Here’s a sneak peek at the second illustration for the Ferret Files, courtesy of my good pal Richard Argent over at www.argentart.co.uk.
We were working on this scene, busily rewatching old Hammer Horror films when the sad news of Sir Christopher Lee’s death was announced. I suspect that Ferret & Emily may well be making their way into the world of merchandising…
Many years ago when I was but a lad and there were only three channels on TV, Friday night changed forever. My dad, being a pioneer of all things media related purchased a color television, with the result that the old black and white set found its way into the bedroom I shared with my brother. It turned out to be one of those just in time moments. I’d been constructing and painting model kits for a few years, and had moved onto a range by Aurora, which were based on the monster movies of the day. Dracula and the Mummy had turned up in my stocking the previous Christmas; my brother got Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. Having never seen the movies, we made up all sorts of stories about our monsters, imaging what they got up to. Vampires in particular scared me senseless, I was petrified of them. I used to watch a lot of Doctor Who, he was my go-to hero of the day. I tried to imagine how the Doctor might deal with Count Dracula, concluding that even a sonic screwdriver was no match for the might of the pointy teeth!
It was much to my surprise/shock/horror then, when one of the three channels announced they were going to start a season of Hammer Horror films on a Friday night, beginning with the classic Dracula. My brother couldn’t wait. For me, it was a terrifying countdown to a showdown with my horror nemesis, the Prince of the neck-suckers himself. The tension became unbearable. Even my parents knew that something was up, because if there was one thing they found absolutely impossible it was getting two young lads to go to bed on a Friday night, so they could get up to a bit of ‘parent stuff’. That Friday night we were well behaved and ready for bed early. It was unheard of. In preparation, I borrowed a cross from my gran – I’d learned from a school mate that vampires don’t like Jesus. My brother being more of a pragmatist borrowed a wooden tent peg from the family tent set. He too had heard stories about vampires, and was determined to deal with Drac in his own way, should the pesky blighter try anything window related while the film was on.
From the opening score onwards I was under the sheets, hiding behind a pillow. Within fifteen minutes it had all gone horribly wrong for Jonathan Harker, who been warned to flee, then attacked and imprisoned by the most evil vampire of them all, portrayed horrifically by the magnificent Christopher Lee. Enter our saviour in the form of Van Helsing, played by Peter Cushing. Peter had played Doctor Who in a couple of made for TV movies, and this wasn’t lost on me. Not quite the right Doctor, but the Doctor nonetheless had come to the rescue and with the aid of a curtain and the rising sun, eventually defeated the evil one. Over the next few weeks, we watched ‘Brides of Dracula’, ‘Dracula Price of Darkness’, ‘Dracula has Risen from the Grave’, to name but a few. The double act of Lee and Cushing to me as a kid was as perfect as Sooty & Sweep, Spocj & Kirk or Bill and Ben. The perfect horror duo played tag-team with our hopes and fears, frightening the jim-jams offa me, whilst also instilling a love of the horror genre that persists to this day.
It’s with great sadness that I heard of the passing of the Prince of the neck-suckers. Part of me wants to believe that given enough virgin’s blood, he’ll be back. That’s certainly the way it ought to be. For now though, I’m going to make a point of rewatching ‘Dracula’ this Friday night, and reliving old memories.
On a Ferret related footnote, I’ve been working with my pal Richard Argent on the first illustration for the novel, which is set in Highgate Cemetery West, a location used often by the Hammer Horror film crew. The whole Hammer Horror genre has been in my thoughts a lot lately, as we’ve complied a list of all the monsters we want to fit in the illustration. Hence my reasons for penning a tribute to a guy I didn’t get to meet, who was nevertheless influential in converting me to Hammer Horror and a film catalogue we all know and love.
RIP Christopher Lee.
One of my great guiding lights.
Bankster: what a great Portmanteau word which succinctly communicates everything that’s rotten with our current financial system.
