Owner: The other side of the river URL:http://neilbeynon.wordpress.com Join Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:12:43 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Mishaps, writing, comedy sprinkled with opinion. Site statistics:Click here
Friday Flash Fiction 2007-12-14 07:50:14 Last week I went up to the wire, if you missed it then you can read it here, and this week is not much better. I’m not sure about it, feedback is always welcome, but here it is, enjoy:
Paths
By Neil Beynon
"You haven't said anything?" he said nervously. His lean figure rested with one arm on the broken edge of a stone. Despite his nonchalant stance his fingers betrayed him as he idly traced a never-ending pattern across the rock's rough edge.
She stood, unmoving, eyes locked on him, her face set as if, like the stone, she'd been weathered that way over millennia.
"You said you loved me," she said. "Not two weeks ago"
Another silence.
He looked at the grass unwilling to meet her eyes. He felt naked, exposed. Then his ego rallied; a nugget of anger in a whirlpool of confusion.
"Yes," he answered. "I did. And I meant it but I can't have you, can I?"
She stepped forward. Emotion danced across her face and in that moment it seemed anything might happen. T Read more:Friday
, Flash
, Fiction
Love to hate 2007-12-13 06:30:58 London. It’s a funny place.
I work in the West End, just on the edge of where Soho meets Oxford Street, and at this time of year I usually think twice about venturing too far from the office due to the mass of Christmas shoppers.
There’s something about Christmas shoppers, particularly London ones. They fall into two categories:
1) The lobotomised - they can be identified by the vacant expression and slow ambling walk; they’re oblivious to anyone else.
2) The SMART weapon - they can be identified by their bulldozer approach to navigating pavements and the large number of bags in each hand.
This period is usually followed, on Christmas Eve, by a mass exodus and London empties of all its workers. This is the best time to be in London. Commuting becomes humane.
And so, on Monday, when this bliss like state seemed to have begun early I was cautious. Then it happened again on Tuesday and I became cocky. This, I thought, is cool. I can relax.
Foolish, foolish Taff.
Yesterda
It’s a cruel world after all 2007-12-12 11:33:37 Terry Pratchett has announced he is suffering from early onset Alzheimers:
 http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2226306,00.html
This is one of the cruel
lest of illnesses for anyone. For someone who relies on and takes so much enjoyment from the use of their brain as a writer it is - well it’s one of my worst nightmares.
Terry seems to be taking it with his customary humour calling it an “an embuggerance”. And I really don’t know what else to say.
Columbo Villian of the Week 2007-12-12 05:00:27 The temptation proved too much. By popular demand this week’s CVTW is the mistress of excess: Amy Winehouse.
Amy Winehouse is the tormented and talented R & B singer from North London. Winehouse is blessed arguably the most unique female vocal in the business, whilst, at the same time, being cursed with one of the most addictive personalities the business has ever seen.
Now after my far earlier rant of a few months ago, where I voiced some fairly heated opinions on the merits of intervention, I have become slightly more suspicious as too the legitimacy of Amy’s illness. Either that or her PR people have no ethics what-so-ever.
Ok maybe it’s the latter but that’s not half as funny as the former. I can see it now…
Amy, up for six Grammies, shows up for the event “half-cut” then proceeds to give a brilliant but clearly drunken performance that has the audience cheering and jeering in equal measure. However, she fails to win a single award an
The House - Live now on Aphelion 2007-12-09 13:11:07 My short story “The House
” is now live on Aphelion, you can check it out here:
http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2007/12/TheHouse.html
And while you’re there you should check out GLP’s “The Redoubt“.
Enjoy.
The Golden Compass AKA Northern Lights 2007-12-09 05:51:27
Let’s be clear: translating a book to the screen is hard, really hard and it shouldn’t be underestimated. Things you can get away with in a book you simply can’t on film for a range of reasons. It’s not the same medium, you have less time and, in some cases, things that are palatable in book form just aren’t in the American dominated world of film.
So Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was always going to be a struggle with its open pop at organised religion and its themes around the nature of authority, death, the purpose of existence and even a light sprinkling of teenage sex.
For this, and the curious decision to keep the US title for the UK release, I approached the first instalment with caution. I was surprised. In a good way.
