rotting insect carcasses under a hundred-watt bulb. There was a bell on the desk, that on closer inspection actually looked like a doorbell that was taped to the counter, the wire running down the side. The desk itself was of some indistinguishable wood that was varnished to look like a hardwood. But it was patchy work and a lighter thinner wood showed underneath. Ringing the bell a second time he realised what the smell was. Taking a closer look at the nodding Chihuahua on the desk. He noticed it actually wasn’t nodding at all because in fact it was a real Chihuahua stuffed and mounted on the desk with a heavy looking ornate base. The plague read ‘Fido’.

He rang the bell again and listened, sounded like a TV was on in the back. He rang the bell again and heard a stirring, like someone waking up. He heard joints cracking, ankles creaked as they took on the weight of the body above them. A slow shuffling noise approached from the backroom.

A gaunt figure appeared mechanically and slow in the alcove. He parted the beads and entered as if he was coming out of an elaborate Swiss cuckoo clock. He was tall and thin but naturally stooped with age. He was wearing a string vest that really didn’t cover a lot up. His arms were sinewy and bare and there were visible tufts of white and grey chest hair sticking out of the places the old vest didn’t cover. His skin, wrinkled but looked as soft as a babies. His face was long and thin and looked like that of a sad horse with flecks of grey stubble and nose hair. He had full head of white hair sitting back on the top of his head. The style similar to that of Bob’s big boy, the mascot of the famous burger chain. A sort of fifties style swoop quiff. He was wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts and some fluffy pink slippers, hence the shuffling sound.

He shuffled behind the desk and cleared his throat.

“Err… this is going to sound strange- “James paused, suddenly flushed as he realised he hadn’t given any thought to what he was going to say. Or even what he hoped to find.

The old man’s eyelids fluttered as if he was dreaming and he lifted two weary grey eyes and pointed them at James with their bowed lids. “My dog barks some”.

James’ mind went completely blank as the old man stared at him “Err never mind, can you just give me a minute?”

“Mentally you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type dog which I have. Perhaps you might even picture Toto from the wizard of Oz” The man began to chuckle to himself. “But I can tell you my dog is always with me.” The old man said as he shuffled back to his room behind the alcove.

James went outside and paced some, he thought about lighting a cigarette but he remembered he didn’t have any. Come to think of it he’d given up years ago, so why that craving would come back now seemed odd. Maybe just something to do with his hand or a reason to be hanging around outside.

There was a small shooting pain behind his eyes. He put a palm against his eye and opened his mouth wide. Turning his head, he took a quick scan of the rooms to see if anything at all was familiar.

Every room looked identical moving across from the office, that same blue door. There was only one noticeable difference about the room on the end of the single story block. The door was ajar.

~

The Rabbit

 

 

 

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LCYE Chapter 6 ‘Call from the past’

Ok back again with some weird shit. Yeah it started pretty stable and but now we’re getting into the silent hill max payne elements and it’s all down hill from here folks. Trippy shit. I tried to reign it in a little and for the most part faught my natural inclinations to go down the rabbit hole and I think it happens rather gradually and hopefull comes off as chilling as I fantacize it to be.
Well let me know what you think as always, busy, busy, busy being busy. Still writing this stuff, hopefully I’ll get it squared away before nano.

As always find the full chapter on inkitt for no monies.

Call From the Past

Aurevoir

~
A phone was ringing somewhere. A distinctive chirping analogue phone.

It seemed to swing in and out on a bedside table in a room he couldn’t piece together in his mind. All the parts were scattered.

He took a sharp intake of breath, a sudden feeling of falling catching him. His head bobbed. His hands tightened on the faux leather steering wheel. He was driving, how long had he been driving? Where was he going? Where was he? Who was he?

He rolled down his window and let the wind batter his cheeks as he craned his neck trying to stop his eyes spinning in his head long enough to read a road sign.

He looked in his rear-view mirror and saw a sign for Poplar avenue.

He was driving in the slow lane of a highway sectioned off in the middle by a line of cypress trees. Driving past a motel with large bulbous palm trees collected almost like a bunch of flowers in the parking lot.

