There are a cluster of new titles coming. (To explain the absence of recent blogs). I thought for a change, I’d share the growing personal library of books written by me. Just so you can see that I do actually do a little bit of work now and again 
On Amazon
One of my old ranting verse poems that I used to perform during the bad days under Apartheid.
A Zombie From the Working Class
Lightning struck he was in the bath
he never knew what came to pass
his brain exploded he began to grow
the curse of the zombie working class!
he sat up and broke a tooth
as his face burst through the top of the roof.
Passersby stared ‘How can a man be so uncouth?
Take a look over there! A 60 foot man with his bum bared.”
“You can tell from where he’s holding that tiny bath
he’s a zombie from the working class.”
He stamped to the Voortrekker monument
and shat in the hole provided-
wiped his arse with seven mello yello’s
before they had a chance to hide them.
The army said:
“Its humiliating, we want a mandate from Mr.Botha
to stop this monster from defecating
on DHQ and Voortrekkerhoogte-”
The kits-konstabels couldn’t cope.
The air force said “You’ve got a hope
if you think we can take on the task
of killing a mile high member of the working class.”
But they napalmed him and he burned for a year
a fiery beacon seen far and near-
A symbol of light. A spark in the dark.
A reminder to the rulers who nearly saw their arse-
‘coz of one pissed off zombie from the working class.
*mello yello’s = the nickname for the bright yellow armored vehicles of the South African police.
DHQ = Defence Headquarters
Voortrekkerhoogte = An area outside of Pretoria used by both the military and the air force as a vast sprawling camp.
kits-konstabels = lit. ‘instant police.’ The nickname for people from the black community drafted hurriedly into the police force to bolster the ranks of the Apartheid forces.
There’s a certain post-coital sensation to coming to the end of another book. I worked on it from October last year through to January this year, and it initially was almost four hundred pages. Subsequent editing chopped it down considerably, and its now sitting at a tolerable 275 pages.
Its going to be a different kind of book, primarily because I’m fairly certain that I don’t want to ‘self publish’ it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble as I have done with my other works. I’m a little sick of self publishing, as well as being amongst the flocks of would-be writers desperately trying to sell their grungy romances or cheesy fantasy/sci-fi works.
(This said, I do have another completed novel/long novella which I may well put up on Amazon etc) – but the larger novel is aimed squarely at traditional publishing. Whether its vanity or not, I wanted to create a piece of literature that’s really good, and use it to try find myself an Agent. I think I’ve succeeded in the first part of the process: its called ‘The Last Mermaid’ and – even if I say so myself – I think its a fine bit of literary fiction.
Part of what propelled me to disengage from the hordes of self publishers was a thread on a well-known forum, sneering at literary fiction. I watched as the earnest scribblers lined up to jeer, and I felt repulsed. Was this what I’d come to? Standing shoulder to shoulder amidst the ignorant, the semi-literate, a Mob who uniformly appeared to be unable to either grasp what literary fiction was, or appreciate the many forms it takes?
I realized there was a difference between these would-be scribblers and myself. I’m creating literature. Or rather, ‘Literature’ – with a capital fucking ‘L.’ I’m not content to churn out crap, and sit and crow about the supposed imminent downfall of trad publishing, or swap stories about how much money can be made self publishing compared to the ‘poor’ folk picked up by the larger publishing houses.
I don’t like surrounding myself with deluded people, and never have. Yet the ability for any aged granny with a scribbled, badly-written manuscript to upload to Amazon and hit ‘publish’ means that there are now tens of thousands of these kinds of hobbyists, calling themselves ‘writers,’ trying to apply their laughable philosophies onto the marketplace at large.
I have never written for money. I don’t write to make money. Yet a large part of the scribblers focus is purely on the royalties they can earn by uploading loathsomely unedited material to Amazon and the other various e-retailers. Its snake oil country, and there’s no mistaking it. The hicks are everywhere, shaking their bottles of medicine, guaranteed to cure all ailments.
