All Posts by Bill

A lazy blog, just because I’m launching a new book, Alternative Dimension. It’s actually been published before, under a pseudonym, but I’ve given it a new cover, made a few tweaks to the content, and am risking alienating readers because it isn’t the usual crime type stuff. But I thought it worth a blog because the writing of it was different from any of my others.

Several years ago I spent a lot of time in the online role-playing game Second Life™. I was researching a story but I found lots of interesting writers’ things happening there. I was also intrigued by the seductive experience of seeming to inhabit a separate reality, which had its own (seemingly impossible) possibilities, and at the same time still be me at a keyboard. It was great meeting people I’d never have come across otherwise. It was also surprising how willing many of them were to reveal all sorts of things about themselves to a total stranger. Sitting in your own home letting an avatar speak for you fools you into thinking you’re anonymous, produces a false sense of security.

Anyway, I wrote several short stories based on events and people there. They were completely separate, self-contained pieces in which the main aim was to be funny but, as the reviews for the first version of the book pointed out, beneath the humour there’s a darkness. They all said very nice things about the humour and, thankfully gave it prominence, but they also used expressions such as ‘a nightmare scenario’, ‘dystopian menace’, ‘perfection seems to exist but the avatars … cast increasingly long and threatening shadows’, ‘deep points well padded in humour to make them more palatable’. And the one I liked best of all, referring to the apparent reality and independence of the avatars, said: ‘This is actually quite chilling if you allow yourself to think about it. Kirton’s humour can protect you only so far!’

The strange thing was that I wasn’t fully aware of that darkness until I started re-reading them with a view to publishing them as a story collection. As I did so, various themes started coming through – not heavy, deep-thinking, philosophical stuff, but observations on people, their dreams, their satisfactions, and the escapes they were trying to achieve by giving themselves a ‘second life’. There was also the whole fascinating area of a world which integrated the structured algorithms, software and electronic logic of computers with the unstable, idiosyncratic impulses of people.

In the end, it was obvious that nearly all the stories’ narratives were driven by similar impulses and it seemed natural to start grouping them together to show how the impulses developed. When I’d done that, two of them (which now constitute the final two chapters of the book), gave me the idea for an overall narrative that could link them all into a single journey. Writing it was completely absorbing and the various characters in the different episodes all became illustrations of aspects of the game experience that marked the progress of the central character.

So it’s given me lots to think about. All my previous books have been written in a linear sequence, with each episode conditioning in some way those which followed it. Here, it began with a set of fully formed, self-contained elements which had to be stitched together.

That, then, is how it came into being. It’s also a sales pitch. For the moment it’s only available on Kindle – here in the USA and here in the UK. The paperback will be ready soon..

I like most kinds of sport. Unlike almost every other aspect of life, sport has structure, rules, meaning. When you play or watch a game, you can briefly shed the knowledge that everything else you do is pointless and accidental and, until it ends, enjoy performing or observing actions which make sense, which are deliberate and aim to achieve a specific, designed and agreed result. Golfers who thank their Lord Jesus for helping them to guide that little white ball into a hole don’t get it. If, when they lost matches, they heaped scorn and derision on him for his failings or claimed that he’d missed the team bus, that would be more consistent and make more sporting sense, but invoking his name introduces an element which is not covered by the rules and is thus extraneous. Games have a beginning, a middle and an end. They are self-contained pockets of significance in an otherwise absurd continuum.

But modern life is moving so quickly from the values which used to inform it that some games are breaking out of the straitjacket of their codes and seeking to become as unstructured and chaotic as mainstream living. The experience, for example, of watching football has become philosophically far more challenging. By the way, the Americans call their version of the game soccer, because they already have a game called football, one in which the ball is passed and controlled with the hands, which, in an absurd universe, makes complete sense.

So what’s happened to football to bring about the change? In a word, money. It’s a clear fact that paying men grotesquely inflated sums can potentially ruin their health. There’s a distinct statistical correlation between the size of the weekly pay cheque and their pain thresholds. When fouled, female players, who earn relatively little compared with their male counterparts, get back up and get on with the game. But the lightest of touches (and sometimes even when there’s no contact at all), has men writhing in agony, often compounding the injury by doing several rolls along the turf. The neural pathways are also affected because, from whatever anatomical location the contact or near-contact occurs, the pain shoots immediately to their faces, which they bury in their hands, emitting through their fingers agonised cries which are pitiful to hear.

The same distortion occurs in their moral equilibrium too because, while women accept the referee’s decisions with rarely any signs of protest, men see injustices being perpetrated at every whistle blast and crowd round officials to help them understand how the rules of the game are being distorted by their interpretations of them.

So football seems to have changed irrevocably. It’s moving closer and closer to the situations penned by Ionesco, Beckett and that famous goalkeeper, Albert Camus. To complete the progression, all it now needs is for the ubiquitous gender gap to be closed. My contribution to the debate about the future of our national sport is simply stated: if we want to see women playing the game as it should be played – with histrionics, simulation, immaturity and an awareness that the ego is more important than the team – we need to pay them much more.

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I know people are scared of spiders. They’re a sort of template for creepy, unnatural monsters. That brilliant old movie The Incredible Shrinking Man has many very scary sequences, but the best is the one with the spider. They seem to represent all the dark, nasty things that lurk in our subconscious. They’re also much better than we are in many ways – not just connected with making webs or knowing the best recipes which have flies as the main ingredient. I don’t know if they have muscles but, whether they do or not, whatever it is that makes them able to scuttle so effectively works much better than our tendons and things.

I’m writing about them because I’ve just had to get rid of one from the bath. I’ve been cleaning the bit of the house I use as a study because it’s also where guests stay when they come (the only occasions when it sees a vacuum cleaner or duster). This spider had been in the bath for about a week (it’s a spare bathroom). I’d seen it every day and marvelled at the fact that it was often in exactly the same place it had been when I’d looked several hours or even a whole day before. We’re incapable of standing still that long and, even if we did, when we eventually decided to move, we’d creak, be racked with pain, stagger and generally feel terrible. But, if they’re disturbed, they can take off at top speed immediately and you don’t hear any spidery cries of ‘Oh shit, that hurts’.

Another thing. When I eventually had to get rid of my creepy visitor, I got a glass, put it over him, slipped a sheet of paper under the glass to keep him in and took him to the front door to let him go. I upended the glass, he fell about four feet (the equivalent of us jumping from the 15^th storey I’d guess), landed perfectly without bouncing and took off at Usain Bolt speed right away. Which is all very impressive.

Coincidentally, the following day I heard a spider expert on the radio talking about them. (BTW, don’t quote any of this in your PhD thesis on arachnids because I haven’t checked the facts and may be remembering them wrongly.) I’m sure he said they had 8 eyes, some on top of their head, some in front. In  addition to that, the tactics they have to use when they mate could very usefully be employed by most if not all men.

Very wisely, they’re scared stiff of females. Certainly some, if not all, make sure they tap out some great rhythms on her web before they actually sidle up to her. I don’t know if they’re special, agreed signals or the latest in arachnid Zumba routines, but they let her know they’re not a Big Spidery Mac. Makes sense when you think of what the female might do to you otherwise.

And the pièce de résistance is delivered by the one (or maybe more) which has (have) the courtesy and common sense to bring her a gift of a juicy meal. This level of romanticism is rewarded when she’s so busy enjoying it that she doesn’t notice him having his evil way with her as she eats.

We can learn a lot from these enterprising creatures if only we stop squishing them..