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I screwed up my body clock when I was at school. Long before I ever tried to become an author. From the age of 14, I used to come home at 5pm, sleep for 2-3 hours cos I was so tired from previous night, have dinner at 8pm and then do homework until 1 or 2am and then go to bed with my head still fizzing from such application. As an unemployed adult one summer, I wrote for a period between 5pm and 5am and during a spell of paid work, I popped homeopathic stay awake tablets, without appreciating that it was just Nature's amphetamines albeit a slightly more depleted dose.

So I brought my sleeping difficulties entirely upon myself. There are two different types I've laboured with. One is not being able to fall asleep (and cursing those who extol their ability to drop off the moment their 'head hits the pillow') and tossing and turning all night long, where the bedroom becomes like a gladiatorial arena full of menace, rather than a relaxing place to let go into sleep's embrace. Of course you normally drop off just in time for the alarm clock to summon you to get up for work. The second is you manage to fall asleep, but you wake up several times during the night. Instead of being rested and restorative, sleep is fitful and draining. In my case, I sort of slide out of sleep into an awareness of 'oh, I'm awake'. The archetypical light-sleeper. Some people suffer sleep aponea, whereby irregular breathing wakes them up. I've never had myself tested to see if this is the case with me. Certainly my insomnia pattern started out of the former kind, the unable to drop off, usually because my head was pulsing with thoughts, some significant, many trivial, the brain saying 'we're not done with the day yet mister'. As a writer, I've used this to my advantage, more of which below.

The treatments I've sought in the course of my insomnia, range across acupuncture, herbal remedies and homeopathy, reflexology, kinesiology, self-hypnosis, cognitive therapy, and psychoanalysis. Some helped take the edge of a crisis of sleeplessness for protracted periods, but none made the problem disappear and nor could I really expect any to. The one thing I have never done is take either prescription drugs or those purchased over the counter. The latter I gauge to be less than useless, the former I will keep in reserve for when I'm in my dotage and really need medicated assistance to sleep; I judge, rightly or wrongly, that if I started now or even ten years ago, I would require such a high dosage in latter years as to make it impracticable, or dangerous, or both. Acupuncturists study the tongue for a diagnostic; mine said I had the tongue of a 70 year old - when I was under 30).

Insomniacs do get more sleep than they credit, but there's no doubt a lack of zzzz's leaves you short of energy, irritable and maybe under-par at work. So, that's the downside of insomnia. But believe it or not for me there are boons as well. I didn't really 'get' cognitive therapy, which seemed to be about changing one's way of thinking about the whole issue, to de-problematise it, but it did bring out one interesting facet. I admitted that I feared losing my ability to write if my sleep problem magically disappeared overnight (or even during the small hours of a morning which only slightly less improbable). You see I do tons of writing lying in bed with my eyes shut.

Not actual writing with pen on paper, but composition in my mind. There is something about retiring to bed with the intention to sleep, when the brain, or my brain at least, seems to say okay, now we've got a little peace and quiet from the hurly burly of the day, let's bring to the surface all the stuff that we didn't have time to look at. I'm hardly unique in that, since people lie awake at night making lists of things to do tomorrow, or trying to work out the solution to a problem. There is something about that space, lying prone and in the dark, that seems very conducive to a quality akin to meditation on the practicalities of life. In my case, it's the time for all the ideas that have been simmering for whatever writing project I'm engaged in, but have been unable to address during a day of work and child-rearing and running a kids' soccer team, to elbow their way to the forefront and demand they be heard.

This is the part of the creative process that I am amazed by. Sometimes whole scenes or exchanges between characters emerge fully formed, seemingly from nowhere. But like the marble sculpture that exists in the artist's mind as he contemplates the unworked slab, the work has been proceeding at a level just below open consciousness. I used to get up when I was single and switch the light on and jot it all down, which only furthered the unlikelihood of ever getting to sleep that night. Over the years I have taught myself techniques to avoid doing that. As the ideas come, I number them off and attach a keyword to each number. I go over them matching number and keywords a few times, before (hopefully succumbing to blissful unconsciousness). In the morning when I wake up, I know I may have say 6 or 7 things to recover and as long as I can recall the key word, I pretty much reproduce the thoughts from the night before. Some I may not recall in all their detail and some I never recover, but again over the years I have allowed myself this fall-off. Maybe the best idea I ever had for a character goes by the wayside in this manner, but I feel that's just the price of maintaining my equilibrium between getting some sleep and yet retaining the creative processing. Anything else would possibly invite madness.

So I value that genuinely silent space on retiring to bed. I never go and lie down with the intention of working, but if it comes I never reject its outpourings either. I feel it's a few layers removed from dream consciousness, but in my case the realm of dreams have never provided me with any creative output. I rarely remember my dreams at all. No, this is a conscious level, albeit I don't seem to be in full control of the ideas emerging from the creative forge as they rise up in a shower of touchstoned sparks.

Over the Christmas period I was about halfway through the first draft of a new novel. Without fail, every night of that 2 week holiday period I was assailed by the next tranche of writing for an hour or two as I lay in bed. Sometimes taking me ahead on to parts as yet unwritten, or rewrites or links across to what I had written earlier that day. The circumstance of being off work meant that I could have the luxury of sleeping till late, thereby giving full rein to the 'writing' by night. Energy-wise I wasn't in much of a state do lots of other activities over the holiday period, but then I probably wouldn't have done much anyway. Instead I virtually finished the second half of the novel draft in that period.

So for me, and I recognise this doesn't necessarily hold true for other insomniacs, it is a price I'm prepared to pay. It seems indelibly tied up with my writing and creative processes (sorry Mr Cognitive Therapist and Shrinkety Shrink). During those periods when I'm not writing, then it does flicker across my consciousness as being a burden, but fortunately these are few and far between. I'm also aware that it may have an impact on my long-term health, but this is both an imponderable and again, a calculated trade-off in the cost-benefit columns.

It isn't always writing that keeps me awake. My kids' football team have cause me sleepless nights, which is even more ridiculous that writing being the culprit, but there you go. My mind has also arbitrarily posed me obscure musical challenges to keep me company through the night, or a dare to name all 105 (as was) elements in the Periodic Table. I think that may be my brain having a laugh at my expense, just to keep me honest and remind me who's in charge in this relationship.

I'm not for one moment advocating that insomnia is a good thing. At the moment I'm battling with my 12 year old son who refuses to go to bed at a reasonable hour, pointing to the weathered skin around the eyes and telling him that not even I started at so tender an age to defy our circadian rhythms. But I think it is instructive to not let it dominate you and your thinking. Don't clock watch - it took me about 15 years to kick that habit for example. Don't let the insomnia own you.

Do any of you folks have similar experiences with creativity and sleeplessness? Or are there any long-term insomniacs who want to share tips?

