1 Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars Selected Words of Literary Adventure & Aspiration by Mark Cantrell This Edition Published October 2006 By The Author Copyright (c) 2005/2006. Mark Cantrell. Some Rights Reserved. Released Under Creative Commons THIS anthology has been released by the author under a creative commons license. It may be downloaded for personal use and otherwise distributed, provided it is not distributed for commercial purposes. The author must be credited and no revisions or alterations are to be made to the text of this PDF document. Extracts, such as those for review purposes, may be used subject to the normal restrictions of fair usage. For any other usage, contact the author. 2 Publisher: Mark Cantrell, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK. Email: [email protected] Web: www.tykewriter.supanet.com Cover art 'The Womb' by Phil Wainman. Used by permission of the artist. www.surrealdreams.co.uk Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars Selected Words of Literary Adventure & Aspiration by Mark Cantrell CONTENTS INTRODUCTION From Way Outa Here To Somewhere Over There IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS... A WORD OR THREE FROM OUR SPONSORS... Penning The Altered States Hunters Of The Untamed Idea Dance With The Muse And Write To Dissent It Just Got Harder! Primal Expression Don't You Dare Publish My Collected Works! THE STORY WAS... THAT AFTER THE FRIVOLITY... THERE CAME... A Walk In The Woods The Ghost Of Sarajevo The Rise & Fall Of Sisyphus Sinners In Streaming Video Joe's Last Meal Time Changeth The Man You Looking At Me? - The Almost True Story Of Paddington Bear Shopping For Katie Nathan's Friend To Heal The World Deadly Night Shade IT IS TIME... TO FACE... THE ARTICLES OF FAITH... Writing A Living Memorial Taking Bradford By Storm The Naked Verse Poetry Bridges The Pond Scrawling On The Megalith Poets Launch Peaceful Dissent Not In This Pensioner's Name! Mild-Mannered & Foul-Mouthed Genetically Modified Muse The Horror & The Ecstasy: Poets Commemorate The Victims... Asylum Seekers Speak Out Hostess With The Mostess Mayakovsky's Pants A Tragedy Of Ego Over Idealism WAIT THERE'S... ALL THESE LEFT OVER BITS... There Is No Sanctuary The Pestilent Script Have You Ever Done It Whilst Being Stood Up? Synapses Of The Soul BIOGRAPHY: The Literary Life & Times Of A Tyke In Exile INTRODUCTION: From Way Outa Here To Somewhere Over There THINGS were getting serious. I was fresh out of fags. 3 The coffee had congealed. And the beer was definitely off. Yes. Out it went, through the door, slithering along like an oversized amber slug. Always sensible in any crisis, a pint, but I was in no state to follow course and sup the bitter dregs of retreat. So, in the thick of all this chaos, I went for the less-than-heroic option and made like The Scream. They were coming in thick and fast all around. Porting in through the hollow points in the quantum-foam-wash of real space like, well, like hollowed out bullets bludgeoning through flesh. The doors of perception were being well and truly gate-crashed. What was to be a rather gentile soiree of a literary persuasion, was turned into a cyber-boot-stomping montage of fearsome verbiage. There were words everywhere. They merged into one writhing, putrescent orgasm of frenzied composition. The cascading babble deafened right down to the bowels. The walls and windows were drenched in spilled ink, the floor was awash in black and bubbled with more words emerging like ectoplasm ghouls to eat the flesh of literary taste. It was horrible. It was The Attack of the 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars. And try saying that in a bookshop without getting funny looks. It was all my fault too. I just wasn't capable of controlling my pen. I let it prod and probe where pens were not meant to ponder, and cracked open a splurging orifice of psycho-babble into an unprepared universe. With those words flooding into this doomed world, and me out of chemical inducements, I figured there was only one thing left to do. Make like a writer and delete the scene, but the only part of me capable of running was my bowel. Fortunately there was a deafening flash of inspiration and the ink-blinded windows imploded. Black-clad figures, straight out of an action flick, chased the cascading shards like a punctuation expletive. I managed to duck as they abseiled into the narrative flow with the [full-]stopping power of a full-metal-colon. The Editors were here to save the paragraph. Red pens flashed like maser-death. They scythed through the invaders. Dismembered