Posted in: Recent Updates | Tagged: short and curlies, si spurrier

Short 'n Curlies #40 by Si Spurrier

News From The Spursphere:

I'm scum.

I'm a wart-weasel of the very worst ilk.  I've deserted you, my plucky lovetumours, for three long weeks, and can only hope you've been able to satisfy the pernicious HateCrave on your own.  But I'm not without excuse, and — should it help you to know — I have Suffered in my absence.

Herculean were my labors!  Sarlaccian was my pain!  Lost-esque is the Disjointed Mess I've become!

(That was a cheap shot, right?  Yeah.  Consider it proof that This Is Really Me, Back From The Front, and not some pale Spurclone from William Christensen's private skinlab, built to feed his sticky earlobe-based appetites.)

Y'see: I've been novellising hard, my cherubs.  After months of unregulated industry — squeezing the eyeball-bleeding terrors of Prose Authorship between the chewy sweetmeats of Comicky Fun — my publishers suddenly nuked my schedule from afar with a command to Deliver Or Desist.  (There's this whole bubbly backstory about Why It's Not My Fault That This Fucking Book's Taken So Long To Write, but it's sort of convoluted, kinda dull, and worst of all it might shatter your faith in the efficiency, fairness and Unsurpassed Professionalism of the mighty Publishing Trade, ahahaha, so let's steer clear.)

Suffice to say I've spent the past month writing, rewriting, cutting, rewriting, replotting, rewriting, changing characters' names, rewriting, hacking out entirely Vital material, rewriting, composing satisfying endings, rewriting, doodling speculative front covers, rewriting, and polishing like a Pixie With A Poo.  Also, rewriting.  I've somehow sliced 22000 words out of (what I thought) was a pretty tight manuscript, have accidentally generated an entirely unforeseen subplot, and have discovered I have an unhealthy fixation with the words "ooze", "frothy" and "scintillating".

But now it's done.  Sort of.  For a little while, anyway.  It's been blasted-off to Those Who Matter to be read and re-read, to be dissected and scorned, to be smeared in the literary bumsoup of Red Biro Ink and then, ultimately, returned to me: like a sex-attack victim with its page-numbers round its ankles and its italics streaking its face.  Whereupon I shall, no doubt, cough-up another lung and stumble back to the coalface.  Until then I'm free to resume all the comics I was halfway through writing, slouch like the proverbial Rough Beast back to the Bethlehem of Twitter (@sispurrier, fyi), and to finally put on some clothes and Leave The House.  I haven't worn pants in three weeks, should you care to know it, which is a) unpleasant, b) More Unpleasant when you recall I'm British and that "pants" therefore Don't Mean Trousers, and c) a topic of some misery for my long-suffering Z-Chair.

Novels, if you wanted a Moral to This Tale, are Hard Fucking Work.  In fact the world is full of doubleclever epigrams on the subject, so we can all nod and Fwahfwahfwah delightedly.

Truman Capote said finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it, which makes it sound a lot more glamorous and exciting than it is.  He also said I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil, which is more sensible — but also fucking depressing.

I tried to express my own feelings on the subject recently, but you'll forgive me if my brain was too deeply entrenched in the slimy misery of WurdMaking to add any wit to the axiom.  Nonetheless, here it is: my offering of Truth to any would-be novelist.

Two thirds of novel-writing is the ability to Ignore the scale of the task that lies ahead, and that's true at any point of the process; even when you think it's Over.

As ever, it falls to the mighty Douglas Adams to apply the capstone to a grisly subject:

Writing is easy — all you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.

He's dead now.  Coincidence?

BrainFart:

There now exists a Fresh and Not-At-All-Cheap tradition for Deconstructivist Comicbook Frippery.  Welcome to the PostNow.

The movement basically involves taking a cliché (let's say, for instance, The Implausible And Indestructible Superhero), mercilessly dissecting it and turning it on its head (What If A Normal Geek-Kid Became A Costumed Adventurer?), and then reassembling it in an entertaining and surprising fashion.

(…And then ruining it by introducing some Implausible And Indestructible Superheroes and a fucking jetpack with miniguns.  I digress.)

My contribution to this rich and ever-expanding literary movement will be a six-issue Wonderserial with the working-title Blamzan of the Capes. It's the story of an aristocratic child whose family dies when their plane crashes into a forgotten Diamond Distribution warehouse.  As the sole survivor, locked inside the vast longbox-infested store, he's raised by a family of friendly rats and learns everything he knows about the Outside World from the innumerable spandex comics around him.  And their letter pages.

The action begins when a gang of unscrupulous eBayers break into his world seeking a fabled Liefeld comic in which Female Character #5 actually stands on the flats of her feet.  Discovering only the deluded manchild — with his costume made of moisture-resistant baggies — they take him back to New York as a Curio.

There follows a three-issue Fight Sequence in which Blamzan slaughters his way through anyone wearing skintight clothing, Goes Bad, Goes Good Again, gets hooked on an implausibly-named Drug, finds his long-lost brother, kills his long-lost brother, rapes his long-lost brother's hitherto-unmentioned girlfriend as a lazy demonstration that he's once more Gone Bad, slowly starves as a result of being unable to eat any meal without noisily speculating about Who'd Win In A Fight, Salt Or Pepper?, gets shot, Goes Good again, loses his powers, regains his powers, realises he never had any powers in the first place, goes on a Spiritual Quest To Find The Heart Of America, has sex with an alien (vending machine), kills an alien (vending machine) and hides the body in a freezer, gets sucked into an entirely fictional crossover-event of his own fabrication, and finally gets hits by a train while trying to rescue a sewer-rat from the made-up Galactic Warlord, Turdman.  The penultimate episode will be a beautiful elegy in which the friends and enemies he's met along the way pass through his disintegrating mind like a procession of ghosts, culminating in a Mysterious Doctor telling him all the Bad Shit he did along the way Wasn't Actually Canon And Therefore Never Happened, thus allowing him to die with a clean conscience.

And then episode 6 is just 22 pages of his body, oh-so-slowly starting to rot, as we wait for him to come back to life.

Which he doesn't, aha, y'see, because it's post modern.

Find Me @:

Twitter: @SiSpurrier

WWWebbage: www.simonspurrier.blogspot.com

Send wurdz, thoughts, stories, Hatings, and Oregano, lots and lots of Oregano, to the Only Checked Occasionally And I Might Not Bother Replying At All Ha Ha Ha email address:

Contact@Chop-This-Bit-Outsimonspurrier.co.uk

Or the It Might Not Get To Me At All But If It Does I Promise To Recycle It snailmail address:

C/O William Christensen,

Avatar Press
515 N. Century Blvd.
Rantoul, IL 61866

(Disclaimer: Secretly, I'm nice.)

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