Merde

Monsieur Macbride est un idiot! Yes, it's official... well, it's been official for years, but it's been brought into staggering prominence in the last twelve hours.

The trip to France was nice. I know a lot of people knock them, but God bless British Airways for still having the old-fashioned British pluck and panache to provide complimentary gin and tonics on their flights. It might not seem like much, but to me this harks back to a time when flying somewhere was actually fun, rather than an ordeal of security, X-rays, one piece of carry-on luggage and take off your shoes please. I don't want to take off my shoes. Not because of any nefarious devices stashed in the soles, but because most of my socks have holes in them. And I know to my peril how the sight of a naked toe, poking cheekily through a black sock excites the female security guards.

For some reason it's been weeks since I had a decent sleep. You know, one where you wake up feeling less knackered than you were when you went to bed? But I have a book to finish! He said nobly. Or knobbly... but we'll get to that later. This lack of sleepingness has resulted in a certain tired quality to my waking life. So much so that I nearly left my laptop on the plane. And given that I'd been writing on the damn thing all the way from Aberdeen to Heathrow, that's pretty inexcusable.

I hit Paris (he said, changing tenses) in a bleary-eyed daze. It's technically an hour later than it was, and yet at the same time earlier internally than it now says on my watch. If you catch my drift. After scrummaging for my luggage -- which looks like a refugee from the Crimean war -- it's into a car and off to the hotel where I find out that the lovely lady looking after me has been drafted in at the last minute to look after some poor nervous author on their first television interview. Do I mind, but she can't come take me to dinner? Of course I don't mind! Work comes first! Good luck to your author!

So it's out onto the streets of Paris for me, looking for somewhere to eat. And being as it's quarter to ten, I'm ravenous, and convinced I'm never going to get anything to eat ever again, I opt for the nearest thing that's actually open: Indiana Café -- a faux-American diner, full of middle-aged men and their very attractive 'nieces'. *ahem*

This is one of things that stagers me about France. I'm in an inexpensive, American-themed diner. And I can order steak tartar. And when it comes it's goooood. Of course it helps my bearded self-esteem that I order the whole meal in French: "Les tartar... se bon?"
"Oui c'est bon"
Gallic shrug. "Oui: tarar."
Oh I'm so swish. Or would be if I wasn't sitting on my tod, surrounded by dirty old men and women young enough to be their daughters. And while they're canoodling across the generation gap, how do I fill my time? Watching something called 'Robotboy' on the Cartoon Network -- with the sound turned off. Cartoons and raw mince... Yay me!

Midnight -- there's a pigeon outside my window making amorous noises.

Half past midnight -- same pigeon.

One am -- police car wheeeeee-whawwwwwwing away into the distance.

01:30 -- PIGEON!

02:00, 02:10, 02:30, 03:00 -- PIGEONPIGEONPIGEON!!!

03:10 -- get up, open window and swear at bastard Pavarotti pigeon.

03:12 -- realise that pigeon is French, and so doesn't understand "BUGGER OFF YOU TWO-WINGED, GREASY, FLYING-RAT BASTARD!"

03:15 -- Rack brains for really good French swearwords. Come up blank.

Repeat till the alarm goes off.

When I eventually give up any pretence of sleep and haul my saggy carcass down to breakfast, I'm not a pretty sight. Heavy black bags under bloodshot eyes. Stoop. Shuffle. Mumbling pigeon-related obscenities under my breath.

There are no knobs in my hotel room. I know that sounds rude, but it isn't. Someone has stolen all my room's knobs. Knob on the sink to raise and lower the bathplug? Gone. The one for the sink? Gone. The one to open and shut the minibar? Gone. My room is a knob-free zone. It's as if someone's gone though the place going, "Mmmm, knobs... ooooooh...." And then made free with the hot-monkey-knob-related-love, and disposed of the evidence afterwards. Pervert.

Anyway, after breakfast it's down to some breakneck editing of the audio abridgement of BROKEN SKIN. Yes, not only am I over here to attend the thriller festival, I'm also editing the audio script (they start recording on Tuesday), and trying to write Book Number The Fourth at the same time. Hahahahahahahahaaaaaaaargh...