It didn’t really tell him much; he wasn’t familiar with the area.

He wound the window up as the air started to sting his cheeks. He turned the rear-view mirror down quickly and looked at his face. There were light scratches already fading on his cheeks. James turned the mirror up again and didn’t give it much thought.

He passed a small one story building, yellow brick with red trim. Only the words ‘CHEAP CIGARETTES’ embossed on the side. There was a McDonalds that looked like a texmex restaurant on his right and a gas station. He checked his dash, he didn’t need gas.

His reactions were slow, even moving his head was a grand gesture a colossal effort. He didn’t see the car in front slow down for the light. He slammed right into the back of a Honda civic. His face hit the steering wheel hard.

He could see the coffee cup, but he didn’t try to stop it. It was white and made of stained porcelain, it said ‘CHINA’ on the bottom. It hit a deco floor of black and white tiles, shattering and spreading a brown gritty liquid on the floor, that could only be coffee. He straightened and took in another sobering breath bracing his neck. Pain worked its way through his body, like a hurdler jumping all the vertebrae in his spine.

A waitress galloped over with a fresh pot of coffee as if that could put humpty dumpty back together again. She was small and girlish and had mousey brown hair, a pale pretty face with delicate features. Wearing a green plaid skirt and apron as some kind of uniform with a white blouse. Her name tag read; ‘Becky’.

“Are you alright? What happened to you?” She said, a genuine tone of concern in her voice.

“What?” James said.

“Your eye is bleeding” She pointed to her eye and held herself delicately.

James padded his eye with his hand until it came up wet. “Oh yeah, I think I was in a car accident”

“Oh my god, I’ll take care of this, we have a bathroom in the back you can get cleaned up.”

The sound of running water.

James opened his eyes, there was someone in front of him, through the steam, he wiped the glass. It was a man, a man with brown hair, he had a cut over his eye, light scratches on his face. There was blood. It took him a moment to realise it was his own face. It felt alien to him, was he wearing a new face or was it always like this?

The poet Pool, in his poem “Somebody’s been wearing my face again” wrote: ‘In this hall of mirrors/Built by liars, I am a pale reflection of myself.’

The water was running hot, he dipped his hands in it and slowly padded his face.

It stung but he kept at it.

After a few minutes it was clean and he felt a warming sensation under his collar. The steam cleared and he took another look at himself. He was still wearing his work clothes, a jacket he’d never seen before. It was maybe one size too big sitting on his shoulders making him look like a tailor’s dummy. It was a leather bikers jacket with a yellow stripe running up the arms.

He patted the pockets, they were empty. He opened it and put his hand inside the inside breast pocket and came out with a peculiar matchbox which had the same pattern as the floor. A hatched black and white, with a strange symbol that may have been a bird of some kind. Embossed in black it read “Twin Pines lodge” With an address ‘West capitol avenue, Sacramento’.

Puzzled he turned it over, it was blank but someone had drawn a set of lips on the back with red lipstick. As if it was a kiss.

 

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Welcome to Bat Country, breakdown of the first issue.

I wanted to do a breakdown of the first issue of Bat Country, try to make some sense out of the whole mess that is Bat Country, try to lay that whole twisted bag of snakes out, and if you’ve read any of it, you know this is going to be a long one.

If people would ask me what I wanted to achieve with this book, I don’t really know if I could sum it up in a few words. But I guess the closest thing I could say would just be a fear of open spaces. I wanted to cultivate and exacerbate my fear of the outside world. That’s basically what the title means; the world is full of carnivorous flying rodents that want to suck your blood.

Basically I’m just trying to make excuses for why this comic makes no sense ha-ha. It’s told from the perspective of someone who can’t see in straight lines, everything enters his brain differently and since he’s the narrator of his own story, the narrative is unreliable.

