Chion is Book of the Month at The PODler

I had a look around the various POD book review blogs recently and was delighted to discover that Chion has been selected as April’s Book of the Month at The PODler. There was stiff competition that month, with two other book rated “A” and “A+”.

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Idea for a superhero supervillain short story anthology

For some time now, I’ve had the desire to edit and publish an anthology of short stories written by others. I don’t want to do a general sci-fi or horror themed collection, though; I want to be much more particular - to create a mythology that has enough scope for a great variation of stories. I think it was Machine of Death that got my mind turning in this direction. I’ve been musing upon several ideas, and I want to share what I think is the strongest one with you.

Imagine an experimental prison facility where the inmates are required to undergo a surgical operation on their brains that accelerates their thought processes to ten times normal speed. However, the convicts feel completely normal inside their own heads, as if they are processing thoughts at normal speed. So, how would they perceive the world around them? In slow motion. Now, what’s the purpose of all this? To reduce the problem of prison overcrowding; to get convicts in and out of prison as quickly as possible and yet still give them appropriate punishment. And so, a ten-year prison sentence can be served in the space of one year; a twenty-year stretch in two. On completion of a sentence, each convict will be given a second operation on his brain, returning his thoughts to normal, before he is released back to society.

Since this is an experimental prison - the first of its kind - there are some unexpected side-effects. The convicts develop the ability to control the speed of their own thoughts; it’s like being able to slow down and speed up time itself by an act of the will. (I’m also toying with giving them the ability to astral project their souls out of their bodies, but the jury’s still out on that one.) The inmates keep this ability hidden from the prison authorities.

Then one day there is a mass prison break, and let’s say one hundred of these men (and women?) are now at large in society. Imagine all those thieves, rapists, murderers walking free, with a massive tactical advantage over anyone who would hunt them down. Imagine getting into a fist-fight and being able to see every blow coming in slow motion. Imagine seeing bullets tearing through the air towards you and being able to dodge (bearing in mind that the human body is still acting in realtime and you won’t be able to move at ten times the normal speed; what you will have, by all appearances, is lightning reflexes, but you certainly won’t be The Flash). Imagine being surrounded by a SWAT team and being able to slow time down a near standstill, allowing you to observe all of your enemies’ positions and plan your escape with careful patience.

Is this mythology strong enough to span fifteen to twenty original stories? Stories about these extraordinary evil men and the ordinary people whose job is to catch them (and any more diverse scenarios that other writers can think of). The idea originated in a piece of X-Files fan fiction that I wrote a decade ago, called Reflex - a story about Mulder and Scully on the trail of a bullet-dodging rapist (published in a small press zine called RQC). The idea was brought to the front of my mind again recently when playing the videogame F.E.A.R., where your character has the ability to slow time down for brief periods while engaging in combat. I’m also fascinated with the notion of bad guys being the only people with “super powers” (of course, there is scope for one of those stories about the innocent man wrongfully incarcerated); the good guys must use cunning and ingenuity, rather than an alternative super-power, to win the day (although I wouldn’t rule out the appearance of actual superheroes, if the story is good enough).

I’m not giving this project a definite green light just yet. This post is me putting the feelers out, to see what others think. Marketing-wise, I reckon the time is right for such an anthology, as superheroes are very much in vogue these days. But is my take on the genre worth pursuing? Comments and suggestions most welcome.

Life as a First Aider: Accidents will happen

I renewed my First Aid certificate recently. It’s valid for three years, and this is my third renewal. Many people stick it for a while, then give up. But I consider it a valuable skill, and something I want to maintain indefinitely, for the benefit of my personal life as well as my those I work with. I thought I’d share with you some of the thrills and spills that have come my way over the past six years as a qualified First Aider in a school of seven hundred pupils. Statistically speaking, with those figures, accidents are bound to happen once in a while. Occasionally it’s something scary, and other times it’s even funny.

