More Work

Funding was critical for National Geographic.


Deadlines were uncompromising.


Lingerie was at a premium.

Work

Captain Mifune loved cigarette breaks.

[Prologue]

My interest in writing started off with fan fiction.

Believe it, baby.

Like most 8 year-olds, I was completely in love with movie monsters. Scared shitless by them, but also awed by their strength, anger and their imperviousness to harm.

But it was fan fiction with a twist.

I used to imagine that the monsters would have fantastic and interesting lives of their own, not just relegated to 2-D cannon fodder for the heroes who always got the buxom wenches nervous and the loser sidekicks cheering on in admiration.

No, these monsters were 3-D, they had personality, a sense of humour and dammit, they knew how to occupy their time.

I'd write about how the octopus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would rise out of the ocean and terrorize people on land, how the Cyclops that Sinbad fought would live again and go on more adventures in search of plunder, how the Iron Man would fight aliens from outer space that came to invade England.

(The Iron Man destroyed the aliens, but was badly hurt, so the town people let him live in the junkyard. One day, he got bored and went to back into the ocean and was never seen again)

My favourite one was my own sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; in my version, the heroes travelled to New York with their captured dinosaurs and ran a freak show, which other children would fear and enjoy.

I had a wild imagination.

Geezer

I felt 25 today.

I felt it for the first time in over 7 months, since my birthday in December last year.

It hits you when you least expect it.

I feel like I've just lost something. I don't know what it is. I just hope it isn't anything I can't live without.

The trigger: Listening to Radiohead in the car. It made me feel nostalgic.

And you're only supposed to feel nostalgic when you're older.

Like when you're 25.

Bulletproof...I Wish I Was

Limb by limb and tooth by tooth
Tearing up inside of me
Every day every hour
I wish that I was bullet proof

Wax me
Mould me
Heat the pins and stab them in
You have turned me into this
Just wish that it was bullet proof

So pay the money and take a shot
Leadfill the hole in me
I could burst a million bubbles
All surrogate and bullet proof

And bullet proof
And bullet proof
And bullet proof.

Clean

"So, do you have to airbrush all of the models?"

"Yes"

"But that's going to make them look really fake!"

"Yes"

I watched on with child-like curiosity as the graphic artist completed his task of obliterating all of the model's natural imperfections. The sort of imperfections that make us normal people look human. The face had become something else now; the construct was ready to meet the rest of the world free of defects, free of prejudice, designer everything.

You don't want that face. You may find it appealing, you may go out and buy things to try to look that way (Photoshop is a good start), but believe me, you don't want that sort of perfection.

It looked too clean.