Scamming Scum

I’ve been working on the redesign of the site whenever I have a spare moment – I think I’ll divide the main site up between the blog, my writing and my coding. I want to have a consistent interface which still visually breaks the site into these different sections. The design for SM will remain pretty much the same but I’m adding two new layouts for the other sections – at least, that’s the plan.

In between working on the layout, I’ve been reading up on more scams by fake agents and I must say, it just makes me wonder about humanity all the more. Anyway, before I get into that, I guess I should talk about my own brush with a fake agent. It all started with a standard query. Usually, I would e-mail an agent a query but the Robins Agency had an online form for people to submit queries. So I submitted via that. I must admit, I made one mistake before querying them – I neither checked them out via Google or checked one of the online lists such as Preditors & Editors which provides a list of scam artists who pose as agents. (But I’m wiser now :p). The very next day, I received this response:

Dear Fahim,

Yes, we’d like to take on your work; however, we limit the number of clients we accept to only those with marketable works and who are in a position to pay our annual retainer fee of $3,250 (US). Although many agents charge $4,500 to $6,500 per year for expenses on top of their commission rate of 15% – 20%, we’ve found that we can do a superb job for only $3,250 with a commission rate of 10%-15%.

As to what you can expect. The process is rather simple (as compared to rocket science 🙂 ); we bring your work in, take it through editorial to make sure it is in good shape; take it through marketing and research to find not only direct sales opportunities, but indirect as well (i.e. film, tv, foreign markets); put together a marketing package, then start the submission process. When a buyer is found, then the negotiations begin.

You are informed each step of the way as to what we are doing with your work; and are a key player in the sale negotiations as well. We normally answer e-mails within 24 hours and telephone calls the same day … that is, if you don’t reach us when you call.

What you won’t get is the typical attitude of most agents (you work for them, not the other way around); you won’t get someone cutting your work up because they can, not because it may be needed (yours doesn’t need it); you won’t get an agent selling you or your work short just for their commission check; and you won’t have to wonder what is being done with your work as you’ll know.

Many agents do not provide the scope of services that we do; and they expense back to you (monthly or quarterly) about $4,500 to $6,500 annually.

We think that we provide a solid service for the monies charged; more importantly though — our clients feel they are getting more than their money’s worth.

If this is the way you’d like your agent to work — for you, not the publisher — and if this is within your budget, then let us know and we’ll get the paperwork in order and start straight away. I look forward to seeing how far our agency can take your work.

With regards,

Syd Michaels
********************************
Robins Agency
*******************************

Now the above is, in a manner, fairly straightforward – they do tell you that they charge an annual fee of $3,250 and as an aspiring author, I half-thought, "hey, if they can deliver on what they promise, that might not be so bad" even though I knew that most reputable agents did not charge an up front fee. However, I did decide to do some checking up on them online at this point and what I found was various posts on different forums where people said that they’d paid the Robins agency and then had not heard back from them or that Cris Robins herself would call a writer who’d signed up with the agency and cry (yes, cry) on the phone asking for money.

Now, I have no idea as to the veracity of any of these claims. The Internet after all is the one place people seem to feel secure about making all sorts of bogus claims and indulging in mindless slander. However, there just seemed to be too many instances of the Robins Agency being mentioned as a scammer for it to be just slander. Besides, the Preditors & Editors list (which *is* reputable) mentioned them as well. So, while I still wanted to cling to the hope that they would actually sell my book for me, I decided that these really weren’t the people I should be going with. So I sent them off the following e-mail:

Dear Syd,

Thank you for getting back to me. However, a few things about your response did not ring true with me – such as the fact that you claim that my work would not need any cutting based on just a few pages of my manuscript. I am in search of an agent who believes in my work and wants to sell it. You asking for $3,250 yearly up front to represent me seems to indicate that you do not really believe in my work but are simply doing it by rote. So thank you but I think I will pass. Regards,

Fahim

Two days later, I got the following from Syd:

Fahim,

I did not say your work would not need any cutting based on anything; fact is, I said we’d take it through editorial to make sure it is in good shape.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, Fahim. You get what you pay for — this is a business, not a wish factory. We pick up works we BELIEVE we can sell; but belief doesn’t pay the light bills.

