The difficulties in describing a complex story

I completed my novel Alarums of Reality last night. Describing it in a few words or even a lot of words is even more difficult than with my other novels. I've made three attempts at writing a back cover text, all woefully incomplete, even combined. Notice how they're all describing different parts of the story?

I'll probably go with the first though.

Back cover text:

The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…

The once so great Caine Manor has become a ruin, one only fit for carrion birds and revenants. No one but daring children and crazed souls dare breach its confines.

The proud and shiny Caine Manor is an outstanding example of renovated architecture at the heart of the city.

Looking at the building, the house, resembling a castle, hidden in a strange, illuminated mist, squinting your eyes, it’s often hard to tell what’s illusion and what’s real. Reality shifts and burns around the Caine Manor, either ruin or proud house, reaching out with strands of night and fire to the surrounding areas and to existence at large. It is the center, or at least one center, in an ever-shifting world.

Is Chloe Webster dead or alive? Is Marion Dexter? Is Marlon Caine? Or David Fallon Somby? Are they perhaps both? Or neither? What is the world? Is it a brick, a hard, impenetrable wall or closer to something akin to mist and shadow? Existence might make sense, to us, to them, but only in glimpses, only in passing, beyond a corner somewhere ahead. They may wonder. They may die clueless. Because they don’t know, don’t know why terror strikes them and makes their heart beat like a sledgehammer in their chest.

From a place unbound by time and space alarums of reality are reaching out to touch and ultimately engulf them all.

Second back cover text:

The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…

There is no rhyme, no reason.

WHO KILLED CHLOE WEBSTER?

WHO KILLED DAVID FALLON SOMBY?

These are the questions everybody is asking these days, but no one can answer them.

Not the investigative reporter, not the wife that murdered her husband, not the husband that killed his wife, not the old man in the old house and certainly not the two detectives investigating the cases.

A lot is mysteriously absent.

But that is reality… isn’t it? There will always be pieces of the puzzle missing, absent in any equation, any painting of existence. We can claim otherwise, but when it comes down to it we know that not all the pieces fit the puzzle, know that nothing is as it seems.

One witness account to any given event is just that, incomplete, in the great scheme of things. What happened? What truly happened? The truth is only glimpsed by those digging deeper, seeking below the surface, beyond the veil, down there, in the boiling waters…

Third back cover text:

The end is the beginning. The beginning is the end…

Chloe Webster is dead, and no one seems to know why…

Did the estranged, former husband kill her? Was it the scorned girlfriend of a lover, or an unknown assailant she encountered during her nightly excursions into the unknown and dangerous parts of human existence?

Chloe was a seeker, a dabbler in the occult, a frequent participant in such obscure circles.

All her life she sought what’s hidden, what rests (or doesn’t rest) below the surface of everyday life, and those claiming knowledge of such things claim that she finally found it, found what she was looking for.

She was observed while she moved into the old hotel, the old building by the lake, observed while casting spells and performing occult ceremonies in the dead of night. Witness-accounts place her at dozens of seedy bars and occult stores and events around the world. Her life, also the final seven nights is fairly well documented. There is little controversy over the facts, but lots of it over what’s mysteriously absent. The final, revealing clues elude private and official investigators alike.

After years of rabid research she returned to the shores of the lake, on her path to her destiny, to what some calls her predestined fate. Truth, unquestionable and unopposed awaits her in the land and streets by the lake, and the distant and ancient and beyond mysterious Caine Manor…

The wild man in modern society

One among many (countless) subjects I write about is the wild man in modern society, especially in my series The Janus Clan. During the course of ten or rather eleven books (including ShadowWalk) we follow Ted and Liz through forty years, from the stumbling of their early life to the point when they reach the pinnacle of their growth, through inhuman hardship and full scale rebellion.

