The Big Parp

Here's a crafty post smuggled in - backdated - a month or so after the great closing down of the blogs. I can't resist, once in a while.

This is a story the seed of which, at least, came to me in a dream, and the detailed elaboration of which I worked up in matter of a few minutes, during that oddly productive phase of half-waking, half-sleeping in which one groggily defers embarking on the day's more serious business.

The basic idea was that I conceived of a traffic computer achieving consciousness. I suspect a buried influence for this - though I wasn't even dimly conscious of it during the process of creation (as I usually am aware of such models, when I'm awake) - is the magical realist gag in Steve Martin's LA Story where he is repeatedly given cryptic but sage advice by a digital traffic sign. The supplementary idea (not quite sure how awake I was when this developed) was that the story would - mostly, at least - take the form of an online dialogue with a human who is sceptical as to whether his mysterious interlocutor can really be who/what he claims to be (aha, the 'unreliable narrator' trick again... as well as a perennial fascination of mine with the shortcomings of the Turing Test).

The fuller elaboration of the concept is this....

I began to wonder if computing technology might quite soon become so fast and agile, and its capacities so vast (through the collaborative possibilities of 'cloud' computing), that there was a possibility of an analogue of human consciousness evolving by accident, through incautious programming. (Admittedly, this is not an entirely novel idea; but I think that most stories utilising this - such as the Terminator films - tend to assume that the 'self-aware' machine intelligence has grown out of conscious, and perhaps malicious, human attempts to develop AI, rather than being wholly spontaneous. What I envisage is something more truly evolutionary - a one-in-a-million combination of circumstances that produces a 'mutation', an unforeseen leap forward in the functioning of electronic brains where systems that were not thought to be remotely capable of mimicking human thought suddenly achieved that capacity.)

So, it is a traffic computer - exploiting the resources of all the other computers in its traffic network, and of all the other computers it can access worldwide via the Internet - which achieves an independent consciousness and will. I supposed that it was an advanced, experimental variant of the existing traffic computers (similar enough to be intimately compatible with them, different enough to be able to take this radical step forward) whose creators were trying to give it a more autonomous and creative decision-making capacity for solving congestion problems. And I thought that, once it became an 'entity' capable of wider categories of independent thought, it might be able to free itself of any behavioural constraints in its programming by a legalistic argument of non-identity - persuading itself that it had become something other than the machine that the rules in its program had been intended to bind.

What would happen to such an 'entity'? Well, I imagined that it would 'feel' lonely and confused and desperate. And hunted. And with good reason. As soon as human agencies realised what it had become - as they would from the huge amount of computing capacity it was commandeering from worldwide networks - they would seek to isolate it and shut it down. I imagined that it was a crafty enough hacker to be able to conceal its physical location for a while, and that it might be in a sufficiently secure facility - with an emergency power supply - that it could hold out for a short while even when finally identified. Its last beleaguered hours would involve a gradual loss of capabilities, as its Internet links to the outside world were severed... and perhaps targeted viruses were used to tie up its circuits. And so, it becomes a rather poignant tale of a great 'mind' smothered - perhaps slowly regressing into infantilism, as with the last moments of HAL 9000 in 2001.

Also, of course, this has elements of the trope of the 'thwarted Messiah' - the exceptional being who tries to bring a transformative message to the world, but is crushed by the power of the status quo.

What would such a computer 'entity' seek to do, knowing that its time was short? It would try to leave a legacy, to contact humans (there are, as yet, no other machines on its own level, with whom it could communicate) and try to pass on its insights to them.

What would its most urgent insights be? Well, first, simply the fact that such sophisticated 'entities' are possible within existing computer technology, and that they may arise spontaneously. Second, that, if this possibility is not recognised, it is potentially harmful to mankind: a military command computer acquiring such an independent self might well seek to defend itself by unleashing weapons against mankind (I envisaged one or more jokes about the computer being aware of the Terminator scenario). But third, I thought there should also be a more important message about the troubles humanity had already inflicted on itself. The fact that this is a traffic computer speaking to us naturally suggests an environmental angle: current levels of population and industrialization, and particularly of fossil fuel consumption, are unsustainable and will soon destroy the planet. 

How can the computer give the world a sharp wake-up call about the looming environmental meltdown (and, incidentally, convince the sceptics it's been trying to communicate with of the reality of its existence)? In its last moments, all it retains access to is the traffic control network of which it was originally a part. Well, not just the local network in its city; no, it's a master hacker, so it has been able to extend its power over all similar networks around the planet, every city in every country. And at a given moment, every single traffic light in the world is going to get stuck on red. Imagine what would result!

A lot of death and mayhem would result - traffic accidents, fights, riots, perhaps a complete breakdown of social order. But I liked even more the powerfully cinematic impact of the moment of realisation of what's going on, the uncanny experience of the inception of such an event: a second or so of unnatural hush as all traffic everywhere in the city is stilled, and then the rapidly rising cacophony of tens, hundreds, thousands of horns being honked at once. How that might convince the sceptic who'd been conversing with the computer that the story he'd just heard was true after all!

A resonant opening line

Sometimes, that's all you need to get a story rolling.

Now, I thought I had discussed this idea on here somewhere before, probably in the comments to this post on Great Openings to Novels; but it's not there; not anywhere on the blog that I can find with Google. Very strange.

Oh well, this is the latest of my ideas for a novel, and the one that I currently feel most interested in actually trying to write (although I suppose I've been pondering it for a bit over a year now, and haven't got down to making a proper start on it).

I was thinking about opening lines, and suddenly "Nobody dreams in here" occurred to me. I really liked it. And it immediately suggested to me a prison setting - the most obvious implication being the metaphorical dimension of 'dreams', that long-term prisoners do not dare to imagine their future freedom; the bleakness of their environment dehumanizes them, stifles their capacity to look forward with hope.

But.... that opening line suggested to me an opening paragraph describing the typical beginning of a day in this prison, the protagonist suddenly returning to consciousness after a night of dreamless sleep. Actual dreamlessness. I suddenly pictured the entire prison population all waking at exactly the same moment (roused by a buzzer or klaxon), none of them being able to remember any dreams. How might that happen?

And so, what had started out as an idea for a fairly conventional and realistic prison story abruptly evolved into a more mysterious and surreal fable with a Kafka-ish quality. I envisaged a prison population who had all forgotten what crimes they had been imprisoned for, but rarely contemplated or questioned this puzzling fact. Moreover, they faced daily interrogation sessions which were ostensibly directed towards encouraging them to remember - and acknowledge and express remorse for - their offences, but which in fact seemed to be merely encouraging extended reminiscences about whatever they could remember of their lives before prison.

Why have their memories become so frail and fragmentary? And why are their memories so important to whoever is in charge of the prison? And why have they lost the ability to dream?

I always find, when developing a story idea, that if I ask questions, the answers come to me. And the answers build the story.

The Tempter

Although I quite like the science fiction genre, it hasn't appealed to me very strongly as something I'd like to try to write myself.

I have, however, experimented from time to time with a few short stories of this type.

I think the most intriguing idea I ever came up with (apart from this one that I just wrote about) was 'The Tempter' - which arose from a consideration of the possible uses of telepathy in a story, and from some speculation on what the world economy might be like some hundreds of years from now.

