al-Hazred : : projekt-blog

Part one in an occasional series: ASK PUB MONKEY!



(Original photo of pub from Matt Seppings, found on Flickr.)

An untitled thingy, being an experiment in hypercondensed action fiction

Muzzle-flash everywhere like the popping of flashbulbs and shells ripping the air apart while Sabine shoots me a glance and mouths a single expletive. The ground reaches up and smacks me in the back. Deadlead fills the space I'd been occupying. Twin pistol-grips kiss my palms like an old lover: with each barked syllable they orgasm-jolt, lurching back as my fingers squeeze them just-so.
The first gunman catches a bullet in the face and goes down for a long nap on a pillow of his own brains. A shot hits the ground two inches past my left ear. That's too damn close for comfort if you ask me and I hear Sabine's shotgun agree with me with a fist-sized exclamation mark in the second gunman's lower intestine. He goes down knees-first, groping at the spilled red ropes of his guts and I can't bear to make him wait for Sabine to clear the chamber before putting him out of his misery so I drop a few rounds into his chest. The third gunman takes to his heels, so Sabine confiscates them from twenty yards away and then swings an arm down to help me to my feet.
The third gunman's lying on his back like an overturned beetle, begging for his mama and trying not to notice that the boot standing next to his head still has his foot inside. I lose the spent clips and reload; tuck the girls back in my belt-holsters. Sabine takes her sunglasses off and wipes the spatter with the corner of her coat. Our new friend keeps groaning like he just invented it and mumbling something over and over under his breath. It takes me a second to cotton to what he's saying. Sabine doesn't speak a word of Spanish so I do the honours and fill her in on his last breathless bargaining chip. He spills the dirt on his employer even faster than his stumps are spilling blood, all in good faith that we've some honour left in us that didn't run for the door with our patience. He just wants medical attention. Funny what a couple of gunshot wounds can do for your priorities. I leave Sabine to make pretend she's a veterinarian to our loose-lipped little racehorse while I make some calls
and twenty minutes later Jesus Cortez, the David Koresh of the Mexicano quarter, is staring down the barrel of Sabine's shotgun with a lump in his throat and asks us why we're here. He knows damn well and I tell him as much, then punctuate it with a minor head trauma to drive the point home. The cultists are looking itchy and shifting from foot to foot like they're thinking maybe if they throw down they can take us out before Sabine pops Cortez. Their leader isn't that stupid or else just doesn't want to risk taking a money-shot on the chin from the steel cock of death currently getting intimate with his dentistry and shakes his head 'no' to them. Agrees to call off the contract. He stutters while he's on the phone but I hear him stay true to his word. That's always the good thing about middlemen: the two things that concern them most are the money in their pants pocket and the pulse of the man wearing said pants. Threaten to cut either one and they'll fold like a cheap card table. I wanted the name of whoever put Cortez up to taking out the hit on Sabine and I, but even getting to first base with a twelve-gauge wasn't loosening his lips on that score. A shame, but his reticence speaks volumes.
We leave little Jesus Cortez to pick up his teeth and find a seamstress to stitch up his head wound, and swing by Mandolin's on the lookout for a contact. It's never closed, says the sign, and gives us time to soak up some caffeine while we wait for someone in the know. No-one casting around for a fish like Cortez could manage it without making waves big enough for the bottom-feeders to pick up on, and that's where the contacts come in. Sleazy Harry rolls in and slips us a name in exchange for a deuce and a solid. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised at the name he gave us
and the man behind the name's pretty surprised too when he comes to with a lump on his skull and dead fish in his nostrils. It's quiet down by the docks, like it was when we were kids, though the water's since been replaced with a layer of muck so thick you can cut it into blocks. I wonder about asking him why he wanted us dead but something in Sabine's eyes makes me realise I don't want to hear the answer. A mystery lets me sleep at night. Sabine and I rock-paper-scissors for the job like when we were nippers. She still has the same old tell, so I let her win and watch her trudge back to the car, leaving the two of us alone.
Anyway. Like I said, it's quiet down by the docks, and a couple of hard words in the old man's frontal lobes aside, it stays that way. The smell of cordite drifts up and mingles with the gulls overhead while the estuary ooze laps over his body and sucks him down into darkness beneath.
I say a last goodbye to our old dad and join Sabine in the idling car.