Liz and Ted are special, even among their own kin, where special is not a four letter word, but rather something to be savored and celebrated. They have the fire inside, like all human beings, but in their case it's boiling and hissing beyond description, both inside and outside. The modern society, civilization stifle emotion, stifle life itself, taming and destroying everything making life worth living. We see them resist the ruthless Machine slowly killing us all. We witness when the resistance turns into full-blown rebellion.

The two Warrens, Liz and Ted are travelers. Even though they during a few short, hectic, sort of peaceful years resided in the ancestral home in London, they spent most of their lives Journeying across the vast reality of the world… beyond… on their path to a terrifying and remarkable destiny.

The Janus Clan - ten (or rather eleven) deep and uncompromising novels about the wild man, about human beings in the modern world, the forty years of traveling, the slow burning fire, as The Phoenix is rising from the ashes.

The first book, The Defenseless is ready for printing, and will be out soon.

The many Keppler novels and projects

Quite a few of them have been realized. Many are still waiting to be so or be publiced, or filmed or done.

Well over two years ago I promised that my six completed novels would be published soon. It didn't happen. Life just got in the way, you know. I could have published them. It was three years since I had published my novel Shadowwalk, three years then, and i felt ready to publish the next.

It didn't happen, and now six years have passed. Time flies, you know. Before you know it another full turn of the seasons is gone.

My problem in this context (or one of them) is perhaps that I'm not in a hurry. People hurry too much, in my opinion.

But I feel ready now, ready this year. I feel confident that I will succeed in publishing at least one more book, between all my other projects.

A possible film project is coming up this summer, though, and that might ruin any other plans...

Just a little note here, to note that I'm still here.

Piracy saves music

They say piracy kills music, kills movies and so forth, but that is totally false, merely yet another totally false statement from an oppressive society.

If anything piracy saves music and everything, from the powerful music, movie and publishing industry that has pretty much ruined music, ruined movies and publishing in general for as long as they have existed. All creative activity has been forced into narrow chunks of the cavern for so long, now, that people have forgotten what true, controversial art is like and can be.

The music, movies, books and all published by established publishing houses have been a disaster for decades. There were a brief period in the late sixties and early seventies where even they felt they had to release controversial and through-provoking stuff, but that period is long gone. I used to think the eighties were a disaster, but that’s nothing compared to the nineties and zeroes. This is what you stooges, you braindead supporters of the oppressive «anti-piracy» laws help sustain? You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Giving copyright rights to corporations are so wrong, on so many levels that I can hardly begin to address it properly. Personal copyrights should remain. People should have the rights to their own work, but corporations shouldn’t, also because it isn’t their work. Corporations shouldn’t have the rights to bacteria or genetic materials or similar either. It’s all the same insanity, the idea that life can be owned.

Individual copyright to art should remain. Everything else should go.

And even individuals shouldn’t have infinite rights to their own work. When they have, say earned about a million dollars on a record, all their rights in that regard, to that copyrighted property should cease. I don’t think such a demand is excessive at all. On the contrary. It should be implemented on a vast scale. How much is enough? I say.

All encouragement to greed should cease, right now.

Individual artists should always retain the intellectual property rights to their own art. It just shouldn’t include the endless money flow that some of them enjoy.

The massive downloading of various illegal materials has reduced the earnings of the established publishing and production companies, reduced the companies in stature and power. Their total dominance is at an end, and that is such a great thing. They still earn an insane amount of money unfortunately, but their influence is decreasing. Today an underbrush of alternative and individual and smaller creative units are rising all over the world. Anyone can publish and also in part and increasingly so distribute their own material. And that is what is truly bugging the tyrants, the moguls at the top. They’re about to lose control over the information flow, their established right to censor and steer people’s attention. The established publishers still have the existing enormous advertising machine at their disposal, but even that is changing. And desperate as they are, they use their established, but hopefully waning power to force ever more oppressive legislation on the world at large. The propaganda stunt «Piracy is killing music» is an integral part of that.

Reject it. Reject them, tell them to go fuck themselves and ignore their insane ranting, and enjoy the true art, the true fire of life coming from independent artists, people that haven’t sold out, haven’t sold their most precious inner fire and creative well to the corporative power of this ugly world.