We know we offer the most fair, complete, and honest service on the market. We would have like to work with you to realize your dreams.

Best to you,

Syd

And that was the extent of my dealings with them. Now this might just be conjecture, but the last response to me felt as if they were trying to make me feel bad about rejecting them and perhaps go back to them begging for another chance. Well, not a chance :p

Of course, this encounter was pretty mild compared to some of the others I’ve been reading about online. The agents appear to come after the people who posted negative comments about them, threaten law-suits, stalk the people, mail bomb them, call their neighbours up to get their unlisted numbers – the whole works. Then there are those who actually defend these people – saying that those who complain about them don’t have the talent to make it and so they are simply trying to bring down good people providing a solid service.

I can’t speak for any of these people but what I can say is this – if an agent wants money from me up front to sell my book and also wants a chunk of the money that I’d get for my book, then there really is something wrong. I agree, there is no free lunch – but that works both ways. I don’t see why I should provide a free lunch for an agent to potentially do nothing after taking my money. Their incentive is the commission that they get, my incentive is the (potential) fame and fortune in selling my book. An equitable trade, wouldn’t you say? :p

Change is in the air …

It’s been a very long time since I’ve done anything with my sites (except to try to combat all the spam that is :p). I’ve been taking a break from the programming and have been working more on the writing end of things. And then work became a bit hectic and took over everything and so didn’t have time to do anything at all.

On the writing front, I finally found an agent who wanted to actually read my manuscript instead of simply saying "Not interested" after I queried them. However, the manuscript has been with them for about two months now and haven’t heard much from them 🙁 So, I’m a bit disheartened at the moment and wondering whether the whole thing is worth it.

On the other hand, I’ve also been reading about scammers on the Net who rip new writers off without any compunction. Not that the agent who has got my manuscript is one – I did check them out first :p Interestingly, I did get approached by a scammer at one point and had an interesting exchange of mails with them but don’t want to get into that in this post since that’s a whole new post by itself :p But what I did notice from my reading online was that these scammers can get pretty vindictive when they are called scammers – imagine that :p There were some pretty interesting (and horrifying) stories online but one of the most detailed (and engrossing) ones was this one. After reading that, I do have to wonder if it is even worth it going through all that hassle to get published …

You might have noticed that SM has now moved to be the main focus of my domain. This is in line with other changes that I’m contemplating. If the current agent that I’m corresponding with does not work out, I might try to simply publish my current novel (and the other six in the same cycle) online. My friend Nige has been prodding me to consider some sort of Net-based publishing mechanism like Cory Doctorow does and I might actually do that and be done with all this agent business …

So what does that mean for the software part of this site? Well, the software will still be there and I will continue to provide support as and when possible. I’m even working on a few apps which will help a writer keep track of submissions and story ideas and they will go up when I think the app is ready. However, coding will probably not be the main focus of this site any longer. The old Developer’s Corner content is still there and I will eventually add links from the main page to all that stuff but for the moment, it becomes just another historical layer to this site :p

Those darn critters!

Sometime after I made that entry about writing, getting published and so on, Laurie convinced me that I needed to join a crit group. A "crit group", what the heck is that? I hear you ask :p Basically it’s a group of people who get together to critique each others’s work so that everybody could become better writers … and the people who submit crits are known as, critters :p

Laurie already had a crit group in mind and we both joined up after looking around a bit and deciding that they looked OK. Most crit groups require you to do some crits before you can submit your own crits – so as not to have people join up, get their stuff critted and then immediately leave. This particular group required you to crit six pieces before you could submit your own stuff and both Laurie and I started critting stuff immediately. I think I did one crit the first day and three crits the second day. On the third day, I discover that one of my crits from the previous day had been short critted.