Which is really where the trouble starts. Had I not gone back to INoGITCH, I'd be finished this one by now. But I was stupid and wanted to return to work. If I was finished now, I wouldn't be trying to write. And I wouldn't have left my notebook on the train from Paris to Lyon.

Yup: my poor red notebook, with all the research notes in it for Book Number The Fourth, has disappeared off the face of the earth. Whoooooosh! Gone and never called me mother.

My lovely French Publicist Margaux has been pestering the rail company non-stop. The nice people at Michel Lafon (my publishers) have been doing the same. And there's no sodding sign of it. So four weeks to go till the book has to be delivered, and I've lost the only copy of all the things I need to know to actually finish the book.

Like I said: Monsieur Macbride est un idiot!

I think I'm going to cry...

Lazy poo-head

Yes, I know I haven't been as diligent as I could be keeping Casa Del Halfhead all neat and tidy. Instead of a regular waxing, it's been left to grow all hairy in the pubic region. Nasty little tufts sticking out the sides of its underwear, like a wee curly moustache.

She Who Must Read The Blog At Work Every Morning In Order To Find Out What Sort Of Mess She's Going To Come Home To, has a theory about this: I'm too busy worrying about Book Number the Fourth. And there isn't room in my pretty, little head for much else. And while it's nice to be told one's head is 'little and pretty' -- rather than huge and ugly -- it's not a nice thought. My brain should be capable of performing more than one task at a time.

OK, so I'm not a woman, but I have occasionally dressed up as one, and that's got to count for something.

Right now, for example, I'm thinking about cooking something nice for tea. And packing up to fly to metrosexual Paris tomorrow, for the first stop in my gruelling tour of France. Well, OK, it's not a tour as such. More of an overnight stay in Paris followed by a fast train to Lyon for the Thriller Book Fair / Festival thing, but 'tour' makes it sound much more exotic.

Apparently I'm going to be on a panel as well: 18:00 on Friday with Anne Perry, Graham Hurley and Jonathan Trigell. No idea what the panel's about (only found out I was participating yesterday), but I've never let that get in the way of beard-related jokes of an all-out, no-bars-held smut-fest variety.

Salut maintenant! My Eengleesh chooms...

Scene of the crime

Of course, getting a conviction is going to be difficult, because there's no sign of the body. Just the evidence of a violent struggle. Tufts of feathers strewn across the dark brown earth. Fluffy grey wisps caught on the occasional clutch of weedy grass.

I'm pretty sure the victim was a pheasant. The pinfeathers have that distinctive brown and white chevron pattern you only see on the female. But without a body...

Of course it's possible Grendel's dragged the corpse into her Den Of Death under the leylandii hedge, to feast upon her victim, or maybe it was just a fight. A bit of name-calling that got out of hand. Someone says something they can't take back, and the next thing you know they're swinging punches, pulling hair, fur and feathers flying. Only there's no sign of any injury on Grendel. AKA: Little Miss. AKA: Kitty Pookerton. AKA: Stephanie Meerschaum (when she's ordering pizza, or conducting internet fraud). But she does have prior: mousicide, serial shrew killings, baby rabbits, a greenfinch... Why not a pheasant?

Then again, maybe we shouldn't be looking at just the usual suspects. Maybe we should be opening the investigation up to consider other possibilities. Like the black cat who's come calling over the last couple of weeks. Sitting on the picnic table and howling like his (or her) bum's on fire.

Maybe this is the real villain, and the feathers have been planted to set Grendel up? A backyard turf war.

Or maybe it's something far more sinister...

