Creepy Toad Ornaments

Right now, as I type this, a creepy toad ornament is looking at me.

This particular ornament is a little smaller than the size of a fist, made of dark wood. The upper jaw/head/back section is actually a lid, which conceals a small cavity for storing half-digested flies, lily pad crumbs, long-lost surgical forceps, or whatever else might be found inside a toad.

The creepy toad ornament came from somewhere in Sheffield. Miss-Matic saw it, and decided her life really wasn't complete without a creepy toad ornament, and so it came home with us.

Although the creepy toad ornament is ugly, it isn't inherently creepy. It's creepiness comes from the fact that it watches me.

You know those paintings that show up in Scooby-Doo episodes, where the eyes move and follow the Scooby gang?

Yeah, no, it's not like that.

And you know that feeling you get, when someone is watching you? When the hairs on your neck stand up, and you get those unexplainable chills?

Yeah, no, it's not like that either.

But no matter where I sit in the room, this maternally fornicating toad is always facing directly towards me.

I have no idea why. Every time I pass it, I straighten it out. I turn it perpendicularly away from the wall; I center it, so it faces the middle of the room. Misaligned objects also annoy Miss-Matic, so I've watched her with my own eyes, straightening this fucking toad thing...

And yet, when I'm sitting on the sofa, procrastinating, or reading, or watching TV, I'll glance up, and the creepy ornamental toad will be angled directly toward me again.

It's extremely unnerving. I mean, sometimes I like to scratch my balls when I'm sitting on this sofa. I don't want some voyeuristic toad ornament watching me.

To distract myself from whatever else I should be doing right now (writing, scratching my bits, turning the creepy toad ornament back the other way), I have developed five possible hypotheses to explain it. These are as follows:

1.  It's haunted.

This is the simplest and most straightforward of the hypotheses. The creepy toad ornament is haunted by the ghost of a dead toad. It warms itself against the chill of the grave by reorienting itself a number of degrees on a daily basis, so it can look at me, because I'm an interesting thing for a dead toad to look at.

2.  It's evil.

This is similar to the above theory, only the ornament is not haunted by a dead toad, but instead is the icon or avatar of an evil toad demon. It cools itself from the fires of hell by reorienting itself a number of degrees on a daily basis, so it can look at me, because I'm cool.

3.  It fancies me.

Whenever I see someone sexy, I like to look at them in a manner which makes them uncomfortable, and which invariably prompts them to describe me as creepy. Thus, applying similar logic, I am sexy and the toad ornament has the hots for me.

4.  Someone is breaking into my flat.

In this hypothesis, some prankster breaks into my flat on a daily basis to reorient the toad ornament by a few degrees, so that I might mistakenly believe the toad ornament fancies me. I have no idea who this prankster might be, but I believe such people usually have an accomplice called 'Jimmy', whose job it is to crack open the window so they can get in.

5.  I am the toad ornament.

If none of the other hypotheses hold, I can only conclude that the creepy toad ornament is a splintered shard of my own tortured subconscious, while I am likewise none other than a cloven chunk of the creepy toad ornament's maimed psyche. We stare at each other across the vast gulf that divides subjective consciousness, mirrors to the thin facades of each other's narcissistic solipsism; two abysses staring back at each other, wondering where the fuck this analogy might be going, whether it's time for a beer, and whether both our lives might be better if we just looked at the TV instead.

It is possible, of course, that none of these hypotheses are correct - but I'll be damned if I can think of more reasonable explanations.

In any case, I want to scratch my bits, so I'm going to turn it away now.

Dropping Things Again

I'm good at dropping things.

So good, in fact, that sometimes my natural dropping-things instincts kick in when I'm not even trying.

This is usually fine, except when I'm holding a thing - especially a thing that should not be dropped - like a baby.

Dropping babies is the kind of thing that can get you in trouble with babies' parents, concerned bystanders and officers of the law - not to mention make you generally unattractive to women. I'm also informed it's not good for the baby either - but what's it going to do, beat me up? I'm more concerned about the women.

My fear of holding babies kept me away from them for a long time. I was thirty-years-old before I first held a baby. Its name was Kate (Hi Kate! Don't read this. I like to swear), and I struggled to think of it as a she - because, to me, it was basically just something that shouldn't be dropped.