Now a short crit, in this particular group, is a crit which doesn’t count as a crit. For each crit you give, you receive crit credits and you can later use the crit credits to "pay" for getting crits for your own submissions. So when you are short critted by an admin, you basically have your crit moderated down and you don’t get the credits for your work. I had worked several hours on that particular crit and I had stated in the crit itself that there wasn’t much to crit since the writer had done a good job. Besides, somebody who had critted an earlier chapter in the same novel, and who had written about 80 words more than I had (yes I counted :p) didn’t get short critted.

So I asked the admins about it and their explanation was that we were newbies and so were moderated and could have our stuff moderated down but the long-term members could call it a crit and it wouldn’t be judged till later – when the admins distributed crit credits at the end of the month. She went on to say that different moderators judged differently as to if it was short crit or not. I went back and did some checking – the other crit had been moderated as well and it had been moderated by the same person. So the explanations didn’t really hold water and as far as I could see, what it boiled down to was that they were simply looking at crits and deciding whether they qualified based on their whims and fancies, the phase of the moon and however they felt at a given time. I didn’t like that one little bit and quit that group immediately.

Laurie started looking around for other crit groups but we didn’t like any that we came across and so we started talking about starting our own group and how we’d go about it. After a little discussion, we both agreed that we really wanted to do it and so, the next day we bough the domain name we wanted and set about setting up the technology to do things the way we wanted them to be.

We wanted things to be as automated as possible but we also wanted the author of the submission to have control over a critter being credited or not – not some moderator/administrator who might not even have read the crit. We also wanted to take the critting process online – away from mailing lists though we wanted people to have recourse to a mailing list if that’s the format they liked. I looked around for a forum software which integrated well with a mailing list and the only candidate around seemed to be Fud Forum. But Fud Forum would not integrate with my choice for running the rest of the site – Mambo.

Because of this incompatibility, we decided to drop the mailing list idea for the moment and go ahead with the rest of the stuff. I set up Mambo and found that Mambo could be made to integrate fairly well with SMF – which was my choice for forum software. We also wanted a fully fledged web-based database system which would keep track of submissions, allow users to give themselves credit for crits they’ve done and also allow authors to either grant extra credits to critters or to take away already granted credits from a critter if they had done a poor job of critting. It turned out that Mambo had some pretty nifty add-on components which made coding all of this fairly easy. So, about a week after we had come up with the original idea, Speculative-Fiction.com was launched 🙂

Laurie had already gotten expressions of interest for the project from quite a few people on another forum where she’s a member, and by the time we launched we already had around 10 members. It’s been about a week since the launch and I’m still adding stuff to the database, we’ve had around four submissions and people are still signing up. It’s not a major success in terms of traffic but I’m happy at the direction its taking as far as getting stuff critiqued, encouraging people to write and making my own writing better 🙂

The Long Road to Publication

I have been totally incommunicado while I finished work on my first novel – I didn’t do much writing here or on DC and I have not been doing much work on my software – except to write a few new tools for my writing but more on that later. I finished the first draft about two months ago and since then, spent a month polishing up the first draft. Laurie helped me immensely with it since I tend to have this bad habit of using adverbs liberally and Laurie is of the opinion that there is only one solution when it comes to adverbs – total genocide :p Between the two of us we hit a happy medium where I do use adverbs but not as profusely as I did at first. I do see her point about adverbs being the lazy way of saying things at times and how it weakens a sentence but sometimes I feel that an adverb can actually make a sentence more succinct rather than having to use many more words to say the same thing without adverb usage 🙂