So the first page I get my sneaky twin peaks reference in to Big Ed’s Gas farm (I’ll look a right twat if that’s wrong now ha-ha) and get into my thing about sugar, I’m sure if I was some hypersensitive writer for the guardian I’d call it ‘sugarshaming’ ha-ha. But since I’m not I tend to think people associate lots of sugar with childishness, as if growing older means you no longer see a reason to enjoy ‘the sweet life. I wanted to introduce Ransom as a character that relished in his childishness and was almost petulant in his reaction to people trying to shame him into conforming to their own way of thinking.

TLDR: Motherfucker like his coffee sweet.

I think maybe a year or two ago, I began this strange fascination with cooking shows or just food shows in general. I watched come dine with me just to watch absolute cunts sit and try to withstand each other for a few evenings in a row, talking shit about each other in the backroom. There was something delicious about uncomfortable silences shared by complete strangers who had never the less grown to hate each other over the course of one evening ha-ha. English people like myself have such an acquired taste for awkwardness.

Then I started to watch Man VS Food, for those that haven’t watched it, it’s basically a show about a chubby American fellow going from town to town taking up eating challenges. Eating a giant burger or a colossal omelette or something, or a really hot curry. I really enjoyed it for the food (I love food) and the competitive nature, it was just a fun show.

But this was when I was little more social justicey, so I started to spin my Marxist (did away with those thankfully away, just a nice empty space now ha-ha) and it made me think this show was everything wrong with America. It was decadent, ‘people are starving’ I said to myself as I watched this pudgy American stuff his face with a hotdog the size of a skateboard.

I was both in awe and disgust with America and the American way, a fine line between love and hate indeed.

One of my many fantasies is that of walking the earth like Cain in Kung fu, I’ve often thought about just walking, getting into some adventures and just travelling. Then to hit the ground realising I have no money and my shoes are made from inedible canvas. The realities of it were just too glaring, how would I eat, how would I make enough money to travel and survive? But then I realised that in America those two things could coincide. In the wondrous USA you can be paid for eating, so something that could have been just a throwaway piece of plot filler became almost the crux of the story.

On a whole the basic joke of the story is that it’s almost as if to America thinks it can reach enlightenment through eating. Purely by how much they eat and how much of science they honed of gluttony.

This was going to by my satirical comic poking fun at the American dream, the hypocrisy of modern culture and capitalism and religion and all that good stuff. But after a while those things started to bore me and realised that trying to force people to think like me through a comic made me as bad as the assholes I was critiquing, so I cut that shit out. Now I just want to make people laugh and make them think and deliver something so fucking out there, they’ll never forget.

Diagnosis love is another reference to Twin peaks, well the first season, which is my favourite. It had this soap opera running in the background of the occasional episode, the story of which was cheesy but was a mirror of what was happening in the show. I really liked the feel of it and how it added another layer to story, making it seem self aware. I initially was introduced by this; I don’t know what you call it really in Max Payne 2. The idea that you can’t tell if you’re mimicking the art or it’s mimicking you. Obviously Max Payne must have copied it from Twin Peaks.

I suppose in a way a part of me wanted to mock most other webcomics where this type of storytelling isn’t intentionally cheesy and ridiculous ha-ha. It’s there to contrast the goings on in the ‘real world’ but mirror them just enough to seem relate-able.

It’s choked full of odd references, Night of the Hunter, Wild at heart, dune, Beetlejuice, I want to get across to the reader that outside to Ransom is literally an alien planet, these diners in the middle of nowhere are like ‘safe spaces’ from all that nature trying to get him.

Liberty or the cowboy is another matter all together; I guess he’s a reference to the Big Lebowski in a way.

The first issue that makes me cringe is the dialogue; yeah my own dialogue makes me cringe. I wanted to copy the style of Max Payne, Address Unknown and Twin Peaks, so essentially I wanted the dialogue to be as cheesy and as hackneyed as possible. I want it to feel fake and strange and just wrong, like a 90’s TV show. And gradually if people keep reading that’ll fade away and it’ll grow with the reader. It’s very much, I hate to say like Natural Born Killers (I hated that movie), the style, the critic of American culture. That niggling feeling that all that freedom and all that space gives you. I can’t help feeling that that feeling is intoxicating and addictive and the reason for all the evil in the world and all the good.
People can be so free they feel trapped, they have all this power to do whatever they want but they stay where they are, pacing back and forth in a cage of their own making. Or they toss it all away like Ransom and burn out rather than fade away. That’s conflict we have here, that’s what I think American culture is, ultimate freedom driving people mad, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, quite the opposite in fact.

