THE DEMI-MONDE FALL 2

Here's the second preview of the illustrations that will be going into 'Fall' (excuse the typos - they're in the process of being corrected). This bit was written four years ago (doesn't time fly ...) and as I was looking for a symbol of a re-rejuvenated Britain it seemed that resuscitating the Blue Streak was the way to go. The Blue Streak was to have been the British ICBM, a totemic symbol of Britain's might and place in the world, but the deprivations of the Second World War, the country's economic decline and unease in Washington meant that the project was cancelled. All I'm hoping is that I wasn't being unwittingly prescient when I wrote this piece ...

Invent-10n

Hard at work on a novella I'm writing for Peter Coleborn and Alchemy Press. I had originally conceived it as a cut and paste piece made up of a montage from various diaries, newspaper cuttings etc. but Ive reined back and it'll be a tad more conventional now. It's a story set in a near-future Britain and features one of my favourite characters, a reBopper named Jenni-Fur. I got interested in the 30's jazz slang of people like Cab Calloway so I decided to update it a little and jenni-Fur's patois is the result. In her own words she's lush thrush with a tight tush.

I'm quite a way into the story now but the ending is proving to be a little tricky - it's a real downer.

Anyway here's Jenni-Fur:

THE DEMI-MONDE FALL

The final edit of the last book of the series 'Fall' is now with the publishers so I had to turn my attention to the plates that I would use in the book. As some of my readers will have twigged, the 'Real World' in the Demi-Monde is out-of-kilter with our world so I thought it would be fun to show some of these counter-factual differences as newspaper cuttings.

Here's the first:

I couldn't resist the idea of the marvellous Marilyn being exiled to the UK. The thought of her starring in some of the Elstree comedies is mouth-watering!