I sat on a sofa, holding this funny-smelling small human cub, while only two rooms distant was a kitchen with drawers full of sharp kitchen implements - knives and skewers and other pointy sticks with unfathomable (but presumably culinary) purposes.

What if I dropped the baby on those knives?

So I sat on the sofa, terrified that baby Kate would slip from my arms and land on the knives in the kitchen, suffering coo-ing and aww-ing and people joking that the baby and I had the same hair-style.

And just as I felt my grip loosening - just as the baby began to slip from my arms onto the knives in the drawer in the kitchen - someone took it from me, and I slumped back on the sofa, sweating and palpitating and wishing the damn thing would just grow up already so we could have a beer together and laugh about the time I nearly killed it.

Since then I have held approximately zero babies, but now I have a new and terrifying dropping-things related fear.

I have recently found a job to do around my writing. I work in a cafe. I serve hot beverages to parents who bring babies into the cafe. I carry hot liquids between tables and up steps. Sometimes those babies lie in prams or baby carriages, next to their mothers' tables, dreaming sweet dreams of boobs or first-person pukers or whatever, and I have to get a hot maraschino or chocotato or oversized three-person pot of tea past the baby, to the table.

This is not a good idea. I have a terrible fear of bathing newborn nippers in scalding liquid at least three times a shift. I also have alarming doubts about the structural integrity of teapots, of serving trays and saucers. Visions swim through my head of ceramic cracking, handles breaking, tiny lungs screaming.

I don't even have a very good grasp of the horizontal. There's so much that could go wrong. I wouldn't trust me with solids, let alone liquids. Let alone hot liquids.

But on the other hand, I get an incredible amout of job satisfaction every time I deliver a drink without something dying.

The sound of a saucer settling gently on a tabletop is sweeter than the sound of a woman calling me to bed. The thunk of a tea-pot delivered with the same amount of tea with which it was filled is like hearing my name chanted by a victorious army, standing over the bloody corpses of our enemies on the field of battle. When a young mother thanks me for bringing her latte without killing her baby, it's like hearing the doors of Valhalla creak open just wide enough for Odin's hand to reach out and give me a high-five.

I am the great service-industry hero. Come and watch me in action. It's thrilling. You'll be ooh-ing and ahh-ing with excitement as I weave my way between the tables. Bring your dates. Bring your kids.

Just order something chilled.

A Tribute to James Herbert

British horror author James Herbert passed away yesterday, aged 69.

Herbert was one of my favourite writers as a teenager. I much preferred his style of horror to that of some of his contemporaries. Herbert's writing was simpler, sparser, less baroque - and it packed a greater punch.

I don't recall being scared by a James Herbert novel - but I certainly remember being horrified. There's a scene in Shrine where someone is trapped in a burning car. The protagonist looks back and sees that unfortunate soul's face pushing out through a mask of melting glass as they try to escape the vehicle. That stuff stays with you. The image induced by those few lines of text.

That was horror.

The other reason I liked James Herbert's books was (of course) for the sex scenes. His books were liberally sprinkled with them. I learned sex could be kinky from Lair. I learned what a blowjob was from James Herbert - possibly from Shrine (I haven't possessed a copy in years, so I can't check). A friend in school used the word, and I didn't know what it meant, so I risked high-school humiliation by asking him.

'What she does with the crème de menthe in Shrine,' he replied. For a few months I thought all blowjobs were performed with the aid of minty drinks, but I soon figured it out.

Herbert's style of horror ranged from speculative fiction to the supernatural, through detective-style narratives or apocalyptic scenarios. Some of my favourite scenes were those in which people themselves become the danger - for instance in The Fog, or The Dark, where insanity and violence sets in, and affected individuals and crowds become sources of terror. These scenes undoubtedly influenced my love of zombie movies and fiction today.

And of course, there was the rats trilogy - The Rats, Lair, and Domain, in which we became the hunted, and death comes from the shadows with teeth and fur and skittering feet. These books were graphic and uncompromising, brutal and bloody, and as a teenager, exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read.