The Victorian explorer drove into the heart of the jungle, his heart ignited by tales of hidden cities and vast troves of gold. Trussed up tightly in his safari suit and pith helmet, the only decorative adornment was the curlicue of the ends of his moustache. The only life more choked off than he, were those trees suffocated by the vines that enchained them.
The canopy's tendrils were thick and plenteous. They conspired to even banish the light. With their machetes the expedition toiled endlessly to cleave a path. Until they finally cut through to the great temple that had been reclaimed by the jungle, once its human inhabitants had mysteriously melted away. The sheer scale of the edifice fair took the man's breath away and he could only twizzle his moustache by way of appreciation.
This being an era of incipient photography, his box cameras could barely frame any of the grandeur within their pinholes. Even the sketch artist found his hand reeling at the immensity of the task and failed to render a fifth of its full splendour. How was the adventurer to transmit the evidence of his discovery? How was his name to be spread around the world? For the only gold to be had here was in relaying its wonders to his countrymen. The party started taking their machetes to the stonework and slicing off the friezes to transport back to the museums of their Imperial capital far to the West.
*
The statues and friezes had a room dedicated to themselves within the museum of Oriental art. The lights were turned down lower in this gallery than in any other throughout the exhibition. The gazes of the Buddhas criss-crossed the room, illuminating the gloom with their strange glow of serenity. Nothing else existed in that room, other than their inscrutably smiling visages. Visitors found utter peace in the dark room. They could stay there contemplating for hours, without feeling the need to slit their wrists or dive into the abysses of Mark Rothko's meditative canvases as offered by other temples of entrancement.
People were so transported by their experience in the gallery, that they often became pilgrims to the temple itself, deep in the heart of the cleared jungle. Though dwarfed by the immensity of the temple complex, they didn't quite achieve the same sense of ease and contentment. Many put it down to the stonework being out in the full light under the sky, in contrast with the everlasting restful crepuscule back in the museum. It still didn't prevent their hankering for a stone Buddha of their own and a thriving market in stolen friezes and statues soon developed in order to meet the insatiable demand.
Over time so many friezes had been removed from the temple's walls and porticos, that the temple became a shell of itself already a shell. The visitors dropped off as word of its disappointments trailed back. Meanwhile the Oriental museum had been a victim of its own timeless success and its constraints by being a building constructed in the previous century and in need of modernising. The permanent exhibition was moved to a bright, spanking new purpose built design and for some reasons the Buddhas were ensconced in a light, airy room in order to dispense their luminous smiles.  The enchantment of their aura was dispelled.
Accordingly they stopped inspiring people to travel to their original home. The temple was so denuded of any decoration and adornment, other than those friezes too cracked by clumsy hands to be salvageable, that tourists stopped visiting entirely. And in time the jungles once again closed back over the vacated human colony. The Cheshire Cat beams of the Buddhas cast away far from home in a forlorn vault of the museum,  may just have broadened imperceptibly. Even as the jungle twizzled its creepers and tendrils in appreciation.

Book trailers are a relatively new phenomenon. Partly because there are so many authors in a crowded marketplace, seeking new ways to push their product. Partly with the accessibility of cheap video technology and file sharing platforms.

Using a filmic medium to promote the printed word. Interesting juxtaposition.

POINT 1 - It always amazes me when authors neglect to put some words from the book into the trailer, either as text or in voice over. Remember, first and foremost the video is supposed to sell your novel. Give them a taste of your style. A killer sentence, you'd probably tweet the same as a sales tool wouldn't you?

This crossing over of visual discipline between viewing moving images and reading static print blocks is not a unique thing. If you think about pop music videos, they are there to sell a song. The video tells its own story, allied closely to the song of course, but very much with its own narrative impulse. It's the same for book trailers.

POINT 2 - The visual language of a video is very different to that of the written book. You might think in terms of the video standing as a piece of art in its own right, one that just happens to be about your book. You need to storyboard the video from beginning to end before starting compiling it. Just like a real movie!

In a way, if the trailer video has to stand as a work of art in its own right, we have to ask is it actually doing the job of pushing the book? By this I mean if someone happens on your trailer on a general video sharing site like YouTube and is interested in it enough to watch it through to the end, are they responding to the film narrative of the trailer more than any genuine interest in the book? They're watching it because it's a good video, not necessarily because the book appeals to them. Don't forget, our trailers go under the designation of "Entertainment" rather than any specific 'books' section. The culture of books being as significant as say cute kittens (or music videos) for going viral has yet to establish itself. I remain unconvinced as yet that YouTube is a significant platform for book trailer by mid list and debut authors. Philip Roth interview, a respectable 75,000 views. Stephen King talking books, an impressive 236,000 views. Lady Gaga "Judas" video, 144 million views...

POINT 3 - Once you've made your trailer video, there are several sites other than just YouTube you can display it. Blazing Trailers, Vimeo, GoodReads, your Amazon author page and others. Then there are dedicated sites for YA and fantasy trailers. You can of course mount it on your blog and FB and therefore tweet links and you can get feedback and comments. I actually think GoodReads could be progressive and start up its own video channel for GoodReads authors, with not only trailers, but interviews, readings and build a reputation as a dedicated video channel for all things contemporary literature. Just a thought.

I'll return to the contents and style of trailers later, but I just want to point out that author reading footage or discussions/ interviews I believe are more conducive to promoting books. Talking about books in general is liable to glean a bigger audience and in between you can slip in information about your book. Talking about where your book originated from, or some interesting anecdote about the research process, personalise it far more than a book trailer. You can record readings at home, but be aware without the sense of a live audience, the sight of you or me, book in hand (probably part blocking our face, or else our eyes are looking down at the book held low rather than into the caemra), plus the static nature of such an act, does not sustain the visual medium for very long. Then you are really thrown back on the words to carry the viewer and chances are, if they're from any part way through the novel, shorn from their context, they're not necessarily going to elicit an entirely clear understanding in the reader.

POINT 4 - Live readings with audience appreciation from bated breath to applause really helps validate what the viewer is looking at. It conveys a certain instant status to you as author/performer.

What is a viewer actually looking at? Again, back to the different visual language of video medium. I've already stated that YouTube is perhaps too blunt a platform for literary content. Having said that, if you appeal to its viewers in the language they are used to, the language of kitsch, cute, edgy or whatever, then you may just hit on something that goes sufficiently viral in book terms (how many views do we anticipate? Not the 100,000s of music videos, maybe knock a zero off that figure for a 'viral' trailer).

POINT 5 - Have in mind a realistic idea of what you expect your trailer to achieve. if nothing else, such thinking will help you set your budget for its production.

