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Bill Forgo: Part 2 – All Ears

insomnihack — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:23:04 +0000

He couldn’t believe it — all the hard work was possibly going to pay off; it seemed that someone who had been employed to start skimming through the slushpiles had come across something of his that he had forgotten about. It was something he had written in that period when he had been unable to afford to print out a second copy and he had sent off the only original that he had out to the publishers. Pitchblende was about someone who had invented a way to enter the paintings which he created — he had turned them into doorways into realms of ideas. His was a book of ideas — one which combined discussion of art with notions of what constituted reality.

The letter he had received said that he had managed to create a piece of science fiction fantasy that was both novel and beautiful and they would like to meet up with him to talk about it. It was somewhat strange to him to recieve this praise for a piece that he could barely remember having written but there was that whole thing about not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Serendipity usually bypassed him — went calling at the next house or street over.

He sat there and Bill looked at the bottle he had gone out and purchased. He had been dry for so long now and he thought about how only this morning that whiskey had been all about commiserating with himself about all the miserable luck he had — now it could be a source of celebration. Sure, he could manage one or two drinks on a day like this when he was looking like getting a big break from some publishing company.

He went to get a glass.

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Grace Favour – Part 1: Wondering Aloud

insomnihack — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:54:49 +0000

She was guesswork — that was how she would describe herself; every success and every failure came to her the same way. She supposed it was the same with everyone at the end of the day but she felt that she had a much healthier relationship with the vagaries of chance than most people. Most people could not open up to the possibility of chaos in their lives — if something worked once then they believed that it would always work. She worked out the odds — she didn’t believe that anything was ever that solid.

Grace — that was how she moved through life and she believed that the name was a true gift from her mother to her. Her mother had been called Mercy and that had affected how she related to those around her; a name was sometimes a simple spell and other times the associations were more complex and took years of exploration to uncover.

People would hear those two words: Grace Favour, and they would hear it as a command. It would tap into their consciousness at some deep level and it would make them treat her well — it would incline them towards giving her things; people made allowances for Grace because they, for some reason, felt that she deserved that. She would let her wishes float into the room, believing the idea that walls have ears; believing that the universe was built to amplify and redirect her positive energy into the things that she wanted. She called it wondering aloud and it was a very important daily ritual for her.

Peter Courtier – Part 1: Manners Maketh A Man

insomnihack — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:01:26 +0000

He prided himself on having good manners — he was known for it; it was his stock in trade. He had just published a small book on etiquette to some acclaim. It was strange to him that something which should be the backbone of civilised society was considered a niche market; that to him indicated that the world was in a dire state. He obviously knew that things were bad — he had to interact daily with people who had no consideration for each other and no respect for themselves; it depressed him. Still, he did not see that the lack of cordiality and manners at large in the world was any kind of excuse for him to sink to that level; to behave that way himself would have been like condoning the awful conduct of everyone else.

He believed that in the same way an avalanche could be started by one small pebble he could effect a change in the way the world behaved just by behaving well himself. He had been flooded with offers of venues where he might provide inspirational lectures and a lot of bookstore owners had contacted him and offered him a platform from which to conduct a book tour. He asked his agent whether this kind of thing was normal and had been told that it was definitely a weird situation but that they shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The possibility of a regular weekly column in one of the larger national newspapers had also been batted around. Things were looking up. The phone rang and he picked it up.

‘Peter?’

‘Yes?’

‘Your father has had a stroke.’

Julie Seer: Part 1 – Eye Eye

insomnihack — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:49:15 +0000

She wasn’t shy about letting people know that she knew where everything was going and that she knew where everything should have gone instead. Cassandras ran around telling people about all the woes that were to be visited on them; Julies, so it seemed, sat there looking smug and told you after the fact what you could have done. She was about as much use as one of those empaths that tell you that someone is angry when they have a gun pointed at you — like, wow, how perceptive.

Julie’s gift hadn’t served to instil her with a desire to save her fellow man. Was it supposed to? Well, wasn’t that the way with these things — didn’t great powers bestow some kind of heroic instinct and innate grace upon the person? Apparently not. Julie had been a misanthrope before she had been given second sight and seeing what was due to happen beforehand and why only served to intensify that feeling.

She had gone from someone who on the surface was fairly happy-go-lucky to someone that snapped all the time at people and because they couldn’t see what she saw and would scarcely believe it if it were described to them she had a doubly frustrating time of it. After her first bad experience of trying to prevent a disaster she got very disheartened. The second time she revealed her knowledge to people and they disbelieved her and then it happened she was taken in for questioning. The third time they believed her and the ones who did got scared — that whole thing of don’t shoot the messenger is easier to obey when the messenger is telling you about something that has already happened; Julie’s brand of message was unnerving — people said they would rather not know. She feared for her liberty if she were to divulge the secrets anymore.