Granted Chris Weitz has, at first glance, bottled the aspects of the story that dealt with religion. Instead he’s opted to turn the anti-authoritarian aspect of the film up to eleven but, to be quite frank, Read more:Golden
, Compass
, Northern
, Lights
, Northern Lights
Friday Flash Fiction 2007-12-07 12:00:00 So continuing my up-to-the-wire approach to deadlines I have managed to cobble together a FridayFlash
Entry. It’s a bit grim, and if you missed last weeks please do check it out.
Here’s this week’s entry:
Faded Letters
By Neil Beynon
He sits on the bench staring at the envelope.
He does not know what to do. The paper pouch is creased, dog-eared, stained, even slightly torn from weeks transferred between pockets, bag, desk and hand.
It is the first thing he thinks of when he rises, the last thing he considers as he waits for sleep to drop its velvet curtain, in many ways it's the only the thing he thinks of.
Sarah left him, finally sick of being second fiddle to a piece of mail. When she told her friends, they thought he was gay. It took a bit of explaining to make them understand he was just pathetic.
She opened hers of course, always one to plan, an exit strategy for all contingencies. And she was happier, able to do more, enjoy more, as if a safety net had been Read more:Fiction
Blocked 2007-12-07 06:29:33 I’m not sure if there will be a FFF from me today but after last week’s debacle I figured some regular readers may have missed last week’s entry.
So here’s a link to be getting on with while I try to remove the worst case of writer’s block I’ve had in ages. Stay tuned - there’ll be more later.
Read more:Blocked
The right side of the river 2007-12-23 08:31:02
I'm back in Wales, back at home, and after four months - four difficult months - it really does feel great to breathe air that doesn't leave you with snot the colour of slate. To be able to look up at the night sky and see actual stars instead of enough neon to power a small African state.
Yesterday I pretty much kicked back; I worked on a redraft of short story I wrote in Hong Kong and read some Lord Shang. I'm currently recovering from the disappointment that my story, my masterpiece, is not quite as wonderful as I thought it was when I was writing it. But I still like it.
Last night I popped over to see my brother, R. There was beer, banter and a remote control helicopter. G and my sister, E, looked on with amusement as the previously mentioned helicopter was flown into the Christmas tree, TV, sofa, table, pretty much anything. Never let my bro or myself behind the controls of a real aircraft.
Now I'm warming up to tackle a tricky story I drafted a while back that needs so
Friday Flash Fiction 2007-12-21 02:20:34 An experiment this week:
Centre Point
By Neil Beynon
The city of light glows black in the afternoon sun. Coiled snakes run through its passageways and thoroughfares, snip snapping at any strays, grinding over the unseen, the passed out, the forgotten.
Confused, bleeding and lost in the maze, Will wanders. He is clutching paper on which monkey glyphs are scrawled; he cannot read them. Once he had the power but it has been taken from him. So many things stripped from him. He is not even naked, he is like a skeleton picked raw by birds and bleached white by the burning star above. He does not know why.
Will ambles through the hidden paths, secret stairs and high towers until he comes before the sorcerer. Will does not know for what reason he has made this journey to a man even madder than he, if that's what the sorcerer is.
Will does think he's gone mad. That he has been driven so by the venomous worms that traverse the city, eroding the rock with their bellies. The sorcerer is speaki Read more:Friday
, Fiction
, Flash
Merry Madness 2007-12-20 02:58:55 Ah, the first day of my holiday. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and minus three outside. All I really, really want to do is curl up on the sofa with a good book and a bucket of tea.
What I’m actually going to do is go to Bluewater to finish my Christmas shopping, this is a foolish thing to do this close to Christmas, I may not make it. They’ll just find a pair of Nike and my smoking credit card…
Every year I tell myself I’ll do it online. I work online, I spend vast amounts of time online. Do I every manage it? Do I buggery! If I’m lucky I’ll buy a couple of presents at the start of the month but more likely not. I’ll be there on Christmas Eve performing a shopper’s version of dodgems as I skit from store to store.
And I really can’t string this out any longer. I’ve got to go.
*sniffs* It’s a far better thing I do…
Read more:Madness
, Merry
Columbo Villian of the Week 2007-12-19 09:56:54
Yes folks, that's right. This week's Columbo Villian of the Week is good old George W. Bush, the leader of the free world, lord help us.
George W, or that Texan halfwit as I prefer to refer to him, rose to power as President in a strange quirk of the world's largest democracy where you can lose the popular vote but still win the election. Only in America.