Now the second part of the story, some paranoid people are actually being followed. Now I can’t hope to hide this, this entire scene was inspired by my favourite scene in Mulholland Drive, the hitman scene. I thought that scene was so funny, I couldn’t resist. I really love that film and I feel robbed that it wasn’t turned into a full TV show as it was intended, I would have really loved to have seen more from that bungling hitman. I can’t help feeling if Netflix existed in the 90’s Lynch would have been even more popular than he is and not this cult god we admonish him as now.

This scene where the henchmen are going through his apartment is a back story hint, the story of Bat Country just like Twin Peaks starts in the middle. The reader will have to work back as the story moves forward to understand why Ransom is on his journey and who he’s running from.

I got a lot of influence from Silent Hill 4 the room. That game really stuck with me for the voyeuristic nature, and its dreamlike interpretation of agoraphobia. Despite it bombing I found it really intriguing. Another influence is Oldboy, but that might be too spoilery ha-ha.

I was listening to the new Nick Cave album when I wrote this scene and for some reason I decided to put lyrics from Higgs Bosom Blues directly into the scene, don’t ask me why.

Ransom is on a journey, he’s trying to find the American dream and these two bumbling killers are following him.

He wakes from his dream for a minute then he’s back in it again harder than ever. The idea for this comic sort of came from the idea of the idea of the hero. What is a hero? To me a hero is a normal person who has no regard for themselves whatsoever, they’re not afraid of pain, they’re not afraid of humiliation or getting things horribly wrong. And that’s what Ransom tries to be.
I wanted the combat to be real and disgusting and brutal and just… messy and Florian really delivered with this scene. He really captured the brutality and the inelegance of an actual fight, no kung fu bullshit, no gimmicks, just blood and cuts and tooth and nails.

…and then it ends as abruptly as it started. I wanted the first issue to be a snapshot, a glimpse into this dream world, something that would make someone want to dig deeper and discover the underlying meaning. But shit, I’ve rambled enough.

Just go read it already ha-ha.
http://tapastic.com/series/Bat-Country

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Blue Velvet

It sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it but one of my biggest influences when I write right now and in the creative process in general is David Lynch.

Which is odd to say it’s pretentious because Lynch’s work, I find remarkably unpretentious, so distinctly odd without necessarily trying to be, just unrestrainedly uncommon and intriguing. Every one of his films and Twin Peaks is almost like someone took the idea of film making or a tv show and handed it to an Alien and he made his own interpretation that was like what had come before but so drastically but indescribably different. Something you just couldn’t put your finger on but it was rolling around in your brain itching in the corners of your eyes and just couldn’t get it.

I’m not a lifelong fan, I had seen the Elephantman and Dune but I think I was too young to have been caught up in Twin Peaks at the time of its release and those two movies are probably the worst ones to watch in retrospect. Both films are constrained by one being true and the other being based on a sci-fi novel.

So he slipped through the cracks, while I was quite happy with my Tarantino’s and my Scorcese’s and whomever else grazed my adolescent movie palate.

Until I saw a film that really struck an odd note with me that sticks with me even now and no it wasn’t actually by David Lynch *plot twist* it was by Jennifer Lynch, his talented daughter. The movie was called Surveillance, a really haunting off kilter thriller, I love even to this day. But what really stuck with me was the sound track.

The music was haunting and jarring and really something else, I couldn’t help tracking down the soundtrack and finding my favourite song from the film which was called ‘Speed Roadster’ written and performed by… David Lynch.
Who was this alternative/electro/country sounding singer I’d never heard of but couldn’t get enough of; oh what he’s the director’s father? And he’s a writer/director (/among other things, painter/actor) as well? Wow.