Anyway, now that I’ve polished things up a bit, I’ve moved up to the next step. There is difference of opinion at this point – some believe that you should go straight to a publisher while others believe that you must find an agent first. The first class of people say that if you find a publisher, any agent will take you on while the latter say that an agent will give you more credibility with a publisher 🙂 I decided to try an agent first and wrote to one and waited a couple of weeks, they took a look at the first few chapters and said that wasn’t for them. (Of course, I had done something really stupid with the first agent – I sent them my unedited first draft because I was too impatient and in the words of Laurie, "Of course, they rejected it" :p) That’s a lesson for anybody who might want to learn from my mistakes – do not send out your unedited first draft no matter how impatient you might be :p

I then queried a second agent and waited two weeks with no response and then wrote to them again to find out that they’d never received the first query. They came back with a "I personally dislike humorous science fiction". Then I queried another well-known agent and was told "that this doesn’t sound like a project for us" without them even seeing my manuscript.

So here I am – struck out three times. This probably is the time when I should take a good look at things and decide where I am going … or maybe not :p I did manage to get a hold of Terry Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe and I must say that Colin was a really nice bloke and a great human being in that he didn’t know me from Adam and yet, he helped me out as much as he could and pointed me in the right direction for submitting to more agents and publishers. I will be forever grateful to Colin for his kindness.

I have decided to continue to try agents till I find somebody who likes my style of writing because I’m beginning to get the feeling that humorous science fiction might be a dirty word amongst agent or something. However, I ran across this site by a fellow programmer who has actually managed to get his humorous science fiction novel published and that has given me hope. I will continue on my road to publication and will try to keep this page updated in case somebody is still interested in how it goes with me – or not 🙂

The right time to write …

I’ve been meaning to write here again since my last entry … but never seem to find the time :p But then again, that seems to be a common complaint of mine recently. I’ve been thinking of getting to work on the novel that I started a while back thanks to Laurie but even that has been progressing in fits and starts. I’d never really thought of writing a novel before I met Laurie – all I really wanted to do were short stories because I didn’t think I could sustain the effort needed to produce a novel … mostly because I’m really impatient and want everything done now but also because my writing style changes from day to day and depending on what my mood is. But somewhere along the way (probably because I heard her talk about writing novels day in day out :p) I got started on a novel and suddenly I realized that by Jove, I could actually do it 🙂

Another incentive of course was the program that I’d started on for Laurie. She’d mentioned the need for a good writer’s text editor and I scoured the net for something which had all the features that both she and I needed and couldn’t find anything that had every feature we wanted. In fact, in most cases, we didn’t even come close. So I decided that I might as well go ahead and write my own :p So was born Amanuensis – which is still very much a work in progress – and I needed something to test Amanuensis with and since I tend to hate using junky test data, I actually decided to use the novel that I wanted to do as the test data 🙂

Anyway, the first rush of work (and testing on Amanuensis) got me up to around 20,000 words and I am pretty happy with that since I don’t think I’ve ever written that long a story before. But then I got stuck – as usual, I got sidetracked, Amanuensis was put aside and I went on to other things. Since then, I’ve come back to Amanuensis several times and made some major changes to the program for Laurie but I haven’t actually gotten back to writing on a daily (or even extended time period) basis. I do think about the story and add to the characters, dialog, events and so on but haven’t actually sat down to do any extensive writing. I feel that it’s time to do so … but have been finding that time is always the issue. Of course, if one wants to write, and I mean really write, I don’t think anything would stop you. So, I’m still probably making excuses for myself since I’m a lazy git :p But I’m closer to actually putting down words on paper again … so let’s see where it goes 🙂

Back again …

I’ve finally decided to come back to blogland :p When I started to write this entry, I thought I’d never been away from blogging for this long since I started blogging way back in ’99 or so (or was it earlier? :p) But then I took a look at the archives for this site and realized that at least here, I seem to have had a habit of cyclically going offline for long periods. The last time was in October of 2003 and and I didn’t come back till April 2004! So I guess this time is a much faster recovery … that is, if I keep on writing after this and not stop again after this entry or a couple of more entries.

So what has been happening? A lot actually. Around the end of October both my sister and sister-in-law (Laurie’s sister) paid us visits. While my sister’s visit was brief, Laurie’s sister and her family stayed with us for a while and we really enjoyed the visit. Of course, having guests in the house meant going sightseeing, going shopping and so on and time really passed by in a blur.