Let me be the first to say that I’d rather be traditionally published and earn a pittance than be sitting on a mountain of cash because I’ve uploaded some shitty genre work that’s taken off with the e-reader audience. If that makes me a snob, then so be it. There’s a certain cachet that I enjoy from charming the critics – I don’t mind earning less money than someone whose bug-eyed-monster tome happens to be selling well. You have the cash, I’ll have the intellectual buzz from having my work appreciated and understood.
So there.
In more pleasant news, the latest book has gone through a rigorous edit and multiple revisions and rewrites, and seems to be in a state that’s pleasing to me and my grimly efficient Editor. Next step is to concoct a synopsis, dig out the query letter form, assemble a list of agents and begin submitting.
The other work that’s sitting with the Editor, The Burial Party, is a noir piece set in the heart of the cancer that is the capitalist system: Vegas. I still have to see whether the story holds together. If it does, this is the one I’ll probably be uploading to the various e-outlets. Seeing as it contains ‘paranormal’ elements, I figure it might be fun to add to the long list of titles I have on offer.
Its funny to realize that I am ‘between books’ at the moment. Its a horrid state of affairs. I like to be writing something. The fact that I am not, means that this blog actually gets updated. *rolls eyes* I await the arrival of my muse for the next bit of work.
For those who care, my general rants, musings, and other issues tend to spew out on Facebook on a daily basis – and can be found at https://www.facebook.com/ianfraser1
Be advised, I am opinionated. My work comes from a churning cauldron of contradictory views and ideas, and my social media postings often reflect this. I am not the kind of writer who leans over backwards to avoid offending anyone. But you probably know this already, if you’ve experienced my work.
I work in the genre of the Grotesque – technically, most often in the field known as the Satiric Grotesque – and rather than re-invent the wheel, for further reading, some good info can be found at : http://davidlavery.net/grotesque/major_artists_theorists/Theorists/Thomson/thomson3.html
The creative mind is like a jigsaw puzzle; pieces reflect aspects of the real life of the artist. Some parts of the puzzle interlock, others lie by themselves: puzzling puzzles. Just where do stories come from?
I thought I’d provide the origin of the various stories I’ve written. Normally, I wouldn’t bother, but I’m in a ‘down-time’ mode after having finished the latest work.
PIGMAN’S FINGERS
This was the first formal fiction prose I wrote. It emerged as a novella, and with minor tweaks by my editor, managed to upset my Agent at the time, due to its content. The piece is post-apocalyptic.
There is a beautiful film by Charles Laughton called ‘The Night of the Hunter’ – dealing with a psychotic ‘preacher’ on the hunt for missing loot from a bank robbery, terrorizing two children in the process. There are moments in the film that are pure David Lynch: American Gothic at its finest. Parts of Blue Velvet clearly spring from ‘Night of the Hunter.’ Moonlight shining on white picket fences juxtaposed with terror. Scuttling insects unseen beneath supposedly beautiful cropped suburban lawns. Unexpected magical realism.
I wanted to create something with a similar mood to it, take the homespun folksy Americana of Norman Rockwell, and gore it elegantly – yet set it within the framework of ‘almost’ fantasy. The opening sentence of Pigman’s Fingers emerged naturally, and the subsequent piece seemed to write itself:
‘The sex with Mom was good and for once, I was in the mood for it.’
The voice was present from the get-go: a young boy in some distant future long after the present civilization has collapsed, being quite matter of fact about his life, habits, and dreams. The narrative begins and the story unfolds.
According to Jung, instances of the ocean tend to symbolize the subconscious – I seem to be drawn to forests, and specifically forests at night. ‘Pigman’ clearly used the overgrown forests as representative of ‘something’ – what, I couldn’t say.
A long time ago, I wrote a short film script about an abused child making a deal with a serial killer to help ‘fix’ the child’s life. Aspects of this trickled into the Pigman story: the idea of fringe benefits occurring from a Faustian deal. I softened things and made the narrator part of what to him is a ‘love story’ but which, to us as readers, is something that is probably anything but love.
After all, if you’re damaged goods to begin with, you’ll look for love in all the wrong places.
But I avoided going the usual Western route of instilling ‘morality’ into the piece. I treat what is abnormal as something quite sweet and nourishing – at least to the narrator. As a writer, I find doing this makes for a gleefully interesting story. There are shades of the masochism of Arthur Machen’s ‘Hill of Dreams’ and the perversity of Mishima running through Pigman’s Fingers – but its all wrapped up in soft focused moonlight and an ugly terrible beauty.