The first time I laid eyes on the City of London, it was the early 80s and everyone wore bowler hats. Fast forward to the late 80s, when I started working there for real, and double breasted suits with red braces were the fashion of the day. I confess, I couldn’t get into one of those suits – immortalized by 1930s Chicago – fast enough, although red braces were a step too far. The City was pure madness, fueled by a mixture of greed, never ending bonuses, drugs, champagne, fast cars and loose women. Sadly for me, I didn’t live that lifestyle, I simply helped support it with IT systems and software – anything to make stocks and futures move faster. Looking back, it’s probably a good job I wasn’t a trader, as I’d either be dead or else hulking around a collection of knackered organs, bludgeoned into failure through massive overindulgence.
Michael Douglas as Gordon ‘Greed is Good’ Gecko in the movie Wall St epitomized the world of finance in that period of time; more recently the role of monied bad boy was reprized by Leonard Di Caprio in the movie Wolf of Wall St. Both films portray the period as one massive hedonistic binge, which resonates with my experiences. We all knew there were some bad people working the system, but they were our bad people, people who’d fought their way up from the bottom, displacing the Old Boys in their bowler hats. It was all one big splurge of harmless fun.
Somewhere along the route that all changed. Once the bankers in their bowler hats had been thoroughly displaced, the financialization of everything began in earnest. Our people, with their wide boy attitudes and disregard for regulations paved the way for an influx of used car salesmen and outright crooks, who in turn begat bigger crooks. Under their tutelage, finance became a massive part of the economy, the search forever on for ways to make ever bigger profits. It should come as no surprise to discover that once the real crooks found their way in, they clamored for looser regulations. When government employed useful tax inspectors, the financiers offered them more money to change sides. The bought the regulators; they employed rocket scientists to create financial mechanisms that no-one but other rocket scientists can understand. The party went from a few mates and a few beers, to neighborhood riot, advertised on Facebook. Instead of stopping it when called, the police joined in and the party got larger still.
And here we are today.
If you follow the financial news you’ll see fines for LIBOR rigging, fines for rigging the currency market, all shrouded in a culture of denial. It was one bad apple, guv – honest. The truth is, the banksters moved in and slowly but surely they captured every market and bought off the opposition. They hypnotized government, then bought them off too. Rigging markets is like you and your teenage mates drinking a bit of your dad’s scotch when he’s out. To hide the crime you top the bottle up with water. You get away with it, so you do it again and again, until it becomes impossible to stop. Soon, the scotch is all gone. So you fill the bottle with cold tea and hide it at the back of the booze cabinet. Then you start on the gin and vodka. Pretty soon the entire booze cabinet is colored water. Next you spend all your time thinking up ways to keep your dad out. In the end, you leave home and when the crime is discovered, blame it all on your baby brother. I know he’s only 5 dad, but hell can he drink!
I propose that the international crime syndicate that captured our financial system operates as a secret society, thoroughly ingrained in the City of London and Wall Street. Ferret, the hero of The Ferret Files belongs to said organization and knows many of their secrets. As we’ve previously established, he’s a charming consultant who works in the City and thanks to insider trading has become very wealthy. Now he’s bored and wants to follow his childhood dream of becoming a detective. However, his friends are having none of it and unless he starts earning again quickly, he’ll soon discover how his superiors deal with foot soldiers who they deem are no longer of any use.
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Firstly, in order to remove any confusion, the consultants referred to in the title of this piece are of the Management variety, and not their more respectable surgical cousins. I’m sure they both share many characteristics – that’s what the comments section is for.
I’ve spent many years working in corporates and the echelons of government, both as a consultant and an employer of consultants, so when I say that the chief characteristic of a great consultant is the ability to charm your pants off, you better believe it. You know you’ve met a mediocre or poor consultant when at the end of a meeting you still have your pants fastened firmly around your waist. The great consultant leaves with two pairs of trousers, and you’re so befuddled you don’t even realise until you get home that you rode the tube in socks and underwear.
With great charm comes a great smile. It’s that smile that acts as an anchor to the feelings you had during the first ever meeting with your new consultant chum, so much so that as soon as you see them, you take your own pants off and hand them over, along with your jacket and wallet. With a wink, the great consultant hands you back your tube pass. The mediocre consultant, meanwhile, is still trying to figure out how the hell the really good guy has a different suit for every day of the month.
