Don’t want to turn the blog into a quote-fest, but this is relevant to something new I just started working on:

“We do have one thing going for us. Miss Watkins was a nobody. She was a drifter. No family, no close friends. She said she had hitch-hiked East from Idaho. So she won’t be missed”.

That’s Mayor Vaughan’s closing remark on the one off freak shark attack to Chief Brody in Jaws by Peter Benchley. I haven’t read the book since I was a kid and @squeezeomatic was kind enough to send me a neat edition to reread. The book lasted 35 years with no idiot scribbling in it and then I come along with my pen.

I’ve started getting asked the ideas question recently. Where do they come from, or more precisely where do I get them from. The easy answer is the same place as everyone else.

I read a lot and that helps. And if opportunity knocks then ideas have me on speed dial. The above quote jumped out of me in relation to something very far removed from sharks and that something came to me almost fully fleshed out when a quick look online for a character name wound up three hours later with the sun coming up and an iPad full of notes.

I was asked about naming things last week too. Nipped into the BBC to do that so if the few words of mine make it into something linkable I’ll drop the URL here.

Packing for a funeral. Well, not the funeral itself – what could I possibly need?* But I will be up north for a few days. Winging it really.

While waiting for stuff to charge I was reading The Tokyo Montana Express by Richard Brautigan. Here is something he called The Tomb of the Unknown Friend:

I saw somebody on the street yesterday that I almost knew very well. It was a man with a kind and interesting face. Too bad we had never met before. We might have been very close friends if only we had met . When I saw him I almost felt like stopping and suggesting that we have a drink and talk about old times, mutual friends and acquaintances: whatever happened to so and so? and do you remember the night when we…?

The only thing missing was that we had shared no old times together to talk about because you have to meet somebody before you can do that.

The man walked by me without any recognizing expression. My face wore the same mask, but inside I felt as if I almost knew him. It was really a shame that the only thing that separated us from being good friends was the stupid fact that we had never met.

We both disappeared in opposite directions that swallowed any possibility of friendship.

I’ve been overwhelmed – truly overwhelmed – by the correspondence I’ve had over the past week. I’m glad something in what I wrote helped a few people and am humbled by the response.

I’m still working my way through and replying. Thank you.

* I guess you could crack wise and reply “a black suit”. I don’t own one. I’m winging that too.

1972:

That’s my mum, Christine, holding on to the little bundle of joy that would turn into this large bundle of idiocy. The guy trying to work out where I came from would be Michael senior and next to him is my grandmother, Mary Jessie.

She died in 1999, my dad went in 1988 and I got the news about my mum this morning. She went into hospital last week, was diagnosed with pneumonia and died sometime over the weekend.

I spoke to her on Thursday.

That the news only reached me today says a lot about my relationship with her. With my family period. My grandmother offered the kind of unconditional love grandparents revel in right up until it became conditional on a few things. My decision to move away from my home town upset more than one apple cart. When I told my mother I’d accepted a place at university she threw a hammer at me.

Tough crowd.

But this is all stuff I came to terms with years ago. My dad had no idea who I was and if he’d lived longer I’d still be a fuck-up in his eyes. I came home from that first year at university to find my mum had destroyed all my belongings. The stuff was replaceable over time, but the writing she’d found and thrown away without a care in the world underlined that we really were from different worlds.

And all this stuff worked out. If I’d been a better son or at least the kind of son they were expecting then I’d have been miserable or at least a very different person today. That sounds horribly selfish, but in just about every other aspect of my life I try my very best to be generous. One of the good guys. That’s never stopped me from acknowledging that some things come at too high a cost.

My family never felt like one and it was the one thing I’ve never been able to fix.

My new family became the people who came with me. There are a few people who have stood by me through thick and thin and living my life online has assured that my friendships are global and the people I love know that I came to this place through conviction rather than duty. I’m fascinated by other people’s relationships with family and I guess I write about it a lot.

Sadly over the last couple of years I’ve seen too many of my friends lose family members. I know how devastating this has been for them and I feel guilty that a few tweets of mine this morning resulted in so many messages of condolence and emails/calls checking that I’m OK. Losing my family is in no way as brutal as it has been for others and while I’m not torn apart by this I am incredibly touched by how many of you have reached out in only a few hours.

Thank you.

The next week or so will be interesting. I come from a large unimmediate family and I’m the only one to escape. Black sheep doesn’t cover it and there will be a lot of recrimination heading my way over the next few weeks. Nothing I’m not prepared for.