In some ways, as an immigrant to America, and understanding its schizophrenic imperialism: the notion of it being simultaneously a place of great freedom, and yet the spawner of global terror (in the name of the ideology of ‘democracy’), I consider Pigman to be my ‘love letter’ to America – much like Dennis Hopper speaks of a love letter from Hell, in Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet.’ Obviously, Hopper refers to a bullet – whereas my own ‘love letter’ is an attempt to make sense of the insensible. Futility in action? Perhaps.
Finished another book. This may not seem like a big event to you. But I’m mildly content: I managed to get an entire narrative out of my head and on to the page. More importantly, I don’t think it sucks, as they say in the classics. Time will tell on that score.
Initial stats: 344 pages. Time taken to write: 3 months.
Now I’m editing and cutting out the fat. (Given that I plan nothing when I write, its part and parcel of the process for there to be extra material that has no place in the finished work). Also, the characters I start out with on page one, have evolved significantly by page 100 – requiring lots of rewriting as I backtrack to incorporate their personalities into the text from the get go.
I’ve noticed that the overall length is beginning to shrink as I cut, even though I’m only 60 pages into the editing. Already, almost 5 pages has been removed – and I expect a lot more to go before I’m done.
Its stunning to realize that The Great Gatsby is only around 180 pages long. Novel lengths have increased since Fitzgerald’s day. On the other hand, his story lasted precisely as long as it should have, without any wasted words: a thing to be aspired toward.
The object of editing is to make a narrative as tight as it can be, and which propels the plot forward. Anything that smacks of the writer going ‘Ummm’ has to be removed. The same goes for repetition and redundancies. Ditto anything like what I call ‘TV dialog’ – filler material.
Another layer that I enjoy working with are the rhythms in the text and subtext. Words are beats, percussion instruments; sentences are like bars of music. There is poetry in prose that only sustained whittling can bring out.
I like being as vicious as possible with my own work, trimming words, sentences, and subplots that go nowhere, allowing my text to bang the drum in the eye of the reader.
Its taken me a number of novels (and novellas) to get to what I reckon is a certain level of proficiency in writing, where I enjoy playing with ‘inference’ in the text. The newbie writer, on the other hand, is all adverbs and description, over-painting every scene, and worse, paying no attention to rhythm.
I’ve noticed that I like to experiment with inferring ideas, preferably unspeakable ones. Rather than over describe concepts, I simply slip them unexpectedly into the hand of the reader. There’s something delicious about successfully conveying subversive ideas to readers.
He dug up her body and stripped it. Afterwards, the night mist felt cool on his bare skin.
Yes, but what happened between those two sentences? *shrugs* Its not for me to say. Its for the reader to decide. All the best movies take place between the ears of the reader.
As of this point, as an update: I’ve managed to throw out roughly 25 pages of the new novel. I’m still doing the first ‘pass’ – so there’s bound to be more that gets consigned to the scrapheap before I’m done. I hate wasting words. First I do multiple passes on the book in a harsh edit, and then it gets passed to my Grim Russian Editor for the real editing. By the time the public gets to see it, if ever, its been severely road-tested.
Thinking about it, its one of the things I hate about a lot of the material up on Amazon for sale by the ‘self published authors’ – there’s little or no sense of craft in what they’re doing. But this is a blog post for another time
Until the next time, if my own misanthropic tendencies don’t get me.
Where did you study?
I didn’t. I have one year of high school under my belt. I was something of a mess as a kid. Formal school and me simply didn’t agree. Falling into the South African army at the height of Apartheid altered this state for me permanently – I emerged from it highly politicized, and as U2 put it: ‘wide awake.’
Why Do You Write?
I grew up as a stutterer who couldn’t express himself. Its hard to explain what its like having things to say and being unable to say it; trapped by ones own body (or mind) as the case may be. When I managed to overcome that hurdle, the words just poured out of me. They never stopped. I talked so much my folks would say I was ‘vaccinated with a gramophone needle.’ Same applies with writing and telling tales.
