My first effort as a writer came when I was six, I think – I plagiarised a cartoon strip and mislabelled a “laboratory experiment” as a “lavatory experiment”… then I wrote a 50,000 word horror story when I was 17, now thankfully long lost. I started writing fiction again during my second year of university – I was about twenty at the time, but some years after that I decided that screenwriting was in my future and my urge to write prose fiction dried up. I started again in 2005 – an idea popped into my head that wouldn’t make much of a film, and after mulling it for a week or so I decided to gave it a try. It was a struggle (I still find writing a laborious process, probably always will) so in the end I joined the wonderful Leeds Writers Circle to force my hand – I figured I’d need something to read to them when I first showed up, and it worked because I got it finished in time.
That story and various other things can be found on the following links but, although I always intended to continue developing the ongoing projects regularly, due to real world calls on my time none of them have been updated for quite a while. However, recently I have been lucky enough to have two short pieces published – not under my given name – and as of 2012 I have decided to commit to writing fiction full time, so perhaps I will pick up some of these projects and dust them off…
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Old Wolf
The first thing I wrote after studying film storytelling was to be an unspoken dialogue between a wolf and his prey, but when I sat down to write it shifted into something else and ended up more like a piece of oral folklore, a lesson in story-form to be passed down from one generation to the next. Or something like that. I never really imagined I could get it published, so in August 2009 I based a blog on it, inviting anyone who read the story – if they wanted – to translate it into another language. After a few inquiries, all fell silent.
…until March 2010. Mentioning all this at a writers group I attend in Madrid, one enthusiastic member practically demanded permission to play, and immediately got it. So, in addition to a couple of Google Translate-generated versions in Chinese and Arabic, Old Wolf now exists in Spanish as well, under the title El Viejo Lobo – and the invitation remains open to anyone else.
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Agent for C.H.A.N.G.E.
A Thrilling Adventure in Pursuit of Truth and Justice
In a terrified London, in an alternate England, in a world held tight in the grip of an infallible faith, bloody death stalks the streets, looming from the gutters, hiding in the shadows. To speak the wrong word or conceive the wrong thought risks the same end – a visit from the dark hand of the church’s Holy Inquisition. The year is 1964 – and no-one could imagine who that killer is…
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The House on Two Legs
The House on Two Legs tells the story of Ivan Zoh, a simple Russian peasant fated to alter the balance of the world, ending the age of the mythic, the fantastic and the supernatural and ushering in that of merely human corruption and evil. I was inspired in this by reading Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp (which I have also looked at in another long abandoned blog, Fractal Morphology).
It is an attempt to create an interconnected web of folklore, although again it is something I’ve not found time to add to almost since it began. Although the notion of writing a lengthy piece of evolving folklore – with each chapter as a discrete story based on Propp’s structural analysis – was mine, the idea of having hotlinks between these stories nested in the texts was not. This came from the example of 217 Babel Street, a strange, fractured and, so far as I know, still developing collaborative narrative which can be viewed here.
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The Thriller in a Manila
Finally, though as a wannabe writer myself it pains me to do so, I want to put an end to all the questions and state definitively that I have never met Cliff Knoetz, we are not in any way in communication, and that aside from a certain agreement on the relative merits or lack thereof shown by some contemporary commercial writing enterprises, there is no connection between the two of us. Cliff Knoetz is a literary giant with a great future ahead of him and I, well, I am nothing. Besides, he doesn’t wear glasses. These glasses, right here.