Then rather ashamedly I started to put together the dots and I had heard a lot of talk about I think True Detective and how it was ‘like twin peaks’ which in some respects is true. It does capture that haunting sorrow of the unavoidable nature of life and the boundless horror of the unknown (a little Lovecraftian in that respect too, despite it being based on the Yellow King mythos). I may be rewriting my own history here, I can’t be sure, so instead of watching True Detective I watched Twin Peaks (And then eventually True detective) and I was captivated, a little bored/confused at times but I had to keep watching.

There was just something about it, something that made me want to laugh but also cry bitterly and it held me in this state between sorrow and a drunk sort of happiness and each emotion seemed to feed off the other and deepen, the depths of the humour dug larger holes for the sorrow to hide and when the credits rolled over Laura’s face you remembered why you were here.

Frankly I was amazed that such a compelling show could be written about one murder, I can hardly concentrate long enough through an episode of csi or the walking dead where the cast drops like flies.

It was amazing that one fictional person’s life could touch so many people in so many different ways and although she wasn’t technically a character, Laura was the show.

So I initially got into David Lynch not even knowing he made films or tv shows, I just thought he was a weird old guy that made cool music. I loved introducing my brother to Lynch because we watched all his films together and I can’t remember if we watched the Twin Peaks movie Fire walk with me first or not but he hadn’t seen the show before watching. There’s this bit where some weird shit happens and my brother turns to me expecting me to know what the fuck it means because I watched the show and I was like; ‘Dude, I don’t fucking know’ and it was pretty funny.
I was told it didn’t matter if you watched the movie or the show first but I’m glad I watched the show first because it completely depicts Laura’s murder, something I think should never have been done.

In the classic Poe style mystery, the greatest mysteries are the ones that go unsolved.

But producers and ratings and money and bing bang boom, they ruined the whole mystery and then the show limped on after until it eventually keeled over with the help of Billy Zane??

Season 2 in my opinion is a complete clusterfuck, I hold out hope for the reboot, but I intend to keep my expectations as low as possible and coddle myself in the warm embrace of my favourite Lynch films, Blue Velvet being one.

The thing that separates Lynch from any other of my influences is that I not only learnt a lot about story telling from him but also about the creative process in general. I think it’s in a Tom Waits song (Of which the name escapes me) where he says David Lynch told him that he had to sit in a comfy chair and close his eyes and wait for the big one to come along.

Although he may have been alluding to his transcendental meditation woo of which I am not subscribed (I can sit in a chair with my eyes closed without paying like ten quid a month to some swami or whatever) as a fan of Lovecraft this struck a chord with me.

There’s a part of me that is deeply sceptical of woo, all things woo but there’s another part that believes that stories are located in a river in a different dimension and when we close our eyes and concentrate we can catch the odd big fish.
All stories are essentially the same in structure but the core principals of the story come from somewhere else, they’re pieced together from dreams and movies and conversations and some ultra-terrestrial other or just plain pulled out of your ass.

But sometimes I can’t help feeling that I’m not creating stories, I’m just uncovering something that was already there or giving life to something long dead and that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite it most likely being bullshit it gives me a nice Lovecraft boner, like I’m in my own story and some ungodly horror is going to burst into the room and tentacle rape me.. what was that noise? On the stairs, it can’t be…*gasp* my eyes, my ey..*indiscernible screaming*.

Check out more strips at Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg the comic strip
And my Lynchian mystery comic here Bat Country

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Walk the Earth like Pookie in Three Ring Samurai.

Forgive me in advance for the rambling nature of this blog, I really don’t have a plan, I just have two words ‘Kung fu’.

For those not familiar with it, Kung Fu is a tv show with David Carradine playing a half Chinese half American boy raised in a shaolin temple after both his parents are killed by a tyrannical Emperor.
The story is based around his travels to seek out his family in America after his master is killed he must flee china wanted for killing the emperors son in an act of hot on the spot vengeance for the unwarranted killing.