I'll give you an example of what I mean about using the visual language of YouTube. I viewed a trailer that was entirely composed of what looked like security camera footage of someone being kidnapped in a car park and bundled into the trunk of a car. Unsurprisingly it was a thriller being promoted. To me it had a kind of "Blair Witch" campaigning feel about it. The viewer asks themselves what they just viewed, was it real footage? Was it specially filmed? Is it found footage that just happens to fit in with the book? Anything that makes the viewer linger over your video and think about it beyond the 90 seconds that the viewing lasts.

More specifically now on the style of trailers. They all look the same right? Those off the shelf computer generated packages where the characters are flat two-dimensional cartoons. Every horror trailer has a skull and dagger in it. Probably a raven too for good measure. Every fantasy book has a sun halo behind the head of the main character and a broadsword. To my mind it's really hard to distinguish one book from any other done in these styles. And as to the words flashed across the screen, more often than not I don't get the sense of what the book is about, certainly not how it differs from any other book of its ilk. You know the word "Quest" will slide across the screen at some point of any Fantasy trailer. The paucity of text appearing in many trailers is akin to tagging your book on Amazon or on your website with just one label. Only with a trailer you're not actually limited in number, so use them! Words are the main currency of what we all do as writers right? I think it's great if the author's voice reading even a sentence or two over the images can be done. Or failing that, those two dynamite sentences scrolling across the screen.

POINT 6 - Use your imagination, make your video look different to every one in that genre that has gone before.


Summary:

1) YouTube is maybe not the best platform for trailers and any literary content. But there are plenty of others
2) Your video ought to be a piece of art in its own right. It must be aware of the differing visual language between film and a book
3) Your video ought to look to be different from all others out there, both in visual style, but also consider it's hook (the example of the 'kidnap' footage I gave above)
4) Think hard about budget, how much you can afford, weighed up against a realistic set of expectations of what the trailer can achieve
5) Remember you are selling the words of your book. Don't neglect to offer some up in the trailer
6) Don't overlook other types of book-related video content. Live readings, author interviews etc

Ein: The war hero was adorned like a Christmas tree. Gold piping and brocade ran down from his shoulder like poison ivy. Multicoloured banded ribbons of military decorations distended across his breast like chromatography analysis. One empty sleeve of his uniform lay against his chest just below, pinned in place by a medal. The silver branches of its star echoed the shape of the shrapnel that had originally caused his arm to be severed. He gave a salute with the hand of his only arm.
Sechs: The Hindu deity had six arms. In one was the ubiquitous wheel, symbol of the perfect creation of the cosmos. While another carried a fearsome pronged trident. A third cupped a snake, seemingly slithering free from her grasp. A fourth had a lotus bud sitting in the palm of the hand, offered up to the heavens. The fifth countered it with a thunderbolt raised high as if it had issued from the sky and the goddess had snared it in her grip, saving her people. Or perhaps intending to hurl it herself, having snatched it from heaven's quiver. Her last hand gripped a conch shell, poised to be sounded, so as to summon the primordial creative energy of the world.
Sechzehn: The boat was a thing of beauty as it sliced through the water. Sixteen sculls in perfect periodicity, retracted into the stomachs of the oarsmen leaning back, before being repelled away from them again. The upright blades ducking and doffing the last possible moment, at the point which they break the water like a guillemot hunting from the surface. Like the delicate hand movements of an Indian dancer clacking her narrative rhythms. And yet this sixteen limbed beast is more about rhythmic power than grace. The cox with his hands to his exhorting mouth, twitching like the two antennae around the maw of an insect, while its centipedal limbs flared out as the thoracic body of the boat was propelled along. One of the rowers catches a crab and is forced to raise his appendage above his head, perpendicular to the rest of the limbs. As if he had snapped the bone at the elbow.
Acht: The octopus was going ahunting and afishing. Two of its tentacles curled their suction cups around a rock in order to anchor it. It extended a third outwards, wiggling it to make ripples in the water to give the impression that it was bait. A fourth arm was surreptitiously doing some surveillance of its own, monitoring the field around the lure-limb. A fifth arm shot out to grab the victim once it came into range, and the sixth clamped itself around the fifth and reeled its brother back towards its mouth to inject it with venom. The seventh arm prepared to amputate itself as a sacrifice, should the octopus be disturbed while in the act of eating. The last arm wiped a morsel that was clinging to the outside of its maw with the gesture of full satisfaction, like a diner might use the napkin at the end of his meal.
Vier/Zwei: The boy stood with his arms crossed over his chest, each hand hugging its opposite shoulder as if he were in a straitjacket. The man craned his arms out to bid his son into their embrace. The boy didn't move. The man wiggled his hands beckoning to him. The boy stayed held in place. The man took a step forward, his arms still extended, like the prongs of a forklift truck. Sensing no rebuff, the man chanced another forward stride. His face cracked into a lop-sided smile, trying to accentuate the consoling nature of his gesture. The boy seemed to slip further inside his own lost folds, even though there was no discernible outward motion. The man crept forward with slow, unbroken steps until he could envelop the boy. He slotted his arms around the boy's shoulders, but the latter's own arms remained resolutely pinned to himself. "Come on son, come to Dad". The boy spat at him and in the reflexive recoil towards his sullied face, the boy ducked and escaped the older man's flailing arms.
Drei: The clock had three armatures circumnavigating its dial at various velocities. A two-dimensional solar system, wreaking the maximal gravitational force on the observer, holding him in its thrall. He watched as the thick, stubby arm planted itself ramrod straight along on the inside track, all but motionless to the eye. Moving in increments only barely noticeable, was a thinner spine. Laboriously circuiting the clockface, inching away from its larger cousin stood to attention. Like an arthritic limb, slowly it completed a full circle, all in order to nudge its fellow traveller one notch along, before leaving him behind and embarking on another tour. And thus did it proceed once again on its Sisyphean toil. Lapping them both was the thin red pointer, hurtling along with its streamlined needle. Lighting the way for its two country bumpkin bodkins as it studiously ticked off every indented segment round the perimeter of the dial. Its motion a blur, the observer could not always take its progress in. When he tilted his head, sometimes he managed to make the red indicator freeze momentarily in place. Before it skipped off merrily resuming its unfettered revolutions.
Zwei/Null: The frame of the bow was twitching with the pent up force of the string pulling it. His hand steady and steadying at the perfect centre of the wood. His other arm was perpendicular, to them both, as it drew back the wire to where it caressed the stubble of his face. His jaw was being grazed as the cable oscillated with the tension it contained within, exactly mirroring the tendons and ligaments in his arm which were burning with the exertions of containing such elastic power.One arm precisely cupped the barrel along its entire length as if they were two entwined serpents. The other cocked at the elbow, jutting away from the man's sleek prone form, as his finger palpated the harsh curve of the trigger.Right arm telescoped out in front of him, the left wrapped up and over the metal tube resting on its shoulder. Like he was carrying harvested wheatsheafs. But the metal tube was like a third limb, his heaped up rear arm like a chancre, an outgrowth of grizzled, diseased tissue. He pressed the trigger and was rocked back by the unseen fourth arm, the trail of fiery smoke that shot out behind him. He released his forward hand from gripping the RPG and brought his hand over his eyes to peer at his target ablaze. Then he swung the tube across his shoulders and casually threaded both hands over it as if he were tied to it like a condemned man as he strode off back into the mountains. 
             

