Yet another short story submitted to Twisted50 Vol 2

This one, which I wrote over the last three days, rejoices in the title 'Contracts for the Design of Certain Vulgar Necessities'.

Jissom, who works in some nebular capacity in industrial design, is stranded on the motorway on his way to a conference in The Vale. He is rescued by a heavy smoking alcoholic with a name very much like Wankingstain. Wankingstain takes him to Club, which is inside a building on a dilapidated industrial estate under the flyover. There, Jissom recognises Professor Goetz, a disgraced anthropologist conducting an independent research program focussing on depersonalisation among the gimps who are part of Club's furniture. Drunkenness, escaped gimps, murder, arson, weird funerals, embittered recluses - it's all in here.

http://www.create50.com/scripts/56f3ffac6e6f645d1f000357

The Dharma of the Eye - a New Short Story Submitted to the Next Twisted50 Anthology

The Dharma of the Eye is a peculiar little story about a civilian CCTV operator in Shroud Town. As the New Era approaches and everyone starts wearing their Star Trek uniforms, this overweight enema addict harasses the health service with his digestive Munchausen disorder, wrestles with the singularly unrewarding magical fiction inflicted on him by his vacuous landlady, and drinks cider and pernod alone in the pub. And all along, the Unauthorised Enema Squad have had their eye on him.

http://www.create50.com/scripts/56e9ae8e6e6f645d1f00008d?age=verified

Two Short Stories

In the last few weeks, I've written two short stories:-

(1) The Inanity of the Deed, a 4,000 word adaptation of Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, which I've submitted to The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. A sex shop proprietor sacrifices his clueless step-son to an agent provocateur's plot to bomb the local cadet depot, and secures his alibi by participating in an open-mike activist benefit evening, where he reads his excruciatingly bad poetry.
https://www.bristolprize.co.uk

(2) Professor Guzman's PhD Student. Like Inanity, Guzman riffs upon the theme of incompetent terrorists. In the run-up to the election as Prime Minister of a Corbyn-esque useful idiot, ivory tower sociopaths plot to burn a polling station in the Mendips, leading to the deaths of the idiot Greenpeace-ish chuggers hired for this purpose. I've submitted Guzman to the second Twisted50 anthology; readers may recall that two of my short stories - Lolitasaurus and Disaster of the Will - are already on the shortlist for the first Twisted50 anthology.
http://twisted-vol2.create50.com/profiles/richard-craven

Diverse speeches from my play, The Senseless Counterfeit

(1) Suliman's Yoga Creep Speech. Act 1 Scene ii

It seems to me that Shakespeare missed a trick.

He might prophetically have writ about

another age of man, the Yoga Creep,

between his Justice and his Pantaloon,

whose shrivelled member, kept from its repose,

held upright by those blue remembered pills,

twitches in the presence of young hippie chicks.

I see right through you, Sleaze. You’re nothing but

a goat who gulls impressionable youth,

an oniony old sage with borrowed cloak.

(2) Mr Luvvertory on Selling Ketamine. Act 1 Scene i

It’s true. Powder of Equus Tranquillus,

which is to say, that wondrous ketamine,

which makes one snorting it think he’s a worm,

or else an elongated pasta strand.

A true alchemic catalyst is k

makes of the meanest bedsit sumptuous halls,

transmutes the vilest, most disgusting knave

unto the choicest ponce that ever graced the court;

although it’s ultimately bladder-wrack,

causing its hierophants to go around with bags.

A vertically integrated biz:

I cook it up myself in pots and pans.

(3) Slime on Selling Cocaine. Act 1 Scene i

Betimes, I dabbled in an allied trade,

a merchant in Talcum of Medellin, I was,

importing in swallowed prophylacticals

that snuff, for which fine gentlefolk

betaking themselves unto the privy room,

upon the cistern thereof chop it out in lines

and by it most subtly are energised,

which their companions do remark upon

when they resume their wonted dinner seats,

and overbear all others with their rant.

H.G.Wells nails Henry James

As Frances Wilson, writing in the Telegraph, puts it,

"[James's] middle period produced The Bostonians, and The Princess Casamassima, among the least satisfactory of his novels, while the “late style” of The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors – which HG Wells compared to a hippopotamus laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that has got into a corner of its cage – sealed James’s reputation as The Master."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/henry-james-a-novelist-for-the-wi-fi-age/


Although I can sort of see the point of The Ambassadors, I still feel that, had I been made aware of Wells's comment before embarking on 'Plomacy, I would have been spared a gruesome ordeal.