James Herbert was a major influence on me, and a champion of his genre. Fiction would not be the same if his work hadn't flown the flag for horror, and would certainly be much poorer without it.

Applause

I live opposite a pub - which would be great if, a) I was deaf, b) I could afford to drink, and c) it wasn't full of morons. Unfortunately, none of these things are true, so instead of going there I usually content myself to lie in bed in the small hours of the morning, listening to the drunken patrons screaming at each other like taxi-seeking monkeys, entertaining me with loud stories of the time they flung their favourite poo at a fellow monkey before trying to get it into a threesome with a genetically not-dissimilar kebab.

But Miss-Matic and I had a guest to stay the other day, so we scoured the back of the sofa for enough loose-change to show him the sights and sounds of our small town, starting by going across the road for a drink.

Upon arriving in the pub, pre-lubricated with wine and beer and the smell of a suspicious vodka that I didn't allow closer than arm's length, we discovered that a band was playing to a bunch of locals and their mothers. A girl with reddy-pink or pinky-red hair was screaming into a microphone. I couldn't really discern what she was singing, but she sounded rather angry.

We got drinks at the bar and watched the band for a while. The girl continued to rage, and I soon began to wonder if she was angry with the microphone itself.

No, not just angry - furious.

She clutched it like she was trying to throttle it, to squeeze its scrawny neck until the head popped off in a gout of blood and sparks.

When the song ended, the audience clapped enthusiastically. I guess they had all had unpleasant experiences with microphones too. I tried to join in the applause, but I was holding my pint.

Clapping with a drink is hard - I just ineffectually tapped the side of my glass. The microphone had no idea that I was on the side of the reddy-pink or pinky-red-haired girl. It couldn't hear me at all.

I stamped my feet for a bit, but Miss-Matic told me to stop because I looked 'weird and stompy'.

I started to call out, 'clap clap clap clap clap', but she didn't like that either.

The band embarked on their next song - a hard-rocking tale of how a microphone killed a young girl's dog or something - and I used this time to plan how best to applaud when it concluded.

I figured I would use the power of plurality - the dexterity of the duo - the adaptability of aquaintanceship! - by clapping one-handed with my friend. That way we could both hold our beers and clap the band at the same time.

And so, when the song ended, that's what we did.

Unfortunately, our timing was off, so we looked like one-armed four-year-olds playing pat-a-cake without any understanding of the rules - or maybe over-enthusiastic terra-phile aliens practising congratulatory high-fives.

The red-or-pink-haired girl announced their last song. The way she introduced it led me to believe it was going to be a cover, a song I should know, a famous hit by a famous band. Maybe it was, but I'm not aware of many songs about revenge on a microphone for running over a cat.

I nodded along, enjoying the tune, but all the while wondering how I could best show my appreciation for the band without having to relinquish my beer. It was easy for Miss-Matic - she had rings on her fingers, so she could still clap by chinking them against her glass. It was while pondering this that the solution came to me:

I could just chink my beer against my belt buckle!

Simple and effective.

So the band played on, and when the final chord died, I gave an enthusiastic 'Woo!', and proceeded to show my appreciation of their playing - and antipathy towards microphones - by chinking my pint-glass against my belt buckle.

And that's why it looked like I peed myself on Saturday night.

Infected Connection

Ladies and gentlemen, cats and dogs, cakes and confectionary products everywhere.

I am pleased to announce that my novel Infected Connection is now available as an ebook.

There's a NEW trailer!

There's a website! With extras and FAQs and even a mobile version!

But most importantly, there's a novel!

So if you fancy some high-tech horror with your tea and toast, technological terror with your coffee and cake, or science-fiction scares with your beer and bacon sandwiches, there are links to Smashwords and a bunch of different Amazon sites, here.

* * *

In other news...

Read the above again!

It's exciting! And Lappy II, my poor beleaguered laptop, deserves a well-earned high-five for making it through all this without turning into a flaming wreck!

Self ePublishing

It's time.

I started writing about 12 years ago - which translates to approximately 1.5 years of writing, and 10.5 of furious and intense procrastination, masturbation and staring out of windows, waiting for fiction to assemble itself on the screen before me, and playing tower defence flash games when it did not.