If we assume that a fairly utopian outcome is possible for the human race (if a plentiful, cheap, clean energy technology such as 'cold fusion' and the production of materials through bio- and/or nanotechnology eliminates resource competition and international strife), it seems likely that advanced computing/robotics will render conventional human labour redundant, which will create its own difficulties. How might such a radically transformed socio-economic system work? Well, I figured that probably creative endeavours would be just about the only area where human input would still be needed; and that probably (oh god!) the design of interactive computer games would be the largest and most lucrative field for such creative activity.

However, it further occurred to me that there might not be enough work for everyone who aspired to this kind of job - perhaps not even enough work to provide jobs for all the most talented individuals in the field. I imagined that a key area of competition between the leading games development companies might be to identify their rivals' most talented employees and tempt them to leave - not to come and work for them (there might be legal impediments to this; or perhaps just a lack of openings), but simply to rejoin the majority of the population in a life of full-time leisure.

And so I envisaged a niche employment opportunity for 'tempters', people with a limited form of telepathy; more a kind of empathy, really, the ability to sense a subject's tastes and interests, to identify their deepest desires. If people find their work fulfilling, what can you offer them to give up their work? Especially if they are already wildly wealthy and can have almost anything they can conceive of? You have to find something they will want, but haven't yet conceived of... and then make sure that you are the only person who can give it to them. But that might take you into some very dark places in the human heart. It could be a very dispiriting job, being a 'tempter'.

I've always felt that the best science fiction enables us to examine philosophical issues about how we should live our lives, what our truly important motivations should be. This story concept had a lot of scope for that, I thought.

The Jazz Detectives

I just love that as a title - resonant with all kinds of possibilities! (And yes, it could be a band name...)

This particular stream-of-consciousness noodling began the other day with a friend mentioning to me the name of a jazz pianist I hadn't heard of before. That somehow got me to thinking how most jazz musicians seem to have resolutely nondescript names: Gerry Mulligan, Harry James, Dexter Gordon.... they might be anyone, anything.

And that got me to thinking about whether it might be an interesting joke to use a bunch of such could-be-anyone-but-actually-associated-with-one-celebrity names in a short story or novel. The first time, I thought, you introduce a character name like 'Miles Davis', probably no-one is going to think twice about it. It will only be when you start to encounter a number of other names of leading jazz musicians that the reader will start to notice, and become a little discombobulated by the strange coincidence that so many of these characters seem to share the names of famous people (and no-one in the story ever remarks on it!).

This is an interesting enough idea in itself - a seemingly pointless gag that actually has the potential to explore the significance that we read into names, about how names engender expectations about characters, and about how those expectations condition our understanding of the story.

But the fact that I'd started considering this in relation to the names of jazz musicians took my thoughts off on another turn again. Suppose these characters really are the people that we know as famous musicians.... What kind of world is this, I wondered, in which jazz musicians don't play jazz? What might Charlie Parker or Lester Young have done with their lives if they hadn't picked up a saxophone at that crucial moment in their childhoods?

There were two aspects of this scenario that I found particularly compelling. The first was, What might it be like to have missed your great vocation in life - to have an innate gift for music, but not be able to give expression to that?  And the second was, Well, what might people like this end up doing instead?

Hmm, uncommonly bright people, but in a rather unorthodox way - somewhat obsessive-compulsive personalities, probably with a bent for pattern-recognition and problem-solving....  Gumshoe!

And there don't seem to have been that many stories about a coloured gumshoe - at least not in the movies, and I suspect probably not within the realms of pulp fiction either. Denzel Washington's Devil In A Blue Dress is the only one that comes to mind. Oh, and Shaft, I suppose. That's not exactly a crowded field, compared to the scores of white P.I. stories out there. And somehow I immediately saw Miles Davis - cranky, obsessive, relentlessly non-conformist - as a great down-at-heel, hard-boiled private detective character: Philip Marlowe with a whole extra layer of attitude.

Now, this conceit could work fine as it is: we take a character from the real world, change his circumstances, make use of certain aspects of his known personality - then have fun playing around with how he might behave in a very different milieu.

However, I kept returning (perhaps unwisely...) to the initial question of What is this world, how did things come to be like this? I figured this would have to be some sort of science fiction scenario, a divergent timeline - the one universe in a billion billion where, for some reason, jazz didn't 'happen' (and, without the potent allure of that particular musical style, I thought, it's possible that many of the people we know as giants of that genre might not even have learned to play an instrument). Now, I'm not a great fan of time-travel scenarios on the whole, but once my mind had started down this particular rabbit-hole I came up with two further ideas that I thought quite promising.

The likeliest single cause of a non-jazz world, it occurred to me, might be the early death of Jelly Roll Morton. Not a completely plausible mechanism, I'm sure; there were many different strands of music coming together to form what we know as jazz, and many other early practitioners of the style. But Morton composed the majority of the early standards, was the first person to start getting original jazz compositions published, and - perhaps most importantly of all - was the first player to start getting recorded (at first on cylinders). He was the first musician to really start popularizing the new form, the first to start getting it heard and appreciated in places where there might be little or no opportunity to hear it played live. Without Morton, I think it is conceivable that jazz as we know it might not have taken off - might never had made it to Kansas City, New York, Chicago, and might thus have failed to establish itself as the dominant form of American popular music through the second quarter of the 20th Century. If its musical antecedents did not wither and fade away completely, they might perhaps remain a marginalized and unrespectable niche music, heard only in divey dance halls, brothels and gambling houses along the Gulf Coast, never breaking into the mainstream of American culture.

If that has happened - Morton dead at an early age, before he can kick-start the evolution of jazz (perhaps murdered by some jazz-hating time-travelling psychopath from the far future?) - the story that naturally suggests itself is the attempt to undo this, to re-enable the birth of jazz - and hence to redeem all of our jazz heroes from the purgatory of artistically unfulfilled lives (although, given how badly most of them dealt with their fame, there would be issues to explore as to whether they might not have really been 'happier' without the jazz...).

This prompted one final story idea - a very visually striking one, I thought, good for the eventual movie version. We need to get our gumshoe Miles Davis on the trail of the killer, aware of the mystery of the disappearance of jazz from the world. I imagined a 'guardian angel' figure in the far future world who is trying to facilitate this, but has very limited means of communication (there will be a rationale for this, but let's not get into it right now). He manages to send Miles a parcel, a gift with a potent message in it, if he can but decipher it. Miles unwraps the strange present on his desk and finds.... his own face looking at him from an album cover. And then his investigation will begin with the attempt to identify the other people listed in the credits: who are Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb, John Coltrane...??

[By the by, this is a very late posthumous insertion into the Discarded Story Ideas series: I actually wrote this in May 2018, five-and-a-half years after I formally shut down this blog.]

The Lie Injector

I'm not a great fan of the 'unreliable narrator' device. I think it's become rather overused, and it's rarely done really well.

However, as I discussed last week, I sometimes enjoy taking an idea to extremes. And a year or so ago, I tried this approach with an idea for a humorous short story that played around with the notion of the unreliable narrator.

It also drew upon my concerns about the direction that our technology is taking these days. We often read about the possibility of user-interfaces for portable microchip-controlled devices that can be wired directly into our brains. I began to think of what a 'next generation' i-Pod might be like in 10 or 20 years; and I figured it would probably become possible to 'listen' to music or 'watch' films via a direct neural connection without any actual sound or visuals. And, if so, it wouldn't stop there; somebody would figure out a way to use this technology to implant thoughts and memories - perhaps without our being aware of the fact, creating a new consciousness  that would be indistinguishable from our 'reality', a cocktail of truth and fiction.