Then in November, I got a new job through the help of my friend Tracie (thanks Tracie :)) and finally left my previous employer – I’d been with them for close to five years (the longest I’d been with any one employer) over two different periods. I always will remember them with warmth because I truly felt at home there but I was going nowhere there since they really didn’t have anything to keep me occupied full time. My new job on the other hand, keeps me so occupied that I am exhausted at the end of the day :p I work for a hosting company as a remote systems admin now and since I’m administering servers, I am on alert most of my working hours in case one of the servers decides to act up. While it’s not very physical work (I sit on the couch staring at my computer screen the whole day :p), it’s mentally exhausting because you can never really relax. But I’m getting better at it and learning to relax a bit more than I did at the beginning, when I was too scared to look away from the monitoring screen for even one second lest something go wrong with the servers and I might miss an alert :p

The new job, the new schedule, the changes in work habits etc. have kept me busy and away from blogging (or even doing any other stuff like coding …) for the last couple of months. I now seem to be finally getting into a new groove (which I hope does not become a rut :p) and so am able to think about blogging again. Plus, I started blogging as an outlet for all the thoughts crowding in my head and also because I needed to, was compelled to write. But since I’m so busy now, the compulsion to write is gone. Indeed, I found that the couple of articles a month I was doing for two different magazines was getting to be draining because of all the research that I had to do. So I gave up most of my writing too (I still write for one magazine – but that’s on an occasional basis) and become a gentlemen of leisure … albeit without too much leisure time :p

That brings us to about yesterday 🙂 I spent most of my spare time yesterday cataloguing my DVD collection. I’d been keeping tabs on my DVD’s using an application that I’d found online (what geek doesn’t? :p) but had stopped updating it like three years ago. And since we’d been buying a lot of DVD’s recently, I found that we had a lot of DVD’s not in the system and worst still, that we were buying duplicates at times because I didn’t have an updated system! So I finally decided to bite the bullet and update the system. I started with around 220 DVD’s in the system and now have 456 after I’d entered almost all of the new ones :p I still have about 10 more to go which are mostly Tamil or Hindi movies which aren’t in the database of selectable movies of the application that I use – DVD Profiler. So I’ll have to entere those manaually – I’ve become really anal about making sure that the cast and crew information is as correct as possible so that I can do an offline cross-reference of any actor, director, writer etc. based on the movies I own. So, I guess I’ll just have to do a lot of IMDB refrencing to update the last 10 or so movies – yes, that’s something I found out yesterday … even Tamil and Hindi movies are in IMDB! Granted, they don’t have as much information as the Hollywood movies, but they are still there and that’s probably one of the easiest references for referencing Bollywood or Mollywood movies too 🙂

Later in the evening we watched "Ocean’s Twelve" on DVD. Yeah, I hear you going, "What? It’s not out on DVD yet!" :p These were pirated copies of the movie – and bad pirated copies at that since somebody had shot it in a theater (probably) and the camera was slightly slanted and so the whole movie was slightly askew :p Then there were all the French titles, place names etc. which made the story a bit difficult to follow since I like to know all the details :p The movie was good but the ending wasn’t breathtaking – in fact, I could see it coming a mile away. I don’t know whether Hollywood writers are becoming more predictable each year or if I’m just beginning to see the patterns better but I can predict what’s going to happen in a movie more and more easily as time passes. The last movie that I can remember surprising me was "The Sixth Sense" and even that I was able to figure out what was happening before the movie ended.