Great consultants need great hair. This is more a guideline than a rule, as it’s possible to make it as a baldie, but here’s the inside rip: you have to have a really nice shaped head. One consultant pal of mine had lost a lot of hair, and if he let it grow even for a couple of days, he became invisible in a crowd. Shaved right down, he had the IT factor in bunches. His trick was not so much the collecting of pants, as the collecting of bras and frillies, although truth be told he was so smooth, he undoubtedly had a wardrobe full of client’s pants too.
A great consultant dresses the part. Not over-the-top $10,000 suits like you find in banking circles, all that does is serve to alienate them from the average client . A great consultant working in media dresses down, wearing smart casual. The same great consultant working in advertising wears a nice fashionable suit. The great consultant working in banking comes home with three of four $10,000 suits on their first day in the job, setting them up for the remainder of the week.
Finally, like all consultants, a great consultant speaks a proprietary language comprised of grandiose, highfaluting technical and business terms that sound utterly believable when they purr them out, but somehow manage to turn into utter twaddle when you try to repeat them in the lunch queue. The ability to utter choice phrases as though your very pants depend on them is a confidence thing, something the mediocre consultant can’t grasp and mere mortals swoon over.
I can’t claim to be a great consultant myself, on the grounds that I’m still buying my own trousers after twenty years. But I am good at giving solid advice. FYI – the type of advice not to give is: ‘your dress will look great on me’, even if it’s the truth. During one charm offensive I did once swap clothes with a female client in an office with the shutters down, but that led to all sorts of horrible complications when she left to get coffee and didn’t come back for an hour. She went on to join a top consultancy by the way, and still has my suit to this day. I call her occasionally and ask for it back. She tells me to pop over, which I tried the once. Kindly, she let me keep my tube pass.
Anyway, the point of this article is to say hurrah for consultants. Love them or hate them, the world would be a much more boring place without them. So much so, that I’ve taken all the great consultants I’ve ever met and rolled them up into one character called Ferret. A wayward consultant who’s great at his job but is gagging to become a detective. Let’s call him a detecting consultant. He has a wardrobe full of pants and a collection of frillies. Nothing can possibly go wrong for him. That is, until the day he loses his charm…
Purchase Ferret
So here I am once more, back on the final chapter of the Ferret Files, nineteen months after the last time I was here. Things have moved on – in a good direction, the whole novel feels much better and my characters are much happier with their lot. How do I know? They’ve stopped bitching to me about unfulfilled desires and hanging plot lines.
So what have I learned during the second revision?
1) If you have a novel inside you that’s demanding to see the light of day, write it. Perseverance is key. Set to and don’t stop writing until you’ve finished. No excuses. Really want it. Focus on how great it will feel once you’ve reached that final chapter. Make pictures of the day you write ‘The End’. Chances are you’ll have to reorganize your life and miss out on things you’d otherwise do. Sacrifice is no bad thing. It hardens your resolve.
2) There will be days when you want to tear your hair out, days when you think you’re a dillweed for ever imagining you can write and days when you don’t get started until 8 hours after you planned. On the flip side, there will be days when you feel amazing inside. You’ll have a smile for everyone, especially yourself, over some delicious one-liner, a clever plot twist or a paragraph of narrative that’s good enough for Jehovah. Those are the days that make it all worthwhile. People will think you’re on drugs. Let them.
3) Listen to your characters. They know what they want better than you do. If you push them about, they will fight back. Take heed of what they say, take a deep breath and go with it. You’ll learn things about your characters that you didn’t know and that’ll make you feel on top of the world. See (2). Any good story is the story of characters and how they change over time when faced with issues they didn’t expect to encounter. If you’re ever in doubt about who your characters are, imagine them all at a dinner party. Who forgets to wear a bow tie? Who takes two, just in case? Now lob a grenade in the room and watch them react. This is a metaphor for something unexpected BTW, it doesn’t have to be a real grenade. The point is to take your characters out of the novel, put them in a situation that doesn’t exist in the novel, add some chaos, watch and learn.
4) Not every brilliant idea you have has to be used immediately. If it doesn’t fit, don’t try and cram it in. Some ideas are so good, they’re novels on their own, they need space to develop and breathe. So keep a notebook, jot them down and then leave well alone. Rabbit holes will derail you. and once you’re down one, it’s easy to forget how you got there. Think Alice in Wonderland.
