The Anthropologists from Mars – early notes

All the aliens turn up at once, drifting aimlessly around the solar system like a bunch of early party arrivees. They can’t be seen or detected from by any Earth-based observatory. They are cloaked somehow.

An ore freighter en route from Titan to the settlement on Ganymede runs into an alien vessel. Literally. It decloaks, dwarfing the megaton freighter. The Earth ship backs up to take a proper look. The alien ship is a smooth grey cube five hundred miles on a side.

earth ship: we come in peace.

Minutes pass. Finally, a small red light appears near the centre of the surface closest to the freighter.

alien vessel: go away.
earth ship: repeat message. we come in peace.
alien vessel: look, just go. Seriously.
earth ship: request clarification of previous message.
alien vessel: are you serious? piss off!
earth ship: er…why?
alien vessel: you aren’t meant to be able to see us. if the cops notice you hanging around like a bad smell we’ll have our invitation revoked. Now shoo, before we subtract the intrinsic field from your [untranslatable] fusion device.

A pair of idential alien anthropologist tourists in human form, utterly imperturbable and indestructable, insist on involving themselves in a series of major earth-based conflicts and catastrophes. Althrough their profession insists they are ostensibly uninvolved, they are somehow always affecting the outcome of events.

humans: You’re clearly aliens. Why do you look like us? Was there an prehistorical diaspora of stone-age spacemen? Have earth people been breeding in space? Or did you abduct us and steal our DNA?
visiting alien anthropologists: Uh, neither. We had these meatstructures made so we could come down and hang out in your atmosphere. You know, blend in and check out the joint.
humans: But you’re over ten feet tall!
vaa: Ah, that’s just a scaling problem. Maybe we can shave a bit off here and there.
humans: And those, uh, gills? You know, on your neck?
vaa: Ventilation. You got any idea how hot it gets inside one of these?

Building Stories in Public

I’ve decided. Well, I’ve kind of decided. It’s somewhere between ‘Yes, I’m so going to do this’ and ‘Maybe I’ll do this some of the time’. Once or twice it’s been back to ‘This is a really bad idea’. That’s the kind of decision it is, my decision to do all my writing work right here on the blog. In public. At least, as public as this blog is, which is about the same as following a footpath to the middle of a very large wood in the small hours of the morning on the coldest night of winter and whispering at a badger. That is: public, but not exactly well-attended. Nevertheless, story ideas, notes, story developments, synopses, short articles and draft after draft after draft of the Novel will all arrive here in some form*.

I can’t provide a reasoned argument as to why this is a good idea. It feels like a good idea. Lots of people (probably most people, if not all) will tell me that it’s a really bad idea. After all, do musicians let you hear their work in progress? No, surely not, cry the detractors. They present the finished article when it’s ready to hear. But that’s not the way that all musicians work. Early drafts, demo tapes, remixes, alternate versions, live versions. Fan remixes, even (cf Radiohead’s recent Nude remix compo).

My idea in its purest original form was to put anything and everything here on the blog. Old stuff, new stuff, crap I’ve removed from story drafts, abandoned ideas. Then my internal auditors, my Jiminy Crickets, got wind of the idea via some neurological country road and sent in the mental heavy mob. You’ll hide the truly awful stuff, they insisted. Polish what you put out there. Edit it before anyone sees it. Delete blog posts you have second thoughts about, even. At first I agreed with them. Now I think I’d feel a bit like Winston Smith at his day job, erasing undesirables from newspaper photos. This kind of thing you either do or you don’t do. “There is no ‘try’” as the little green Jedi Master said.

Some crazy Buddhist teacher said

First thought, best thought**

So I’m going with that.

*I’m a little concerned about copyright stuff, but hey.

**It was Chögyam Trungpa, fact fans. Try saying that ten times quickly after a pint of whisky.