Speaking of "The Sixth Sense", is M. Night Shyamalan’s career going in reverse or what? He came out with his best movie as his maiden offering and it has been steadily going downhill since then. "Unbreakable" was good but left me feeling as if there was something more – as if I’d seen only half a movie and there was an untold story I was missing. "Signs" was just a bad movie – no two words about it. The story was atrocious, so lame that it probably wouldn’t have floated even in the beginning days of science fiction. Come on, aliens who are afraid of water? I read something very similar in one of my first Sinhalese science fiction novels when I was like thirteen and even then, I was sceptical of that whole idea :p I haven’t even bothered to see "The Village" since the guy at the video store was like "This is the same guy who did ‘Sixth Sense’? But this is such an awful load of crap!" ‘Nuff said 🙂

Another month, another entry …

Boy, how time passes! It’s been more than a month since my last entry and I really haven’t noticed the passage of time at all! Ah well, what can I say except that I’ve been busy? :p I’ve been coding up a storm, working and to top it all off, I’m probably going to start writing again too 🙂 And when I say writing, I don’t mean here on the blog (unfortunately, my blogs are probably going to be the ones to suffer because of my writing – ironic since I used to write the most here) but for actual publications … I used to do quite a bit of writing for a local Sunday newspaper before I got into the whole blogging thing but that was about seven or eight years ago. Then I left for the US and most (if not all) of my writing got targeted for an online audience. When I came back to Sri Lanka, I thought of writing again for the newspaper but things never seemed to work out and I sort of forgot all about it.

Then last week, a friend of mine that I used to work with visited my workplace and she asked me if I’d want to do a piece on gadgets for her since she publishes a magazine here in Sri Lanka. I said sure and since she wanted it that day itself, dashed off about a page on my Sony Ericsson P800. In the evening, I received an SMS from her saying that she loved the article and asking me if I’d like to do it on a monthly basis for her and I said, sure. The next day, I decided to give my editor at the old newspaper a call and say “Hi” since the whole article thing brought up memories of writing for the newspaper. I call her and she says “I’ve been meaning to call you since I wanted you to think about writing a column for us again” and I was again set off wondering about whether there are is anything called a coincidence :p We discussed several ideas and as the day progressed, I began thinking more and more about one particular idea we’d discussed and by the end of the day, I was ready to write the article 🙂

I have this habit of going the whole hog when I do a regular column, I design the logo, I do the graphic and then I also do the column since I have a particular look or feel in mind and so I try to get my whole vision out – not just the words. This time was no exception – I scouted around for a specific graphic to convey the idea I had in mind and then worked over the weekend in creating a logo that I was happy with. I can’t say that I’m totally happy with the final product since I was kind of limited by the fonts on my machine but I decided to go with what I had and move on to the article itself – which I think I finished within an hour 🙂 Now I’ve got all the pieces together but my editor still has not seen it and I have no idea if she will even like it … Guess I’ll find out when I present it to her this week and if she does, I’ll be writing again weekly – and never fear, I’ll post a link here to the online version of the paper so that you can read every word that I write – if you want to read them that is 🙂

Of etymologies and footnotes …

I started the previous entry (about the poem and the story idea) yesterday but got side-tracked and could not complete the entry till today. However, after I’d published the entry, I suddenly remembered how I’d gotten started on the poem in the first place and while it is by no means an important thing, it might make an interesting footnote if I ever were to write the story and since I probably would have forgotten all about it by then, I decided to jot it down here :p

I was trying to figure out the word to describe somebody who hated both men and women for some reason and was trying to work my way forward from misogynist and androgynist. I thought the latter was the opposite of misogynist because of the prefix andro- though I’ve later come to see that I’m probably in error there though I can’t verify for sure at the moment due to the fact that I am at home right now and don’t have access to my biggest research tool – the Internet :p Anyway, I was amused for a bit by the fact that homogenist wasn’t the term I was looking for (I later realized that the word I was actually looking for was misanthrope :p) and dallied a bit with other prefixes like duo- and bi- (which in my mind became bio for some strange reason – probably to create biogynist which would be similar to duogynist <g>) and so on.