She took to writing books; took to writing “speculative fiction” and whereas someone who lets the words fall from their lips as prognostications gets looked at strangely, a science fiction author doing the same can become a celebrated voice in the genre. Julie Seer was becoming a guaranteed bestseller.

Bethann Vetiver: Part 1 – Familiar

insomnihack — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:38:40 +0000

Full moon tonight — she could feel it in her blood. She had to check the calendar but she knew she was right. She looked over at the toad that was sat near her laptop — did he nod his head? She wasn’t entirely sure — Arnold had been in a bit of a grump for a while now, and why? Just because she had told him that mating season or not he couldn’t go gallivanting around like he was just some run of the mill amphibian; he was bonded to her and he had time to be reckoned — he had a choice, stay around and assist or remain in the form he was currently in for a very long time.

‘It’s not bloody well fair — all those other brainless bastards get to hop around fucking whatever they land near and I, the one toad out of the whole lot of them who might appreciate what it is that’s going on, am kept inside like some naughty kid that’s been staying out too late. Well, fuck you, Bethann — try casting any bloody spells without me and we’ll see how far you get.’

‘Oh, come on, Arnold, you know you have the worst memory ever. Tell me, exactly how much reading have you been doing to keep up to date with the latest ideas regarding effective incantations? Not much, eh? And by the way, you used to be human, what the hell pleasure an you get out of screwing a slimy toad?’

‘Well, the bastards that turned me into this aren’t totally heartless — they left some of the hardwiring in here working, so where you see some slimy little critter I’m fucking the Marilyn Monroe of the toad world.’

‘Nice. Anyway, tonight my power is going to be at an all time high so, please, will you help me?’

“Hmm, it’s o bloody hard to stay mad at you. As you asked nicely I’ll do it. Can I ask a favour?’

‘If it goes well will you let me go and get some pussy?’

‘Well, as you asked so nicely …’ she replied, smiling.

John Doe: Part 1: Trace

insomnihack — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:11:50 +0000

He touched the mirror, leaned in closer, peered into his own eye, looking at the tech disguised as floaters in the white. He smiled, a ceramic toothed smile — functional and untraceable; they had no makers mark on them. Nothing on him had anything identifiable. He was careful; more careful now than he had ever been. He leaned back again, looked where his hand had been, where his fingertips had pressed; no prints.

He had floating access to all the networks he could ever want to utilise — skeleton key privileges that the people who had set up could not revoke. Why could they not revoke them? Because they technically didn’t exist, had to be totally untrackable — it was a risk; a risk they only felt comfortable taking because of the measures they took to physically pin down an agent. Those measures had been made ineffective — he had contacts; they had trained him too well … they had trained him to disappear off all radars, even their own.

He made things now and sold them at craft fairs — jewellery and the like; it had a low impact on his time and he had become skilled at the selling of his wares. People found it hard to believe that he had not been doing it or his whole life and that he was not formally trained. He would smile, shyly retire from the conversation; let them draw their own conclusions. The whole game was not to give anything away — to remain mutable in the eyes of everyone. He was anonymous.

Cyan Rip: Part 1 – Strings

insomnihack — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:41:46 +0000

Every single thing in this life was bound by some kind of strings — from the smallest decision to the highest dimension: strings and nothing but. It got tiresome. He found that the only way to master all of these threads that ran through his life was to play the guitar — seek out the mysteries of harmony and disharmony and all the various modulations inbetween. He hoped to never break a string and he rarely did — having some kind of sixth sense regards the tension of the string and the way it was playing (not the tuning,something else entirely); as above so below and all that crap.

He thought himself the epitome of cool. Guitar strapped on, bottle of designer beer in one hand, cigarette clamped between his teeth, playing a Hendrix inspired blues riff. People looked to him as an arbiter of hipness, but people were also increasingly looking at him for sign of a breakout — sign of a breakthrough; some promise that there was a way out of this mundane reality that they were all trapped in. He hoped that he were not just a big fish in a small pond; the best of a bad bunch — any one of those phrases which cut someone back down to the size they needed to be to fit in a 24/7 routine.

He had been writing a lot of original music lately and he had been easing them in amongst the standards the regulars on the pub scene wanted. He was getting to the point where people were recognising his compositions and asking for them by name — and they were doing it regularly enough and passionately enough, whilst buying enough booze, that the bar owners didn’t mind. He just needed to fashion what he had into an album — had to have some product for the agents to listen to. Cyan Rip was awaiting a convergence of different things to allow his ascension to the position of rock god.

