The Great Escape

I have made good my escape, but can’t believe you all accepted Aliya’s word of what had been happening to me. I suppose the last blogpost I wrote, about being tasked with a secret government mission concerning vegetables, which was made under threat of being buried alive in a pile of potatoes may have helped suppress any feelings of suspicion, so I’ll give you all the benefit of the doubt.

But rather than a Playmobil version of Heaven, I have been through Hell. Hell I tell you.

Several weeks ago I feel unwittingly into a trap set by Aliya and her family, who had undergone some kind of group trauma resulting in them all believing the key to the world’s salvation will come in the form of vegetables.

I was invited to their house under the pretence of trying a new recipe Aliya had arrived at due to an odd mix of ingredients in her latest veggiebox delivery. They had far too many tomatoes, and as we all know, not being a true vegetable, tomatoes are things Aliya has little truck with.

I was as much a fool in going as you have been in believing the warped Playmobil fantasies she has been playing out on this blog since my capture. (Incidentally, anyone who knows me would be aware that I’d never write iPhone with a capital ‘I’, even with the inconvenience of U’s for hands and no discernible fingers to speak of. What’s more I feel my reputation as a stern, joyless misanthrope may have been irrevocably tarnished by the ‘Neilio’ sign-offs Aliya used in her fake missives.)

So how did I make good my escape? Ironically, I turned Aliya and her family’s own vegetables against them.

As close readers of this blog will know, Aliya’s hubby is a military man. Recently he—rather than I—had been tasked with a top secret government mission concerning vegetables. But not just any vegetables. Oh no. We’re talking GENETICALLY MODIFIED VEGETABLES.

These are strange, triffid-like creatures that grow in the space of days rather than weeks. During my imprisonment—which, if you’ve ever read The Collector, you’ll have some idea of how Aliya treated me—the only times I was allowed out of doors unsupervised was to tend the GM vegetable patch. This was a sorry scrap of earth (these GM foods will grow pretty much anywhere) surrounded on three sides by fifteen feet high sheer concrete walls, and on the third side by the sad entryway to the stairwell leading down to the cellar where I was kept.

Having overheard conversations concerning a new fridge freezer that had to be ‘just so, for you know what’, I knew I had to at least attempt to escape, even if I was destined to die trying. My plan was simple, but, as you will now realise, given that I’m here writing to you, effective.

I planted my next batch of seedlings in a carefully considered pattern, so that when they had grown to their full size—within a matter of days, the mutants!—they would spell out a rescue plea for me. To whit: Help! Nutters Have Me Locked Up And Are Making Me Grow These Weird Super-Sized Rhubarbs. Send A Shrink.

Although this was quite a lot of veggie-text to fit into the small courtyard, I felt I needed to add something more, to illustrate the urgency of the situation. So did. PS Please Hurry. I Think They’ve Got A New Fridge Freezer On Order.

Now all I could do was wait. Three terrifying days passed. I had a real scare when that leaflet about the second hand fridge freezer came through, but as luck would have it I was granted a reprieve. And with just minutes to spare my rescuers arrived. As I was airlifted to safety by the Waitrose helicopter, I could see a white goods delivery van had parked up outside the house.

As soon we landed I called my good friend Professor Robert Winston and asked for his advice. He picked me up in an armoured truck and we were straight back to the military base, although it petrified me to be there. I needn’t have worried though. Bob’s crew of trained SWAT Psychiatrists had soon overpowered what little resistance was offered, mainly by Aliya armed with Munchie’s Supersoaker 3000 and a dressing gown belt tied round her head.

I’m pleased to report that the Whiteley family are now ensconced in a high security rehabilitation unit in Milton Keynes specialised in the treatment of vegetable obsessives, and are generally making good progress. Aliya’s therapy mainly consists of exposure to Rorschach images resembling squashed tomatoes.

Serendipity & Veggiebox - redux

For anyone out there who liked and is missing Serendipity, I'm resurrecting it, sort of. I want tweets of a magical realist nature addressed to me on Twitter (@neilayres) and I'll retweet the ones I like best. I'll also regularly include the very best in a post on this here blog, with a credit and short bio for the author. Poems and song lyrics are as welcome as prose.

Here're some examples of the kind of thing I mean:

The speaker is a little man, shrunken and bent, who seems to shrink and bend more and more every time anyone calls him

- Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller (Translated by William Weaver)

Troll brains do not hold many memories. Mostly their minds flicker and ripple like the glossy water in a forest tarn ruffled by the wind

- Kerstin Ekman, The Forest of Hours (Translated by Anna Paterson)

Holy ghosts and talk-show hosts are planted in the sand, to beautify the foothills and shake the many hands

- The Meat Puppets, Plateau

Along similar lines, you can address your veggiebook extracts to Aliya, and she'll no doubt do the same for the best quotes, breaches of copyright notwithstanding (@bluepootle)

Snow joke

As it snowed this morning, I thought I'd let all you budding published authors into the news that Snowbooks are looking for some very specific book types for their 2010 list. I don't seem to be able to get to a direct post for this on their blog, so I've snagged the whole thing. There's a link at the bottom:

2010. It seems so futuristic. Will we all finally get our jet packs? I for one will be saving scraps of tin foil from now on, with which to fashion a suitable cardigan or such like garment. And don’t forget the colander hat to set it all off, with a coat hanger aerial jauntily poking out the top.