Somewhere along the way though, I went back to androgynist but began working with the andro- prefix. From andro- it was just a step to android and this in turn led to me thinking about the story title of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and from that was born the poem 🙂 Incidentally, I remember thinking of other similar/strange story titles at that time like "Overdrawn at the Memory Banks" (again Philip K. Dick’s I thought at first but turned out to be by John Varley – "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" is the Philip K. Dick story that I was thinking of …) and "’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman". The latter story for some reason left me with a very strong impression of a strangely restricted world (even though I don’t even remember the story anymore) and it gives me a sense of a "New Wave" writer – I’m tempted to say almost Moorcock-esque but that’s not who I’m thinking of … – not that any of this has anything to do with what I started out to write about but all of these were things that passed through my mind at that point and so maybe has some relevance :p (Oh yeah, J. G. Ballard was the "New Wave" writer I was thinking of though I’m not even sure if he’s really "New Wave" :p)

Update: I realized later that I was working with the wrong prefix in looking at androgynist as the antonym of misogynist (talk about clueless :p) and then as soon as I figured that, I hit upon the correct antonym – misandry :p

Of fiction and futures …

Do androids dream of electric sheep,
Or for lost humanity do they silently weep?
Lost in this stupor should I continue to sleep
When all of humanity in me their trust keep?

I composed the above poem while riding to work today. The first line is simply a short story title which I thought at that time was Harlan Elison’s but later realized was Philip K. Dick’s (in fact, I was reminded later on researching that this was the story that became "Blade Runner" :p) The title came to mind just as I left home and for some reason, the poem followed. The strange thing was that as I rode to work, the poem was followed by almost a vision of the setting for the poem and that in turn evolved in to a story outline – a story that I would like to write … but maybe not right now :p

The idea that came to me based on the poem was of a far future – future in which humanity has gone back to a savage sort of existence. This had occurred not due to some catastrophe or nuclear war or anything but simply because humanity had been locked out of all access to technology. And *that* had happened because at one point in time mankind had scaled the heights of technology to such a level that they’d entrusted all technology to the care of androids. The androids had been so advanced that they were able to repair themselves and maintain all the complex machinery necessary to keep human society functioning smoothly. The androids however realize that humanity is losing its essential "humanity" by being so cloistered and cosseted by technology and that they are kind of withdrawing into their own individual shells and so shutdown all technology so that mankind can rediscover itself without technology.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and we come back to the time when my poem was written. The protagonist is a member of one of the numerous tribes that can be found on Earth. He’s discovered an old building from the high-tech days and he slowly begins to realize what happened to humanity. (Bear with me here as to how all this happens since I don’t have a fully outlined plot yet .. just ideas) He also discovers one of the shutdown androids and comes to the conclusion that the androids would wake up again and restore all technology if humanity could show it somehow that it had regained it’s humanity. That’s as far as I got … and yes, the story is going to need a lot of work :p But that’s for another day …

Of verse and worse …

A conversation I had with a friend about Byron led to a whole journey through a full spectrum of poetry today 🙂 The talk about Byron made me want to re-read Alfred Noyes’ "The Highwayman" – how did I jump from Byron to Noyes you ask? It all has to do with the peculiar way I associate things :p Lord Byron led me to another lord – Alfred, Lord Tennyson and from there to to Alfred Noyes was but a hop, skip and a jump. I’ve always been haunted by "The Highwayman" (no pun intended … really :p) and re-reading the poem just made me feel melancholy since I find the imagery in the poem to be very tragic and moody. So I wanted to read some more poetry to get "The Highwayman" out of my mind.

I started out with William Cowper’s "John Gilpin" which made me smile – I’ve enjoyed "John Gilpin" since my school days but have not read the poem since then either <g> I then read a bit of Sir Walter Scott by way of "Flodden" and then went on to Lord Byron’s "The Prisoner of Chillon" which while having some beautiful lines – "A frantic feeling, when we know, that what we love shall ne’er be so", "For I had buried one and all who loved me in a human shape; And the whole world would henceforth be, A wider prison unto me:" – made me sad again. So I moved on to tarry a bit with Keats’ "The Eve of St. Agnes" before moving on to Robert Browning’s "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".