In this time I've manage to squeeze from my creative sphincter four full, and two half, novels; a smattering of short stories, and two depressing poems. Two of these novels were sent off to the Club of Literary Agents, where they got drunk, and nobody asked them to dance, and they came back home at the end of the evening and had a wank and cried themselves to sleep. The others just got stuck having pre-club drinks at the Need-Another-Redraft bar.

But I'm not getting any younger, and there comes a time when if you want something done, then, damn it, you're just going to have to do it yourself.

If that something is the retrieval of a nice cold beer from the fridge, a nice cold snack from the fridge, or a nice cold beer-snack combo from the fridge, then that's easily handled without too much fuss - even if it isn't quite as satisfying as having those things delivered to you by topless concubines with nothing better to do. 

But if that something is publishing a piece of fiction you've wrestled and fought and molested over many years, it's bloody stressful.

Publishing a novel online is a huge gamble. Many print publishers will not consider any work that has been previously published, even partly, online. Someone who goes this route goes it alone, and risks the brutal crushing of all their literary hopes and dreams through the venture. 

If the alternative to success, (even limited) recognition of one's efforts, and motivation to continue writing is despair and admission of defeat, then the stakes could be as stratospherically-high as finding oneself self-defenestrating from the window of a call-centre, or - worse still - answering phones in one.

Self publishing is (arguably) no longer looked upon as the vanity exercise as it once was. The world is changing. Bands are going solo without the sticky fingers of record companies in their pies - one of my favourite bands, Protest the Hero, have recently crowdfunded their fourth studio album, releasing themselves from the constraints of traditional record company contracts. Independent film-makers are producing daring content on which movie studios would never take a chance, and more and more directors are realising they don't need mammoth studios to get concepts onto the screen and in front of an audience.

Sure, there's undoubtedly a sense of validation that comes with 'traditional' publishing - that someone somewhere, with their own interests, or those of the company they work for, deems your work to be of a profitable nature. But this system implies and introduces a level of censorship into the industry. Works of merit may not always be profitable, and such a criteria should not constitute our definition of the word merit.

My time has come. Regardless of how this pans out, I am going solo. I am going to be a sister who's doing it for himself.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I am both pleased and terrified to announce the self-epublication, later this month, of my hi-tech horror/thriller novel, Infected Connection.

Forget the blurb. How about a video teaser?

Yep. That's me, when I'm not being a cartoon. I shaved off my beard for that. And that's Miss-Matic in the background.

Now you know what I was doing with those wire spiders - even though only one made it into the final cut.

It's been a long process, making this teaser. The processing requirements for both the video editing, image manipulation, and 3D graphics were a little too much for LappyII (sucessor to the awesome Lappy, and star of such exploits as striking asphalt before an important presentation, and my ventures into speech recognition). Now it overheats and reboots after only 20 or 30 minutes of activity. I can no longer use it on my lap, and I've had to raise it off the table to help the airflow through the vents (yes, my laptop is literally up on blocks as I type this).

I've invested a lot of time and energy into this project, and it all comes to a head this month.

More details will be forthcoming. The novel's website is up and running, at infectedconnection.com, where you can find the blurb, and cover. Another video - a more trailer-like trailer - is on its way too.

So, there we go. I'm trying to get the novel as much exposure as possible before I launch it on Amazon - so if any of you lovely people would like to visit the teaser's YouTube page and comment or give it the thumbs up (please!), share it on Facebook or your blogs, scare your friends and colleagues, or whatever... I would be very, very, grateful, and promise to rank you just above cheesecake and just below otters on the list of things that I love.

The Tale of the Mysterious Bong

I was lying in bed the other night, working out exactly how I would melt the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to drown the low-lying areas of the world if I were a supervillain, when my musings were interrupted by a bong.

By this, I don't mean that an oversized piece of drug paraphernalia flew through my window on smokey wings of purple haze and struck me on the head, saving coast-dwellers around the globe from getting their socks wet - but that something, somewhere, went bong.

'Ah,' I thought. 'My old nemesis, the mysterious bonging noise. You have tracked me down once again!'

Only the bonging noise isn't so mysterious any more. I solved this riddle sometime last year.