Okay, so NaNo was something of a monumental failure the second I started work for Circuit City; I didn't even make the halfway point. But here's a litte story featuring John Crayfish, a moody bastard who won't get out of my head some days. I call this one WHISKEY'S REVENGE.

Crayfish flicked the airtight cap off his cigarette and spat on the magnesium tip. It flared into life briefly and then stuttered as he sucked the heat through the tobacco, drawing enough oxygen in to let the paper casing catch and smoulder. The backlight on his phone was blinking under the orange glow of the sodium light at the corner of Foxtrot and Layevska and he had to squint to make out the name of the place he was supposed to meet the girl. He hated the Indic character set on his phone; he made a mental note to have one of his pet hackers sort the bugger out whenever he next got a chance. Two gangbangers in a whitewalled Cadillac glowered at him as the car rolled by alongside the kerb. They were Lao, probably the Kha-Nyous if he was up to date on gang colours. He usually was. It was Crayfish’s job to know things like that. He was a Contact.
( Read the rest of 'Whiskey's Revenge' behind the cut )

© 2006 David Williams, etc

I sat at the table in the bar. I drank too much wine. I needed to urinate and went to the bathroom. In the bathroom there was a poster. The poster had my girlfriend's face on it. Below her face it read 'for a good time call this number.' Underneath there was a number. It was my girlfriend's number. I went back out into the bar and slapped my girlfriend in the face. Then I drank more wine. I needed to urinate so I went out into the street and used a grid.
I didn't want to see that poster again.

In the latest Shit Happens strip, the final panel has Halifax and Holly sitting atop the roof of their building, looking over the city while a full moon looks down on them in turn.

However... that wasn't how the final panel was meant to look. Due to Potatoshop's 'Save for web' feature peaking out at 256 colours, coupled with the ultra-detailed one-third-of-the-strip panel, the original final panel couldn't be used without either looking like shit or eating half a meg of size. So here it is: the cut-for-size 'sunset' panel of Shit Happens:

This is a bigger version of a picture I whipped up for the background of part of today's comic; it's meant to have a '20s or '30s feel to it, but with the inking it turned out a bit more like a '60s comic book.



(May display funky on some LJ setups -- background of image is transparent.)

As today's comic required an internal shot of Shakra's room, I had to knock up some art for a wallposter in there. This was the first idea that sprang to mind, partly because Shakra likes cartoons and likes Vampires, but mostly because after Elton John's musical about Lestat, the next stage really is a Disney cartoon of him.

Rough layout sketch of today's Shit Happens strip - see the finished version at raincannon.com.

A Matrix-flavoured picture I drew a good two or three years ago now in ballpoint pen, newly screwed around with on PotatoShop. I scanned it, cut all the separate elements (figure, foreground pillars, mid-ground pillars, background pillars, floor, walls) out and played around with layer masks and the blur tools to get the depth into it, then cut the gunfire out and put inner/outer glow on it, and played with the contrast on a couple of other layers. It took about an hour and a half to do all the PotatoShoppery, all told. I'm pretty happy with the finished result, considering that I was never that pleased with the original image to begin with.

I've been learning some of the basics of Illustrator over the last few days, and had a go at knocking together a picture of some form -- I'm pleased with how Dwight himself turned out, though his skin is a bit grey and dead-looking when I see it on a CRT monitor instead of the LCD screen. The background is slightly more ropey, but that's because I knocked it up in about half an hour as something to go behind Dwight, and should really have made the stroke around the components a darker colour because it turned all bitty and light when I moved it over to PotatoShop.
The shading on Dwight and the background were both done on PotatoShop - I can't work out a decent way to do it on Illustrator without it taking forever. The smoke at the top of the image was done as a last-minute addition on PotatoShop.

