nixsight

Dan Lester – Author of “Bell, Book & Handlebars”, an account of his cycling tour of the UK’s supernatural hotspots – has returned to Elephant Words, after a triumphant six month engagement in the colonies.

His first new piece is a deceptively simple piece of faked-up ephemera that has one absolute killer idea at it’s core. It is called “The Museum Of July 22nd, 1987″, and exists here.

This seems like as good a time as any to take a look at some of my favourite moments of Mr Lester’s previous run at Elephant Words. His first post came on 29/07/08, but his first appearance came a week earlier:

(more…)

Dear Journal,

Peculiar noises abound in the house, that J. claims not to hear… most unusual. He has been listening more and more to that dreadful eighties revival house music, in an effort to distract from his current situation, but it is difficult to imagine that even that din might drown out the screams that persist in our walls.

Anya has found more pieces of the body, though now I begin to suspect that these seperate parts are from more than one corpse. I continue to place them in the shed – they are too far gone even for my own tastes, and you know, Dear Journal, how I like to know where my food has been.

The shed, incidentally, seems a little… odd. Time spent in there seems to take on peculiar qualities – I oftentimes was finding that I would step in there for but a moment in the noon sun, and it would be past midnight when I exited. And the walls seem to sweat, despite the dessicated nature of most of the body parts I am storing in there.

To be frank, I don’t like to spend any longer than absolutely necessary in there.

The best story about Anya today is that she somehow managed to find her way into my cupboard… goodness knows how she managed to lock herself in there… I was trying to call her in from the garden for over ten minutes before I realised she was crying from inside the house.

She left the cupboard in an awful state, with mud and bodily fluids not her own covering the floor. Though oddly, when I was looking for her, I hadn’t seen any trail through the house to the room. I must have tidied it away in a frenzy before realising she was missing, quite despite myself.

Dear Journal,

I’m a little worried about J. He claims that the other night, he got a call from his ex-wife S. At least, the incoming number on his phone was his ex-wife’s but all he could hear on the line were garbled, guttural, glottal voices. He seems fairly certain that she almost never spoke like that.

What’s slightly odder is that he hasn’t been able to pay his bill for a couple of months, so his phone is actually cut off at the moment.

A quick phone call to Orange to check the line assured him that there had been no incoming calls to his phone from any of the afterlife territories, so at the very least, we can be certain that S. is still alive, or at least, that whoever was using her phone is.

Anya continues to find pieces of the dead. I continue to store them in the shed. J’s preoccupation seems complete, though… when I asked him if he’d noticed how strange the shed was getting, he asked me “what shed?” and then proceeded to tell me that we didn’t have a shed. I didn’t argue; it’s impossible to reason with someone who’s heart is causing them so much distraction.

Dear Journal,

V. worried about J. now. He disappears for hours at a time after work. Sometimes he says that he’s been in his bedroom, thinking, but I know that’s not true because when I’ve looked in, he’s not there. Other times, he goes out into the rain with no coat on… he says he’s just going for a walk, but it always happens just after another of those damn phonecalls from his other-dimensional ex-wife.

On Sunday, I was sitting on my bed, reading a book, and had been for nearly two hours, when I got a little peckish for some of my special “dried meats”; you know the ones, dear Journal, the ones that I prepare myself and keep wrapped in wax paper in the driest nook of my walk-in cupboard. The ones that taste of lost loves.

I got up from the bed, scratched myself in the most anti-social of manners, and opened the door to said cupboard. Imagine my shock on finding J. in there, looking perplexed and a little sad.

I admit to losing my composure a little. I shouted:
“What the hell are you doing in there, J? I thought you were out? How long have you been in there?”

All he could say was “I thought I heard her” and “The rain washes all the trails away”, with that sad look on his face. It was a pretty long way to go for a prank; that’s my stance on it, Dear Journal. He must have stood there for hours, just to give me a fright. The least he could have done was look pleased with himself. I shushed him out of the wardrobe, I couldn’t have him dripping all over my clean clothes, and got him a towel… I don’t care if he does have a strange sense of humour, I still care about him catching a chill… and sent him on his way to his room.

Do you know, he’s so embarassed about that practical joke that he won’t even acknowledge it? He still claims, all these days later, that he had followed S’s trail to a door in a hidden wooded part of The Common, and the next thing he knew, I was ushering him out of my room. Pride, dear Journal, makes idiots of us all.

This week at Elephant Words, Xander Bennett posted a beautiful photo by Austin Andrews:

It was my turn to post today, and I did, but only just, ten or so minutes ago.

My piece is called “The Imaginary”:

CAPTION:
THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR
ALL AUDIENCES

[Music: "Hoppipolla" by Sigur Ros]

[Studio Titlecards]

[CUT TO: Tracking shot of leafy suburb, colour saturated to look like the 80s.]

[The same suburb - we're now closer in on one garden. Two young boys, around ten years old, are running around, chasing each other.]

NARRATOR (V.O.):
When Nathan Ray was a boy, he had the best friend in the world…

[Close on the boys. One is pale skinned, blond and scrawny, stripped to the waist, the other darker, with Oriental features - his outfit more traditional or rustic, a small knife attached by thong to his waist. One catches the other, and they wrestle.]

[Close up on the boys faces, as they laugh and jostle.]

[CUT TO: The boys, a couple years older, walking through the darkened woods, sunlight shafting through the trees.]

NATHAN (O.S.):
It isn’t fair. How come you don’t get to go to school? I’ll miss you.