No one expected much. No one expected him to be around for any longer than his father.
After all, he is a renowned halfwit, a man who as Governor of Texas executed more people than anyone else in US history, a self-confessed alcoholic (albeit reformed) and dogged by constant rumours of draft dodging sprinkled with drug abuse.
Then a certain event, that no one could have predicted (except as it turns out the NSA, CIA and FBI…allegedly) happened and a surge of patriotism launched the floundering president to the top of the mountain. Very convenient, mutter the conspiracy theorists (we know who you are).
George W. responded in t
MirrorMask 2007-12-16 16:14:36
My sister, S, was visiting this weekend. And very kindly brought her copy of MirrorMask up for me to watch. The plan had been to watch it on Saturday evening after an afternoon spent with a collection of my old school friends.
Plans went a bit awry after I sampled one of my friend's home brew cider. People who know me in meatspace will know that I have the alcohol tolerance of a Chihuahua and that this was a foolish move.
I don't know what was in this cider, I don't want to know, I just know it only stayed inside me for around four hours - if you know what I mean.
Anyway. I didn't get round to watching MirrorMask until this morning and was, it's fair to say, a little worse for wear. Even so I think I would have had the same reaction even if I were feeling bouncier.
The reaction: F**K Me That Was Good.
The film tells the tale of Helena a circus girl who longs for a normal life away from her crazy parents, played by the charming Rob Brydon and the divine Gina McKee. When her m
Columbo Villian of the Week: Simon Cowell 2007-12-26 08:30:08 This week's CVTW is the godfather of TV talent shows, SimonCowell
.
Cowell made his bones as an A & R man in the notoriously unpleasant music industry, first at EMI and then later in a strong of his own labels of varying degrees of success. In the nineties he made some serious cash by successfully using other media, noticeably television tie-ins such as wrestling, Teletubbies and Power Rangers to produce hit records.
Maybe that was where the nugget came from. Or perhaps it was his time with Pete Waterman, the man who in the eighties gave us so many soap stars turned singers. Don't mock him, he gave us Kylie.
Kylie…mmmmm…. sorry went to a quiet place there.
Anyway, Simon has been there on the fringes of popular culture for a lot longer than most people realised when he shot to national fame as a member of the judging panel on Pop Idol. The idea was for an interactive talent show where the final judgement as to who won would be down to the voting public. The winner got signe Read more:Simon Cowell
Merry Christmas 2007-12-25 06:08:35
It’s Christmas
morning here in the UK. At least for the next twenty minutes or so.
I’ve already had a glass of champagne and, by way of warm up for eating my own body weight in turkey, smoked salmon and scrambled egg on toast. Oh yes, we do Christmas in style here.
My presents have gone down well. I’m pleased about this as I’d been a lot more organised this year and one or two presents were a gamble as to whether someone else had bought them or not.
I’ve had a remarkably good haul this year; people have been very generous and very thoughtful. Somewhere along the way people got the idea I’m a Neil Gaiman fan, I can’t imagine where Thanks to some masterful co-ordination of my family by G I know have a much larger Sandman collection than I had before.
The great thing is my youngest sister has become a huge Gaiman fan in recent months also getting a substantial amount of the Gaiman back catalogue and I get to play the cool older brother who recom Read more:Merry
, Merry Christmas
Christmas Trees Cost Lives 2007-12-24 11:50:07 This video made me smile.
I got sent this courtesy of my alumni mailing list. The animator, Ed Hartwell, graduated the year after me, that’s all I really know about him - you can check his site out here.
Enjoy:
Read more:Lives
, Trees
, Christmas
Review: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi 2008-03-11 08:36:21 In what seems like contradiction, free is very much the current marketing buzzword for people trying to increase sales. Since Tor - in return for your email address - decided to release a book a week for free via their website it seems like everyone’s been jumping on the bandwagon. In such a climate it’s [...] Read more:Old Man
Unblocked 2008-03-10 08:19:31 As has been alluded to a few times recently, I have been experiencing more than my fair share of writer’s block, that all pervading paralysing fear that the ideas will dry up and not a single interesting sentence will be transmitted to the page.
This happens to me periodically and so I’ve built up a whole [...]
