Tuesday 8 November 2022

YOU WEREN'T THERE MAN (but you were)





Plus  with the help of my printer I have once again re-defined the meaning of success to include things I have already done. Goals are being achieved and a complete product including every artist is within tantalizing reach!


500 copies printed          £9,110.00 
Daniel Grady layout £12,710.00 
Simones interior art £13,270.00 
Scraps Art          £13,430.00   <<<< WE ARE HERE!!
Maria Ku as consultant £13,990.00 
Jason Thompson £14,540.00 
Jez Gordon          £14,870.00 
Peter Mullen          £15,370.00 
Amanda Franck £15,650.00 
Daniel Puerta          £15,760.00 
Valin Mattheis           £16,640.00 
Dirk Detweiler Leichty £16,920.00 
Ana Polanšćak £17,250.00 
Alec Sorenson          £17,500.00 






Instead of writing short fictions where I pretend to be a Troll King I have been advised to sell my latest Book by actually talking about the book. I am not sure how to do this.

I pull out the book, I leaf through it..


and I am trapped - this time by a review of Amber Diceless (Wednesday July 2018), Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games - first entry of this subsection.

"It stumbles into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park" very clever patrick

then remarks on the nature of complexity "Amber has 4 stats, 3 kinds of universal magic power, no dice and it takes 250+ pages of US Letter Size to tell you what to do with them"



Lets flip again...




Page 241 Section; Uncertain Worlds, Subsection; Modern Heroes/Modern Monsters, entry; "Best Enemies”, (Saturday 23 January 2016), paragraph 2 "THE CARAPACED GOD"

"Bow to me heroes, for only by my will is your reality maintained!"

Clad in infinite unending onion-rings of trans-uranic iron teased from the torn hearts of worlds spiralling to nothing in the flensing horizon of a Cherenkov-strobing black hole. Armour flaked and abrading with the touch of unspeakable eons yet ever growing by the substance of his own dark thought. Each layer riveted with unique gnosis etched in sacred languages invented by prophetic monks. From his palace of shadow and slow-decaying waves at the end of all realities the Carapaced God rules and turns his hidden eye to earth and is displeased. Perhaps he wishes a continent moved, a second sun created, a nation drowned or time revered. or simply the slate of history wiped clean. Seeking some alteration he sends forth his sombre legions. Insect Priests, Twilight Knights, Tense Fetish Nuns and looming PanzerSnaegle. The heroes oppose him yet he is an enemy that can never truly be defeated for should he fall, all reality would collapse into screaming chaos."

.......

Would you believe that having it in front of you. Having the whole thing in front of you in print, in a single, coherent text you can access at fingertip, feels substantially different than just leafing through a blog?

Did we only dream such incredible events? But lo, the dreamer looks down at their hands and finds some token, a gem or a leaf of page or something to indicate that yes, it was real, that all that crazy stuff did actually happen.



ANOTHER FLIP!



Page 197, Section; False Readings, no subsection, entry; "Knights of the Snail" (no date given).

"The Queen was dead and the King of the Curlicue throne was sad.

All day he slept and wept and, as the sun fell through the empty air towards the terminating line of night, he woke and pushed away his salt-encrusted sheets and walked to the balconies deepening void to stare into the dying summer light, while the Fool, Ham Floret waited in his shadow tensing his legs to leap in case the king should try to jump.

The King did not jump. He simply looked into the gathering gloom, counting the drawn storms as they marched across the velvet horizon and the sun bled red across the land."

.....


Time, in this book, the ten years of its making, does not really exist. it has been re-arranged, and so all the changes in personhood and style which took place across that decade are living next to each other, like the differing generations of an extended family, living in random houses on a terraced street.

Open a door and what will you find? 


FLIP!



Page 410, Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games, “Quest of the Mist Golem by Delvers Dungeon, Full title; Quest of the Mist Golem, Module QMG1, Mist Hold”, Wednesday 5 October 2011

Several paragraphs down;

"There is a mini hex map with nothing on it. For a journey which we've already been told only takes a day and which will be 'uneventful'.

Every night mist rises from the ground near the tower and kills everything in it. So you can only gain access during the day. you are also safe from the mist in the tower, so no time limit there.

There is some rather boring treasure, except that some of it is black coral. I would just dump the rest and have the evil wizard paying his Gnolls in Black Coral. It's vaguely poetic."


Harsh words Patrick of 2011!Cruel even, would you survive such criticism?


FLIP!



Page 559, Section; Cryptoculture, Subsection; Star Trek, Entry 'Complex Objects Moving through Space', part two 'Opening My Doom-Wings Takes a While' Friday 13th March 2015, Subsection 'Nemesis'

"aand the azteking is back in the opening shot. It still doesn't look quite right. 

Ah crap there is more shuttlecraft dicking around on-planet. There is at least a half-interesting pov shot. But then an awful stunt.

Shuttles crashing, shuttles being too fast, shuttles having little shuttle adventures, all these are bad signs"

....

Simply an extended or in depth-review of a youtube compilation video showing every Star Trek film only through its effects shots and nothing else, or, when uncovered in the Borgesian labyrinth of Patricks Mind Palace, something more? A reference? A clue? A little fractal spark that leads you on a goose chase through the text? Somewhere in Rome Tom Hanks looks at a wall and whispers "oh my god".

To some extent what you are buying is not a book, but a palace, or really more a ruin, where the ages and towers and layers have been mixed up by overenthusiastic Victorian archaeologists who just blasted through a bunch with dynamite and re-built other parts the way they "should be".

...
 
"From the blue beautiful self-indulgent 70s mystical V'ger to the clenched, grey-black desperate-to-be-cool CGI of Shinzons hateship, it seems fitting that we end where we began: watching a physical thing unfold for fucking ages."

...

How can I explain to you why I thought this would be a good idea and, furthermore, why I thought people might actually buy it?

Ego? Of course. A desire for just a little more imagined immortality? Yes. But, more fundamentally, are you the kind of person who walks down the alley by the side of the shopping centre and explores the rear of the warehouses, peeking through ancient security doors and eyeing the brick work? What if someone was living in that wooden add-on that seems stuck to the roof of a building half-way up? It looks like it’s been there for 50 years. No-one would know they were there. 

Are you someone who plays on the swings or are you more interested in that strange gap between the hedge and the security fencing at the back of the park?


FLIP!


Page 650 Section; Kleinplastik, 'The Loss of Silence in the Mortal Realms’, Wednesday 29th May 2019 (I fiddled with it a little after that point. Subgroup; The Music of the Band. Paragraph 15

"The forming and grouping of a skirmishing Warband is quite different than with most other kinds of wargame. Most other figures resonate or 'play' together in regular groupings, they feed off each other and carry their identity in relation to each other."


The spine on my giant test print is already cracking, BUT YOURS WILL NEVER* CRACK! A casebound tome! A fine Wilabin cover! Eternal and pure! A mystery to unfold, a curiosity to boast of or a folly to regret, its up to you.







(*Not a legal claim.)

2 comments:

  1. I wish for this book with art or not, but more art would be certainly nice.

    As for the book and time: sometimes I look back at the box with my filled out notebooks, and each one is both as if very far away and written by an entirely different person and as if no time had passed at all. Maybe it is a little like magic door.

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