I was going to have a rant

But then I thought: what's the point? Especially as it was about the Most High Grand Arch Thieving Bastard Of Her Majesty's Government AKA the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There I was, having a wonderful dream about killing all humans, when the early morning round up of the papers came on the alarm: Gordon Brown (blessed be his name in the fiery pits of hell that spawned him*) is planning to raid any bank account left dormant for 15 years or more. Presumably on the reasoning that if you've not played with it for that long, you don't really want it. So surely it'd be more fun for him to get his sticky little fingers on instead. Think of all the jelly babies, cocaine and hookers he could afford!**

To be honest, I'm surprised he's setting the bar at 15 years. If he made it 3 he'd be able to bugger us all out of a lot more money! See: lack of planning, that's the problem with politicians these days. They want to be truly vicious, ruthless bastards, but have to settle for rampant cock-weaselry instead.

Which I'm sure we'll see out in force at tomorrow's budget. Cocks and Weasels all over the place. Running about on both sides of the house, trying to out cock and out weasel each other.

But as I say: what's the point ranting? According to the guy who worked with the Downing Street Bandito for four years, he rides roughshod over his fellow governmental willy-weasels, ignoring their opinions and hurting their feelings with his ministerial shenanigans. So what chance do the rest of us have? Mind you, as Lord Turnbull says, "You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all."

Which is exactly the quality I'm looking for in a Prime Minister. Go team!

Mind you, the rest of them aren't much better. I get the feeling this next general election's going to be a little bit like pissing into a burning chip pan. WHOOOOOOOSH!!! Burnt privates and no pubic hair for anybody.

See: that's your quality political analysis that is.

We now return you to our regular apathy.

* And no: this time I'm not having a go at Fife, I seriously believe the man fell from the very arse of the Devil himself. Ecumenically speaking...
** I'm not actually suggesting that the Chancellor has a hooker / drug / confectionary problem, as that would be naughty. I merely use these ridiculous images to poke a bit of good-natured fun at his expense. After all, who would ever believe a politician of doing anything in the least bit morally questionable? It's just too far-fetched!

In which Stuart is a naughty boy

Yup, no writing for me yesterday: far too knackered. I suppose I could claim post-performance fatigue, but seeing as I just ponced about for an hour wearing a suit, it seems a bit unlikely. She Who Must Be Consulted About Such Matters thinks it's a lack of holiday that does it. Which I'm guessing is a thinly-veiled hint that she wants taken away somewhere.

This is, of course, fuelled by jealousy that I'm going to Lyon the week after next. I keep telling her it's work, not fun. Who wants to hang around a bar in the sunny south-ish of France with a bunch of dipsomaniac crime and thriller writers? Hell on earth, so it is ;}#

Trouble is that there's no way in God's saucy fridge-magnet that I'm going to be going anywhere before I turn Book Number The Fourth in to HarperCollins for their careful consideration / laughing derision. I suppose we could set up a 200Watt bulb in the little concrete outhouse* at the bottom of the garden and maybe wheech a bit of builders' sand about the place. You can recreate sunburn with the judicious application of an electric sander, or by rubbing in heaps and heaps of Ralgex. Then all you need is to consume four bottles of crappy wine, some chicken that's about three and a half months past its sell-by-date and you've got your package holiday experience right there.

It's a plan.

* So called because it is outside of the house, not because we go to the toilet out there. Well, maybe sometimes, but we're only human.

Tutankhamen

Well, it seems that the curse of Mr Burns has at last been lifted! The readers' groups event at Fyvie Castle went off OK. Everyone seemed to have a good time. No one threw anything. And only one person nodded off. OK, so she was sitting in the front row, so that was a tad distracting, but everyone who remained awake were very nice.

I think they were mostly stunned by my choice of attire for the evening: a sort of linen suit thing that makes me look like a bearded Michael Palin who's let himself go. They were expecting some sort of hairy scruffbag in a holey jumper and muddy boots. Possible with trousers on, but you never can tell...

Plus the castle is a great venue to do events like that in. I'm not sure if they illuminate it every evening, but it was quite the little ego-stroke to drive up to the front door, pretending it was all lit up for me! Me, I tell you: ME!!! Bwahahahahaha!

*ahem*

There was wine, there was shortbread, there were enough sandwiches to feed the whole of Fraserburgh for a month, and we even had music courtesy of a wee ceilidh band from Turriff Academy. Very good they were too.

