Attack Of The 50-foot Verbose Mutant Killer Fountain Pens From Mars | Page 7

work, after sailing single-handed round the world and finally reaching - salt encrusted and storm battered - the safety of port, the hardest part of all is yet to come.
For when that manuscript is finished, it must be touted to publisher and agent.
Expect them both to be hard-nosed and cynical, 'cos they've seen it all before and crushed many a shrinking violet author in the clenched fist of their business realism. Hard work? You ain't seen nothing yet.
After months and years at sea in an ocean of words, the novelist now has to boil the whole thing down into a mere page full of words. Condensed, concised, rendered down to its barest and simplest points. And all the way through you have to make it clear what an exciting, original unmissable work it is.
So, you still think writing a novel is hard?
Try selling it to a jaundiced publishing world. Ocean sailing! Where's my life jacket?
July 2003

Primal Expression
ALL humans beings are storytellers, cave painters, poets and musicians. We are creatures of creation; it's central to our nature to express ourselves.
This has been true ever since the first spark of self-awareness compelled us to ponder the dark depths between the stars, to search for meaning in our relations with those around us, and with the world in which we live.
Creativity is the central strand that binds our diverse cultures together. It strikes out from one generation to the next to transmit those cultures from the dawn of time to the ever-distant tomorrow. This urge to create ramifies into everything we do, even into the darker aspects of our collective psyche - the capacity to destroy.
Art in its many forms was mankind's first expression of dissent; a subversion of the dominion of Nature. It stood for our own battle to escape the incarceration within the savage Eden that is the natural world.
Countless generations later, artistic expression in all its forms is still a basic act of defiance and of dissent. This time nature is not the object of our rebellion, but the human society that surrounds us and stifles us in everything we do.
From the day we are born, we are subliminally informed that we are fit only to labour or to perform some functional task for the market and its support systems. That and to dutifully consume material products.
Modern society catalogues humanity. It compartmentalises the human soul, splits it into components and neatly files them away. Here is our box, and there we must remain.
Capitalism needs throwaway components. We are expected to be near automatons performing repetitive tasks, regulated by the manager's clock and to live out our lives in the service of the market. This is called freedom.
In return, we get a little food, a roof over our heads, and a varying ration of pocket money to spend on consumer things like clothes and cars and holidays in the sun4.
Capitalism does not need a wealth of thinkers, or visionaries or people with untrammelled imagination. Such people are in general a hindrance to the smooth flow of profit. Instead, the vast majority is expected to channel imagination into other avenues.
So the accountant finds clever ways to boost a client's profit. The scientist working for an armaments company finds ever better ways to kill and maim. The labourer is simply crushed.
Or so it would seem.
Dig a little deeper into the Dark Continent that is the majority of mankind and we find the burning fires of ancient creativity. Sometimes it screams at us from the walls of our prison cities in the most colourful displays of graffiti art.
At other times we must peer a little harder into the crevasses and shadows of our narrow world, think a little laterally to realise that despite its circumstances, humanity still fights to express itself, any way it can, by whatever limited means.
"Shaz was 'ere" the scrawl tells us from a wall. This and many like it, sometimes accompanied by crude drawings in a primeval mimicry of the 'higher' graffiti art or indeed of ancient cave drawings, scream their creator's desire to be recognised in their existence.
As for the story telling tradition, that is alive and well in the most unlikely of places. Look to the pub, or similar gatherings where people flock to converse. In the simple telling of anecdotes and gossips, stories of their lives are performed for the small audience of family and friend.
Here are the rawest forms of self-expression, the human mind declaring its existence in the face of perpetual indifference. Perhaps it is also the most pitiable, but in a sense it shows that some spark of defiance still sputters in the human soul.
Some may find it difficult to perceive such notions in pointless scrawling, or in the casual gossip and boasting of a tap room milieu. Yet it represents in its most