Fakers gonna fake.

Tonight I have been assessing the novel situation. It is ridiculous. I have so many almost-ready that really I should shut the blog, take two weeks off work and I’d finish at least three of them in that time. Maybe it’s a writer thing, not wanting to let the babies grow up, like some mother hen afraid to let the chicks out of the nest. Time the buggers moved out and started paying me instead of me always looking after them!

There are too many. I have to put some on the back burner and leave them alone and concentrate on just a few. I have decided to concentrate on ‘Norman’s House’, ‘Panoptica’ and ‘Inside Outside’ since these are the most-nearly ready. ‘The Armageddon Show’ cannot come out until after ‘Demdike’s Revival’ which comes after ‘Norman’s House’ and I should not be doing anything at all with those two now anyway. ‘Victor’s Will’ is a zombie tale, plenty of those around anyway and ‘Channelling’ is a lot of fun but it started as a short story and it’ll be so far in the future as a novel that I have decided to put out the short story now. The novel can wait, it’ll still have that Chapter One but unless I focus I’ll never get any of them finished.

‘Channelling’ was not written as any kind of allegory. It was a straightforward blast of rage at the fake TV psychics who always find exactly the right number of ghosts for a half-hour show, they never fail to find exactly the right ghosts for the audience and they never come up blank. I wrote the story to show a couple of the tricks they use and what might happen if, one day, the ghosts really came through. The novel charts Robert Odin’s return from psychiatric care into a world that still thinks he’s mad for what he now sees. It is not going to happen for quite some time unless I win the lottery, and since I don’t enter…

Incidentally, I like to link stories. This one links to ‘The Colony Man‘ which is forever free.

Lately I have taken to including smokers in all stories, especially in the ‘Dark Thoughts and Demons’ collection where flouting of the smoking ban is common and one ghost is made of ash. I am renormalising smoking in a quiet, seditious way.

Maybe ‘Channelling’ has an unintended allegory. Keep on pretending something is true and one day it might come true. Pretend that even seeing a smoker will give you cancer and there are some of us who will be delighted to convince you to death.

There are those out in the blogosphere who try to combat antismoking rubbish with truth. I combat it with absurdity. I like to push them into deeper and deeper terror – all the grey dust is tobacco ash, before tobacco came to this country in 15diddlywhatsit there was no grey dust. Look at China where lots of people smoke and there is grey dust everywhere. Look at the Congo where hardly anyone smokes and there is no grey dust. Is any of it even remotely true? Doesn’t matter. The drones will believe anything, the Puritans made them that way. Increasing numbers of them are terrified of dust and will try to rid their houses of it even though most dust is their own shed skin cells and they can never be free of it. Even if they kill all smokers, we will still haunt them.

So now, when I come across a coughing, hand-waving, raddled old harridan I do not react with hate. I react with logic. A strange logic, perhaps, but one of the first things I learned when branching into fiction was that it does not have to be real, it just has to make sense. Fiction, on the whole, makes far more sense than reality because reality makes no sense at all.

Over on Frank’s place, Carol2000 calls for a concerted, organised reaction from smokers. I am very opposed to this.

For one thing, I will not be controlled. Not by Big Tobacco, not by Anti-Tobacco and not even by the Smoker’s Union. No, I will not do as you say. Hear my theme tune.

More importantly, any organisation can be broken.  An organisation has leaders. A heirarchy. Generals and majors. Take them out and the footsoldiers are lost. That is what the Puritans, the Righteous, are trying to do. They are looking for links to Big Tobacco and cannot understand that those links do not exist. There is no organisation. There are no leaders. As Obo once put it, they are taking over a country house by house. There is no central command they can take out and finally destroy their enemy. And I suggest that we should never develop one.

Lawsuits are irrelevant when the law belongs to the enemy. We cannot fight them in their occupied territory. It will just cost us money we don’t have.

If the antismokers manage to take me out, it makes no difference, If they shut down Frank or Junican or Dick Puddlecote or VGIF or Mike McFadden or Nothing2Declare or Smokervoter or any of the others, it makes no difference. None of us hold any office in their imagined ‘big tobacco resistance’. We don’t even care about Big Tobacco. Increasingly, we are growing our own.

We like to smoke and we just want to be left alone. Not one current mainstream political party will ever grasp that simple concept. The fake science of tobacco control is their excuse to hate us all and they really do love to hate us all. If you smoke and you vote for any of them, you are a turkey voting for Christmas. They openly hate you and still you vote for them? How fucking stupid can you get?

Well, about as stupid as the drinkers and the smokers and the drivers and anyone else voting for the Triad of LibLabCon. Vote your way into oblivion if you want. I will not.

We are not an organisation. We have no leaders and no rule book. We are the chaos that explodes into Robert Odin’s head after he has faked it for so many years.

The antis are the fake psychics using their tricks and twisted words to convince the gullible.

We are the real ghosts who will find them in the end.