And unlike the Scottish Book Association's dreaded haggis and humiliation fest, I didn't die on my arse. Hurrah!

Still, there's always next time ;}#

By way of an update

Before you say anything: I know. OK? I thought it was a safe place to stash the body, but when I sobered up... Yeah. Who knew nuns contained so much blood? Much more than postmen, or telesales people...

Anyway, Book Number The Fourth continues to do my head in. (Figuratively. I mean, it's not lurking round the corners in my house, in the dark, ready to leap out and commit violent assault with a golf club, or anything. It'd like to, but I keep it chained to the desk, watched over by a naked picture of Gloria Hunniford. That'll teach it.) Yes I've finally clambered past the halfway point. Hurrah for me, yeah, I'm so special, let's have a party. *ahem*

One thing I've noticed about this book, other than the sudden proliferation of foul language that starts about a third of the way in (the swearometer graph's going to be off the scale on this one, I think) is that Book Number The Fourth really isn't like the other three were to write. In a way this is a good thing: no repeating oneself, it's good to stretch, etc. and suchlike bollocks. In another way this is a pain in the bum, as it's all uncharted territory and therefore a lot more difficult.

Difficult makes my head hurt.

It also makes me all 'stare off into the distance with a slightly constipated look on my face'-ish, worrying about what's coming next and if it's all working, and why there isn't any milk for the tea. She Who Must Be Consulted From Time To Time On Matters Not Involving Horses thinks that's why posting on the old blog is so erratic. There is only room in my little manly brain for one thing at a time, and right now it's so full of nasty things there's no space left for anything else.

Bad Stuart, naughty!

I would have thought having had holes drilled in my head would have let some of the excess stuff out, but it doesn't seem to have. The only plan I can come up with is to start forgetting things as quickly as possible to free up space.

Red wine's good for killing brain cells, isn't it? I can't remember...

Nekkid...

Schadenfreude is such a wonderful word. Not as wonderful as 'pantaloons', or 'fish', but it more than makes up for that by being a bastard to spell. And it describes perfectly my reaction to the news that Israel's ambassador to El Salvador has been sacked, after police found him outside the Israeli embassy, pissed as a fart and nekkid as the day he was born*. Well, except for the bondage gear he was wearing.

They had to take a ball gag out of his gob before he could confirm who he was.

I would personally like to thank the Israeli Foreign Office for getting Ambassador Tzuriel Refael to don his favourite rubber-wear in order to promote BROKEN SKIN. Yes, he was supposed to wait till May when the book comes out, before exposing himself (literally) to the world, but beggars can't be choosers.

Now I met a number of people into the bondage scene when I was researching the book, and they were all very nice, staggeringly normal people. Bondage is a serious business to them, it's their sexuality, and we all know what happens when you make fun of people's sexuality. You become a cock-weasel. Well, unless they're turned-on by dead bodies, livestock, or Nana Mouskouri -- then you can feel free to rip the piss out of them till the cows, Greek singers with bizarre central partings, and/or zombies come home.

But surely if you're representing your country's government in a foreign land, you should be bright enough to get up to whatever it is that floats your rubber duck in private! Not only was Ambassador Refael found wearing his favourite little number, he was also bound and gagged. So it's not as if he was in the middle of something intimate, then had to go answer the door. Maybe to sign for a parcel, or pay the milkman? And his dressing gown gets caught in the door as it slams shut with him on the wrong side... you know: the sort of thing that happens on Benny Hill and Carry On Up The Smutty Franchise films. No, he was tied up as well. And everyone knows you should never try to pay the milkman when you're bound hand and foot -- it's impossible to reach your wallet. That's just rude. Much better to just pretend you're not in, so he'll come back later. Unless you have some sort of urgent, kinky need for peach melba yoghurt.

And can you imagine what the rest of this poor, demented sod's life's going to be like? "I work for twenty six years in the service of my country, and do they call me Refael the consensus builder? No! I slave in the foreign office, brokering deals between seemingly irreconcilable antagonists, but do they call me Refael the peace maker? No! I build orphanages with my own hands, but do they call me Refael the saintly? No! I wake up outside the embassy, tied up and pissed as a fart in my rubber nun's outfit ONE TIME..."