The scariest incident was when I was called into the girls’ gym to take a look at a girl who had fallen roughly on her knee. We’ll call her “Sharon.” Sharon was sitting on a bench, barely able to keep her eyes open, similar to how I imagine someone who had been drugged would look. I couldn’t discern the correlation between hurting one’s knee and struggling to keep conscious. After several minutes, I made the decision to take her to hospital by car. Sharon was asthmatic, so while I carried her out to my car, another teacher went to fetch her inhaler. Walking briskly through the foyer, the teacher accidentally dropped the inhaler, causing it to come apart. No matter. Sharon didn’t appear to need it. When I got her placed into the passenger seat of my car, she was so weak that she couldn’t lift her arms out of the seat belt once I had fastened it across her body. The teacher got into the rear seat, and we set off on the three-mile journey to Craigavon Area Hospital. About one mile down the road, Sharon became frightened, not knowing where she was or what was going on. About all she could do was hyperventile. No problem. We would give her a squirt from her inhaler … Oh. It’s broken. The teacher frantically started trying to put the inhaler back together. A couple of times, she would half re-construct it, then hold it to Sharon’s mouth, and it would come apart again. I had to raise my voice and tell her to calm down and fix the inhaler properly. I was having visions of stopping the car on the high-speed carriageway, dragging the girl out onto the road, and commencing CPR. Thankfully, the teacher did manage to repair the inhaler and give Sharon a squirt. Sharon’s breathing improved a little, but she was now more awake and expressing considerable pain. Nevertheless, we drove the rest of the way to hospital without incident.

On retrospect, what I think happened was that the pain of Sharon’s fall was so intense that it almost knocked her out. That explained her semi-conscious condition. When not fully conscious, you’re not as receptive to pain. So, as the journey got underway and she started coming round, she felt intense pain in her knee. That led to hyperventilating. In the end, it turned out she hadn’t even broken a bone. But the whole incident shows you how difficult it can sometimes be to diagnose someone’s condition, despite all the detail in the First Aid Manual. The girl has no memory whatsoever of the journey to hospital. Once, I recounted it all to Sharon and one of her friends, and they thought it was hilarious … as you would.

Another case was a girl who would inexplicably collapse with some regularity: “Emma.” I dealt with her five or six times over the course of her three years at Clounagh. She had seen a few doctors, but no one could find anything medically wrong with her. And yet, every once in a while her legs would give out, and I would have to carry her to somewhere comfortable, then wait with her. Usually the condition would worsen; she would start to drift out of consciousness and breathe rapidly. Always, she came out of it in ten minutes or so. It’s possible that the reason no one could find anything wrong was because we were watching panic attacks - a psychological rather than physical issue. But it was odd to see the attack escalate after we’d made her comfortable. Emma has now moved on to high school and is alive and well.

A boy, “Derek,” once ran across the empty school playground, straight into a car door, while the driver was opening the door. The scenario was doubly unlikely to happen because cars are not normally allowed in the playground; this was a special circumstance of facilitating a pupil in a wheelchair. But it happened. Unfortunately, Derek was running up from behind the car, so the part of the door that hit him was the edge. The sharp bottom corner of the door actually entered Derek’s ankle, causing a deep, dry, bloodless wound - the first of its kind I had ever seen. His ankle struck the door so hard that the impact caused a slight bend in the metal at the corner. For a short while, he was lying on the ground panicking that he was dying. But by the time we were halfway to hospital in the ambulance, it was a different story. He asked if he could see the wound. The nurse let him. His reaction was “Sweet!” They kept him in hospital for a few days with worries about his spleen, because he was peeing blood, but he was right as rain in the end.

Then there are the funny incidents. A boy, “Charlie,” came to me with a massive bump on his forehead. I asked the usual questions, like “How did it happen?” He replied, “I hit a wall in the playground at break time.” I’m thinking, Someone pushed him. He denied it. “How did you hit the wall, then?” No answer. I had been thinking it was the usual shenannigans, but now I’m suspecting bullying - and it’s a serious sort of bullying when the kid won’t admit to the identity of his attacker. I found out later from a third party what actually went down. Charlie ran into a wall, because he was being chased by a seagull.