A brief message from your host 2008-03-09 10:00:40 Boo. Bet you thought I’d run away to become a sheep farmer. No? Oh, that’s embarrassing. Forget the sheep.
Anyway: The Woodsman, work and related sundry have prevented me from blogging as regularly as I would like. Some of my family have commented that I haven’t been as good lately at keeping this thing up to [...]
Mackety Mac 2008-03-09 03:40:19 Recently - in a move wrapped in common sense and taste - a friend of mine purchased an Apple Mac.
And so I sent her a list. A list of software I can’t do without on my own Mac. It occurred to me others might be interested so here’s my “couldn’t live without” software list for [...]
Friday Flash Fiction: Elevator 2 - Tin Clouds 2008-03-07 12:31:40 Ok. I’ve been a bit pushed for time again and so we witness the somewhat dubious return of the Elevator or to be strictly accurate Elevator 2 - Tin Clouds
. Err, hope you enjoy:
Elevator 2 - Tin Clouds
By Neil Beynon
At the edge of the world where the rainbow’s end, there lies a Tinman who [...] Read more:Friday
, Flash
, Fiction
Beware of Dog 2008-03-04 15:01:50 Dear Chav,
I trust this letter finds you in rather better health than I am at the moment as I sit here typing, a bag of frozen peas on my distressed knee, unable to move my neck through ten degrees.
You probably don’t recognise me, having only glimpsed my face momentarily before I demonstrated just how fast [...] Read more:Beware
The Woodsman: Update 5 2008-03-04 01:38:48 Well, I just got done with the full rewrite of Chapter three. It’ll need to gestate for a few days before I go back and make sure I haven’t made a hash of it but it’s more or less done. And I think it may turn out to be chapters 3 and 4. We’ll see.
Progress [...] Read more:Update
Review: Midnight’s Children 2008-03-02 04:00:45 So I finally finished reading it. In truth, I finished the book that launched Rushdie’s career proper (Grimus never really garnered the same attention) a few days ago. I needed to let it pretty much slosh around my head for a little while before I could distil the experience down to a few hundred words.
Yes [...] Read more:Children
Friday Flash Fiction: Shard 2008-02-29 12:43:27 Not having the best of weeks this is a little late in the day, I hope you enjoy anyway.
Shard
By Neil Beynon
The shard felt smooth like glass as he rested its not insignificant weight in his hand, he looked down at it; purple stone flashing in the grey mid afternoon sun. The wind ran its fingers [...] Read more:Friday
, Flash
, Fiction
Columbo Villain of The Week: Hiatus 2008-02-27 16:32:54 Sorry all. No villain this week.
The Woodsman and some other projects (including the pesky day job) have soaked up rather more time than planned. I should get back to normal service next week.
Kind of bummed out at the moment but this cheered me somewhat:
I was bought The Hobbit by my father when I was very [...] Read more:Villain
, Hiatus
Friday Flash Fiction: Pockets 2008-03-14 08:00:41 On the back of today’s announcement I feel almost deflated posting this week’s entry. It didn’t quite live up to the expectations I had when the idea first occurred but with the final draft of The Woodsman well underway (we just met the Tream) this is all I’ve got.
And of course wodwo is not something [...] Read more:Friday
, Flash
, Fiction
, Pockets
Breaking news: Illuminations 2008-03-14 06:41:38 Ok, so I promised news. And here it is. Odd Two Out Publishing has announced the imminent release of Illuminations, a new anthology of the weird and wonderful in very short fiction featuring, amongst others, me.
From Odd Two Out:
ILLUMINATIONS: The Friday Flash Fiction Anthology
ISBN 978-0-9558662-0-3
ILLUMINATIONS is a new anthology from small press [...] Read more:Breaking
Quick Update: 88 MPH and rising 2008-03-16 15:08:37 Yes, things are getting a little frantic.
I’ve spent the weekend working on existing stories - including but not exclusively the Woodsman - and performing DIY. Both exercises have had varying degrees of success, leaving me questioning where the hell the weekend went.
But there’s no time for questions. Onwards and upwards.
It’s nearly Monday 17th March and [...] Read more:Quick
, Update
, Quick Update
Grand Slam: Wales 2008-03-15 13:57:16 We won, that’s five wins for five matches. That Ladies and Gents is a Grand
Slam:
Bloody brilliant. Read more:Wales
, Grand Slam
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