Cycling + > SMIDSY

The world inside your window

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Librarian:
by finestra

Writing for an audience of one is my hobby, so I’ve written a couple of novels and a few volumes of quirky short stories. I always was an imaginative child, and I didn’t really grow up. Are they books anyone other than me would read? My wife has read a few and, under torture, confessed they were good, but she also made some comments about the things that happen in my head and the value of psychological counselling. I have no big plans to get them published; the pleasure is in the emptying of my brain onto the virtual page and giving the characters the life they deserve. Short stories are easy, but bringing an entire novel together is quite an intellectual challenge. More so, if like me, you don’t actually plan anything. I bring the characters into being and let them sort it out. I set the benchmark of intellectual laziness.

I’m on the third part of a sci-fi trilogy that I wrote because I was angry about bloody trilogies and why can’t they just write the one book and get it over with? So I dared myself. There’s nothing original to it, and in that there’s comfort. It’s like a familiar bed to lie in. It’s about a guy called Rourke who is cursed to do the right things for the wrong reasons, or possibly vice versa. There’s a universe-ending peril because there always is. Rourke really isn’t the man to save the universe. There’s a lot of robots because there always are, and a lot of spaceships, because well, it’s sci-fi. I’m writing the book I’d want to read. We’re doing time travel at the moment, unpicking the first two volumes and giving myself a creative migraine. Rourke really isn’t the best character, but that’s because, like all protagonists, he’s the author. Skyr is my favourite; she’s an android who looks like a nine-year-old girl and has chromium eyes and a fondness for dangerous weaponry and the sort of scheming that would make Machiavelli step back and raise his hands and say ‘whoo, too much.’ I’m pretty sure they’ll save the universe in the end. No, I’d not heard that Skyr was a yoghurt product until I’d started writing it. Damned Icelanders.

Finestre, of course, is a character that belongs somewhere else. I’m on the third book of that, and Finestre came in as a side character. That’s Jezebel’s story, though she thinks her parents should have read the Bible, so she’s Jess, once-upon-a-time librarian in South London who got murdered in a plot to spring a demi-god from his prison dimension (I can’t explain it in fewer than three hundred thousand words, sorry). While that worked, he didn’t quite bargain on what Jess became. She’s basically my take on a vampire and, yes, she’s awesome and she’s saved the universe twice and will save it some more. She’s gone off the rails at the moment, but I think we’ll have her back on-side. There’s a trio of angelic assassins who are finding their way out of being amoral killing machines: Sisley and Sybil, and Sisley’s sister, Sarla, who really got Jess killed in the first place, but now hangs around her flat and drinks her wine. Did I forget the demi-god she inadvertently sprung, that was Jist, and he’s now dead. Jist’s sister is Finestre, and she’s the queen of Hell on account she killed everything else. We think. She’s the Devil anyway. She had another brother, Barabos, but he was volume 2, and Jess had to kill him too. The archangel Gabriel who made the mistake of siding with Barabos. She had to drink Finestre’s blood to make that so, which is why she’s currently off the rails. The Devil is a rich pudding. There’s a lot of killing and even more sarcasm. I never went to Sunday School, so I’m not sure my take on Hell and Heaven are kosher. It’s a gloriously stupid romp. It features Death himself, a board-game playing serial killer called Martin, his ex Julie who is now Jess’s on-off BFF and incidentally a ghost as Sarla got her killed too. There are talking crows and Elephant and Castle is a hell-portal. Many, many heads have been pulled, torn, and cut-off. Everyone has a bloody good time. Jess is currently slaughtering her way through London’s criminal underworld. Sarla got herself into the police force through the deal with Finestre, Sybil is in Heaven, Sisley in the realm of the Dead, and Julie has been kidnapped by an army of corrupted angels who want to take over our world and eat us.

What's in a nameThis came on the radio as I was mulling over a name, or would've if I was listening to the radio at the time:

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