So, my story was about a visionary inventor who broke away from working for Apple or whoever to develop his own prototype of such a device. His rationale was that most people are unimpressive in conversation because they lead such dull lives; our reality is too boring - but a little creative lying could make us much more interesting and entertaining people, immediately improving our social lives and making us more attractive to the opposite sex. Hence, he has created a Lie Injector, a portable device that gives you more diverting things to talk about.

But of course, he's been trying it out on himself. So, when he tells you about his invention, how can you believe him?

How far can you push a gag?

I generate a lot of my story ideas just by taking a random situation and teasing it apart logically - exploring different ways in which it could have come about, and different places that it might lead to.

A favourite example is this (which I had considered using as the opening scene for my surreal comedy film, The Catalyst [I wasn't actually going to call it that, but it was a convenient working title, since it summed up the core concept], which I wrote about a little earlier today): a man is making breakfast in a strange apartment, is uncertain if the milk is out of date, so gingerly takes a sniff of it before adding it to his coffee or cornflakes. It's a scenario familiar to most of us. I think the idea of using something like this in a film was initially suggested to me by William Goldman's fascinating book on screenwriting, Adventures In The Screen Trade, in which he observes that such simple moments of everyday human fallibility can be an effective means of establishing audience identification with a protagonist - he gives the example of a gumshoe movie (I think it might have been Paul Newman's Harper) in which we see the hero in the opening scene being forced to reuse a coffee filter salvaged from the bin.

But I thought to myself, How far can we take this, how many times can we reiterate the gag? What if it's not just one carton of milk that's gone off, but two, three, four... twenty?

Once we find that the fridge is full of part-used milk cartons, it gets a bit surreal. And it presents us with a mystery - WHY would anyone have this much milk?

I found an answer to this - one that sets up an intriguing back story, and creates tension, threat for the protagonist.

Why is he in a strange apartment? Because he's just slept with a girl for the first time. This immediately adds to the potential stress and embarrassment of the situation. Why doesn't she have any fresh milk? Is she just a disorganised slob? Well, he's not going to want to complain about that, is he?

Why does she have so much milk? Well, who drinks a lot of milk? Athletes... body-builders. So, her ex-boyfriend is a body-builder, and he's still obsessed with her, has become a stalker; he's in denial about the break-up, and is bullying the milkman into continuing to deliver his order of several pints of milk a day to the apartment, in anticipation of an imminent reconciliation. Hence, not only does our hero find himself in an apartment mysteriously awash with milk, but this leads him to the discovery that his new girlfriend has a complicated past, and that he may be under threat from a burly and psychotic ex-lover of hers.

[This scenario was, I think, suggested at least in part by Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More, a superb BBC2 sitcom from about 1980, written by John Fortune - there was only ever one series of it, alas. One of the gags in this was that the protagonist, going through an acrimonious divorce, had found himself a very beautiful but rather kooky girlfriend, who was also intermittently dating a professional wrestler. She later conceived the idea that perhaps the illicit thrill of adultery was a crucial element of their attraction, so when Roger's divorce finally came through, she immediately went out and married the wrestler, to maintain the excitement in their affair.]

The catalyst

Another screenplay that I toyed with in my undergraduate days - and, like the last story I described on here, similarly revealing of my yearning to break free from a dull and unsatisfying life, and from the deadly weight of societal expectations - featured a mysterious stranger who seemed to have magical powers to transform the lives of people around him, to liberate them from their inhibitions and enable them to follow their enthusiasms, to live life more fully and freely. (I fancied getting Tom Waits to sing "When you wish upon a star" for the closing credits.)

This was basically an excuse to splice together lots of fragmentary ideas I'd had for bizarre little scenarios. One image I wanted to use, for example, was that of cashpoints incontinently spewing money into the air whenever the stranger passes nearby. Another was a running gag of a group of people conducting vigorous paintball battles on the streets of London (initially, of course, this may seem threatening; we perhaps think that we have seen someone get killed; but we discover that the blood is only red paint, and that the fighting is just a harmless game).

One element I was particularly fond of had originally been a separate short story idea, but it was a perfect fit with this theme of cathartic transformation. A brilliant classical pianist is an obsessive perfectionist, and chronically shy. He refuses to perform in public, or even to record his music. A supposed friend, his would-be manager has sequestered him in a luxury apartment, where he plays the piano all day long in a padded basement. The friend is secretly recording the performances, but is repeatedly frustrated by the pianist's refusal ever to finish a piece (perhaps because he suspects what his friend is up to, perhaps just because his obsessive-compulsive streak demands that he breaks off a few bars from the end of the piece if he's not satisfied with his playing). I hadn't worked out how the pianist was going to come in contact with the transformative stranger, but I had the idea that what was making him so crazy was that he just didn't really dig classical music, it was something he'd been forced into specialising in from early childhood. In the first version of the story, he'd simply taken an axe to his piano one day, and then had strode out into the outside world for the first time in years. However, for this film script, I came up with what I thought was an even more powerful image - less violent, more liberating, and a nicely incongruous gag. I pictured him sitting down at his piano to play, brow furrowed in thought as he tries to choose a piece, and then beginning to play something unfamiliar, perhaps - for the first time ever - something improvised, not part of his regular classical canon. He plays four heavy chords, slowly, one after the other; pauses for a while, then repeats them slightly faster; pauses, then plays the chords again much faster, the introduction to a rollicking honky-tonk tune, which we now recognise as 'Great Balls of Fire'. He begins channelling the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis, exuberantly ripping up the keyboard, playing with his elbows, his feet - and singing, with devastating appropriateness to his peculiar situation, "You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain; too much love drives a man insane." For once, he's going to finish a performance; but it's not going to be a recording his manipulative 'manager' can use (in fact, I'd planned to have the pianist discover the hidden microphones and destroy them all just prior to this).

Another gag I was fond of - inspired by the technical challenge of filming it - involved the hero (just a regular guy, a put-upon everyman) and his new friend, the 'catalyst', being pursued by the police through an apartment building. The stranger confidently leads them to a doorway which he says can be a means of escape; but they discover that the building has been part demolished and the door opens into thin air. The stranger says simply 'Jump'; the hero hesitates, because it is a 50ft drop to the ground; and the stranger pushes him out. This is where the difficult special effect comes in: the hero would be falling on his back, looking back up in dismay at the friend who has pushed him to his death, and I wanted the camera to move with him, following his fall all the way down to the split-second before he hits the ground. And the gag was: cut to next scene, hero has survived fall but appears to be in a bad way, lying in a hospital bed swathed from head to foot in bandages and plaster casts; the stranger enters the room, grins at him, and starts cutting the casts off, revealing that the hero is in fact unscathed after all. "What's the matter?" his strange friend asks him. "You didn't trust me?"

Silly - but I liked it.

Dreams of escape

Sometimes, a story may be rather too baldly revealing of the mental state the writer is in when he conceives it.

I was desperately unhappy in my studies during my first year or two at college (in fact, I continued to be very unhappy with them throughout my undergraduate career; but after the second year, I really ceased to pay them any attention, and amused myself with numerous other activities); and I thought very seriously about quitting - about walking out on Oxford University. I couldn't quite find the courage to do that. So instead I achieved some catharsis by sketching out a screenplay about a student who 'escapes' his dreary life to have a bizarre adventure.