PAZU (O.S.):
I’ll still be here.

[Long shot of the woods, the sky darkening.]

PAZU (V.O.):
I’ll always be here.

I should say now, on the record, that I think what I’ve achieved this time is a fine validation of the hard and excellent work that the decent movie or TV trailer makers do, because basically, I make it look as hard as anything.

There’s a thread of deliberate parody in the piece, along with what I think is a really nice story, but I think they may get overwhelmed with the clunkiness and uncertainty of my dabbling with the format, which I tend to believe never gets scripted out normally anyway – falling instead to the skills of really quite talented editors instead.

Douglas and Xander do this stuff much better than I do, is what I’m saying.

But all that aside, it may divert you for a few minutes! I’d like to know what you think. You can read the whole piece here: http://elephantwords.co.uk/2008/07/15/the-imaginary/

Please comment either here, there, or in the forum thread attached to the piece.

It occurs to me that I haven’t been linking out to my EW pieces very consistently at all, recently. Actually, I’m considering doing a series of short retrospectives over here, taking in seven weeks at a time, since the very beginning. That might be interesting. But in the meantime, here are links to the pieces I’ve done since the last time I linked out to one:

09/06/08 – Meat-Free

03/06/08 – Rudy Of The Lost Heart

28/05/08 – The Other One

22/05/08 – WTF Mortality

16/05/08 – Heaven And Earth

10/05/08 – Gray’s Anatomy

My Elephant Words piece, on a 24-hour turnaround, went up late last night. It’s basically a string of ideas that occurred to me, all in a bluster, and I don’t know whether I really pulled them together enough for it to count as a working story, but there’s probably enough in there to make you go “oooh”.

It’s inspired by this picture by Mr David Baillie:

… and Lego.

It’s called Meat-Free, and it goes a little something like this:

“… Sometimes all it takes is just being too – maybe dumb, maybe naive – to get something done. Because if it doesn’t occur to you that an idea is something that no-one has ever made happen before, you don’t really have the chance to consider failure…”

I’ve not been all that happy with how my last few Elephants have turned out, so imagine my surprise when I wrote something both short enough to not kill brain-cells, and fun enough to still be fun, for this week’s outing.

It is based on this image by David Baillie:

And is a heartwarming piece of blank verse called “What We Found When We Cleared The House”

One bedside cabinet
On the unmoved side of the bed
Contains enough sex toys,
And in so many styles and fashions,
That it makes you weep openly.

It all sounds a little like that.

You should give it a go… you’ll like it, or your money back.

This week, Andrew Cheverton leaves Elephant Words for a time, to spend more time on his comic work. He will replaced in the short term by Rol Hirst.

Both Andy and Rol were founding contributors to Elephant Words, and it’s a big deal that one of them is leaving… and that one of them left before, but is back for more.

Andy’s Elephants can almost all be defined by a desire to experiment, and a need to always provide as solid a piece as possible. Rol’s, by a pitch perfect sardonic sense of humour and the ability to almost always make you commit that rarest of acts, the Laugh Out Loud.

For your reading pleasure, here are a few of my favourite pieces by the two authors so far:

Andy Cheverton:
The Scare Crows of Mars -

But Donny and me, we made it onto the surface of Mars.  The spaceship was dented because Sam was supposed to help.  We’re the first men on Mars.  That means it belongs to us now.

The Longshanks Bill Quartet -

Longshanks Bill Reaches The End Of The World
Longshanks Bill And The Great Space Elevator
Longshanks Bill Hits The Ground In The Sky
Longshanks Bill Falls Up To His Waist In Love

The Last Snow Of Summer -

If they allowed illegally cute women to be bag ladies, Cookie would be their queen.

On Montague Road -

There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.

Rol Hirst:
Keep Out Of Lake -

This is what I’m thinking as I stand outside her room, reading that old tin sign she’s got pinned on the door, ‘Keep Out Of Lake’, wondering if that’s like ‘Do Not Disturb’ where she comes from, wondering what I’m even doing here tonight.

They Were Robots All Along… -

“And the twist was – they were robots all along.”

On The Air -

Jesse reads the report like he’s supposed to, like he has every night for twenty-eight years, then he taps the screen that fires off Celine Dion on the playout system and stares out at the stars. Celine Dion! Has it really come to this?

I Can Read You Like A Book -

Of course you would. You’re no different to me. Unless you’re the sort who’d do it, but wouldn’t ever admit to it. In which case: at least I’m honest.

It’s Five O’Clock Nowhere -

Sometimes it felt like even the second hand was fighting a losing battle.

Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player -

They called it The Dangerous Interval, Diabolus In Musica – The Devil In Music.

Last week was my turn to post an image to Elephant Words. I made it myself. It is this:

Everyone did a nice job. Mine went last. In a quite exciting twist, it has been posted at 50 Years From Now almost simultaneously! I am awesome! (As is Monk at that site, of course.)

It is called “The Boulevard Of Broken Glass”. As an Elephant, it’s here, as a slice of the England of 50 Years From Now, here. Here’s a taste:

In some parts of town, the ground crunches underfoot – accumulated years of discarded glass, broken and ground down, coat the concrete pavements. The city gave up on maintaining these streets. Crossing the imaginary boundary from nTown to nHigh, Siân stepped onto one of these glittering pathways. Like a native, she took it in her stride.

I haven’t read any of the posts this week yet… The image is scaring the hell out of me with the lack of ideas I am having based on it, and I don’t want to confuse myself with the other writers’ smart thinkin’.