A review of State of Change!

Well, some kind soul has reviewed my free pdf novel, State of Change, over on the Cover to Cover reading blog. It's a very fair review, so go ahead and read if you have been interested in reading but never taken the plunge. You can read it online or download a pdf version right here.

This might be my first fiction review EVER! I swear to God it's not a sock puppet!

State of Change

Well, that's it: all ten part are out. State of Change is now available as a single pdf document here, but if you want to read it online the links, in order, are:

Part One: The Fear
Part Two: The Offer
Part Three: A Bit Like A Lobotomy
Part Four: The New Direction
Part Five: The Silver Machine
Part Six: Body Fuck/Mind Fuck
Part Seven: Psychedelic Super Nazis
Part Eight: Cuba Street Improv
Part Nine: The Not Quite Death of Arlo Makepeace Dylan
Part Ten: The End

I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

State of Change Part Ten: The End

Well, here we are, the final part. How does it all end? Well, only one way to find out, right? I know how it ends up, of course, but I didn't know when I wrote it, and that's quite obvious to me now. I'd go so far to say that things don't really end well.

Looking back, it's very clear that this is the work of a writer figuring out how to write a longer work. I'd already published a few shorts, and felt I had that under control, but how to make a longer work? How to sustain an idea through the complete movement? I now think the key is to have your end, however vague it might be, in sight. No matter how lost you get - and I got very lost here - you've got that ending standing in as a pole star keeping you on track.

Another important lesson I learned was revision. Early on, writing this on an Amiga, I had a catastrophic disc error which left me to type the whole thing in again from a print out. This gave me the freedom to drop stuff I didn't like, stuff that ultimately wasn't worth re-typing. The tyranny of what's there - you've got to break away from it.

Twice this thing attracted a publisher, and never made it to print. Well, it's still not published, but I feel it's out of my system now, even if only ten or so people have looked at it, let alone read the whole thing. Well, onward. I have other unpublised novels that I hope you'll be able to enjoy in the future - stay tuned for something else at some unspecified time. Maybe not coming soon, maybe not coming at all, but... er...

State of Change Part Nine: The Not Quite Death of Arlo Makepeace Dylan

Part Nine of my short novel State of Change has been posted at its own blog. I quite like this bit, and I think it worked well on the whole. The Dick reference is a bit heavy handed, but I think it does a good job of slowly moving to the inevitable. My opinions on dystopias haven't changed, either.

Nearly at the end now, one more part and that's it. Then what? Hm!

State of Change Part Eight: Cuba Street Improv

Ah, Cuba Street! This, of course, was written years ago when Cuba Street was still (just) clinging to its boho vibe. Midnight Espresso was run by lunatics, the Working Men's Club operated out of that disgusting old hotel (the name of which I've forgotten), Mr Smiles had yet to be bull-dozed for the benefit of the motorway, the dusty empty World Trade Centre was still home to dodgy go-nowhere importers and East European trade missions. Silvios and Slowboat, Konditerei Aida (that used to advertise before the movies) and The Hole in the Wall Club. It may be hard to believe now, but the Matterhorn was once a poky little coffee shop selling sausage rolls and watery tea.

Time was, there was a line-up of second hand bookshops, and dole day could be happily spent sifting through the shelves looking for ancient artefacts at a bargain price. They've all been replaced by coffee shops now, feeding kiwi coffee snobbery (one of my old home's least appealing features, although food snobbery in general was well under weigh before I left). The Ferret bookshop still endures, as of my last visit, and I urge you to poke your nose in to its dusty, quirky wilfully anti-commercial corners to see if you can still catch a whiff of the way things were.

I guess if there's one thing I got wrong it was which way the Street would go. Obviously, I was writing about the present then, not the future, and I did understand how it was all being compromised and commodified, but little did I suspect the extent of the puke-inducing yuppie-fication that has occurred.


All of which doesn't have much to do with part eight of State of Change. Here we find Dylan at last backed into a corner and seeking a way out. What options are the left for him? Can he find a way out? Is a dignified exit still a possibility? Read on!

State of Change: no new episode this week

I've been at a wedding and therefore have missed a week of updating State of Change. Part eight will appear next Sunday. In the meantime, here's a handy catch-up sheet for those following at home

The Epigraph
Which is pretty important and, I think has come true in the years since I first read it. Here it is, since it's not very long:

“No longer content to wait for social movements to bubble up from the ‘burbs, young, fresh and sniffing for product, a cute symbiosis of media outlets and cultural product firms synthesize them between themselves. ...Far from being a credible claim to futurity, the Marketing Plan follows a relentlessly sideways logic of replacing one product-rhetoric-art’n’theory mix with the next, different from the last in exactly the same way as the last was different to the batch before that. ...Hype may very well be the future of culture.” - McKenzie Wark, “Cyberhype”, World Art, November 1994.

Introduction
Some words of excuse by the author.

Part One: The Fear
In which we are introduced to our hero, Arlo Makepeace Dylan, and his millieu.

Part Two: The Offer
Dylan hears some bad news and is thrown a lifeline.

Part Three: A Little Bit Like A Lobotomy
Dylan undergoes brain surgery and meets his new flatmates.

Part Four: The New Direction
Dylan has some unusual experiences and attends a party.