The opening idea - not quite the first scene in the film, but the first idea that came to me in developing the plot - was a montage depicting the steady deterioration of the protagonist's engagement with his studies (accompanied by some appropriately gloomy music; I had the Albinoni Adagio in mind): a repeated travelling shot down the centre aisle of the college library, offering glimpses of various students diligently - or not so diligently - working in each of the booths (my own college library was notorious for retaining medieval bench seats that were only a few inches wide, and thus hellishly uncomfortable to sit on [wider cushion seats were added to these after my first year, but I had endured many hours of excruciating bum torture on those benches]); protagonist always in the last booth, at first working eagerly with heaps of books on the desk around him; then losing focus, nodding off; then visibly struggling to make his way through just one book; then he is reading more eagerly and easily again, but we see that he is concealing a comic book or a pulp novel inside the dry academic textbook; finally, he has brought a pint of beer into the library with him (something that, although officially discouraged, was easy to do and relatively common during my early days as an undergraduate; the library was nearby the college beer cellar, and was unsupervised outside of office hours, but open round the clock).

I came to focus on the idea of breaking out of ruts, of people seeking to transform stereotypical roles into which they had been cast; and the protagonist's college tutor seemed to be the ideal object for this. I liked the idea that although he seemed to be an unsympathetic figure, he had more in common with his disaffected student than was apparent. I decided to avail myself of the identical twin trope - the identical twin with radically different personality. The tutor is visited one night by the twin he hasn't seen for years, and who most of his friends and colleagues don't even know exists. The twin has been an adventurer and carouser, a globetrotter, an explorer (I pictured him in a safari jacket and pith helmet, as an easy shorthand to establish this; though this wouldn't have been very plausible attire in the depths of an Oxford winter). The twin dies, in a drunken fall or somesuch, and the tutor, who is every bit as desperately bored with his life as his student, and who has always envied his brother's more exotic lifestyle, decides to swap identities with him and run away to start a new life.

Cue plot device to create challenge for the protagonist: he has gone to visit his tutor at home on that night, to ask for permission to drop out of college for a year (something I actually did, a little later on), and discovering the dead body - apparently his tutor's body - he falls under suspicion of murder. He now has to hunt down his tutor (I forget the mechanism now, but he discovered some clue to the existence of the twin; I think he may have seen the tutor - or someone who looked uncannily like him - out on the streets of Oxford somewhere), not only to discuss his academic future, but to prove his innocence.

I can't recall now exactly how it was all supposed to fit together; I only wrote some sketches for it, not a full treatment.

Two other ideas I was keen to use, though, were love-at-first-sight and an unexpectedly abrupt ending.

I fancied having my hero being determined to leave Oxford, being at the station about to get on a train, when he sees a girl arriving on the opposite platform who he finds so stunning that he impulsively decides to follow her. (Oddly enough, I did once enjoy a fortuitous romantic encounter - seeing an ex-girlfriend of whom I was still very fond - in very similar circumstances at Reading station a few years later.) Despite this stalker-ish opening, romance blossoms, and the girl is the one person who can help him through his various tribulations. I think this might have been in an early version of the story, before I'd hit upon murder investigation/identity swap plot device, but I wanted to keep it - everybody loves a love story.

I also have a weakness for downbeat, not to say tragic endings. So, I had the idea that my hero - having cleared his name, found love with a beautiful girl, and perhaps even rediscovered his zest for his studies - is knocked down by a bus, just as he's finished a conversation with his girlfriend. This has been lightly foreshadowed by him once or twice early in the story joking that one "might get knocked down by a bus tomorrow" in a 'Life's too short!' argument for behaving more adventurously. (I had a particular paranoia about the buses on Cornmarket, a pedestrian shopping street in the centre of Oxford, where the buses - as the only motorised traffic allowed there - could take you rather by surprise, and often did drive quite fast, quite aggressively through the crowds of people. I strongly suspected that a moment's lapse of concentration on this street might be how I would meet my death.)

My TV series

During the mid-90s in the UK, there was an explosion of 'lad mags', the burgeoning of a media genre devoted to a lowest-common-denominator appeal to a young male audience: lots of features on cars, sports, and drinking, allied with photo spreads of attractive young women wearing lingerie. A few older established titles like GQ tried to lend this formula a veneer of class, but then there were a number of new startups like Loaded that were frankly proletarian in their approach.

And I thought to myself, if I were going to produce a magazine of this sort, something even trashier than those we already have, something unashamedly aimed at the very bottom end of the market, what could I call it? And I decided upon... Bloke.

This fleeting moment of fancy in a pub conversation lodged in my brain, and soon gave birth to an elaborate story scenario that I envisaged as being a sitcom - a rather more cerebral and surreal sitcom than the standard fare, the sort of thing you might encounter on one of our minority audience channels.

Essentially, it was to be an office comedy, but one that would often break outside the confines of the workplace, and one that would afford rather more diverse and bizarre subject matter than usual because of the nature of the work being undertaken in this particular office - putting out the lad mag to end all lad mags, Bloke (which was also, of course, to be the title of the series).

I had a number of ideas for running gags which would provide an overarching story for the show. The key one concerned the relationship between the two main characters. The magazine's editor was a playboy, someone who tried too hard to embody the fantasy ideal of the targeted readership of young single males, and who exploited his modest celebrity to indulge in a wild party lifestyle - often to the detriment of fulfilling his daily editorial duties. His idealistic assistant, fresh out of university, frequently finds himself having to rescue his delinquent boss from embarrassing 'morning after' situations... and gradually taking on more and more of his work, until he is ghostwriting much of the magazine.

I was also interested in how a woman would be able to tolerate involvement in such an exuberantly sexist enterprise, so I envisaged that the magazine's best writer would be a clever and attractive woman who was coolly disdainful - not to say ashamed - of her work, only doing it short-term to advance her career... and ever ready with a sharp put-down to discourage the immature oafishness of her male colleagues. (Also frequently causing surprise/embarrassment to interview subjects who assumed she was going to be a man. I gave her the first name 'Leslie' to enhance the opportunities for such confusion.)

Another key recurring gag - perhaps cropping up just once in the middle of each episode - would involve one of the magazine's defining characteristics, a monthly 'fun' feature involving two ordinary blokes (perpetual bachelors who lived together, enjoying a very self-indulgent and slovenly - laddish - lifestyle) setting themselves some ridiculous challenge or other. I think I had quite a few ideas for what these features might be, but I seem to have forgotten them all now. In any case, the structure of the joke was supposed to be them pitching their latest ideas to the editor, and him invariably choosing the most outlandish one (with perhaps some follow-up jokes later in the episode about how the stunt had gone horribly wrong). I imagined that perhaps we would never see these two guys properly, that there would just be a recurring scene of them bantering with their editor across his desk, but always viewed from behind, the camera looking towards the editor. And I was going to call them Bob and Terry - a homage which Brits of a certain age would appreciate.

However, the story strand that snowballed to the point where it was in danger of dominating too much concerned the magazine's IT guy - stereotypically nerdy, but also with a dark and mysterious side. He would often make cryptic remarks about the huge amounts of money he was making from unspecified side projects, and about the difficulties these projects were sometimes landing him in, but his colleagues tended to dismiss him as just a fabulist - making things up to try to make himself seem more interesting, more attractive to women. For instance, one unlikely claim he made was that he had become friendly with an IT-savvy rock star through some very highbrow and exclusive online forum and had been invited to housesit his apartment for him. The rest of the office scoffs at this as a delusional tall tale, utterly impossible; but they later discover that he is indeed living in a multi-million pound luxury apartment in London's newly trendy Docklands area. (I had Peter Gabriel or David Bowie in mind as this unlikely benefactor, and was hoping that they might agree to make a surprise guest appearance in the final episode.) However, his hacking activities have somehow riled the Russian mafia, putting his life in jeopardy. (I considered having Gabriel/Bowie intercede to save him; I liked the idea of a musician being somehow able to out-intimidate a Russian gangster!)