In some places his body reproached his self-neglect, by wrapping the shrunken skin tight to the cheese-wire of protuberant bone. Yet the terraced folds at the base of his scraggy throat suggested a chicken about to have its neck wrung. The muscles there had atrophied so as to barely carry the weight of his sunken head. Not that he was moved to look the world in the eye anyway.
Which was why he bumped into her. Hard. Of course their coexistence in proximate space within the whole cityscape, was down to the unlikely probabilities so delighted in by ill-fate. But once so inopportunely wrangled, the collision was perhaps inevitable. Since the impact happened to be with a particularly angular and bony part of him, her face screwed up in what- pain or an upbraiding scowl? The noise that would have betrayed which of the two, was about to emit from her mouth, when she caught herself (which steered the view that it couldn't have been reflexive pain after all. Maybe he just lacked the bone density to register any kind of impression). Presumably she had pierced his involuntary disguise as a skeleton and recognised him as her former lover. That might advise mental shock as being stronger than, or at least can act as a retardant on, physical pain.
They began to converse in the middle of the street, while pedestrians bifurcated around them like a corps de ballet. They talked only of the inconsequential. Since the consequential was all too blatant wasn't it? For never once did she comment on his haggard appearance. Maybe she hadn't noticed, although her initial dawning realisation while the pain signals were travelling up the trunk of her wondrous neck tended to gainsay that. Also, in their time together, she had licked every part of his skin, committing the topography of his body to her memory. She could assuredly reconstruct his form in the dark, like soldiers assembling their guns behind a blindfold. There was simply no way she could have failed to notice.
Maybe she just couldn't let herself acknowledge his deterioration, lest it crush her beneath a cataract of guilt. Or perhaps she just simply didn't care. After all, here was she looking utterly radiant. Her skin positively glowed with a sheen. Her lips looked even fuller and more luscious than when he used to adhere them to his own, though conceivably their present state could have been chemically assisted. In which case she must have come by a source of money.
God she smelled good, unlike him with his carious breath and unscourged odours. But if the sour hooks of his rotting self reached her nose as they unfailingly must have, she wasn't letting on. Even her clothes- new clothes he couldn't recall from their shared walk-in closet- looked fabulous on her. They clung in such a way as to accentuate the sinuous curves of her body, unlike his scarecrow rags which only served to hollow him out. They must have been expensively tailored to flow like that. Yes, she had come by a source of money alright. The only question whether it was a primary or secondary wellspring.
Clearly she was flourishing, while on the other end of the pendulum swing, he was disintegrating. And that had been the tidemark of their relationship too. Someone was going to suffer either way in how things could shake out. If they had stayed together, she would be the one forever trapped within her chrysalis, unable to take off and soar. By leaving, she could bloom and prosper, while he just collapsed in on himself utterly bereft.
It had been his decision to let her go. He knew the likely toll exerted on him, but he loved her so much that he could not bear to keep her wings clipped. They hugged for a final time, whereupon the two hundred odd bones of his skeleton dislocated within the soft flesh pouches of her embrace.

     It's always the lead guitarists who get all the muso-glory. Drummer get the jokes made about them, singers do the interviews and bassists? Well bassists are like the invisible man of the band. Here's a list of 20 songs to partly redress the balance. They may not all be bass licks by musical virtuosos, but the song wouldn't be the same with a lesser bassline.

1) Buzzcocks - "What Do I Get?"
How's this for a bass intro? The instrument really came into its own with punk, since the limited musical abilities of the early punkers meant that the primitive sounds just merged into a noisy squall. But solo bass intros allowed some separation out at the beginning of the song and there were many punk bassists who suddenly stepped more into the limelight than in previous musical eras.



2) The Stranglers - "Nice'N'Sleazy"This was the band who maybe made me really fall in love with the instrument. Jean-Jacques Burnel's bass was just so dirty sounding, as befit their lyrics. Yeah there were persistent rumours that he couldn't actually play and the keyboardist Dave Greenfield was actually playing the riffs, but Burnel was a classically trained musician so I don't buy it. The lowest of low-end bass!
                                       

3) Wire - "Like a Heartbeat"Wire were always more arty purveyors of punk rock, musically stripped down. the bass pulse as a heartbeat, what could be simpler than that? Stunningly effective. Suddenly it was the upfront bass sound that people could dance to, just like in reggae. 
                                      

4) Talking Heads - "Psychokiller"Meanwhile, over in New York where New Wave preceded punk unlike in Britain, there were some accomplished musicians showing a punk attitude but with musical virtuosity to boot. If I wanted to look like JJ Burnel, I wanted Tina Weymouth to be my girlfriend. Quite simply a psychokiller of a bass intro.
                                    

5) Pere Ubu - "Heart Of Darkness"And just to emphasise New York's primacy of the accomplished New Wave sond, comes Pere Ubu and another paranoia-suffused bass intro. Both these tracks have the bass as the more primary instrument and don't they sound all the better for it? New York in the early 80s must have been one messed up city.                                    
6) Public Image Ltd - "Poptones"The brief flare that was punk rock was quickly replaced by New Wave in Britain with similar values to those in the US. Arch musical experimentalists PIL had the musical genius that is Jah Wobble on bass, heavily influenced as his name suggests by bass-heavy dub reggae. A bass sound that is both dense and fragile at the same time. Outstanding.                

7) The Ruts - "Love In Vein"
Part of punk and New Wave was a formal link up and experimentation with reggae and reggae musicians. Ruts were out and out punk but had very close local ties to roots reggae band Misty and the two shared many bills on the Rock Against Racism tour. Here the crossover is clear in one of the most achingly sad and beautiful songs by a punk band.

8) The Jam - "Funeral Pyre"
By now punk had gone all mainstream and bands like the Jam were having regular singles in the Top 10 of the charts. This song is unusually heavy and free-form for what was a tight threesome and everyone normally remembers the drum solo closing out the song, but actually bassist Bruce Foxton was also allowed off his tight leash to twiddle and thump away. Powerpop.
9) The Cure - "A Forest"
The Cure were never punk. A bit low-fi pop on their debut album and soon to move into stadium Goth. But in between was their second melancholy album and this track showing a bass also driving a song, but without the bluster and pose of songs with harder edge. The sound of a higher end bass. Who'd be a bassists though? The Cure's Laurence Tolhurst went to Court to sue over lack of royalties saying he contributed ineffably to the Cure sound. He lost.