5) If you’re stuck, blog it. Social media is your window to the world. If you have something that’s bothering you in the way of the plot, characters or even technique, write about it, put it down for a day and then think about pressing the publish button before you re-read it. That should get the juices flowing. Now you can re-read. Saying something out aloud is very different to saying it in your head. Often the shock will provide the answer. If not, bash the problem around. I tend to use other writers rather than my friends, just because they’ve not been up to their elbows in words and don’t fully understand what’s going through your head.
6) Write about stuff that interests you. You don’t have to be the world’s foremost expert on brain surgery to have an interest in it. Research is all part of the writing experience, whether you do it before you start, or while you’re going along. If you find brain surgery to be as dull as ditch water, then leave it well alone. Ultimately, you’re no different to anybody else out there. If you choose to write about something that you have no interest in whatsoever, it will show. Excuses will abound and you’ll find it difficult to finish. Overall, you won’t enjoy the writing experience and readers will enjoy the reading experience even less. Being happy is the key to being productive. Writing about things that interest me while listening to music I love – there’s no better feeling. See (2).
7) Read often. The more you read good fiction, the more you learn unconsciously about the writing process and the art of story telling. If you have difficulty with a particular plot point, see how your favorite author deals with it. Ultimately, every story has already been told, but not every combination of words has ever been used to reach the conclusion. Writing and music have a lot in common. There’s only so may notes, yet new songs come out all the time and they still manage to be original. Musicians have their influences, authors too. Read. Digest. Be inspired. Dare to reach for Heaven.
That’s it for today. Now I’m back in the flow, I can’t seem to shut up…
Here’s the final Ferret illustration, for now, from my good pal Richard Argent over at Argent Art.
When I set out to write, I wanted to create the novel I’d been waiting 40 odd years to read. At some point, I figured, someone would combine the paranormal, an extinct Nazi drugs program, City of London banksters and financial malfeasance into a coherent story. But no. Still waiting. Lob in a healthy dose of humor, some consultant doublespeak and several years of my own experiences working for the Government on programmes I can’t talk about, and you’ve got the Ferret Files.
Ultimately, I’m no different to anyone else. If I want to read this story, then you do too. And you will. Very soon…
It’s been a while since I finished the first draft of the Ferret Files and started on the second. To be honest, I really had no idea how long it might take, having not written a full length novel before. In the background, I’ve been working with my good pal Richard Argent over at Argent Art to put some Ferret visuals together (Richard is a very talented artist, please check his other stuff out). Firstly, I have a funky new Avatar which I’m very pleased with:
Ferret in London
I should point out that Ferret the Detecting Consultant is a real person, not a cartoon character. He runs a detective agency, this is his logo and it’s what appears on his business cards. Very kindly, he’s agreed to lend it to me, to help promote his story.
Over the next few days I’ll publish some of Richard’s other Ferret illustrations – they’re very good. He’s currently working on a half dozen sketches, drawn in his usual style, as illustrations for the finished novel. I can’t wait to see key scenes of London, populated with my characters, it’s going to rock big time.
It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, but then so much has happened over the last eighteen months.
On a personal basis, a family bereavement stopped me in my tracks. My mother had been ill for some time, fighting Lymphoma. I was desperate to finish the Ferret Files while she was still alive, and thus muffed the ending, which only became apparent on first read through. Back to the drawing board for the last six chapters. More importantly, from a writer’s perspective, I was faced with a huge dilemma. The key event in my hero’s life is the death of the father he didn’t get to know. This is an allegory for the relationship with my own father, which was strained for many years (to put it mildly). With him being a good few years older than my mother, we’d always assumed as a family that he’d pop off first. But then the stubborn ole bugger never has done anything according to plan.
That was Sept 2013.
The death of a loved one certainly brought clarity to my life and gave me a whole bunch of hitherto unexplored emotions to draw on in my writing. It also made me question what I was doing. Is writing really that important? I’d grafted very hard to accomplish something, only to get it wrong at the last. Perhaps I should have spent more time with my mother, rather than keeping my head down and persevering with the details of an imaginary world.