True artistic freedom is no longer only a word.

Incorporate - The Dreamweaver at work

I incorporate my surroundings in my writing, my art. I see a tree, a street or a situation, and it’s burned into my memory. It stays there, live there, changes there or not, and it’s put on paper, like they would have said in the old days, before all writing all art changed, with the onset of the computer and portable laptop.

When I travel all new places stay with me. And even though I’m fairly good at describing places I’ve never been, too, you would probably know where I’ve been by reading what and how I’ve written about a given place or city. Up until recently I’ve usually written about real places. Now, with new books, like the Afterglow series and Alarums of Reality I’m creating cities and cityscapes in what I experience as a new thing for me. I’m building them, from scratch, taken a piece here, an image, a smell there, and changing them into something new and different. At least I am doing it more consciously than before.

I’m evolving yet again, and it feels good, so good. What any decent artist should worry about is growing stale, festering like a closed-off pond.

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time in what you might consider my hometown and area. I walk through and pass by places almost every day, and even if that’s not a situation I’m comfortable with, I’ve discovered it has its uses. One side of a building is one book, one story, the other a completely different scenario, miles, and even an entire universe away. I dream, like I always do, and I create upon it, into other dreams and nightmares and yearnings and failings and everything.

Even in the midst of desolation there are dreams and rebellion and liberation.

Complete

I finally completed the first draft of my script for the short film «Confessions of a Midnight Cannibal» yesterday. It’s only thirteen pages, but I have been struggling a bit, quite a bit with it. I don’t know why exactly. Perhaps it’s a bit of new ground for me, even though the art of Transgression has been a favorite of mine for some time (since forever, really).

The title says it all, really. We experience in graphic details the cannibal’s preparations, implementation and digestion in his quest for the perfect meal.

Our hero is a civilized man, quite the dedicated connoisseur and witty conversationalist, a chef that takes his chores seriously, doing it all himself, the entire process from A to Z. The selection of the meat and various materials, the setting of the table, the works. It’s all his to struggle with and enjoy. I can certainly sympathize with this perfectionist, this maker of meals, even though I don’t share his zeal.

Filming will commence this upcoming summer or the next, depending on various factors. It can be made extremely cheap, which was the plan from the start, even though economics continue to be an issue. So is casting, inevitably. We need a large man, with a large cock, and we probably need a special effects man, even though that won’t necessarily be mandatory. And the man with the large cock needs to have a special voice and modulation. That’s crucial, as well. His voice and modulation, that is. The setting is a large advantage. The film can be made anywhere in the world. Flexibility is a must for a small, independent filmmaker, auteur.

There are only two roles to cast, the meat eater, and the meat. And the meat has no lines.

People having read the script describe it as «deeply disturbing». Very good.

Another guy asked what the message was, what message I wanted to convey to my breathless audience. Message? I replied ironically. I can sort of understand his question, since I tend to be a message man. That doesn’t mean I want to send one every second of the day, though. And there is actually a message here, one he strangely failed to see: I want to transgress any sense of normality in what I do, and I want mundane people to choke on their normality. Easy as pie.

This is a small piece of a larger story, really, one that will hopefully be made later, one of several movies I have written and intend to write in need of (larger) funding.

We’re going to make this enjoyable film, and put it on the Internet for all to watch. Since it will most certainly not be shown in any «decent» theater or festival. It’s an excellent beginning for our string of controversial, very controversial films.

The film division of Midnight Fire Media is finally about to take off.

Project update, early December

It's official. My project is late.

Since publication was supposed to begin in November, that's a dead giveaway. The main reason was technical problems, really, but they have been solved, now. So I'm not really that late yet. I do take my time, like I always do. Everything is pretty much ready to roll. I may wait a while or I may publish tomorrow.

The book after The Defenseless isn't due until February, so I have some time yet. The plan remains intact, and pretty much on schedule.