Part Five: The Silver Machine
Some more unusual experiences, and another party.

Part Six: Mind Fuck/Body Fuck
Things get a bit nasty and a decisive event occurs.

Part Seven: Psychedelic Supernazis
In which a Belgian is accidentally murdered.

Only three(ish) parts to gonow, true believers!

State of Change Part Seven: Psychedelic Super Nazis

I've posted part seven of my novella State of Change over at its own blog. Things start to get really weird now, and a life time's reading of Fortean and conspiracy stuff begins to show. Some questions get answered, some new ones come up and a Belgian gets machine gunned. There's something for everyone this time around!

State of Change Part Six: Mind Fuck/Body Fuck

You'll be excited to hear that part six features some of the harshest of the sex scenes. By this point I was really trying to push myself in that direction, dealing with my own prudery and thinking a bit about buttons that no one likes pushing (I suppose some sickos do). I've pared it back a little for this version, and added a few lines to emphasise the tediousness of it without actually making it tedious, a fine line to navigate!

The egregious Curtis is based ona guy used to know, vaguely, but in retrospect I don't think this little bit of "comedy" works so well. I think it's happening too much in my head, not enough on the page. MUST TRY HARDER!

This part also explicitly introduces some of the philosophical content about reality, causation and how (and if) events follow one from the other. There's more in part seven, where the events depicted here throw a spanner into whatever it is that the blue guy – Manisola the Teacher, as I call him right now – is up to.

This is obviously the climax of the novel (if you'll excuse the expression) and the pieces are now all in place for the denoument (such as it is) to play out.

State of Change Part Five: The Silver Machine

I've posted part five of my short novel State of Change over on its own blog. This episode sees some plot hints being dropped at Zac's part, and then Dylan decamps for home only to discover a party going on at his house.

The description of the party at Dylan's house is pretty much like the sorts of parties I used to go to at about this time, a couple of hundred people squeezed into an Edwardian weatherboard house up in the hills of Brooklyn, Newton, Rosenheath or Thorndon (in fact, while the scene takes place in Brooklyn, the header photo is of Thorndon... it's hard work finding CC licensed photos that fit!) The line about being the oldest person there is an actual conversation I had one night with my friend Peter Campbell at a party in a warehouse space around the top of Willis Street one long ago Saturday.

This marks the halfway point, more or less, of the story. I've established Dyaln's situation and the problem he finds himself in - he's a fading TV star, basically, trying and experimental new technology which may be more than it seems in the hopes of reviving his career. In a longer work, I'd say we would have been just entering the central part of the novel where the characters and questions would be developed and the shape of the key concerns would begin to emerge.

Well, it doesn't quite end up that way and I'd say the work's biggest problem - aside from the prose, which is a little rougher than I'm happy with, generally speaking - is the structure. There's good stuff yet to come (and I think the prose improves too!) but I can see the struggles I am having with plot and structure.

But keep reading, lots of funny sex and violence yet to come!

State of Change Part Four: The New Direction

I've just posted part four of my short novel, State of Change. We're coming up to halfway, and the story's shifting into high gear. We see the new inplant in action, and attend one of Zac's Hefner-cult parties.

This episode shows its age a little when we learn that the device is just a kind of augmented reality. I suppose it has a kind of Timeless Cronenberg mind-fuck appeal to it, but it's the sort of thing the young people do with a pair of specs these days (often alongside rather opaque "haptic systems"). Additionally, our hero receives an urgent message via fax. Viva the mid-90s!

State of Change part three: A Little Bit Like a Lobotomy

Part three of my short novel in ten parts, State of Change, is now live on its own blog. 

Things are beginning to happen now. Dylan's agreed to try out a mysterious new medium that will either revolutionise popular entertainment or turn his brain to mush. We get a vivid surgery scene, and Dylan nips home to meet his flatmates. These people were based on various flatmates I've had over the years, and reading it again after so long is a slightly odd experience. You forget all about these people, who were a vital (even intimate) part of your life for short periods of time, until you turn over an old diary entry or letter that brings it all flooding back...

Maybe when I'm done, I'll write an afterword about how real life and fantasy mixed in this story, for my own interest, at least.

State of Change

I've posted part two of my short novel State of Change over on my State of Change blog. Those of you who missed part one can read it right here!

State of Change

Today, I launch my little foray into online self-publishing in the shape of my short novel, State of Change.

This was never my intent in blogging. I started off just looking for an outlet that was somewhere between a journal and a fanzine, somewhere I could blather about whatever took my fancy without having to worry too much about whether anyone else was interested. It's a place for me to blow off some steam, but with enough discipline to make it creatively useful rather than just an indulgent blow hole.

Well, I dunno how well I've succeeded at that, but i get a bit of traffic, and I think that maybe I can capture some of this to promote my mission in lilfe, my fiction writing.

I'm blog a bit more about my fiction in the coming months, but I'm going to statr of with State of Change. For this purpose, I have established a second blog where it'll be published in ten parts between now and the autumn. After that, I'll put it all together in a pdf and then... well, I don't know. It'll disappear into obscurity, I guess.

Well, with out further ado, here's a link to the introduction and to part one. I'll be publishing every Sunday between now and ten weeks from now, so tell your friends (but maybe not your Mum as it gets a bit saucy in places).