... Continued From Previous Post
First Time Buyers
It's
a truism that horror stories, for all their ghosts and ghouls, are reflections
of our real worries and fears. And
while it's true that the Big things like Death and Fate are scary, the fact is
we spend a lot of our time worrying about comparatively little things - money,
our jobs. Unemployment and homelessness.
And
maybe because we are worried about these things, we tend to demonise those
people who are made redundant or who lose their homes. It's easier to think
that what has happened to them is their
fault somehow, rather than something that could have happened to anyone.
The
real monster in this story is not the white figure running in the mist; like
Frankenstein's monster, it's one we've created ourselves.
Schrodinger's Box
I've
read a smattering of modern cosmology and physics books, and while it's
fascinating I can't say I understand it all. But it's always struck me that
there's huge level of imagination to
such writing, a scale and scope that is awesome, in the original sense of the
word.
The
'thought experiment' known as Schrodinger's Cat also has a perverse and
malicious ingenuity to it - it's easy to imagine an alternative reality where
Schrodinger wrote Twilight Zone style horror stories. In fact, if you believe
some theories of modern physics, this reality actually exists somewhere...
The
quotation that heads the story is from Schrodinger's original 1935 article where
he describes the experiment, which has the marvellous title Die gegenwärtige Situation
in der Quantenmechanik. A description of the experiment and its implications simple enough
for even a humanities graduate like me to understand can be found in the
excellent God and The New Physics by Paul Davies.
The Watchers
This
is the kind of story that makes me wish I hadn't
decide to write these notes at the back of the book, as I've no idea where the
central idea came from. There's some references to philosophy, and obviously
the whole thing is an exaggeration of feminist ideas about the objectification
of women... But other than that, I don't know. I just picked up a pen one day
(I still write all my first drafts by hand) and started writing it. Sometimes
it really is that easy.
Note
to readers: when an author tells you where he or she 'gets their ideas' they're
probably confused or lying.
To Be Continued...
Oh, and a couple of other things:
'Feed The Enemy' is now available on the German Amazon site (in English) as a Kindle Book. Click here if anyone is interested.
And this is a link to The Daily Bev, a 'newspaper' constructed from selected stories and links from my Twitter feed each day. It mainly details the ducking and diving of various indie authors, although there's sometimes a smattering of music, politics, and talking shite on there. It's a great site and easy to use, I really like the results. Check it out. (I'm @JHEverington on Twitter should anyone care...)