But death makes you pause and take stock. I do tend to forget to let others know how important they are to me. So some of you have got that coming. It seems trite to drop a science fiction quote in here, so let’s be trite:

When you can’t run you crawl, and when you can’t crawl you find someone to carry you…

Finding someone to carry us is the adventure, but we often find out who those people are far too late.

I missed my mum when I was a kid. I was sorry when she got ill. First she was hit my mental illness and when we got that under control the physical stuff began to mount up. She spent the last few years confined to the downstairs of the home I grew up in. I believe I’d finally convinced her she needed to move somewhere smaller, but I visited nowhere near as often as I should. And even those infrequent visits seemed to go on too long for both of us. We didn’t have a relationship and I’m sorry about that, but going back over it I don’t think I could have done more.

I don’t believe in gods. Not the cool ones I learned about studying Classics as a kid and certainly not the vindictive old fuck whose ridiculous and damaging version of religion I was brought up in. I know she’s at peace because she’s gone and that’s enough.

I do have one vivid memory though. I was very small and we were walking hand in hand through a busy market on a Saturday morning. I got distracted by something and when I reached out to hold her hand again I was greeted with some surprise by a woman who was most definitely not my mother, but whose hand I had grabbed by mistake. Not being able to find her I immediately fell back on my basic training and wailed like a bastard until she was found. I remember the relief as if it were yesterday.

I guess that was the first time I lost her.

And we let go again somewhere along the way and it takes the cold hard fact that we’ll never see each other again remind me that that’s where the loss is this time.

Or as Bukowski, the miserable old fuck, left it:

These things, and others, in content
show life swinging on a rotten axis.

But the swing’s the thing… let’s enjoy it while we can.

There were only a few of us at school who listened to Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Dio. I’m not sure what I would have done without that kind of music at such an impressionable age. It lead me into the world of art as narrative for sure and made sure I had a life long love of a good guitar solo. For me punk rock, Frank Zappa and Morricone came later. Everything started with the Metal.

I don’t think I’m overstating matters when I say that the voice of Ronnie James Dio not only inspired me as a kid, but has also stayed with me my entire adult life. Some things get blunted by repetition. A Dio record is not one of them.

I’ll miss him even though he’s never ever going to go away.

My heart goes out to all those that knew him.

Awe: an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like

I was reading up on the Shuttle program at the beginning of the year and noticed that one of the very last launches was scheduled on my birthday. I mulled out loud via Twitter that it’d be very cool to see Discovery take off. One of the guys following me turned out to work for NASA and dropped me a line about organising just that.

If you need a reason to fall in love with Twitter there it is.

Now the September launch could easily get pushed back to October at this point so I’m trying to keep THE PLAN as flexible as possible. The very last flight is scheduled for November so I’ll be keeping that date in my back pocket, but Florida four months from now seems very doable. We’ll see.

After a life time of fictional space flight slamming my imagination all over the place I do tend to forget that the real thing is something to savour.

A major strand of the thinking behind space travel in the Slingers universe came from just how problematic breaking orbit can be and I’ve been working on something new that is a small love letter to the battered Shuttles and their continued resilience. It’s sad to think they’ll end up as museum pieces, but if having them on display reminds kids we need to get back up there then they’ll be continuing an important job even in retirement; to inspire awe.

There’s a chance that when Discovery reaches the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum that Enterprise will be able to tour and once again fly on the back of a 747. That’s how the Shuttle as a concept was first revealed to me as a kid and it’s somehow fitting if it were to come full circle. It should also serve as a reminder that 1977 is in danger of making us here in the 21st century look decidedly old fashioned.

We can and we should do better. Anyway, staying in one place is not how we’re wired.

Mallory O’Brian: Do we really have to go to Mars?
Sam Seaborn: Yes.
Mallory O’Brian: Why?
Sam Seaborn: ‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.

The West Wing season two: ‘Galileo’ (2000)

I was explaining to @documentally on Friday the way I use index cards to help map out just about everything. I tend to over think projects and also spread them far and wide over notebooks, bookmarks, iPhone/iPad apps, scraps of paper, several laptops and the margins of books. All of that is eventually collected and ends up on index cards. I know that @sleepydog now has his own system of cards and we’ve been discussing how quickly these 6″ x 4″ blanks amount into something.

