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20 Questions with Ian

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finestre:
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.

Detectorist:

--- Quote from: finestre on January 04, 2025 ---Writing for an audience of one is my hobby

--- End quote ---

You've certainly come to the right place.


--- Quote ---I’m writing the book I’d want to read.

--- End quote ---

What else do you like to read?
What writers have influenced you?
Was Elephant and Castle built on a pre-existing hell portal, or did the works of man darkly consecrate the ground?

finestre:
Good question about Elephant Castle, I feel the manically pedalled swirl around the roundabout during my youthful cycling adventures was, in some part, due to an ancient innate evil working below the ground. A force of diabolical gravity felt most profoundly by cyclists trying to orbit the dread circle. I did occasionally ponder, as a lorry crossed my crave whether the shopping centre would be my final mortal vista. Hell of a way to go. It wasn't as bad as the Lombardy Circle of Death on the A23, but that's because the latter features the Drivers of Croydon, for whom driving around Hell is a normal commute.

I'm not sure recent gentrification has entirely dispelled the sulphurous rumours that something lurks below.

I don't often play a game of favourites when I come to authors. I have David Foster Wallace and James Joyce so I don't have to do it again. I read a lot of trash. I was once caught in a snowstorm in Durango, CO and forced to read the entire Book of Mormon. Twice. It goes better with vodka miniatures.

Detectorist:
Have you seen Heretic?

finestre:
I have not, though I would like to. A shame Jar-Jar never got to reprise his role. Honestly, I gave up with Star Wars some time ago, despite it (and Indiana Jones) being the ground rocks of my childhood (enjoyed while sucking the orange dye our of frozen Kia-Ora lollies in the Heanor ABC, which is of course now, another block of identikit fuck-hutches for the downwardly mobile). I have a deep seated disappointment that I never got a Millennium Falcon. I did see some of the later movies, but nothing of them stuck on my mind, like they were made out of some kind of next-gen teflon. I do remember the CGI Princess Leia Mary Poppins scene. It's one of those movie moments where you realise that hundreds of people have been engaged in producing that scene, they've all seen it, and not one of them uttered the words 'make this stop.'

I did get some cheap tickets to see Elektra and The Tempest last week, this year's season of Hollywood types sojourning on the London stage. They're generally not very good, but I like a curiosity.

Elektra was mostly terrible, only enlivened by the fact that I managed to convince a credulous friend that Brie Larson's brother is named Camembert before the show and I know she spent 75 minutes aching to google this. It's Milo, apparently, and I'm 'a dick.'

Pitches Elektra as an angry punk which isn't a bad take, and Larson puts the effort in with a buzz cut and Bikini Kills t-shirt. That said, she would have been about eight when Bikini Kills disbanded, so age wasn't on her side. If they'd played the punk angle faithfully, it might have worked, but it dissolved into gimmickry, with Brie clutching a mike and doing some semblance of slam poetry and, for reasons unclear, always singing the word 'no' while stomping a distortion pedal. For more reasons unclear every name was accompanied by a sound effect, for instance there was a strange offstage crash every time she mentioned Agamemnon / father, which the first time, everyone assumed was a clumsy stagehand. That quickly evolved through amusing to annoying. Also there was a Zeppelin above the stage. As a plus, the chorus were good and I quite liked the tv reportage ending of the familicide. It would have been improved by not having the victims still on stage and evidently alive though. Maybe they ran out of money for theatrical blood. If you going to do the Greeks, buy a 50 gallon drum and splash it around. Everyone always dies, usually after or during incest.

The Tempest features Signourney Weaver. It was a bit better, but a reminder that those Hollywood types don't have the chops for theatre. The average Brit stage pounder can give the back of the gods earache. I wouldn't want Ian McKellen to shout at me, I reckon he could make your insides fall out. The Americans always have to be miked up. Even the delightful Amy Adams last year, though to be honest, and I'm sorry dear wife, I was mostly listening with my eyes.

Again, for reasons unclear, she spent most of the performance sitting on a chair and looking a bit broody. Prospero should be a trickster, a devious schema, only in the end realising that there's no real value to those schemes and making good. She was less acting, more reading the lines. A shame as the staging was genuinely very good, Stefano and Trinculo stole their comedic scenes (though somewhat knocking the somber pace elsewhere, as though the scenes might have fallen from an alternate production), Arial was excellent, as was the gimpy Caliban. Maybe someone should have let an alien on stage. Shakespeare needed more aliens. Maybe Tarantino, before he disappeared up his own fundament, should have done Titus Andronicus. A missed opportunity, it truly is the grind-house horror of Shakey's back catalogue.

All a bit of a shame, more so after a luminous Midsummer Night's Dream at the Barbican a few weeks before.

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