Each of my staged plays came from simple ideas that occurred to me and I decided to put them down on paper. Some ideas were truly bizarre, others more mundane. Critics and audiences seemed to like them. In addition, writing in a post-colonial society like South Africa, where there was and still is a severe sense of Dickensian squabbling for social position, I enjoyed simply writing material that didn’t give a fuck for conventional thinking. Same applies to me and fiction writing. I like taking readers on a ride unlike anything they’ve experienced before, blurring genres, and doing the unpredictable. Some handle it, some grumble because it doesn’t fit their Hollywood-inspired notions of structure or audience-wish-fulfillment.
What motivates you?
A sense of social justice. Seems kind of simple to say but that’s pretty much it. Its what provoked me into writing plays, into standing on stage and attacking the things I saw as wrong or grotesque. And these days, when I’m focusing mostly on working in prose, the same applies: my stories at times hold up a mirror to the reality I’m seeing.
You left South Africa, despite achieving some degree of artistic fame and celebrity – why?
Well, what do you do as an artist when you’ve reached the top of your field? What happens the next year? And the year after that? What is supposed to be the right path, once you’ve won most of the awards and are making a comfortable living? I didn’t want to become one of the dinosaurs I delighted in attacking – those people who do exactly the same creative work over and over – and who are content being big fish in small ponds. I left because I ran out of creative challenges.
Democracy finally came to South Africa, so on that score I felt it was acceptable to finally step away from my country, now that Apartheid was technically defeated.
Now I’m a small fish in a big pond. I’ve been forced to re-invent myself. Oh, my plays get put on here in the US from time to time. And a couple of universities use my scripts in teaching Drama. But I felt the need to go a step or two beyond play-writing. I discovered the deliciousness of writing prose, specifically fiction.
Immigrants have to re-invent themselves; face the crushing of the ego that occurs from being ‘nobody special.’ I briefly dabbled in doing standup comedy here in the US, as I had done in South Africa. But I quickly saw that I’d have to adopt some repulsive kind of onstage persona in order to have audiences accept what I do. That whole ‘lounge lizard’ “Give yourselves a round of applause for being here, ladies and gentlemen” snake-oil bullshit. That isn’t me.
I decided to switch from playwright to author. I discovered I have lots of stories to tell, in a variety of genres. I use e-book publishing as a simple method of getting my work out to the public without having to wait for the long periods of time that so-called traditional publishing takes.
Additionally, most fiction in South Africa, not surprisingly, given its past, is obsessed with serious issues: race, class, gender. There’s not a lot of space in that market for the kinds of stories I like to tell. Penguin Books published my autobiography because I suppose it was part of my ‘celebrity’ status at the time, but they were and are less inclined to touch my fiction, which doesn’t fit into easy categories.
Are you content?
No, of course not. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t think I’ll ever be. Coming from a position of having been a small part of the struggle against Apartheid, and operating under that violently Fascist system, I am acutely aware that I am in a country which runs a concentration camp outside of international law, and which has ‘legalized’ torture.
I know all the reasons for the so-called ‘war on terror’ but it boils down to me being uncomfortably conscious that my presence here means I have blood on my hands again, like I did under Apartheid. That’s not an anti-American attitude, its the attitude of someone who believes in democracy. Democracies don’t torture, foment terrorism in other countries, or detain people without trial. Like I said earlier, I have a strong sense of social justice.
(Its kind of like Christians who see nothing wrong with armies. I mean really? Just who would Jesus bomb, exactly? And what part of ‘thou shalt not kill’ do Christians not understand? If you’re a nation state killing other people, you aren’t Christian, no matter how much cross-hugging and orgies of Bible-thumping you indulge in. Its fairly simple.)
Heh, I digress.
‘Content’? I don’t think I’ve ever been that. To begin with, I’m not a person whose comfortable in his own skin. I’m a harsh critic of just about everything, especially myself. I’m almost envious of those people who are able to accept the way the world is laid out, and continue on blissfully unaware of injustice and inequality. Then I realize that those people are stupid, and I knuckle down to work. At the same time, I’m acutely aware that no words can equal a well-placed bomb or bullet. So I delude myself, I think, into believing that writing can make a difference somewhere, somehow.