Then I saw this over on Warren’s blog:

Loose Ideas folders are great. Any half-formed idea that you think might have potential to become something someday? Type it into a .txt file of its own and fling it into a folder marked Loose Ideas. Make sure it’s linked to your backups. A Loose Ideas folder is saving for the future. One day, you’re going to find in that folder the exact thing you need at that moment, whether it be a new project or a bit of business that fixes the script or book in front of you

I was assuming that everyone did this. Maybe not.

My own loose ideas folder is where at least two of the things I’m working on right now started out. You need to make a home for those crazy 3am revelations otherwise they slip down under the bed and get eaten by something that doesn’t want you to succeed.

The stuff you write doesn’t have to make it into a library, a book or even a blog post for it to be important enough to save and more importantly you don’t know when that single sentence or word you tucked safely away won’t come roaring back and save you.

Plus .txt files take up less room on your hard drive than all the HD porn you’re saving for a rainy day.

If you’ve met me than you’ll know I like a lot on my plate* so as my sleep pattern becomes ever more erratic I’m going to dust off some of my old audio and visual accounts and throw more content at the blog.

One thing I won’t have time for is fancy editing, but I’ll try and keep things varied. More writing on the move too.

And I’ll finally get around to talking about some of the cool stuff that happened in the last year or so and dig out some old notebooks.

I had coffee with my good friend @documentally** on Friday morning. His adventures are far more interesting than mine, but he still managed to get almost 15 minutes of nonsense out of me. I haven’t listened back to this, but a few people on Twitter seemed to find something interesting in there, so for what it’s worth:

*Yes. That was a fat joke.

**He stole the pen for me.

Around a year ago an old friend of mine got in touch. We hadn’t spoken in over fifteen years and it was as we caught up over coffee that a baton story started by Michael Moorcock in The Guardian came up. I’d written part four and it turns out that Steve had written part six.

Small fucking world.

When we knew each other as teenagers I guess we were both working on our escape routes. For Steve it was music. And it was always obvious he was gonna break out. My own path seemed a little more muddled. We were in a band together for the briefest of moments – I think it was Steve who forced me to buy a bass guitar. What I really remember about that time is that I was more intent on writing about the music than learning how to play it. My bass fell to another friend with a natural ability and that was that.

We won’t mention my singing for Iron Hell.

Steve’s done a lot of cool stuff in the intervening years – including finding a wife smarter than either of us. One of the many things he’s up to right now includes radio drama. And wouldn’t you know it they’re also blowing the doors off the process:

After many queries about just how one goes about making a drama from start to finish, I shall, as producer and director, along with the writer, Michelle Lipton sound designer/editor Eloise Whitmore and composer Stephen Kilpatrick share this process with you

So now you have something else to keep an eye on.

Now I’ve paid Steve back for the bass and shouting at me for messing up ‘Motorbreath’ by getting him on Twitter. And we’re talking about writing something together again.

Probably not with Michael Moorcock this time, but you never know.

First an apology. “Would you watch a TV show called Schrödinger’s Dogs?” and “What do you think it would be about?” are horrible questions to throw at you cold.

Sorry.

But I did it anyway and the replies were unexpected, informative and fun.

Let’s start with the insightful @montimer:

Pulling your replies together I realised that I hadn’t bothered to let anyone know what the show is actually about…

Luckily, Toby has already let that particular cat out of the bag:

Lots of flesh to stick on those bones in another post.

But for now let’s finish with the insightful @montimer:

Well, that’s one of the things we’re finding out…

So what hell kind of a name is Schrödinger’s Dogs for a TV show?

Well, it’s a working title.

It obviously stems from here, but how obvious that is was the first question we had to address. And are still addressing. As a working title I love it. It’s a little nod to Tarantino and a movie which owes its name to a video store customer getting irate over being recommended Au revoir les enfants:

“I don’t want to see no reservoir dogs!”

Perfect.

Doesn’t help us though. And while our fall back title of Glitch is fine, for me at least, it lags far behind SD. Good initials too. Strontium Dog. Sleepydog. Scooby Doo…

But there was an (external) worry that we’d have to explain just what the hell a Schrödinger was to too many people. I prefer to think the audience is smart and curious, but a lot of TV has to tick a lot of boxes – some of them more annoying than others. There’s a great post over on Boing Boing about this at the moment and trust me that a) I know a lot more about this than I’d like to and b) the title is both the most important and least important part of the process.

When we have it we’ll have nailed it. Until then it stays in flux.

Like the cat.

Next: the unscientific method of proving smarts in a non-focussed group and why SD is a pretty good title

Update: Lee has pretty much nailed in the first comment why SD won’t be the final title. Probably. Good t shirt though…