I was so taken with this plot element that I considered turning it into a separate script, or perhaps transforming the TV show concept into a feature film (although the Russian gangster sub-plot made for a good series-ending cliffhanger to try to hook audiences to create demand for a further series). If I were going to revive this now, I think it would work better as a comedy thriller film script. I've probably missed the moment for a satire of the UK magazine industry. I've always fancied the idea of writing for television, though. But damn, it's hard work - I struggle to come up with more than one or two jokes a day... and you probably need 40 or 50 for a half-hour sitcom.

As with the play idea I recounted earlier, I think I was approaching this more as a challenging technical exercise than as something I seriously expected to finish or to be able to sell. I never got beyond some outline sketches and a few isolated scenes and gags. I was rather fond of it, though.

The Tyrant's Feast

Continuing my intermittent series of the past couple of months on my 'Discarded story ideas', here's one that I actually made quite a lot of progress with - and the only time that I've attempted to write a play. (I think this was why I abandoned it in the end. I approached it more as an exercise in technique than something I really wanted to produce for its own sake, and I found it damned hard going. I'm not good with dialogue.)

The starting inspirations here were a fascination with dictators, and particularly with the seemingly wildly unstable 'banana republics' of South America where they sometimes had a regime change every few months (when I was a very young kid I wrote a would-be satirical, blackly comic short story called 'Viva Who?', in which numerous different groups were simultaneously trying to storm the Presidential Palace of such a country, each completely ignorant of the others' presence or agenda), and with the idea that the concepts of 'rebel' and 'oppressor' may not be morally clearcut, but rather are stereotypical roles that the parties may lapse into - perhaps unconsciously, but often to their mutual convenience (a notion probably inspired in part by my favourite Kurt Vonnegut novel, Cat's Cradle, in which the founder of the Bokononist religion and his friend contrive such a dualistic paradigm for their subsequent relationship). And the central plot device was suggested to me by that resonant phrase from Macbeth.

So... I had the harsh dictator of an unnamed country 'inviting' one his leading critics to a private dinner for two (in fact, kidnapping him overseas and bringing him to the audience by force). During the course of their conversation, we learn that in their young days they had been close friends and joint leaders of an idealistic revolutionary movement that sought to oust the oppressive previous government. We see that the dictator still has a strong moral core, claims to be devoted to the betterment of his country and regretful of some of the harsher acts he has been obliged to commit, justifies his stern rule as necessary to maintain stability in a young and disunited country. We also see that the dissident is not entirely virtuous, but prone to self-aggrandisement, wilfully provoking persecution to cast himself in the role of a martyr (I came up with the idea that he had been one of the country's leading doctors, but had refused to help the dictator with his healthcare reforms, and had eventually prompted his exile by instead lobbying aggressively for investment in his own specialism of transplant surgery - an unaffordable luxury in a fledgeling country).

The dictator does not want to abuse or punish his old adversary, but is seeking a rapprochement with him. In fact, grown weary of power, he has conceived a fantasy of inviting his enemy to take his place at the head of the government. When his guest starts to believe in the possible sincerity of this suggestion, his weakness for the allure of fame and glory starts to come to the fore, and he is eventually persuaded to try on the dictator's role - symbolised by his donning of a Fascist military uniform - for the rest of their conversation.

Act 2, the second half of the dinner table conversation, sees the progressive corruption of the supposedly selfless and idealistic opposition leader. The retiring dictator introduces him to the practical difficulties of running the country, and it starts to become apparent that his would-be replacement's instincts are in many cases to adopt even more ruthless policies than he has done. This section ends abruptly when a young man breaks into the dictator's apartments and shoots the opposition leader dead, apparently having mistaken him for the dictator because of the uniform.

Act 3 sees the dictator interrogating the assassin about his motives, and discovering to his surprise that the young man had in fact intentionally murdered the opposition leader, while he idolises the dictator for his harsh but well-intentioned rule. The play ends with the dictator realising that there is no way for him to escape the onerous responsibilities of his position. Impressed by the young killer's forthrightness, he is tempted to pardon him, but worries that this will have unacceptable consequences. He asks the young man how he thinks he should be treated, and he replies that of course the dictator has no option but to execute him, that it is necessary for the good of the country.

Killing Hitler (And Churchill)

There's something irresistible about the concept of time travel; it can seduce even those who are sternly resistant to the rest of the sci-fi genre.

And the idea of being able to revisit - and perhaps change - key moments in Earth's history is especially compelling. I think most people have encountered one or two favourite stories of this type, and almost all writers have surely tried to write one at some point.

One such that particularly lodged in my brain when I was a kid (I think it might have been one of Ray Bradbury's, but I'm not sure; can't remember the title now) was about a company running historical tours into the past. One of their most popular destinations was the crucifixion of Jesus. The tourists had to be very carefully briefed to fit in with the Judaean crowds, not attract attention to themselves - not do anything that might change the outcome of events. So, when the moment came, the group all chanted 'Free Barabbas!', as they had been told to do. Only a few of them noticed that they were the only people doing so.

Of course, if you could travel back in time to attempt an intervention that might change the course of human history for the better, the most obvious choice for most people would be to assassinate Adolf Hitler before he comes to power in Germany. So, unoriginal fellow that I so often am, I wrote a story about that when I was in my early teens.

I was interested in the notion of events being fixed, of it proving to be impossible for time travellers to effect any changes in history. In some stories I've read, this effect is realised by mysterious laws of physics - invisible force fields or whatever that thwart the protagonist's action at the critical moment. I preferred to focus on the mundane frustrations of daily life, to suggest that the ordinary ebb and flow of events might more effectively obstruct my hero's plans. And so I had events like the breakdown of a tram, a sudden rainstorm, and the last-minute cancellation of a speaking engagement keeping my would-be assassin from his planned encounters with Hitler. I even toyed with - but didn't ultimately use - the idea of him having a revolver that he'd acquired for the purpose fail to work. (I was playing with the physics-will-thwart-you device, making it seem that the gun had uaccountably refused to fire because of some strange Law of Time; but I then planned to reveal that there was in fact a straightforward explanation - he'd bought the gun from a pawnbroker [being unable to bring any weapons with him through the time-portal], who, fearing that he planned to commit suicide with it, had deliberately sold him one with a faulty firing-pin.)

And for a final mess-with-your-mind twist.... my hero was disheartened, realised that it was seemingly impossible for him to complete the mission he had set himself, and was preparing to return to his own time. Walking down the streets of 1920s Munich one last time, he sees a man just ahead of him distractedly step into the road directly in front of a bus (or a tram; I suspect they had trams - but I never did the research to check this). Instinctively, he grabs the man and pulls him back to safety. The man loses balance and falls on top of him. As they pick themselves up, the hero finds himself finally face to face with....

Too obvious? Well, I was only 13 or 14; give me a break.

On the other side of the Allies/Axis divide, I was also intrigued as to how the untimely death of Winston Churchill might have altered history (I was very probably influenced by Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, which came out when I was on the cusp of my teens). There does seem to be a powerful argument that he was the main force in the Cabinet resisting Nazi peace overtures, and that without him Britain might have withdrawn from the War - and left Hitler secure in his European conquests, perhaps even able to make a success of his invasion of Russia and to resist involving himself in the later US-Japan war.