10) Dead Kennedys - "We Got a Bigger Problem Now"
Hopping back over the pond and New Wave had taken the reverse journey and morphed into punk, thrash and hardcore. Progenitors of that were San Fransisco's Dead Kennedys with Klaus Flouride on bass. Here he has a little lounge music lick to satirise the right wing's music of choice. This song was a reworking of their earlier hit "California Uber Alles" written about the right-wing Governor Jerry Brown. But with californian Ronald reagan ascending to the Whitehouse, the US did as they say, have a bigger problem than that now... The West coast can do its own rather nice line in paranoia too.

11) Minutemen - "Anchor"
But US punk wasn't all thrash. The Minutemen were a trio whose musical abilities allowed them to include folk and jazz elements to their tightly blended mix. Guitar and bass alternated duties as leading songs and the band introduced Mike Watt, bass guitarist supreme upon the world.

12) World Domination Enterprises - "Asbestos Lead Asbestos"If lead guitars can carry you along highways or out into space, the bass nearly always roots you back into the urban city. Here World Dom with their dub reggae penchant utterly nail the grime of their West London roots. Guitars are wielded like axes or played over the heart and chest, or even teasing over their sex, but bass guitars are always low-slung, closer to the ground. And of course they have a longer fretboard, to keep other people further at arms length...
                                         
13) Gang Of Four - "To Hell With Poverty"
The funk is introduced to New Wave. George Clinton and other funk bands were perhaps the only other precursors of punk who might bring the bass into the foreground. Since Gang Of Four's guitar sound was so choppy and intermittent, they needed a bass sound to carry the weight of some songs and fill in the gaps.

14) Beastie Boys - "Gratitude"
Hip hop could sample any sound it wanted. Yet when the Beastie Boys went back to their live instruments and punky roots, they brought delicious distortion to their bass sound. Ramp it up! RIP Adam MCA Yauch.

15) Birthday Party - "Mutiny In Heaven"
Punk, New Wave, Goth, what did any of it mean anymore by the mid-80s? There was a flowering of indie bands each pursuing their own underground tracks. The Birthday Party from Australia were one such blossoming that couldn't really be pigeonholed. But bassist Tracy Pew with his cowboy hat and biker fashion, sadly now dead from his grand mal seizures, was always driving the band forward with their off beat drum section, sometimes one drummer, sometimes two which he had to compete with as well as compliment. A bass rumble truly to soundtrack the rhythms of Hell!

16) Gun Club - "Sexbeat"
Psychobilly (UK) or swamp blues (US) was creative another offshoot and here the bass truly lends a quality of swampy sludge even as it drives the blues throb along in its train-driving manner.

17) Jesus And Mary Chain - "Sidewalking"
Meanwhile from Scotland, a band who wanted to be the surfer punks, the Beach Boys with a lot of reverb on top. I kind of liked their schtick, but the bass was always prominent among the feedback squall of the lead. It had to be, to keep it all together.

18) Cop Shoot Cop - "Shine On Elisabeth"
Two basses no guitars, this is a no brainer. 1 hi-end bass, one low-end bass, a heavnely heavy duty throbbing racket. This is my bass nirvana I think (the Buddhist ideal highest state of non-being, not Kurt Cobain's outfit).

19) Thee Johns - "White Boy Engineer"
There was a fashion for rock bands having drum machines instead of live drummers which definitely changed the vibe. Drum machines always sounded a bit tinny and brittle, so the bassist had to inject the weight into the musical grooves to compensate.

20) White Denim - "Let's Talk About It"
And so to the present day. I don't much about this band but we seem to be still where we were with permission for the bass sometimes to grab the glory in a song. Even with a geeky looking guy on bass like this one! Thanks for listening

                                                "The Nightmare" - Henry Fuseli 1781


"Nada. Not a thing".
For added emphasis, the succubus shrugged her shoulders, reflexively curving her wings to shroud her breasts, though not the pearl of her sex.
"You're losing your touch".
"Well aren't we all in this epoch of the Worldwide Web? Brothers and sisters are doing it for themselves. But not to each other".
"Do you think he might have been one for me?"
"I dunno. It was all so much easier in the old days. When the Church told everyone what their orientation was. Or the Imams for that matter, Eastwards".
The incubus distended his wings with considerably less delicacy than had the succubus, not the least part of which was because his genitalia were thrust forward by the action. He cracked his knuckles and exhaled theatrically as he did so. He stretched his lips into a raven leer.
"Was he on his back or his stomach when you left him?"
"Neither. Balled up like a foetus".
"Oh god, not another one with a baby fetish? Grow up already!" And with that the incubus brought his taloned hand up to his mouth and blew against it, before quickly moving the hand to waft his breath back under his nose.
"How do I smell?"
"Fetid. Feculent. Foul".
"Splendid! I'm off to make baby wish he'd never been born!"
*
The incubus trudged back, wings between his legs.
"You too huh?"
He shook his head slowly in response.
"Not a bleeding sausage no".
"My Liebchen, it isn't always about sex. There are other nocturnal emissions to be harvested and other means to bring them about".
The two beings hung their heads, veiling them behind a leathered wing-tip.
"Yes Father".
"I shall take on this most trying of cases. You both now go seek out others we have marked for reaping".
*
The man was no longer foetal at least. Made for a smoother saddling. Before he mounted him, the first thing the Nightmare did was peel back the man's pyjama bottoms. There was nothing at the crotch other than the many ridged layers of a cicatrix of skin. He shook his head. His two imbecilic minions could have saved themselves a whole deal of effort if they had only checked for a root cause of the man's unresponsiveness. Although it was true that since the outlawing of castrati, it had somewhat slipped from their diagnostic checklist. Been a while since he'd seen one, but they had always healed very clean, in spite of primitive surgical instruments in the early days. This one looked more rather more mangled. Maybe it had happened when the skin wasn't so youthful and resilient.
He looked at the man's eyes for clues to any affliction. But he only saw his glassy, empty stare.
"At last we get to meet in the flesh".
"What? That is not possible. No one sees me in the flesh, because I only appear in people's dreams when they are asleep".
"Old trick we were taught, sleeping with our eyes open. Ever alert, we can still see shadows and changes in the light in case we have to snap into action".
The man jerked upright and the Nightmare flinched away. The human smiled with a rictus more grotesquely menacing than that of his own incisored incubus minion. The Nightmare regathered himself and tentatively inched closer to the bed. The man watched him but didn't react in any other manner. The Mare grabbed hold of the man's legs before springing up to sit on them, his tail dragging behind him still hanging over the edge of the bed. Using the man's legs like a pole, the Mare fed himself up to the man's waist, whereupon he opened his own horny legs and straddled the other. He bent his knees in to clamp his lower legs against the man's pelvis, the barbed skin looking to drive their spurs into the man's flesh as a goad.
The man didn't move a muscle. The Mare brought his barbed tail up and whipped it across the man's leg. Again the man remained motionless.
"What are you, paralysed or something?"
The man flexed his leg with a sudden jolt. The Mare toppled to one side, but with his demonic strength, managed to remain squatting across the other's legs.
"Not paralysed no. But numb. I can't feel sensations below the waist".
The Nightmare started jouncing his posterior as he tried to ride the man in the manner he was accustomed to doing on all humans. His gluteus maximus tried to manipulate the man's legs, but they stayed resolutely leaden beneath him.
"Yes well the reason for some of that is obvious. But the legs? This goes beyond tempered muscle control, even for Buddhists".
"Yes well your power lies purely within the dreamworld. When I am not dreaming. In the physical world you are absolutely puny to me".
The Mare picked up the fork of his tail and thrust it into the man's leg. The man tilted his head and offered a quizzical raised eyebrow.
"I think the misapprehension you are labouring under, is that you are here to terrorise me".
That stopped the demon in his tracks, his hand frozen in place on his own tail.
"All the terrible images and visions you credit you can thrust upon me, even if I were asleep, I have not only seen before with my own eyes, I too have inflicted them upon others. In this real physical world. So they could not possibly pose me any disturbance. The reason I am forever sleepless at night, has nothing to do with what you or anyone can throw at me. It comes from inside my own head. Replaying on an endless loop. Satisfyingly. Deliciously".
"Oh I get it! I've met your kind before, I've dealt with the likes of you at their zenith during the Counter-Reformation".
"Those amateurs? They were bound by their puny imaginations and an unswerving obedience to their gods. I am a bringer of true terror. I have no such allegiances. Not even to myself".
"You? You're all mouth and no trousers!"
"I did not want to merely triumph over those two infants you sent to taunt me. I wanted the master himself, that is you. A real trial of strength, though I find you in actuality somewhat of a disappointment".
"Now wait. You have to show me some respect. For the weight of history and tradition I bear". For all his bravado, the Mare had plopped off from the man's legs and was backing away from the bed.
"You know what I'm, going to do? I'm going to get hold of that boy and girl of yours, what are they, brother and sister, young lovers? Not anything I haven't incorporated  hundreds of times before. Not even the ugliest pair either. Anyway, I'll gradually dismember them, keeping them alive of course, so that I can feed bits of each to the other. Starting from the feet. After all, that's sort of how I was initiated into these dark arts. How I was tempered... That's got you choking now hasn't it? You're so weak. Your time in the job is up. You have been put out to grass by the likes of me in over half the countries of the world. Sweet dreams Nightmare".