* With thanks to Agent Phil for the link -- he swears he came across it in all innocence, and not because he was surfing for dodgy bondage porn during work hours. Honest.

Summit underground, like.

Well, as I appear to have pissed off one reader far enough to ensure they never want to read my books again* by ranting about BT, I suppose I should mend some fences. That way the bastarding sheep from the field out back won't get into my back garden and eat my sodding plants again. The things are like big, smelly, woolly Houdinis, in various shades of dung-flecked grey. Only they break into things, not out of them.

Ok, so let's forget about the stinky sheep and get to the point here. Remember ages ago I waffled on about a short story I'd managed to con a science fiction magazine into buying? Well, you can now download the whole Subterranean Magazine (Cliché Edition) in PDF form and read it at your leisure. You know, if you haven't got anything better to do, and want to be regaled by tales of William Shakespeares and Pope Rickards IV, for free and stuff.

Oh, and it also contains much better stories than mine, by proper writers and stuff.

Did I mention it was free?

* And yes, I'm sorry to see them go, but it's their choice. I've abandoned authors / musicians / film stars when they've pissed me off too.

In which our bearded protagonist is not having a good day.

I have a nasty dose of the homicidal rages today, all thanks to those fine chaps and chappesses at British Telecom. Now I have to say that there's no single person I'd like to kill, I'd be quite happy with a random selection of about a dozen of them. I'd get twelve dining room chairs, arrange them in a circle, then strap the random dimwits down and take a cordless Black and Decker drill to their foreheads. Maybe with one of those big, core drill cutting heads on it. Go round one by one, making a big round hole in their head stick my hand into the squishy brain matter and rearranging their sodding synapses with my fingers.

I phoned up with an 'enquiry' about my bill. Waited in the queue like a good little boy. Explained the situation to Person Number 1. Put on hold again. Transferred to Person Number 2. Explained everything again. Another chance to listen to the hold music. Transferred to Person Number 3 who apologised because Person Number 2 had put me through to the wrong department (after I'd explained what was wrong for the third time), and wasn't it awful when people are passed from department to department? Yes it is. Can he put me through to the right department? Of course he can, and I'm to have a nice day. More hold music. Person Number 4 -- wrong department. AAAAAArgh -- but Person Number 5 was the most cunning of them all.

By this stage I'm getting a teensy, tiny bit less than impressed. But I'm astonishing myself by staying calm. After all, it's only been half an hour since I started on this bastarding quest, pressing all the right sodding buttons in the phone menu labyrinth that's designed to sap you of the will to live. Telling person after person what my bloody phone number is. WHY? Why do I have to tell them? THEY'RE BT! THEY KNOW WHAT BADGER-BUGGERING NUMBER I'M CALLING FROM!!! IT'S ON THEIR SKATE-SHAGGING SYSTEM!!!!!

Calm breaths, calm breaths.

So with Person Number 5 I want to make sure I've finally got the right department. And just to be on the safe side I ask him for his name. Ooh. In hindsight that was probably my mistake. Well, other than thinking calling the BT help line would actually 'help'. Radjid, says he. Can you spell that for me? I ask, not understanding that I have just walked into the lion's den. 'R for Romeo...' He says. Pause. 'A for Adam...' Longer pause. 'Romeo, Adam...' And then he hung up!

So confounded was he by the task of spelling his own fish-frigging name, he actually hung up!

I've spent half an hour, repeating the same damn sorry tale five time, worn my fingers to tiny stumps fighting my way through 'Press 1 if you'd like to strangle someone; Press 2 if you think you're likely to die of old age before we do anything about your problem; Press 3 if you'd like to tear someone's left foot off and shove it so far up their own rectum they'll be able to bite their toenails from the inside; Press 4 if you think it'll help. It won't, but hey, knock yourself out. Or press 5 to hear these options again, while you slowly go insane.'

