The Clan of the Cave Bague

My ears twitched in annoyance at the springing fool in front of me. Up and down he bounced, grinning inanely and clapping his hands over his head. Clearly, having massive coiled springs attached to his feet had driven off his sanity.

“Woooooooooo” he cried. “Look at meeeeeeee!”

“Yes.” I said. “You’re bouncing. Well done.”

He continued to leap and bounce, happily springing up and down, up and down.

“Can you stop that please?”

A brief frown flickered across the imbecile’s face. “You know, I’m not sure I can,” he said. “But – Weeeeeeeeee! Why would I ever want to!”

My neck was growing painful from the effort of trying to maintain eye-contact with the oscillating buffoon.

“Would you like me to help you to stop,” I offered.

“Never, sir!” he cried. “Now that I have uncovered the arcane mysteries of bouncing, I shall continue to bounce until I draw my last breath, and even then I shall bounce my way past Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven.”

I considered this horrifying vision. A world where my sole companion was a gibbering, leaping, idiot. An afterlife populated by vertically catapulting fruitcakes.

I examined his face as closely as I could, given the incredible rate of change applied to its positioning relative to mine. Idiot or not, the look of joy on his face was unmistakable. And who am I to interfere in the joy of another.

“Very well,” I said. “By all means, enjoy your bouncing. But I ask you as a lifelong friend – would you consider doing it in someone else’s soup?”

Kio said Fish. John D said Spoon. Alex was on the phone. Hence, the following.

The ground shook as the great, flapping, pufferfish bounced down the street towards me. It was one of the weird deep-sea varieties – all teeth and spikes – and didn’t appear to be particularly pleased to be bouncing down a suburban street in the middle of the afternoon.

The fish was of a peculiar size – approximately the same dimensions as one of those little eastern european cars you see discarded at the side of the motorway, shortly before you pass angry-looking men with leather coats and beards.

Every time the fish hit the ground, it made a peculiar whooping-gasp sound, syncopated by the rasping of its pointy bits against the concrete. Its eyes were wild and staring. 

It was difficult to run away. Unless you’ve witnessed first hand the sudden onrush of unavoidable personal injury caused by the appearance of oceanic life where no oceanic life belongs, you really can’t understand the hypnotic power of such an event.

So I stood, and it bounced. A small dog ran out in front of it and yapped energetically. An orifice opened which I would dearly love to believe was the fish’s mouth, and the dog vanished. The sea-creature emitted a singularly fishy belch and continued down the street towards me.

Still unable to run, I rummaged in my pocket for some implement I could use in my defence. I pulled out a yoyo. A nice orange one, with stripy string and a flashing light in the middle. I contemplated the yoyo and the fish contemplated me.

It boinged up in the air in what was likely to be the final bounce before oblivion, when I was suddenly pushed from the side. A young man wearing a leather jacket and a string of onions had attached himself to my arm and was propelling me out of the fish’s path with considerably more gusto than was strictly necessary. As it passed, one of the fish’s razor sharp spines slashed across my yoyo, reducing it to a yo.

“What are you doing, you fool?” the young man shouted in my astonished face. “You can’t just stand still in front of a rampaging puffer fish and expect it to go around you!”

“I can stand wherever I like, Sir, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” I said angrily. I reached into my pocket and produced a small stainless steel teaspoon. I gestured at the young man with it. “I have a spoon!”

The young man, in turn, reached into his own pocket and produced a telephone. “I shall call the coastguard,” he said, “and report the puffer fish to them. Once I have done this, I shall call the police and inform them of your implied assault with cheap cutlery.”

“Damn you, sir!” I cried. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone? I was perfectly happy, there in the path of the puffer fish. You’ve ruined everything!”

The young man was evidently shocked by my outburst and wasted no time in telling me exactly that. “But it would have killed you,” he cried!

“Never,” I said coldly. “In all my life, I’ve never heard of anyone being killed in the street by a puffer fish. Why the very idea is ridiculous.”

I hit the ground with a thump, danced around a little, and then grinned cheerfully at nothing in particular. The elephant-faced man hit the ground a few feet behind me, but at a considerably higher velocity (due to the additional mass he carried in the center of his face).

“Oho!” I cried, dancing around my nasally extruded companion. “You almost caught me there, but not quite!”

I dashed off again, the elephant-faced man in hot pursuit. As he ran, he trumpeted, and as he trumpeted he thumped with his feet. Thump trumpety thump thump, he went.

I grabbed a firm hold of a passing lamppost and swung around in an orbit made eliptical by the uncannily elastic properties of my left arm. As I swung around, the elephant-faced man shot past me in a stampeding rush of feet and mucous.

“Tra-la-la! Too slow by far!” I bellowed, and stuck my fingers up at him.

Enraged, he wheeled around as fast as someone with an eight stone trunk stapled to the middle of his face can. He bellowed his frustration and thump trumpety thump thumped his way back towards me.

Fortunately, I was prepared for him and ended my orbit by releasing the lamppost and soaring straight over his pachydermically-challenged noggin. I landed on one foot, hopped to the other, shot him the fingers one more time and scampered away.