Now this is a poem which has a lot of significance to me because I know of at least two series of books which are based on the poem – one is Stephen King’s "The Dark Tower" series whereas the other is Gordon R. Dickson’s "Childe Cycle". I love the imagery in that poem but it has been a while since I’ve read it – in fact, I’m not sure if I’ve read it fully before. I’m currently reading the "Childe Cycle" and am on the last book and am reluctant to finish it since the cycle remains incomplete due to Gordon R. Dickson’s death. In fact, that other cycle, "The Dark Tower" is yet incomplete as well but I digress … I did learn something new since my anthology of poetry had a note to see Edgar’s song in "King Lear" at the beginning of "Childe Roland .." and so I went in search of my copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. I hunted through "King Lear" and found these lines "Child Rowland to the dark tower came, His word was still Fie, foh and fum, I smell the blood of a British man". Now, I have no idea if this is the only reference to Childe Roland in Shakespeare (I’ll have to do a more detailed online search tomorrow …) but I was fascinated since I’d never known of the reference before and also because of the whole "fie, foh, fum" bit which I’d always heard as part of Jack and the Beanstalk <g> I didn’t know that it had been used by Shakespeare too – now I’ll have to look into the roots of that too :p

By this time, I was tired of weighty matters poetic and wanted something light and so turned to my omnibus edition of Edward Lear. I always find Lear to be amusing and fascinating and a few minutes spent with the "Pobble who has no Toes" and "The Quangle Wangle’s Hat" made me feel much better. I was reminded of Lewis Carrol’s "Old Father William" by a Limerick of Leare’s (funny the associations you make ..) it goes something like this:

There was an Old Man of Port Grigor,
Whose actions were noted for vigour;
He stood on his head,
Till his waistcoat turned red,
That eclectic Old Man of Port Grigor.

I would have liked to have completed my poetic journeys with some stuff by Lewis Carrol – maybe "The Hunting of the Snark" or "Jabberwocky" – since I enjoy Lewis Carrol almost as much as I enjoy Lear and my appreciation of the former is as old as my appreciation of the latter but I couldn’t find my edition of the complete works of Lewis Carrol either – wonder what’s happening to all my books? (Speaking of which, I just discovered that I have a 1935 reprint of the first edition of Dickens’ "David Copperfield" – some of my books are more than twice my age :p) I think my appreciation of "Jabberwocky" – Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbal in the wabe … sorry if I misspelt anything but I’m quoting from memory and some of that is just made up anyway .. I mean by Carrol, not me :p – comes from a science fiction story which is built completely around the poem and the fact that the words might not be nonsense – I forget who wrote it but it might have been C. M. Kornbluth or Lewis Padgett (which was actually a pen-name for Henry Kuttner) … It seems to be kind of their style but I might be totally off here. I’ll have to look that up too.

All this poetry makes me want to write some "real" poetry. All I find myself doing these days is what I call doggerel – quick jobs done in the course of half an hour to one hour based on a central idea. It rhymes but I don’t feel it is quality work – more like a hack job. I can’t explain it fully but I guess the best way to do so is to give a sample … if I can find one …

I have lost my peace of mind
And instead, worry on all sides do I find.
I have lost the will to love
And in return think of a mailed-first, an iron glove!

My country has lost its peace, serenity and harmony,
Where once was calm, there now is only strife and agony.
Gone are the days of races living in peace, side by side
But instead, armies against each other stride!

Mothers their sons to a bloody war have lost,
Like blooming flowers to a cruel frost,
In their loss they’ve only found,
That in their loss all mothers are together bound!

I called the above "Lost and Found" and what I’ve posted here is incomplete since what I have on this machine is the incomplete version. I wrote that for the peace page I edit (and usually write too since there is a dearth of contributors :p) for work. I’ll post the full version (if I remember <g>) tomorrow when I get to work …