But it’s not so far away, you know. In the dynamic world of Snowbooks (where we plan more than a year ahead. Hmm. A brand new definition of dynamic), 2010 is really quite close, and we are starting to think about our list.

So this is a call out to writers to submit your work for our 2010 slate – one which we hope will be better than ever.

Here is what we’re interested in:
• Fantasy. Alternate realities, strange universes. Think The Affinity Bridge, Book of Shadows
• Horror. Zombies, werewolves, vampires, witches, apocalypse, supernatural frighteners. Think Maneater, Paris Immortal, The Fall
• Sci fi – from space opera to near future dystopias.
• Historical fiction. Think Needle in the Blood.
• We’re also looking to scale up our non-fiction publishing programme. We are interested in all topics – even quite specialist or technical subjects if they are interesting enough and written well - we’d like to publish books that are the best in their field, from super-clear introductory texts to, for example, popular science, current affairs, technology, cookery or gardening. Or, I don’t know, bee-keeping. The important thing is the quality of the writing, not the subject. All our non-fiction will be published in full colour with lots of illustrations and photos.
(I wish ‘non-fiction’ had a less negative name. ‘Informative books’, let’s call them. Oh, no, that’s no good either.)

What we’re not interested in: Children’s, poetry, biography, experimental, edgy literary fiction, derivative fantasy featuring lots of orcs and elves.
What we might also be interested in: Other genre writing including chick lit & crime.

Please follow the instructions at www.snowbooks.com/submissions.html. You'll need to send full, not partial or proposed, fiction manuscripts.

Also, Snowbooks author Fiona Robyn has a giveaway available for The Letters, her first release. (Aliya will be reviewing it at some point--there are plenty of vegetables to keep her happy.)Just email fiona@fionarobyn.com to enter. Open until the end of January.

Fiona Robyn's blog tour

From here on in, Aliya and I will be hosting regular flash fiction pieces by guest writers. What better way to kick things off than providing a stopping point for Queen of the hyperflash fiction, Fiona Robyn, on her blogtour, which takes place throughout July. Not even Foo Fighters hit the road this hard. More importantly perhaps than the fact she writes perfect gems about being alive is the one that she has a vegetable patch. Surely the title of this blog is proof enough that we like a decent bit of veggie culture. Fiona couldn't agree more with our veggie/writing crossover ethos:

I can't decide whether growing my own vegetables is easy-as-pie or never-ending-excrutiatingly-hard-work. It seems to depend on how often I do the weeding, and if I've just eaten some home-made blackcurrant jam. I also seem to need to learn the hard way. Last year I watered my sweetcorn seedlings on a scorching day. I knew you weren't meant to water plants in the middle of hot Summer days, but I didn't think it would do them THAT much harm. Every single one shriveled and died a painful death.

"Gardening does feel a bit like writing a novel. Little and often is the key. Paying attention to detail. Plucking out bad words/weeds. And most importantly of all, taking pleasure in the process. Getting satisfaction from completely clearing a little corner of nasty weeds. Enjoying the sensation of sliding ripe raspberries from their white cones. Yes - it's good to bite into firm new potatoes dripping in butter - but the journey is just as important... in the same way that noticing my small stones is just as important as writing them down.

Do you think everyone is capable of experiencing those special moments that are recorded by your stones?

Yes, absolutely. I'm more likely to experience those moments when I have a bit of space in my head - doing things more slowly, focussing on one thing at a time - and so I think we can all improve the chances of these moments occuring by doing the same. I still have days that pass in such a whirlwind that I don't notice a single thing properly - but at least writing a small stone gives me a daily prompt!

Here's a question in mock-haiku. It seems appropriate:

What's your favourite
gem? Tell us about it.
Why's it so special?

Hmmm that's like asking a car enthusiast to choose between his cars! I suppose some of them tend to 'strike me' with more force when I read them, such as the stones I've chosen to end each month in the book. They often tend to be shorter. A few examples of these are:

Quarter to nine:

I look and look at the huge full moon

a white rabbit bottom bobs in the beams before dissolving into the dark

blackbird on bare branches, his beak a chip of flame

A chip of flame for a beak. What a great image.

Have you ever experienced that special stone feeling and somebody else has got it too?

When you ask this question I think about two people sitting in deck chairs and watching the sun go down, but even then they'll be looking at their own sunset, through the filter of their own preferences and experiences. So no, I can't remember having shared this feeling with someone else at the time of the 'moment', but I hope that other people may experience a similar feeling when they read a few of the stones - the ones that resonate for them.

Fiona's book Small Stones: A Year of Moments is available now.