He travels America looking for his family, evading the snare of the emperor and getting into scrapes and adventures, meeting interesting people along the way. With each new adventure a piece of his teachings is called upon to assist him and make sense of a world he’s only just coming face to face with.
Secluded all his life Caine is as a child with the fighting skills of a shaolin priest, through a series of flashback his past is brought to light to help him overcome and decide on certain courses of action to aid him in his adventures.

~

I initially watched the show out of the blue, maybe as some form of research for 3 Ring, I know I definitely shamelessly ripped a lot off for the issue plan, I borrowed a lot of ideas and I in an upcoming arc and I decided to completely parody the montage of Caine’s training in the shaolin temple and make it Pookie’s ridiculous clown training, I just couldn’t resist.

I really, really loved the style; the way the story was structured in the first season was perfect, calling on back-story applying it to current plot. It worked really well because you learned more about him every episode in a way that felt very consistent. And every episode you learnt a valuable and somewhat touching lesson.

It padded the main plot nicely as we learned about Caine throughout his various adventures and then kept us interested in the search for his brother and the threat of the Emperor on his heels and for a guy that had never done kung fu before kung fu David Carradine isn’t half bad as an actor or a fighter coming from someone who knows kung fu. He wasn’t amazing and he did use a stunt double in season one I believe but ditched that for his own stunts in later seasons.

Long story short I loved the show and I wanted the same feel for 3 Ring Samurai, I wanted every arc to be a self contained movie, something that engaged people and had action and drama and suspense and just enough thread of main plot to keep people reading but not enough to overwhelm them.

Sadly the second two seasons of Kung fu really fell short for me and I must admit I almost breathed a sigh of relief, I’m not proud to admit I take pleasure in the downfall of other but I think a lot of people feel shadenfreud a lot more than they’d like to admit. I was relieved to see the show fall because to live up to that, for it to continue at that level of quality would have rendered my endeavours to emulate it seem futile.

I don’t blame the show for this, I blame the times and the idea that writing staff are disposable, they chose to change the writers for season two and with the nature of television in the seventies I feel like they had to make it more consumable for people to watch as re-runs.

Tv wasn’t like how it is now with netflix and the internet, you couldn’t choose to watch a tv show whenever you wanted, and watch them in order, you watched them when they were on, in the order they were on and if you missed an episode you had to watch it in a rerun. You couldn’t just buy the boxset on dvd.
So each episode had to be standalone and almost interchangeable in terms of the timeline of the story so someone could watch any episode in any order and still keep up and enjoy the show.
This change of writers and restructuring of the show is a noticeable decline in cogent plot and although I watched each season through it didn’t measure up in any shape or form to season one.

I don’t know why but my mind keeps drawing back to Twin Peaks and the dire mistake of revealing the mystery around the death of Laura Palmer half way between season two which without a doubt killed the show. Lynch himself said he never wanted to reveal the mystery and I and Edgar Allen Poe would have agreed that the greatest mystery is one that goes unsolved. It was the fault of the producers of the show that forced him to reveal the mystery and then have the show limp on to the end without much a hook to keep the show going.
It’s almost amazing to even think that an entire tv show could be framed around one murder or one person’s life like Kung Fu. But it can because people themselves can be unsolvable mysteries.
And every time the credits rolled over Laura Palmer’s picture I would feel a pang of sorrow for the mystery of her life and even more so for the tawdry reveal of that perfect mystery and then the shop bought replacement mystery awkwardly wedged in its place.

I think if Kung Fu were re-made today it would be an incredibly feat but also a really rewarding one, (Note to self, call Keanu Reeves ;)). This is the golden age of television where the possibilities for stories and budgets and scope and acting talent are virtually limitless and at a time where there is so much pressure on the structure of films and now games it’s really necessary.

So please forgive the faux fanboy ranting, I just wanted to give some perspective to the narrative structure and style of 3 Ring, think Kung Fu meets Fallout 4 haha.

Peace out people.

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We can’t stop here!

Bat Country is back hombres and hombrettes!

Yeah you have no idea what that is, well fuck it if I’m not gonna be happy about it.