And now I'm going to have to go through the whole thing again, but not yet. No, first I have to calm down, because I like to be calm when I'm dealing with idiots. Being angry when dealing with the mentally challenged never helps. It disrupts their already diminished cognitive abilities.

But for now: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh! I HATE BT!

And so it begins...

Well, at long last John 'Spanky' Rickards has finished reading BROKEN SKIN. And right away I can see the kind of reaction this book is going to get when it comes out in May: shameless tittering and low-brow innuendo. Pah! Pah! And thrice more, Pah! I say.

It's my own fault for writing about bondage, I suppose. And mentioning bottoms a lot. And all that sex... Hmm, maybe not the best of mixes for a quiet life when it comes to getting the book reviewed.

I can pretty much see the kind of thing that's going to hit the papers (should any deign to review such a smutty book) -- it'll either be 'puerile, filled with toilet humour and tasteless gags', or... Actually, I think that'll probably be about it. And then everyone will make the magic assumption that far from being the nice, wholesome beardy boy that I am, I'm actually a sexual degenerate who likes to get tied up and spanked. Which just isn't true, I'm a model of propriety me. Made of sexy, sexy Plasticine...

This is the problem with writing about 'bumping uglies'. You can kill people in any number of bizarre ways in your books and no one will look at you funny. But have two of them bonking and everyone goes, "Oooh, I never knew he was into that kind of thing!"

Bah. Can you say "Career suicide"? Stuart can.

Still, Mr Rickards (blessed be his tiny wee hairy chin) did proffer the following blurbitude:

I commend you all to go and buy this with your filthy, filthy money come May.
And don't worry if you only have clean, or even moderately grubby money -- you can easily turn it into the filthiest of filthies by rubbing it into the hairy gunk that collects underneath your sink! Or sellotape it to the underside of your extractor fan then fry a lot of bacon. Stick it in your underpants and wear the same pair without washing them for about a month. Or staple it to your dog -- that'll get it nice and filthy. Or even better: hand it to a politician. You might never get it back, but if you do it'll never feel clean again.

See: we're all about the practical advice here at Casa Del Halfhead.

UPDATE: I see from my blogger dashboard stat thing, that this is the 666th post here! How fitting that it should feature the Nameless Horror himself.

Ring Barb

Well, that interview on Crimezone.nl is up and I have to say it is funny as two monkeys fighting in a bath of porridge with inflatable popes. Or at least it is if you can't read Dutch and have to rely on Babel Fish to make nonsense out of things. Take this lovely intro, for example:

Fawn-coloured its, fawn-coloured ring barb [What? What the hell is a ring barb? Or don't I want to know... maybe he's being dirty?]. Only its optical device stands in the way an comparison with of the three musketiers [Eh? WTF? I'm guessing he means that without my glasses I look like Aramis, or Athos. But if it's Porthos he's in for a kick in the chugs]. A shot in heart and kidneys with humour which seems exclusively to at predestined. He loves beer, gin and Diet Coke and he hates Orwelliaanse the beings also Teletubbies called [damn right he does, sinister brightly-coloured bastards. Time for Tubby Custard my arse!]. Praise does good him, criticism makes him raging [which I think must be Dutch for depressed]. He cooks according to own say as ninja and have socks enough for an orphanage [??? I know I've got a lot of socks, but a whole orphanage? That'd be something special, wouldn't it? -- socks as far as the eye can see, all in various shades of used-to-be-black]. Concerning its age he does vague, but he has largely passed forty [BASTARD!!! I am not bloody forty! AAAAAAAAArgh! If I ever get my hands on that sod from the Sunday Times I'm going to THROTTLE HIM!]. For an interview the goedlachse shot takes largely the time. Stuart MacBride are gifted a narrator who does not shun the somberheid and darkness of the existence, but that by relativising kunstig weet to its humour to all sadness.

It actually gets sillier from there. Ah Babel Fish, where would we be without your surreal fiddling with language?

Right, I'm off to see if I can find a fawn-coloured ring barb on Google images. Though I'm a little worried about what I'm going to find...