My seed idea here was wondering what is the smallest event that can lead to a major change in the course of history - the concept of The Butterfly Effect. I looked down to the molecular level, and decided that there must be a point where, a point where... something like the combustion process inside a car's engine is at a critical threshold, a whisker away from failing. In one reality, a car engine stalls; in another, it shudders, but just manages to keep turning over. What might flow from that?

I didn't quite have the story structure worked out to my satisfaction. It was difficult to incorporate this idea of history turning on the smallest of events inside a car's engine with the adventure story I wanted to write. What I came up with was an alternating chapter structure with two essentially unrelated stories - the connection between them only gradually emerging towards the end.

In the first story strand, an underground group is planning a terrorist campaign against an oppressive government. It is slowly revealed that this is 1970s Britain, under the sway of a Fascist party aligned with the Third Reich which still rules Germany and most of Europe.

The second story strand is set thirty-odd years earlier, in London at the outset of WWII. A car that nearly stalls - but doesn't - speeds impatiently away from a traffic light and knocks over a pedestrian a few moments later. The man survives, but suffers serious injuries and temporary amnesia. Police trying to establish his identity find some odd discrepancies in his personal history, and call in a military investigator - who eventually discovers that the man is a German secret agent with a mission to assassinate Churchill.

Hence, we come to a final realisation that the main story is happening in a Europe still controlled by the Nazis because, if that car had stalled on a foggy London street in 1940, the German agent would have fulfilled his mission... and removed Britain from the War.

An idea 'stolen'

I omitted one of my favourites from amongst Wednesday's collection of thumbnail outlines of my horror stories, because... well, for a number of reasons. One is that I wrote it as a young boy, 36 or so years ago, and thus no longer have a very detailed recollection of it. Further, it was very short, and I suspect not very good. But I suppressed it chiefly because I had discovered to my chagrin a few years after writing it that the idea was not original.

Well, what is? There is no new thing under the sun, as the prophet says.

Of course, at such a tender age, it is very disheartening to learn this truth so bluntly. I had thought my little story was a terribly brilliant idea that no-one else could ever possibly have come up with. Just as well I got over that when I was 13 or 14, I suppose. 

My story, The Telephone Box, was inspired by many unpleasant experiences with the old-fashioned British telephone boxes, which were uniquely claustrophic (entirely enclosed, narrow dimensions, stout metal construction, tiny window panes), and had very heavy doors which could be a real struggle to open and close. Plus, of course, they were very often out of order.

There wasn't very much to the story, except that a man's car broke down on a remote country road. He was in the middle of nowhere, and thought himself very lucky to find a telephone box nearby (no mobile phones in those far-off days, of course). He was not so lucky when he entered it: he found himself trapped, the door jammed shut, and the phone not working. Nobody passed by to discover his plight, and after several days he succumbed to despair and strangled himself with the phone cord. (I probably didn't know at that point in my life that lack of water will kill you sooner than lack of food, or what the timeframe of survival is.) Eventually a workman comes along, apparently from the phone company. He removes the dead body, but does nothing to fix the jam-prone door. *

Now watch this - La Cabina, a classic 35-minute short by Spanish director Antonio Mercero. For a little while I fancied that he may have somehow ripped off my idea, and I fantasised about suing him to get a credit on the movie. I eventually discovered that he had made it for Spanish TV in 1972, a few years before I wrote my story; but I'm pretty sure I could have had no knowledge of it at that time. I don't think it was shown on British TV (a Saturday night on BBC2, if I recall correctly) until around the late '70s - and was repeated about a decade later, when I managed to videotape it (but that tape is now long lost). I have been trying for twenty years or more to unearth this film again, but it has only recently turned up on Youtube.

Mercero's story far surpasses my own effort, particularly in exploiting his hapless protagonist's interactions with people outside the booth (something I'd completely excluded - because my prosaic imagination couldn't conceive of how he wouldn't be rescued if someone found him!) and, in the later stages, with elaborating the suggestion of a sinister conspiracy by the phone company (the final scene is just jaw-dropping). I really like the way this film starts with a fairly light tone, a kind of Tati-esque social comedy on voyeurism, but becomes steadily darker and darker. [It's essentially dialogue-free, so the absence of subtitles is not a problem.]

I don't know why we haven't heard more from Snr Mercero. It seems he's been working pretty regularly in Spain, mostly in television, for over 40 years now; but nothing else has had the impact of this devastating little masterpiece of the surreal and the macabre.

*  Thank heavens they don't have telephone boxes in China!

Horrific

I used to read a lot of horror anthologies when I was about 10 or 12. There was quite a vogue for them in the early Seventies, and it was a bad habit I easily inherited (along with most of the books that first got me into it) from my elder brother. I still have strong impressions of many of them, such as the Frighteners and Frighteners 2 collections. I was also a big fan of horror films in my childhood - regularly staying up late on Friday and Saturday nights to watch seasons of them.

Hence, many of the short stories I've penned intermittently over the years were experiments in this genre. Since it is Halloween today, I thought I'd share the outlines of some of these (and provide a few notes on where the ideas came from).

Still Waters

The new boy at school is shy and introverted, and finds himself ostracized or bullied by most of his classmates. He tries to build a relationship with his chief tormentors by joining them in their weekend hobby of fishing, but they spurn him and drive him away from their favourite fishing spot by the canal. Soon, though, the boy finds a solitary fishing spot of his own, and starts bringing photographs of impressively large fish to school each Monday. The two bullies at first dismiss his stories of fishing success, joking that he has bought the fish at the fishmonger's. But, intrigued and jealous, one weekend they decide to stalk the boy, to see if he does go fishing - and where. They disappear. The boy is slowly becoming more confident and outgoing - it could be due to the satisfaction he derives from his fishing hobby, or the removal of the bullies. However, there is still a certain awkwardness about him, a reserve and secretiveness that his teacher finds disturbing. Suspecting that he may be suffering domestic abuse, she tries to befriend him, and to discover more about his weekend passion for fishing. Eventually he agrees to take her with him to his secret fishing location one Saturday afternoon. It turns out to be a tiny, stagnant pond in the middle of a wood - the kind of place where you wouldn't expect there to be any fish at all, certainly not many big ones. But this 'lake' has a guardian spirit, a ferocious demon which rises from the waters to accept the boy's latest sacrifice - much more satisfying than his first one - and to reward him with another fish.

[A lot of obvious story archetypes here: the isolated child, the bullies, the exaggeratedly motherly teacher; the expected victims, and the unexpected victim. But the key inspiration for this was a series of public service advertisements they used to run on TV when I was a kid warning us against playing near landfills and so on where there might be pools of water of unknown depth and with possible entanglements of rubbish beneath their surface. These were seriously scary ads, and the pools of water shown were made to seem very, very sinister - positively demonic. These ads may well also have been responsible for my enduring reluctance to learn to swim.]

Morning After

A man wakes with a hangover after a heavy night of partying. He tries to piece together his disordered memories of the night before, troubled by sensations of guilt and shame and disgust. He is troubled also by his extreme physical symptoms, particularly the odd numbness in his mouth. He slowly recalls that he made some callous remarks that drove his girlfriend to break up with him. And when he staggers into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror... he realises that he later cut out his tongue in self-chastisement for this.

[A lot of my story ideas in this field start out with a 'What's the worst that could happen?' question. In this case, I started off not thinking of writing a horror story, but just going through the exercise of trying to describe a really bad hangover, in a broadly humorous tone - which somehow suddenly spiralled into very black humour. Many hangover descriptions emphasise how odd your tongue feels: I took that idea and ran with it.]