Exhausted, the elephant-faced man sat down, rested his huge deformed head in his hands and started to cry.

“You’re a complete bastard!” he sobbed.

“Yes,” I called back. “But at least I don’t have a big stupid elephant face!”

My piece said, I swept my huge elephant ears back, and ran like the wind.

Been a bit quiet lately. With good reason too – if you check the “I love it when this happens” post below, you’ll see that I’m working on a book. Well, I’m now about 23,000 words into the first draft and that’s only made possible by not spending loads of time writing on here.

So you might as well get used to the quiet – I have another 100,000 words to do, and then the second draft.

It’s still pretty much writing itself, though.

Okay, so I work in I.T. As a result of this, I know more than my fair share of acronyms – both three-letter and otherwise.

This notwithstanding, I found this book bewildering in the extreme. Not because it reads like stereo instructions (it does) and not because of the acronyms (after all, they are spelled out in English the first time each one is named). Well, ok, the acronym’s were a part of it – by the time I was 75% of the way through, all the major technical terms and acronyms had been defined and were therefore used freely. In huge, opaque, paragraph-sized chunks. But they weren’t the main problem.

My problem is, simply put, this: This is a book about a submarine. Tom Clancy writes with utter conviction and passion. Which left this question echoing in my big ol’ empty head.

How, in the name of all that’s sacred, can ANYONE get SO WORKED UP about a sodding submarine??

I mean, really!

It started out with a short, funny, story about a seance, written by a very talented bloke at my writer’s group.

“I’ve never written a story about a seance,” I thought. Then I started thinking “What if…” and before I knew what had happened, I had a 2,000 word short which I was quite proud of. Except there was something not quite right with it.

It’s the guy in the middle. I know him. Hang on – I had an idea about a guy just like him a while ago. I wonder what would happen if I added this bit to the end….

Oh – it needs a second chapter. Well, why don’t I introduce – nah, that can’t be right, surely.

Two days later. Two days with no music playing during my one-hour each way commute.

The ideas come thick and fast, suggesting possibilities almost too big to grasp. So, I start to take notes of the things popping into my head. The note pile grows ridiculously, so I attempt to put them in some kind of order, to make sense of what the universe is dropping in my lap.

And there it is – sitting in my writing folder. A two thousand word short, two thousand words of background, and a five thousand word scene by scene breakdown of the novel.

And it hasn’t stopped yet – I know that there’s a second book and I even know what the bugger is called.

But I need to stop – I need to get some coherence before I pick up my one and a half chapters again. I also need to get some emotional distance from one of the characters, because right now my every thought is circling around her drama.

Sometimes I love/hate being a writer.

p.s. I cried at my own ending. How pathetic is that?

I haven’t finished this, and I’m not going to. There are two compelling (for me) reasons why this is the case.

Firstly, it’s written in the present tense and that irritates the hell out of me. I have no justification for this – it just does. The irritation of the tense is simply greater than the draw of the narrative.

This, on its own, wouldn’t stop me from reading a novel – it’s the secondary issue that is causing me the most grief. I need to read something which will immerse me totally. The Twilight Saga, for all its faults, has gripped me so deeply that every word I write is being influenced by it. I’m not trying to write Ms Meyer’s story, thanks – I’m trying to write my own.

As a result, I’m heading for the generic safety oTom Clany.

My head is full of the characters, plot and setting of the Twilight series.

This is not good.

I thought reading Exodus would act as an antidote, but I just can’t get into it because it’s written in the present tense and Twilight is just too close to what I was originally working on.

So, I’m going to go off at a tangent and read something completely unrelated to try and purge my brain.

I make no apologies. I really enjoyed these books. I’m also glad I decided to split my mini-reviews as well, although I should have just covered all four at once. So, we know the plot – human girl meets vampire boy, romance ensues, strife arises and is resolved. The End. As far as the plot goes, stretching fairly elegantly over the four volumes, it’s all very entertaining. I only really have two issues.

The central two books are, well, bleak. Like really bleak. Even as a 38 year old bloke, I found myself surprisingly affected by the wringer that the central characters get put through – god knows what the teenagers of the target audience make of it.

Which, I guess, brings me to my second issue. The relationships in these books give me some cause for concern – not the moral or cross-species aspects, but the utter selfless perfection of them. People just don’t behave the way these characters do. This is fine – I’m an adult and I can see that. Thing is, a youngster discovering their first taste of romance through these novels just might use those relationships as the yardstick to measure their own stumbling first steps and – trust me on this – may be bitterley disappointed.

But hey – it’s fantasy and I’m an old fuddy duddy.

I will finish on a high-note. After the depressing middle section, the final book really ups the tempo and even delivers quite a few laughs along the way. Ok, there’s an utterley ludicrous deus ex machina in there, but who cares – it’s no worse than Harry bloody Potter in that regard

As I’ve just gone straight onto Breaking Dawn, I thought I may as well hang off on the mini-review and do both at once. Makes things easier.