Story prompts are great aren't they? They can help get the creative juices roiling, maybe even leading to the writing of a flash for Friday publication.

Whether they're the wonderful photos offered up by Icy Sedgewick. Or the word prompts freely offered at Three Word Wednesday or by Lily Childs' Prediction Challenge and others I'm not even aware of. For someone like me who loves riffing off words, what could be better than being tossed 3 words and told to weave a tale from that?

But, I love the frisson from spotting something in my everyday life that sets off a whole chain of associations that may just end up in a story. Something that drags you away from the ordinary and demands you to don your writer face, whether it's convenient then and there or not. That live alchemy, from something equally random as word or picture prompts, but personal to me in how it leaps up and grabs me by the throat. These prompts are not sought after, nor provided with writing in mind. They are everyday details and observations, but one day your mind is just in a place that transforms them from out of the ordinary.The alchemy begins the moment they leap into the imagination and start sparking ideas.

I think they probably speak in the same way as a word or picture prompt, to ideas that are already bumping and boring inside your head awaiting being given birth. But it is perhaps taking them from that context in which you experienced them that adds something a little bit extra, than to say something provided precisely to jolt the writing process.

As part of the fridayflash twitter community, I wrote a new flash fiction story a week for a year, bookended by some beforehand as I learned the art and a few afterwards as the impetus wouldn't let me go even after I achieved my goal of 52 in 52. My collection "52FF" is what I hope are the best 52 of the 70 or so I wrote.

In the appendix I provide the writing prompts for all but the very experimental last 5 in the collection, which were less inspired by prompts and more by the form of language and words themselves. Most prompts were quite ordinary, sights witnessed on the London Underground, or in a supermarket. One was a single word in a review of a book. Some were fundamentally embedded in the heart of the final story, others just helped me tap into long-held ideas and probably provided the skeleton to hang them on. A couple of the stories I couldn't even remember what the prompts were.

Here are those prompts. I hope you find their genesis potentially useful for coming across your own in the rich pageant that is everyday life.