Bat Country is the culmination of my fevered imagination trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t even try to make sense. This world is so strange and full of contradictions and bullshit that we just let wash over us like steamy farts from landwhale in the mobility scooter in the front of the queue at McDonalds.

Bat Country tries to tie all those loose ends together and make a whole lot of spaghetti. I originally started it before I knew about this whole ‘social justice movement’. When I wanted to write comics about social issues and dun dun dun ‘change the world’… with comics ffs.

Needless to say I was and probably still am a complete retard. Trying to force your opinions on others in the form of prose or a visual medium like comics is just really polite brainwashing and after I saw all this cultural Marxism go down around me in terms of comics and games and… err shirts. I realised that comics and any medium in general should never try to make people think like you, they should just make people think, full stop.

Bat Country is at its heart a story of a misfit, someone who doesn’t fit in, even in his own head, someone so completely alien to this world, it keeps trying to spit him out. Ransom is a normal guy who sees something he shouldn’t have seen and after a long period of time he realises the world just isn’t a good fit for him so he locks himself away for a number of years with the help of a shadowy backer with the mind and the money to keep him quiet and hidden for the rest of his natural life.
But in the mean time Ransom starts to build his own plan, to escape the cage of his own design and go out of this world with a big bang and really bad indigestion.

He plans to go on an adventure, walk the earth, travelling a long stretch of nothing populated by obscure eating contests until at the end reaching spiritual and gastric awakening, opening the third stomach or whatever.

But there are people trying to stop him, troubles he gets embroiled in, other people’s stories crossing with him and mixing up the spaghetti even more.

Dreams and fantasy mixing in real time, 4th wall flimsier than crate paper and ultra-violent eroticism tickling the corner of your eyes… maybe??

I was just standing in a coffee shop one day and I realised how fucking out of place I was just standing there… trying to be a person, what the fuck was thinking? I could barely talk, I just wanted to use the toilet but I had to buy something, so I bought some coffee type thing, it came in a little cup and they asked if I wanted milk and sugar and for some fucking reason I said ‘no’ and changing my mind seemed like the hardest thing in the world. Like I was Hitler and someone asked me if I wanted to kill the Jews or give them all sweets and I said ‘Kill them’ then changed my mind but they already started so it seemed rude to change your mind so you just had to ride it out.

It just made me think about what a comic book character like that would be like, someone just unequipped for life, so much so that life itself is just trying to eat them and just by existing they’re barrelling forth to their own misunderstanding of a self-destruction event.

At the time I was reading noir, I think the Maltese Falcon and that was cool, I’d been a big Raymond Chandler fan when I was younger and this wasn’t as good as that but it was cool and I thought, ‘shit I should write something like this’. Then surreptitiously I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right after and I realised a freak like me could never write something that cool and I should just stick to being the weirdo lizard bootlicker that creates cool by mistake as a by-product of just being fucked in the head.

The reckless abandon and freedom of madness is what I wanted after reading Fear, and coincidentally I had been barrelling down a Lynchian path with Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and I knew I had to capture what I loved about that and pass it over.

There was something so haunting and cheesy I couldn’t not rip it off.

So I started to write a story that was about stuff but really wasn’t about anything, it was almost a sarcastic salute to the human race, beautiful and flawed and all huddled on a little ball of dirt hurtling through space sniffing each other’s farts in little metal boxes in the sky on long haul flights from Cleveland or wherever.
Calling people out on being a virus with shoes but also marvelling at their ingenuity and cruelty and tenacity, I wanted to change the world and that was dumb, I know that now, all you can really do is make someone say ‘Wtf’ and that’s enough, a smile, a nod, a little chortle and you’ve done your job, you haven’t changed the world but you did something, something invisible but very real.

Now if only they’d give me some fucking money haha.

Oh yeah fuck, I almost forgot the whole point of this fucking blog, the next chapter of Bat Country is coming soon, new pages released on a weekly basis and you can read the whole first issue free on tapastic, until I can be bothered to move it somewhere less shitty and hipstery haha

http://tapastic.com/series/Bat-Country

Peace.

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