A girl, “Jane,” once came to me with a red face and eyes so bloodshot that they made me think of Regan from The Exorcist. I have never seen so many veins in the whites of eyes before or since. She looked like she had been beaten about the head. “What happened to your face?” I asked. Nothing at all. Turns out that the demonic possession was slightly more accurate. The bloodshot eyes were not the result of physical attack. She held up her hand and said, “So-and-so called me a [censored], and I got so mad I punched the wall.” I wouldn’t want to get on this girl’s bad side … and she was only eleven or twelve.

The Vice Principal once asked me to come to her office. Once I got there, she handed me a small spray can for wasp stings, and asked me to deal with a boy, “James,” who had been stung. Why couldn’t she apply the spray? It was hardly rocket science. Well, it seems she needed a man. Not because men are better at this sort of thing, but because the sting was inconveniently located between James’s legs just below the groin. And so, there I found myself in the rarest of circumstances, alone in an office, asking a thirteen-year-old boy to pull his trousers down. Sheesh! When you get Child Protection training and they instruct you to avoid circumstances where you are alone with children, they don’t reckon on days like that one.

Well, those are the incidents that stand out in my memory. Added to those are a plethora or cuts, bruises, swellings, sprains, suspected breaks, nosebleeds, and the occasional dislocation and diabetic episode … to name a few. That’s life as a First Aider in a school.

Cycling vs. driving - Part II

Well, I’ve gone and got myself some new wheels - two, rather than four. I am in no position to afford a new car, and frankly I don’t want one. As I indicated in a previous post, I am determined to make a transition to a healthier lifestyle. Whether that means obliterating a car completely from my life has yet to be determined. Nice bike, isn’t it? And where, pray tell, is it sitting? That happens to be my office at the school. Yes, I have finally got off my backside and pedalled my way to work. I intend to keep this up, come rain or shine.

I was a little self-conscious cycling past school pupils on the way to work, knowing how they can sometimes react in an over-the-top fashion to the sight of anything out of the ordinary. A member of staff on two wheels might provoke a similar reaction to news of aliens landing at the White House. Okay, now I’m being over-the-top, but you know what I mean: “Gasp! It’s Mr. Sloan on a bike!”

I could have fixed up my old bike, but I took the notion to get a new one. It’s nice to ride a bike that you can feel some trust in. The chain on that old one used to let me down regularly; I was always afraid to lift my bum from the seat when pedalling hard, for fear that the pedals would slip, then my groin and the frame would have a painful close encounter. The new bike was £200. I could have bought a cheap one for £75, but I thought I’d go for quality. It hardly breaks the bank. When you think about it, £75 is little more than one tank of diesel in my 4×4’s engine; little more than 350 miles drive-time. Amazing how we throw our money away.

New Ulterior cover - Part I

Jerry from Irish Eyes Creations created this wonderful looking beast for a new edition Ulterior that I hope to publish soon. Yes, my first novel will hopefully be back in print again; the fact that I ran out of books before I ran out of demand is reason enough to publish a second edition. But not with that same old cover, oh no. If there’s any weak spot on the original design, it’s the creature’s head. I haven’t got the artistic skills to put together a convincingly professional monster. But Jerry has, as you can see. I think it looks fabulous. Jerry is putting together a full cover design of his own, but he has been kind enough to let me play with the creature, in case I opt for one of my own overall designs. This is a first attempt, based on an early mock-up from last year. There’s a lot of detail here, so make sure you click through to the large picture for the full impact. I intend to do a lot more experimenting (as I did with Chion) before settling on a final design. Hope you’ll share your opinions, as we go through the process.

Chion highly rated at Critical Mick

My novel Chion has acquired yet another great review, this time at book review site Critical Mick.

In a welcome relief from the vast majority of sci-fi, Darryl Sloan has built his novel on a truly original notion … It’s gripping stuff, never dipping into the typical end-of-the-world clichés … Ranking right up there with Lucifer’s Hammer [by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle].

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