Follow me, dear reader, back in time to my youth, when, to while away the hours waiting for sleep to claim me, before misanthropy grew in my soul, like furry green stuff in a long-forgotten, half-drunk mug of tea under the bed, I would work out how to save the world from sea-level rise if I were a superhero.

In those naive days, in the dark of night, there would occasionally come a bong.

It became a frequent occurance, and had no explanation. Nobody else seemed to hear it.

Imaginary heroics would be forgotten. I would jump out of bed, and peer out into the night, looking for the source of the bonging noise. But the night was still and silent. The noise was not repeated, and I would reluctantly go back to bed, frustrated and mystified.

The noise followed me over the years. I left the family home, went to university, and shared houses with friends.

Bong!

Nobody else knew what I was talking about.

I would ask my friends. 'Do you ever hear a bonging noise in the night?'

They looked at me like I was weird, and offered me the bong.

I would ask my girlfriend, if I had one. 'Hey! Are you awake? Did you hear that?'

'What?'

'A bong!'

'Bongs don't make noises.'

'No, I mean, a bong noise.'

'You're imagining things. Pass the bong?'

But I wasn't imagining things. There really was a bonging noise, and it followed me around the country in the subsequent years.

The bong was impossible to explain. It seemed to come from outside, or occasionally underneath. It sounded exactly - onomatopoeically - like it was written. Bong. A metallic noise. A strange reverberating impact. A bong.

I heard it in England. I heard it in Wales. I heard it in Scotland, and even, I'm sure, far across the globe, I heard it a couple of times when I was in New Zealand.

I found an old diary once, when moving homes, and I re-read some of my old ramblings. And there I found, written in a drunken scrawl across both pages:

What fuck is that bonging noise?!? I've been hearing it all my life!! What the fuuuuuuuckk??!?

The nature of the bong in the night clearly troubled me.

I could think of many things that might make strange noises at night. Creaks and cracks, boinks and doinks, clanks and thuds and scrapes and crashes. But what would make a bong?

It could be a gong, I supposed. A gong might make a bong. But I didn't know even one person with a gong, and found it hard to believe that there were closet gong-bongers all around the world, waiting until I was trying to sleep before giving their gongs lone and mysterious bongs.

But then, last year, I figured it out.

Miss-Matic and I were living in the north of the country in a pretty skanky flat. I'd heard the bonging noise once or twice there, and still occasionally wondered what the hell it could be, but largely it had become part of the background mystery of existence.

I was in the kitchen, making mugs of tea. Kettle on first; then get the mugs out. Tea bags in the mugs, then sugar for myself, foul chemical substitute for Miss-Matic. Get the milk out, ready, and take a moment to scoff at the notion of those deluded fools who add milk before the water.

I poured boiling water onto the tea bags and stirred and squished them until the correct consistency of tea was achieved.

I slid the mugs across the counter to the pedal bin, and placed my foot on the pedal.

I pressed down with my foot - a little too hard.

The metal lid of the bin swung upwards, fast.

It struck the underside of the counter.

Bong!

My brain stopped working. My eyes defocused. All the pieces fell into place.

I removed my foot, then enthusiastically repeated the action, opening the bin again.

Bong!

And again, and again. Bong! Bong!

Many a mysterious bong was heard by our neighbours that night, let me tell you.

Miss-Matic wandered in, wondering what the hell I was doing. 

Bong!

I'd figured it out. All these years, I had been hearing overenthusiastic openings of metal pedal bins under, or against, kitchen counters in nearby homes.

Maybe I only heard it when they had doors or windows open. Maybe originally it had even been my own father, making tea for my mother, late at night, that had disturbed me all those many years ago.

Maybe this was actually a much more common noise, that I only ever registered in the silence of the night, when I wasn't watching TV or listening to music, when there were no sounds of traffic, no sirens or voices to fill the air.

Bong!

The mystery was solved.

Now, whenever I hear the bong in the night, I can relax and go to sleep, dreaming my dreams of villanous mayhem, knowing that people are not littering their own kitchens, and that all is right with the world.

Bong!

Guest art! Guest art! This post's picture comes courtesy of the amazingly talented Mister Hope!

Check out his work at misterhope.com - especially if you like things that are awesome and/or superheroes.