I love where Starbucks' priorities lie when it comes to smoking. It's a very enlightened view that you don't see much now: Go ahead, smoke yourself to death, just don't fuck up our coffee while you're doing it.

We walked slowly up the snowdrift, trailing footprints in the powder. Jelene glanced over at me, her breath misting against the ink-black night sky, and asked me if I knew where we were going. I didn't, but the last thing I wanted was to worry her so I uttered a non-committal grunt and curled my lips back against the enamel of my teeth as they chattered lightly in the cold. It was definitely below zero. We were somewhere in Greenland, that much I knew, though where, and if there was shelter nearby, I didn't know.
Jelene took my arm as we crested the top of the bank and gasped cold lungfuls of crisp winter air as one. The trees. Magnificent trees, towering sixty, seventy feet easily. Black needles bristled on each branch. There was enough snow on a single branch to bury a person to the waist. The trunks were thicker than the average family car, covered in gnarled, knotted dull blood-red bark.
"Are they real?" Jelene's voice was a whisper beside me, hot breath rushing upwards and her arms clutched around my own.
"They're real," I said, "Made to order. Aged 'specially, then uprooted and transported to the highest bidder. Hardy things. They grow them up here in the cold places so they can survive whatever the world can throw at them."
I didn't mention the rest. No point in scaring her, I thought.
( Read the rest of 'Wrong Time' )

In-progress detail of a panel I've just scanned for Monday's Shit Happens. As to what's going on, you'll have to wait until Monday to find out.
I like the expression on his face. It's very much like Mitch Royce in Transmetropolitan saying 'I brought gifts!' at the end of 'The New Scum'. Which is interesting, because Ormrod, like Royce, is an editor.

Just been watching the third part of Jonathan Miller's 'Brief History of Disbelief' documentary exploring atheism. Hopefully I can find the first two parts of it online.
If you don't know who Jonathan Miller is, he was a member of innovative proto-satire group 'Beyond the Fringe' with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore, and, of course, Peter Cook. Following that, he's done a lot of theatre production and direction, as well as the 1966 BBC 'Alice In Wonderland' production that is remembered fondly by most. (Alas, the DVD is a BFI special edition, which means it's pretty much not going to come down in price, even on Amazon.) He is, like Peter Cook and Alan Bennett, a professional clever bastard who is far more intelligent than 95% of the people on TV these days.
And I drew this sketch while watching the show. It's in ink-pen on paper.

I've not been very good about writing this year. I've been busy working on Shit Happens, that I draw and co-write with my girlfriend, Mary.

But anyway. Three days in, and I'm on about 2,200 words. Which isn't brilliant for three days in, but not irrecoverable.

( Read the first part here, cut for length )

I haven't written anything even resembling poetry in the longest time, but today I felt like a crack at a pointless sonnet. A sonnet, in fact, about sonnets. Here goes. You were warned.

The sonnet is a strictly governed verse
consisting of just fourteen even lines.
The structure is a blessing and a curse:
as freeing as restrictive for our minds.
The rhyme scheme alternates from 'A' to 'B'
within each four-line stanza's short-lived run.
These stanzas, in a sonnet, number three;
a rhyming couplet follows when all's done.
With decasyllaballic lines throughout
(Iambic footprints in pentameter?)
the sonnet's structure leaves no room for doubt.
(A challenge for poetic amateurs?)
Tradition makes the sonnet's subject 'love':
though for another subject, see above.

I completely cheated on the 'pentameter' and 'amateur' lines by putting question marks after them so they'd actually more closely resemble iambic pentameter. Which they still don't, really, unless you've had a stroke. To be fair, meter all depends on the individual anyway. I'm sure some of the other lines don't work if you're not me, or at least form around where I was raised. And besides which, I couldn't very well write a sonnet about the structure of a sonnet and miss out iambic pentameter, could I?
Also, the bracketed lines make me look far more pretentious than I really am.
The appearance of the word 'just' in the second line is also a total cheat, since it's obviously there to pad out the meter and nothing more. It jumps out a mile as being the only word that doesn't really belong there.