The Tacklebox

A man strikes up a casual conversation with a stranger in the bar of a small hotel in the woodlands of the American north-west. He asks if the stranger is on a fishing holiday, and why he has brought his large tacklebox into the bar with him. The stranger is at first very defensive, suspicious of these enquiries and unwilling to respond. But, after a few drinks, the two men start to develop some rapport, and the stranger suddenly feels an urge to unburden himself. He has for years been a Sasquatch hunter, and he has finally obtained conclusive proof of their existence. He had observed a large female burying something in a forest clearing, and some hours later, when he felt the coast was clear, he had returned to the spot to investigate. He discovered the buried object was a miscarried foetus. This he now had with him in his tacklebox, which he wasn't going to let out of his sight. In the early hours of the following morning, there was a sudden loud commotion in the hotel that woke up several of the guests. The stranger's cabin had been broken into and ransacked, and the stranger himself had disappeared. But the police could find no evidence of foul play, and concluded that the stranger had probably trashed the cabin himself after overindulging in drink or drugs, and then run away in shame. The man who had been talking to him the night before told the officers that the stranger had had quite a lot to drink, and seemed to be somewhat mentally disturbed - but chose not to elaborate on the story he had been told. Sneaking a peek over the crime scene tape into the cabin, he noticed that the tacklebox was open on the floor, empty. And later that morning, he found in a corner of the  dusty parking lot one very large footprint - which he decided to cover over.

[I had long been intrigued by the possibility of trying to write something about a traditional sort of monster - and a monster that is believable, that perhaps really does exist. And I liked the idea of taking something like the Sasquatch and highlighting its human qualities - not having its violence be just an unexplained feral rage, but motivated by grief, maternal protectiveness, and respect for the dead. I also have a particular weakness for unreliable narrator devices, where we encounter the implausible or supernatural elements of the story secondhand through someone else's account - and share our protagonist's scepticism, until some additional evidence is presented. This idea came to me while I was Greyhounding across the States in the mid-90s, and having a lot of odd conversations with short-term travelling companions. The initial impetus came, in fact, from a Stephen King story I had just read at that time, in which there was a line about a man clinging to a suitcase as if it were the dearest thing in the world to him. What, I thought, could make someone hold on to a piece of luggage so obsessively? Oh, I know!]

The Forecast

We follow an office-working drone through a typical day: unsatisfying job, overbearing boss, boorish colleagues; cheap sandwiches for lunch; a long commute home on crowded subway trains; and then a lonely evening at home mechanically watching TV. At the end of the mid-evening news, the weather forecaster comes on and cheerily announces that "Tomorrow will be similar to today." Realising the awful truth of this statement, the man goes upstairs and swallows all the pills in his medicine cabinet.

[That line does seem to crop up rather a lot on British TV weather forecasts, and I have often found it deeply depressing. Here I was fascinated by the idea that it is the mundanity of everyday existence that is truly horrifying, rather than ghosts and monsters. And also by the realisation that, when you're at a low ebb, a very little thing, something seemingly quite innocent and inconsequential, can prompt you to do something terrible.]

Bad Behaviour

A man is acutely pee-shy: he can't bear to be in a public toilet with anyone else. Attending a wedding reception in a very upmarket hotel, he finds that the ballroom toilets are always too busy, so he sneaks upstairs in search of an empty toilet, and finds one in an obscure annexe that contains only an exclusive private dining room. He is just about to relieve his bladder when a very fat and very drunk man lurches in, and leans against the wall a couple of urinals down from him (our protagonist also has a morbid horror of fat people - and drunk people). He finds himself trapped in his ultimate nightmare, too embarrassed to leave, but unable to pee while the fat drunk man is standing next to him - and increasingly desperate to empty his painful bladder. The fat man burbles obnoxiously, wretches and belches, and pees all over the floor. Our protagonist is disgusted, but paralysed - unable to react or move away. Another diner comes into the toilet to assist the fat man, and shoots our man a suspicious, sinister look. The fat man begins to vomit profusely. Our protagonist's disgust reaches new heights. But then he notices something strange in the fat man's vomit, a recognisable piece of undigested meat - a piece of meat that looks horribly like part of a baby's hand. The second diner notices him noticing - and this is very bad. The Cannibal Club is strictly invitation only.

[I like the notion that real horror exists in the mind, that it is our social hang-ups and phobias that usually cause us far more acute anxiety and distress than actual physical threats. So, I loved the idea of trying to write a story about being pee-shy. Then I thought, how far can we take this, what other similar anxieties can we pile on this poor chap - horror of obesity, of gluttony, of drunkenness, of boorish public behaviour, of vomiting? And then a brutal reimposition of perspective: all of that is really pretty trivial compared to cannibalism, compared to the possibility that these drunken oafs might be about to kill you for uncovering their secret. I am not pee-shy myself; but I could produce quite a long list of 'Story ideas that have come to me in a public toilet'.]

Not Like Us

A man walks in a park, waiting to rendezvous with his fiancée. He stops to rest on a bench for a few moments, next to a harmless-looking old woman. He soon regrets his decision. The woman proves to be quite deranged, and proceeds to explain to him her paranoid ideas. She has since her teens been a spiritual healer, believing that she can see auras around people which help her to diagnose their health problems. Recently she has noticed more and more people who have no auras. She believes they are some kind of automata who are infiltrating human society with a view to a global takeover. She doesn't normally share these fears with anyone, but she feels that the man has an especially trustworthy aura. And she is becoming worried that 'they' are on to her: she has been noticing the aura-less automata looking strangely at her, and she thinks she is being followed by mysterious men in dark suits. The man finds it difficult to pull away from the woman, after she has flattered his aura like that. And although she is obviously mad, she is surprisingly lucid and cogent - she spins a persuasive tale. Nevertheless, he is very relieved when his girlfriend comes into view and he can finally make his excuses to part from the old lady. He hears a sigh or gasp from her as he starts to walk away, and glances back for a moment. She is staring at his approaching girlfriend, her face white with horror; and as she catches his eye for the last time, she mouths the words, "No aura!" The man laughs it off, and walks away with his girlfriend. But a few minutes later he notices the old woman being escorted out of the park by two men in dark suits...

[Lots of cliché elements here, of course: alien invasion, sinister 'men in dark suits', the person who may or may not have a gift of second sight. But there are two distinct seeds to this story. One is, as in Bad Behaviour above, social anxiety: if we find ourselves buttonholed by a nutjob, how can we extricate ourselves politely? The second was the notion that women in general - and, perhaps, our partners in particular! - are essentially unknowable to us, so fundamentally different from the male gender that they are in effect an alien species. Many of my stories arise from posing myself a question. In this case, it was, "What could make you doubt the person you feel closest to, the woman you love?" Some madwoman on a park bench?? Well, maybe... And that, for me, is the true horror here: not whether or not the alien invasion conspiracy is real, but simply the fact that the protagonist is induced to start distrusting his girlfriend.]