What’s your writing schedule?
Up at 6am, writing by 8am and then just keep going until the day’s well runs dry. That can be anything from midday to 4pm. I do this seven days a week, including holidays. I couldn’t imagine sitting around twiddling my thumbs and not writing. Life’s far too short not to be getting words down on paper while its still possible.
A lot of your work has a hallucinogenic quality. Do drugs feature in your life, at all?
They used to. I reckon there’re few substances that I haven’t tried at one time or another. I’ve probably altered my brain chemistry in interesting ways because of it. This said, I wouldn’t recommend it as a method of achieving creativity, I just happened to have gobbled and taken a lot of different things along the way, in order to have fun and get my consciousness to the next level. I remember the highs and I also remember the utter anguish and desperation of the lows from narcotics – hence me saying I wouldn’t suggest it as a route to creativity. I just stumbled into a lot of different things and was open to experiencing all of it.
I had occasion to be talking with a three year old. We were discussing a cartoon book put out by a dentistry practice, in which some sort of entity called ‘the Tooth Fairy’ was mentioned. I had to explain that the children in the story were stupid.
The response was: ‘Why?’
I explained slowly and carefully that there was no such thing as a Tooth Fairy, and it was always children’s parents who were the ones to take the teeth from under the pillow and put a coin there.
Naturally, this caused another ‘Why?’
I said that I didn’t really know – perhaps the parents wanted the children to believe in a Tooth Fairy.
‘Why?’
I said because the parents themselves were stupid, and thought that lying to their children was somehow clever.
The three year old nodded thoughtfully. I reiterated that the cartoon book was simply wrong, and that there was no Tooth Fairy, never had been a Tooth Fairy, and despite all the good bits about kindly dentistry, those Tooth Fairy bits were actually all about the children’s parents lying to them.
‘Why?’
I said perhaps it was because the stupid parents wanted their children to have the wrong ideas.
The message sank in. It’ll be reinforced repeatedly, until the three year old is quite content and happy knowing there is no Tooth Fairy, and to have a certain suspicion about anyone who tries to make them think there is.
The child already know there is no Santa, no ‘Father Christmas’ living at the North Pole who delivers presents magically at Christmas. The child is already aware there are just parents who buy things for their kids sometimes. ‘Santa’ is an imaginary thing. This too will be reinforced until its a worldview of no particular importance – although I’m sure the child will have some amusement at those kids who seriously want to believe in a fat red-dressed man showering gifts globally on one specific night.
I kind of am looking forward to having much the same discussion when it comes to all the fairytales of Christianity – the God, Jesus, Mary nonsense – and the ‘magic powers’ of what’s called the ‘Bible.’ I’ve already made my feelings known about flags and the militarism of parades, and the child is soaking up the fact that flags are not a good thing. They’re repulsive – they lead to patriotism, an even worse stupidity.
And later, the child will be taught that swearing oaths to flags is equally meaningless – especially if they have references to imaginary Gods. After all, in this modern age, the notion that a hand placed on some book society says is ‘magic,’ is absurd. Swearing oaths and allegiances? I think not. We’re out of the school playground now. That kind of naivety should not exist.
The child will learn in time that God is dead and He never existed, and where the child is – is wading through the swamps of other people’s ideas about reality. The consumer-addled militarist blood-thirsty desert of the ‘real.’
Already, as a bright articulate child, kept away from television, it knows that there are animals in books – and that we eat them, too. The lovely cows, the cute sheep, the oinking pigs – they all end up on a plate. In supermarkets, we go to inspect the dead animals in the meat section. In time, the child will fully understand the weird human duality of the colorful gamboling lambs in kids books, and the plastic-encased blood dripping haunches of meat which turn into mouth-watering food.
The child will hopefully learn that the most important thing is not about ‘fitting in’ but about perceiving reality as it is, and remaining true to ones own view of it.
I couldn’t think of a better gift to offer a child than an honest worldview.
Especially in a schizophrenic culture pushing for conformity of viewpoints – while pretending each child is an individual, as well as the perpetual lies of consumerism, the Media’s sexualization of children, all overlaid with the ugly mental-crippling effects of religion.
Until the next time…
On 