In all, though I'm not a poet, I can at least do a passable impersonation of one. Even though all my poems rhyme and err toward comedy, mostly because things that rhyme are inherently funny to me. Despite this, rap music isn't funny. Oh, wait, that version of Eminem by the Freelance Hairdresser with all the old TV themes in the background cracks me up, so yes, even rap music is funny to me.

In summation, poetry is a lot harder than it looks, and makes you look like an idiot when you sit in Barnes and Noble counting syllables on your fingers, largely because it looks like you're trying to count to ten and getting frustrated whenever you reach nine and forget what comes next.

There used to be a strip here. It's been removed because someone purporting to be the copyright holder on the art has nastygrammed LJ-Abuse about it, threatening legal action if it isn't taken down.
I don't know if this is a legitimate attempt by the United Press Syndicate to crack down on what must be a terrible problem they have with people misusing Fred Basset, that most popular of comic strips. I'd guess not -- their legal people can probably recognise when something is covered by parody laws.

So it's probably a fan of Fred Basset. Which doesn't surprise me, since the only people who like that comic are right-wing fuckjobs and people so obsessed with their pet dogs that they smear dog food on their genitals for a night of illicit jollies.

( Full text of the e-mail notification from LJ-Abuse )

"I read 'Breakfast At Tiffany's,' once."
"What?" Hazard turned, startled. "You can read?"
"Oh, of course I can read, silly!" Tammigan smiled. "Everyone can read."
Hazard sniffed and lit a cigarette, taking a long drag before responding.
"Not everyone. I know people who can't. Besides, I've never seen you read anything other than those crappy fashion magazines. I've certainly never seen you read Capote."
"The rental place didn't have the video one time, so I decided to read the book instead." Her voice seemed to rise at the end of every utterance she made.
"What did you think of it, then?"
"Huh?"
"The book." Hazard sighed, sucking back a fresh lungful of smoke.
"Which book?"
"'Breakfast At Tiffany's.' What did you think of it?" he exhaled through gritted teeth.
"I liked it." She said, vaguely.
"Which bit did you like?" Hazard inwardly cursed himself for being stupid enough to try to have an intelligent conversation with someone with the same memory capacity as half a goldfish.
"I liked the cat." Tammigan smiled to herself.
"The cat?" he asked, incredulously.
"Yeah, the cat. It was, like, always there, and she threw it out at the end. I kinda felt sorry for it, but it got a happy ending." She sighed contentedly. "I liked the way he gave the cat a happy ending."
Hazard closed his eyes and counted to five.
"The cat." He stated, as levelly as he could manage. "The cat was a metaphor! Didn't you get that? Did you understand anything about the book? The cat was a metaphor for the entire relationship!"
"Oh," Tammigan furrowed her brow, and then smiled sweetly, looking Hazard in the eyes. "No, it was definitely a cat."

* * *

(originally written for a part of the novel I was working on in 2002; the character of Tammigan didn't make the cut)

(Nearly) 1,000 words to clear the crap out of my head this morning.

Dirty Mike had bad habits that infected those around him. He lived his whole life in bars and bus stations, drinking whatever came to hand, be it someone else’s drink on a crowded sports night or the dregs of a whisky bottle thrown at him on the street from a moving taxicab window. I heard that he once drank the piss right from a dog’s cock because he claimed he’d seen it lapping up petrol and figured whatever a dog’s urinary tract could do to it probably wouldn’t stop him getting fucked up off it.

( Read 'Dirty Mike'... )

Wrote this today as a thousand word exercise. It's not a porn story, though the intro reads like it is.

Kim’s lipstick glistened in the darkness of the room as she slid the dress over her head and dropped it to the ground like a snake shedding its skin. Her hair was scraped back from her face and held fast with a thin band of elastic. The silk scarf draped over a lampshade painted the white of her skin a pastel blue, from the diamond edge of her cheekbones to the curve and sway of her hips. There was no sound in the room save my own breathing.

( Read 'The Curse of Kim' )