And so it was, with great pain in my heart, I put my writing down while I worked through the trauma. My mother used to be a teacher, which is where I get my love of literature from, including comics, which was part of her dissertation. Later on, she fell into business and ran her own successful employment agency. As I discovered, she also had a secret life beyond all of this, which none of us knew about. I suspected, but it was only once she’d gone that confidentiality was surrendered and all the pieces fell into place. She was an amazing woman to have three lives. So competent. Yet at the end, so feeble and addled with massive quantities of prescription drugs. That’s what hurts the most, the loss of strength and vitality.
I miss her and I want her back
For a while I thought I was writing Ferret for her, and with her gone, there was no point to anything.
It’s taken over a year, but I now realize that I’m writing for me. And for you. Because ultimately, it’s the YOUs of this world that have helped me get through the loss. The real life YOUs, who say hello on a daily basis, who chew the cud over a noisy beer. The Facebook YOUs who I laugh and joke with, but have never met. The Twitter YOUs, who make me giggle out loud with your delicious sense of humor. The Pinterest YOUs, who are so inventive it hurts. There is pain out there in the world, yes – but there’s also so much more. As an author, it’s my job to find the good in all that pain, and turn it around into something positive. I’ve never stopped loving, but for a long time I did stop feeling loved.
Opening up was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do.
It was also one of the most rewarding.
I want my mum back, just not the mum who died on me. The one before she got ill.
I’m descended from Vikings. Hence the Old Gods suit me. They suited my mother too. She used to like a good drink, a cuss and a swear. I can’t imagine her sitting on a cloud, playing a harp somehow. Neither can I imagine her sweating in chains, moaning. If she’s anywhere, she’s with Odin tossing axes in his Great Hall, sloshing beer with the gods. The code she lived by was a Viking code. She wasn’t perfect by any means, but she always did her best to show respect and not hurt other people, even when she was off pillaging in her long ship.
Here’s raising a glass to her in Valhalla!
I don’t normally do reposts, but this is so spot on it deserves a mention.
I recently wrote those two little words that I didn’t think I’d ever see: THE END.
Two weeks later, I realise it’s anything but! It’s simply the beginning of another cycle of hard work, towards creating a complete product. Overall, I’m very happy with where I am, although a couple of key characters did things I hadn’t planned them to do near the end, which made for a few hairy moments. As an author, if you don’t let your characters be themselves and express their flaws, then really you don’t have a body of work. So they did their thing, created chaos and also revealed secrets I was previously unaware of. One reveal has repercussions right the way back to the beginning of the book, which actually gave me a squeal of delight, as it helps to make sense of a pair of earlier scenes.
On the negative side, it’s taken nearly six months to write the Ferret Files. I’d allowed three.
On the plus side, I did a word count and was delighted to come in at 105K – 25k less than I feared.
On the negative side, I’ve now got to go find a paying job.
On the plus side, an old friend who I’d lost contact with resurfaced, and with her a brilliant comic book artist who remains mostly unknown – now onboard for cover duties and illustrations. I’m very excited about working with this guy, his drawings are nuts.
Mostly, what I’ve taken from the experience of writing my first novel is a feeling of great satisfaction. I knew I had the stamina and will to finish, but that’s not the same as actually doing it full time (I tried part time, it didn’t work for me). What’s come out the other end in terms of first draft and story exceeds my expectations. Considering my plan went to hell after three months, that’s good. Yeah?
Neil Young got me started and saw me over the finishing line. Nightwish and The Ramones supplied a lot of fuel in the middle. FYI – I took a break to Berlin last weekend and let hair down at Rammstein. Visited The Ramones museum just off Oranienburger Strasse – if you get the chance, go. It’s a proper rock n roll shrine. Bat for Lashes helped slow things down.
Jim Morrison and the Doors provided the closing song, with ‘The End’.
As long as the influence of all the great music this novel is infused with seeps out in the reading, you’re gonna have fantastic fun with this one. I set out to write the novel I want to read, which no-one else has so far written. And succeeded. The rest is dominoes, all the way to the bookshelves.
A quick brush-up and it’s time to find some readers…
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The Ferret Files 