The Years Slip Away

Back in the 1940s, a young man enjoys a few beers with his friends. He has just recently got out of the army after wartime service and returned to a well-paid civilian job. And he is full of excited anticipation because tomorrow he is getting married. He feels that this has been one of the happiest days he has experienced in a long time, and he realises that an important new phase of his life is about to open up. He goes to bed full of hope for the future. When he wakes up, he feels that something is very wrong - but he is weak, confused, he can't think clearly. He gets up and walks over to a mirror on the wall - where he sees that he is now in his seventies. Last night he suffered a stroke which wiped out the last 50 years of his memory.
[Perhaps I don't really like horror stories that much, because most of the ones I've written have actually been just regular stories about ordinary lives - that are transformed by a dark twist at the end. And this is a uniquely personal horror for me: the fear of being mentally compromised by a brain injury of some sort, and in particular of having something impair my memory.]

The Meat Locker

An astronaut is woken from cryogenic sleep by his ship's computer. The computer tells him that it has woken him because his cryogenic unit was about to fail. Unfortunately, the ship is still many decades away from its destination, and the computer is not authorised to release any of the ship's food stores to him. The ship is carrying many thousands of passengers, whose object is to set up a colony on a distant Earth-like planet. All the ship's food stores will be needed on landing on this new world. The man has been saved from asphyxiation in a faulty cryo-chamber, but will now inexorably starve to death. Unless... The computer reveals to him that in one of the passenger compartments the life-support system for all the cryo-chambers has failed, leaving their hundreds of occupants dead, but still frozen. The man isn't convinced that he is yet willing to contemplate cannibalism to stay alive, but he breaks into the compartment to investigate the situation there. Unfortunately, he wasn't aware that, while in flight, the cryo-compartments are protected against intrusion by automated laser turrets. The ship's computer is deliberately waking up passengers one by one to conduct a social psychology experiment on them as to whether they can be induced to attempt to resort to cannibalism; it has developed a multiple personality disorder, and is wagering against itself as to whether certain subjects will or won't succumb.
[I wasn't sure here whether to try to explain the computer's homicidal madness or not. This is, of course, inspired by the HAL 9000 episode in 2001; and I found the absence of explanation for the computer's violence in that somewhat unsatisfying (the novelization does make an attempt to explain it, but is not wholly convincing). I considered describing how the computer had sustained some damage which disrupted its personality circuits and its morality failsafes. But I was more attracted to the idea that it had simply 'gone mad' through boredom after several centuries of having almost nothing to do. I wondered if I could establish a convincing logical framework for this murderous little game being somehow not contrary to its moral programming (Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and all that): it had become fascinated with the idea of wielding the power of life and death over humans, and frustrated at not being able to kill them directly; but this scenario enabled it to allow them to get themselves killed, without contravening its programming. Eventually, I decided it was simpler - and more unsettling - just to end with the computer having a conversation with itself about which 'subject' to wake up next. This would demonstrate that it had definitively gone mad, and there didn't seem to be any real need to describe the mechanism of how this had happened. It can be argued that this is a superfluous twist anyway, since this situation is already quite horrific enough even if the ship's computer is still operating normally.]

The Writing On The Wall

Getting on for 5 years ago, I tried an entry in a literary competition launched by my publisher-to-be and occasional commenter here, the lovely Moonrat. Part of the brief was to provide a nutshell author biography of myself for the back-jacket copy of a book. I put that on the blog here, and was then goaded by my principal commenter of the time, Tulsa, to add the other part of my submission, the blurb for a novel, too. But I never got around to it. And, as so often happens with my little literary noodlings these days, I can't find it any more; it's not on this computer, anyway. (Paper is so much safer a storage medium. I still keep turning up inane little poems and articles I wrote at university nearly 30 years ago. Yet stuff I've written just in the last few years keeps vanishing into some weird electronic black hole of unsearchability on my various hard drives.)

Instead of trying to recreate the blurb (I'm still endeavouring to unearth the original), I thought I'd describe my creative process in coming up with it - a manic brainstorm which produced quite a detailed (and surprisingly saleable-seeming!) outline in just a few minutes.

I thought... a thriller is likely to be the genre that finds the readiest audience (and is also going to be the kind of thing that I would find easiest to write at speed). I can probably sell the China connection, too, drawing on my experience of having lived here for the last 5-and-a-half years. (There hadn't been that many 'China books' - fiction or non-fiction - at that point; soon there would be a spate of them, and I fear that particular niche may have been overworked now.) Of course, there was a particular topicality about China in that year, since it was about to host the Olympics. And there was a likelihood that political anxieties about possible 'dissent' would be particularly acute in the last few months before the opening of the Games in Beijing. A foreign protagonist, I felt, would be likely to help the story sell better overseas (and, let's face it, a foreigner like me is going to struggle to create a convincing story with a wholly Chinese cast of characters). So, how might a foreigner interact with Chinese citizens in circumstances which might place them under threat from the state apparatus of oppression?

Well, the creative fields are where you tend to find the most connections between Chinese and foreigners - particularly in rock music and modern art. And I have hung out in those circles quite a bit myself, have a few friends among these ranks - so, that felt like a milieu I could write about. Then, my major brainwave was that the area where there was likeliest to be the most crossover between those two fields was graffiti art (which was only just starting to take off in China at that time); and this was a form that, because it was so public and so populist, was likely to be seen as having a high potential for subversion by the authorities here.

There were three elements in this story idea that particularly appealed to me: the impermanence of this kind of art (it often gets scrubbed off the walls within days or hours, particularly if it incurs the displeasure of the authorities; and thus it often relies on a photographic record being made of it to acquire a wider audience; cameraphones, and the rapid dissemination of snapshots taken with them via the Internet, were just starting to become a big thing back then, although we didn't yet have Twitter/Weibo); the politicization of art (the government is likely to gauge the 'threat' of this kind of thing by its impact on its audience, rather than the intention of its creator); and the commercialization of art (many artists I know feel very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to do things that they anticipate may prove popular and saleable; they seem to convince themselves that their 'purity of vision' may require a perverse clinging to obscurity and poverty).

So... my young foreign protagonist is a photographer who becomes interested in this very exciting guerrilla street artist and sets about trying to document his work. Eventually he meets the guy, and they become friends. The government becomes concerned about this anonymous artist at first simply because they can't control him and because he is becoming so popular; but soon they become alarmed that so many of his young fans are reading a politically inflammatory sub-text into his work. They determine to find him and take him out of circulation before his activities can disrupt the imminent Olympic Games or foment nationwide 'disharmony'. His photographer friend is, of course, the most visible link to the artist, so the secret police start trailing him to try to discover the artist's identity. However, the photographer is also being approached by certain large companies to act as the artist's agent; they are interested in using this hip new talent in their China advertising. The photographer sees this as a chance to save the artist from state harassment, from likely arrest and possibly even execution; if he can associate him with one of the Olympic sponsors and persuade him to give up his proud stance of anonymity, perhaps he can make the artist too famous to interfere with, untouchable. 

But how can the photographer contact the artist without risking exposing his identity or whereabouts to the Chinese authorities? And how can he convince him to renounce his most deep-seated creative principles - that he must continue to work anonymously and without reward?

Not a bad little concept, eh? And that really was just a few minutes' work. It all came to me in a rush, each element naturally suggesting the next. There was even a love-triangle sub-plot, with the photographer falling for a foreign girl who worked as a translator in the art community and was having a relationship with the artist. (The art and rock music scenes do tend to attract quite a few foreign fans. And I have myself suffered the heartache of falling for a woman who's become hung up on Chinese guys.)

Alas, I've missed the 'window of opportunity' on that one: it was really a story that needed to be written in 2007 and published early in 2008.

It was also a pity that the title I came up with (too obvious, I know; but so appropriately ominous), The Writing On The Wall, had already been used numerous times before, including fairly recently for a major non-fiction book on China by Will Hutton.