Plato's Cave: Kebab houses from both when I was at University and when I moved back to London afterwards
Caritas: After attending a charity fundraising auction, where there was the prize of being a character in a Booker winner's next novel
Death Masking Love: I've always had a thing about the smoothness of the outside of a death mask and the wrinkles reproduced inside
The Caller To The Bingo Caller's House Calls 'House': After a twitter hashtag punning game, I was struck by the violence of the rhymes for bingo numbers
In The Nursery: After talking to a child psychologist about the use of play in diagnostics
Confessional: During the 2010 General Election campaign and Prime Minister Gordon Brown's gaff when he was caught describing a voter he'd talked to on camera as 'a bigoted old woman'
Captivation: I was writing a novel with a different police interrogation scene and wondered what it would be like if the suspect started withdrawing from drugs
Loss Of Function: From the phrase 'falling in love' and reading Tom McCarthy's book "Remainder" that week
Bowing Out: The image of the bulbs around a mirror in actors' dressing rooms. I don't know why that image came to me that particular week
Totentanz: I spotted the word in a review in a publication which I was only reading because it had a short piece of my own
Digging For Australia: After failing to excite my own children's enthusiasms for beach holidays
Café Sensorium: After reading a review of a restaurant in which you eat in pitch dark and are served by the blind
8 Legged Army: The tarantula is my animal totem (along with the vulture, see below). Reading about an Amazonian tribe and their relationship to the animals of the forest
Badges: I used to collect rock band badges and pin them to a split open T-shirt I never wore. I was also a cub scout of fairly limited proficiency
Cosmologist's Hangover: Thinking back to a monster hangover at University after a day of five garden parties, working my way back to my college rooms from the furthest one away, stopping off at each of the others on the way. Why this came to me when it did I don't know, as I haven't drunk alcohol for many years
Morning Assembly: I can't remember exactly, but this may have been one of those where the story proceeded from its title. Child soldiers have always been an interest since the days of the Khmer Rouge
2 Up, 1 Down: I attended Tom McCarthy interviewing an architect for his semi-fictional Necronautical Society and it, made me consider the everyday home in ways I'd never thought about before
End of The line: Come on gentle reader, admit you scrutinise what your fellow commuters are reading on the train! Something that kindle readers will prevent us from doing in the future, as there is no readily visible cover art
Deadheading: Another commuter train inspired one. A man sat near me reading a book, with two angry looking scabs on his hairless pate
Pigeon English: I can't remember the inspiration for this, but the pidgin/pigeon homophone led to the grounded bird's eye point of view
Trespass: The anxiety abounding about identity theft and credit card fraud, brought together with the internet's affording of crafting yourself a different online personality from your real life one
Cinderella's Crystal Tips: Seeing a woman's metal ring that covered two fingers between the upper and lower knuckles. It looked like a knuckleduster...
Prometheus Northbound: Looking up at map of the Northern Line during yet another interminable journey along it and the fact that during my peripatetic youth I'd temporarily lodged at about half of the places on the map
5 Items Or Less: Queuing up in my local supermarket to pay, the whole thing came to me all of a piece as I spotted a woman with 3 stars tattooed on her foot
Crazy Gulf: Having played a round with my kids, I began to think back to the props for the holes. Why do all such courses have a clown hole?
The Names: Just something about lists constituting a narrative story in themselves
Basic Geometry: Attending a poetry recital, the word 'fuselage' really resonated in my head. Once it rattled against notions of geometry, I had the juxtaposition that lead to the Twin Towers. I wrote this almost whole on the train journey home
Fairground Attraction: Knife throwing as a metaphor for hurling insults meant to wound but not mortally. At some point I hit upon twinning it with the fire swallower and that made it into a married couple
Cysters: A way of exploring our anxieties about death and abandonment, once I'd read about the calcification of an unborn fetus inside the womb
If It Were Thee: I gutted a previous short story written in the second person that had ground to a halt. Not quite sure how I hit upon the cyborg thing, but once I did then it became all about linguistic programming
The Ties That Bind: "Mr and Mrs Smith" really wasn't a terribly good movie was it? I'd always had the idea of a serial killer who invites hit men to kill him as his series. The husband and wife thing helped me realise it here
Bad Apple: We have an apple tree in our garden. Though fecund, we only get to eat about five apples a year for many of the reasons outlined in the story. We are also plagued by urban foxes and had a rat living off the fallen fruit. Uggh!
Hard Time: I can't remember the impetus for this, but I do write about being imprisoned, or held against your will quite often
Lost Sole: I stepped off a bus and saw a lone woman's shoe on the grass verge. It jolts you out of your familiar associations when an everyday object is seen out of its regular context
De-Terence: Not sure how this became wrapped around a bouncer and I know that came before the stripping away of his youthful illusions, but I can only trace the latter to my own experiences
Bittersweet: I liked the image of injecting poison into the soft centre of a chocolate. An object associated with love, used to kill it off
Knell Quaternion: This started from the story of the Indian temple girl dancer-cum-prostitute and then rolled out into being four tales involving bells
Atlas' Daughter Inherits His Round Shoulders: Just wondered what it might be like to be called in to confirm the identity of your dead loved one
The White Elephant's Graveyard: Reading on Wikipedia about the desert resting place of decommissioned military aircraft
Statutory Statuary: Saying goodbye to visiting friends and wondering when exactly to shut the door on them and getting back to a piece of writing that was calling me. Irony was of course, I ended up writing this instead
Lunar Tic: Just something about your body clock being superimposed upon by authority. My chance to spin on the werewolf story
One Billion Virtuosos And Sos: Just considering how any literate person with access to the internet is now a writer
The Forsaken: The view from the raised platform of my local station. Given a considerable literary makeover, it's not that grim!
Dead Ringer: There would have been some news story about a celebrity lookalike that would have really annoyed me. But for the life on me, I can't remember which one. There are so many after all...
Rich Pickings: The vulture is my other animal familiar. I once stared deep into the eyes of one in a zoo and couldn't begin to describe it. Since then I'd always wanted to write a story about vultures and the increasing ubiquity of child soldiers gave me the hook to hang it on
Drying Out: Another story that may have stemmed from its title, that twin meaning of an alcoholic drying out from their addiction and the drying out of the skin as we age
Assassination City: Youth knife murders are reported every month in London

Euro 2012 has been a terrible competition, of uncompetitive matches, limited ambitions from teams and poor quality on the pitch. Below are 8 reasons why and none of them are because England went out tamely. Let's face it, England contributed very little to the tournament, but then they weren't alone in that.

1) All four semi-finalists came from two groups. The two groups without the host countries. When you seed the host and they are a weak team, you crowd all the decent teams in other groups, because at least two of them should have been seeds. England & the Czechs won their groups, but any of the four teams in Germany's group would have beaten wither of those two, and everyone but Ireland from Spain's group also would have won those groups had they been in them.

2) Who are the top 5 teams in Europe? The 4 who made the semi-finals plus maybe Holland. So the semis are entirely predictable. No shocks in this competition, no surprise packages. And incidentally, no emerging players to take our breath away like Gascoigne in Italia90. Partly because of the Champions League, PS3 football games, transfer gossip and wall to wall forums and fantasy football, everyone knows the names of every player in every team before a ball is kicked. The only player who caught my eye I'd never heard of was a Czech left-back and he was done for Ronaldo's goal that knocked his country out.

3) The quality of strikers in this tournament was appalling. Spain didn't even bother fielding one. France only had 2 in their entire squad. England had two kids, neither of whom nailed down a regular starting place with their clubs. Portugal, Ukraine and the Czechs had strikers who were playing 10 years ago, have they produced no one since? Postiga isn't even expected to score goals for Portugal. He's just there to occupy a defender or two to leave space for Ronaldo. Ibrahimovic graced us for about 10 minutes each game. Why? Because the Swedes had no one to pressure him for his place. The lone exceptions to this were Croatia's pair of Jelavic and Manzukic, the Italians going with a bit of unpredictable flair in Balotelli and Cassano and of course the remorseless Germans. The standard of finishing in the tournament was shocking. Are the only decent strikers in the world from Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay? Yes, probably in truth.

4) There were so few world class defenders on show in this tournament, but teams progressed by playing defensively en masse by having their midfield prioritise defence over attack. I blame Chelsea, who beat superior footballing teams in Barca and Bayern by parking the bus. All four quarter finals were defence versus attack, as the 4 teams who ended up losing, all just tried to keep the opposition at bay and showed zero ambition to try and grab the game by the neck and impose themselves on the opposition. They were all beaten before they stepped on the pitch with such a mindset. If a team has no expectations of winning the thing and they make the knockout stages, why not go for it? How lamely did France go out of the competition?