clauses floundered on the ink floor bubbling a death rattle tattoo as the editors hacked and butchered these babies. Streams of high velocity tippex wiped their asses clean off the face of the Earth. I just ducked under a table and admired the sheer choreography of this high-power revision. Even so, it looked tight to the deadline. These editors were tough S.O.B.s, but the words were giving a tempestuous backchat. We were far from clear of the verbiage yet. Truth is, those editors were in serious danger of becoming overwhelmed by the sheer deluge of noisome composition. I was definitely destined for somebody's bad books... That's when the Critics smashed through the doors. You should have been there to see it for yourself. Some piece of work. The action didn't last long after that. They destroyed them. Drowned them in scorn. The Fountains Pens From Mars just withered and died under the Critics' combined vitriol aplomb and heat-beam stares. 4 With the last bubbling decomposition writhing its last on the ink-swilled floor, I crawled out from under the table. I had to thank these guys for saving my arse from the verbiage swamp. I went up to the nearest editor, grinning like a classic hippy with a bowel full of good shit. He saw me. This Heraclean Hero of the Delete Key watched me sidle nonchalantly his way. He turned and holstered his Red Pen. Adopting a casual stance, he rested one gauntleted hand on his hip while the other reached up to peel off his respirator hood. I stopped then, and stuttered a few grateful incoherences. The Hero's mouth curled in disdain. "Goddam passive voices," he said, "more trouble than worth." I grinned a little weak. He must have mistaken me for some other scribe... Mark Cantrell, Bolton, 16 November 2004 In the beginning there was... A word or three from our sponsors... Penning The Altered States Hunters Of The Untamed Idea Dance With The Muse And Write To Dissent It Just Got Harder! Primal Expression Don't Publish My Collected Works! Penning The Altered States EVERY session at the keyboard is a journey to unknown places. My body might reside in the here and now of the physical universe, but like the ancient shaman high on exotic herbs, my mind - or soul depending on your inclinations - is away elsewhere. Not to the gods. Or the spirits of animals and ancestors. Just. Elsewhere. To that place that somehow reaches back to this world to manifest itself on the glowing screen or the coffee-stained paper. It's a hard place to reach. 5 Some, again, we're back to shamans, have preached the wondrous facilitator that is illegal drugs. Pop a pill, snort some neuro-chemically interesting powder and open the doors to perception. Others might swear by various concoctions of alcohol. And yes, there's always the boring swot who preaches the virtues of hard work. They overlook something. Not about the hard work, that's a given whatever substance you abuse or none. And it isn't sleep deprivation either, which can sometimes be a wonderful hallucinatory mind-swirling phenomenon for the creative writer out for a quick nib. No. They forget. That writing itself is an altered stream of consciousness. The words themselves, and the fizzing incandescent ideas they dance to represent, can themselves open that mystical doorway to perception and otherworldliness. I think, drugs aside, those ancient shamans knew that little secret too. These days they have a phrase for it. Typically boring. The kind of label that only someone who's spent years using their mind to learn the theories and hypotheses of what makes the brain work rather than the mind itself could come up with. Hey, let's take the essential mystery out of the mind, they might have declared. Then thought even that's too scintillating and figured let's just map the neurons and stick a few electrodes in to see how they mechanically behave. They call it the hypnagogic state. It has different brainwave patterns apparently, quite distinct from phases like REM or deep sleep, or various neurologically and experientially interesting substances. I suppose as writers we forget this too. We just say we are on a roll. On a whole roll of flying carpet, maybe. Because that's when we're flying. We've got there without chemicals. Only the most powerful drug known to man: words. Opening the door might be hard work. We might stare at the keyboard or at the paper for ages. Frustrated. Grumpy. Wondering why we bother. And then the idea detonates in the head, or else we get 'back into the flow' and suddenly we're there. Not at the table or the PC. Not in the cafŽ. But out there. In whatever world we're struggling to create.