He ripped out a powerhouse riff that felt like he was snapping the spine out of some god. A fork of lightning to give back to Prometheus.

Cody Spicer: Part 1 – Parts

insomnihack — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:50:00 +0000

Cody Spicer kept his cock in a pickle jar floating in pickling vinegar. He had performed a peotomy on himself in lieu of the gender reassignment surgery that they were making him suffer to be eligible for. So, Cody Spicer was still a pre-op tranny — he had a cock but no cunt and they were telling him that by actually chopping it off he had made the whole procedure more complicated. More complicated was not a phrase that you expected to hear uttered with any degree of seriousness in your twenty fifth year of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. I mean, he thought, just who the fuck are they trying to kid?

He didn’t intend to change his name because he thought it sounded kind of asexual and cool already. Did his dead mum have some kind of inkling of the being she had given birth to? Hmm, maybe she did. Maybe it had something to do with the championing of Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin and the self-printed t-hirt which proclaimed I am Anna Madrigal.

The acting jobs seemed to be popping up with more frequency recently and that surely had to be a good sign and an indication that he was in the right place in his head at least — the right place to be able to pull a decent performance out of the bag when he needed to. The worrying thing, if it were a worrying thing, was that they were all straight roles and that his agent was telling him that he may have found his niche playing a certain type of down on his luck creative straight guy. Wouldn’t that be a kick to the old stump between the legs?

He picked up the jar and shook it. Fucking thing.

‘The curse of the cock wakes me every morning,’ he said smiling.

Gillian Nest: Part 1 – Alone

insomnihack — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:54:58 +0000

She was free again. Well, free in the sense that she was under the weight of crushing loneliness since her husband had passed over and her kids had all flown. She had picked up the novel again and she was trying to find comfort in the lives of the characters that she was crafting from the many experiences she had been through in her long and not so illustrious life as a fledgling socialite. Fledgling socialite? Yep, ‘fraid so — there weren’t many of them out there that were her age but it was as if she had been trapped in amber at an early age and not been allowed to progress beyond a certain rung on the social ladder. She was often given to pondering whether people looked at her and saw a modern day Miss Havisham. Tragic — yes, that is what it was: a tragic loss of potential. And wasn’t that just so more affecting than a loss of life? What potential did the dead have? None.

Was she bitter? You bet your arse she was bitter. She gave the characters she wrote about the kind of life that she lacked and hoped that the depth of detail provided in the hard slog it took to get there would lift the prose out of the realms of mere wish fulfilment. Some characters she obviously made suffer — all the types that had caused her problems in her life underwent a reversal of fortune and found themselves in hard times; stripped of the comforts they had previously enjoyed. She hoped it couldn’t be boiled down to such simple dynamics but she feared that this was the basic truth of her work. Would she grow beyond that? Would she remain a one trick pony? Would that singularity of vision perhaps be hailed as a winning formula? One could only hope.

She had the batteries for the Olympic Runner dildo charging. She had the Blade Trilogy set up in the multidisc DVD player. She had the love beads worked up inside her anus. She had the Julio Inglesias playing. She had the KY Jelly at the ready. She was in for a good night.

Bill Forgo: Part 1 – Doodles

insomnihack — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:06:16 +0000

He had some ideas. He had been on the phone all morning speaking to various people, trying to float various ideas that he thought were real money-spinners but that they seemed to lack the vision to appreciate. The inside of his cheek was painful where he had been chewing it, as were his fingers which he had deprived of nails and bitten down to the cuticles. He popped the cola flavoured gum in his mouth and began to chew on that.

He felt highly strung today. It was days like this that he contemplated taking up smoking again. It was days like this that he regretted that his wallet was so goddamned empty that the worst habit he could afford to take up was moaning about how stony broke he was. Bill looked around at the sketchbooks which he had laying around, looked at the half finished paintings which mocked him, and he wondered when he was going to get that break that every other miserable cocksucker was getting.

People liked his work, what they had seen of it; dealers liked his work. Surely that translated somewhere into the possession of saleable items? Man, he didn’t know; if he had possessed some kind of clue he would have been rolling in it years ago. He had been dry now for two years but damn if there wasn’t a whiskey bottle somewhere close that was singing to him. He hated being a cliche: hated being the starving artist. You never heard about starving art dealers did you? No, because they didn’t have to die to become valuable.

He span the dial on the radio, picked up some Patti Smith and left it there. Make some coffee, do some more doodling and then try round two on the phone calls.