5) Key to the above, is having a world class or pair of decent midfield holding players. That means a player who can break play up, but also one who can start the drive forward by incisive passing. Someone like Makelele or Gattuso. Scott Parker can't pass a ball accurately over 10 yards. I've never seen a tournament where the ball was given away so often by all teams and not just England. And why England blunted themselves by taking their best long-range passer since Beckham and putting him intp the midfield dogfight to rat around with Parker is beyond me. You don't need two holding players, as Germany's fluid midfield shows. they all pitch in with that team.

6) As do the Spanish. If Spain win this thing, it won't be because of their attacking creativity, nor even their passing game. It will because they are far and away the best team at closing down the opposition and stealing the ball back. But when they get it, they play a really slow tip-tap passing game that makes little forward progress. They are Barca, but they lack Messi to drive forward. Can't fault their work rate and commitment, but boy do they stifle the life out of any game.

7) There have been no good games. There I've said it. There have been maybe 2 good halves of football. The second half of Portugal and Denmark improbably became an exciting to and for as Portugal had to win to stay alive and ended up 3-2. The German-Holland first half was good, but the game strangely died a death after Holland dragged it back to 2-1. The Germans have consistently played decent football and of all the teams, though it pains me to say it, I exempt them from the general criticism.

8) EUFA are saying they're going to expand the tournament from 16 to 24 teams? Madness! There aren't 8 good teams to make a tournament let alone 24. Who were we missing from this tournament? The young Belgian team are emerging. Turkey are usually entertaining though not always for the right reasons. Past entertainers Romania and Bulgaria have lost their glory days. Who are we going to get excited at seeing in four years time - Norway and Serbia?

The lone thing I've appreciated about the tournament was the way referees have let a lot go which has cut down the diving because they're giving nothing. zMind you how the officials behind the goal miss Ukraine's goal against England and all the shirt pulling and fouling at corners makes me wonder why they're there. But for me to take as the only positive the refereeing shows how awful a tournament it has been.

Hey the two semi-finals and final may well be crackers of games. But I doubt it. When has any World Cup or Euro Final been anything but a slog to watch? Like this whole competition so far

He'd been following the short man with a limp for a few months now. Clearly both were creatures of habit, standing at the same place along their respective railway platforms each day. Boarding the commuter train in the same carriage, exiting by the same door. They never once acknowledged each other in that way men don't.
He only noticed the man's tattoo once the belated arrival of Summer entailed that the smaller man donned shorts. Shorts that came well down the truncated leg, but shorts all the same. Following in the other's wake at a distance that allowed for the splay of his gammy leg, he espied something winking at him from the man's calf. Whatever it was quickly resheathed itself beneath the trouser fabric, like a puppet diving back behind the curtain. But each forward motion hoisted the cloth up once again and manifested a tattoo to him.
His first thought was wondering why it adorned the back of the leg, a place where the man himself would seldom be able to view it. Perhaps the tattoo was some sort of plaintive runic inscription to cure his lameness. It certainly did seem to be calligraphic rather than pictorial, though it was an indeterminate script to his eye at this distance. He wanted to move closer to try and pierce the words, but the dragging leg formed its own natural buffer zone. Besides he was struck that were this a woman he was pursuing, any further incursion of personal space would have been both unseemly and threatening.
Perhaps the man's lover traced over the characters with her fingers when they were in bed together. That she 'read' his flesh, which would have entailed him lying flat on his stomach. He shook the unsettling notion clear from his squirming mind and dropped back a pace or two from the man. More of the tattoo seemed to be insinuating itself at him from beneath the fabric. Maybe his counterpart was speeding up, further stretching his twisted leg.
The inked flow appeared to run down the leg rather than across it. He speculated that it may have been Chinese. Some wisdom of Confucius or the I-Ching perhaps? The man himself certainly wasn't Oriental. But then David Beckham was hardly a denizen of ancient Rome as he misspelled his Latin inscriptions upon the vellum of his own skin. The harder he peered, the more the characters seemed to twitch and flex.
What he really needed to do was to wrestle the man to the ground and satisfy his own burning curiosity. But grappling with a dwarf? That was just too unseemly.
*
She sported the sandalwood paste Tilaka as a mark of her credo. Those in the know would recognise at a stroke her religious affiliations. Those not in the know demonstrated their ignorance by playfully pressing it and demanding what pushing the red button on her forehead actually did. Beyond pushing her invisible button that was. One didn't require a third eye to see into the closed hearts of these host citizens.
But recently even those of her own kind had inflamed her. Since they regarded her mark as definitively casting her into a caste and not one graced with favour as they went to war with each other in this land far from home. A displacement of the insecurities of exile as they turned in on one another. The host citizens turned away and let them get on with paying their blood debts.
*
He held the power of light in his hand. Concentrated, portable, the pent up energy of the universe cradled in his palm. Lean, streamlined and sucking the heat from his skin. He screwed the laser sight on to his sniper's rifle, brought it up to his eye and squinted the other shut. He started playing it over those in the market square some thousand yards away. As invisible as a god.
The red dab pinpointed various parts of people's anatomy as he ranged over them. The stigmata marking the power of life and death he wielded. God might fabricate tissue and muscles and organs, but with his high-powered projectile spitting fire, he could reverse that process and expose the hollowness of the Lord's creation in a bloody spume.
He trained the red laser on the back of a man's calf while he stood at a market stall inspecting its wares. No doubt haggling and chiselling with the vendor in their tired, time-honoured way. Solely serving to reinforce an etiquette of acquiescence and submissiveness. He could cut him down to true size, simply by delivering a shot right now. See him crumple to the ground, clutching his shattered leg. Make him- any of them- dance like the marionettes looped on string that they were. The man's life hung by a thread, he could bend him utterly to his will. The red Mark of Cain would see to that.
He veered his rifle away and bounced his laser into a woman's eyes. Reflexively she jerked her head away and put her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes. Another dumb puppet marching to his tune. She didn't even look around her for the source of her discomfort. Evidently such turning away of her face happened frequently enough for her not to challenge it. She clearly was not worthy of his divine imprimatur.
This wasn't some mote they can just bat away with a hand. For he was Lord of Flies. The movies always showed the devil with burning red eyes. They got that right at least. Although his oracular oracle was Cyclopean.
He matched his red spot to the cosmetic red dot on the forehead of a young woman. Straight between the eyes. Aligning it perfectly, the symmetry appealed to him. Were he to press the trigger now, the two red circles would be expunged by a hole of similar diameter, tingeing black around its perimeter. Until a fresh dribble of red emerged from the hollow. Third eye my eye he thought to himself as he swung the rifle across the vista. The red circle settled across the temple of a child. Was it a child, or just a very small adult? He already appeared to be limping...