Category: obituarist

Categories
ghost raven obituarist publishing writing

Okay, now what? (2020 edition)

It’s been a looooooong time coming, but as discussed earlier this month, The Obituarist 3 is finished, published and out in the market, where it’s already enjoying literally dozens of sales.

(well, maybe not plural-dozens just yet, but I’m optimistic.)

Hooray! My white whale is dead at last!

From Hell’s heart you stab at me! Tee-hee!

So that’s great. Super cathartic and personally fulfilling, etc etc blah de blah.

But now what do I do with my spare time?

More Obituarist work

Surprise! Nothing ever ends! This world is a purgatory!

Publishing a book is never the final act. Marketing and promotion are still desperately needed if you want your work to make even a single ripple when dropped into the wide dark sea of the internet. Which is a shame, ‘cos I’m completely shit at marketing and promotion! Yet I must nonetheless talk about the book on social media, and attempt to harness my wagon to the caravans of more popular and successful authors, if there’s to be any hope of getting some sales for this book that is, objectively, a really fuckin’ good read.

(Incidentally, this – more than anything else – is why I want to leave self-publishing behind. Fuck the royalty share, I just want someone to do the marketing work for me, you can have all my money, I don’t mind, I’m so old and so, so tired.)

On top of that, I need to update this site with an Obit3 tab that has the blurb, image, purchase links, super-complimentary 5-star reviews (hint freakin’ hint, readers) and so on. Personal website maintenance! Yay! Just like a regular admin job except way less rewarding!

So yeah. Just when I thought I was out, blah blah blah.

Back to Raven’s Blood

And speaking of objectively good books – and by that I mean subjectively good books that I wrote, so don’t be rude – I want to return to Raven’s Blood, my YA superhero fantasy novel that I would dearly love to a) publish and b) turn into a whole Batgirl-meets-D&D series of Ghost Raven books.

Yes but no I mean not quite but also dang how good is this art

I believe in this book, I really do, and that’s probably why my failure to find either a publisher or an agent that believed in it contributed to my… let’s say ‘mental health fluctuations’ over the last few years. I hit a wall, and that’s on me rather than the wall – but walls can be climbed, and it’s perhaps time to work on that again.

How to do that? Well, I’m starting this week by joining a YA writing program/course by Faber/A&U. That could lead to some networking opportunities, but I care more about the opportunities to write my book gooder better, which I know it could be.

Coming out of that, I want to do some rewrites and then YET ANOTHER round of approaching agents and publishers, and you’ll know how well that goes by checking in here and seeing how often I use terms like FUCKPIG and JIZZ SUICIDE.

(PS that art is by Kelsey Eng and OMG it’s so freakin’ good let’s all order some prints)

Onto the next project

Or I could write something else.

I have plenty of ideas!

Which is great, except that ideas are cheap and mean nothing if they aren’t developed and realised in some form!

There’s a lot of content I’d like to work on here – from YA to SF to horror to magical realism to I dunno fuckin’ swords & shit – and I think they’re all ideas worth exploring.

I will not get to explore all of these ideas before I die.

That’s fun to think about.

Alternatively, fuck it all

Thoughts like that – or like ‘we live in a virus-afflicted late-stage-capitalist hellscape to which a heroic dose of ketamine is the only sane response’ – are not especially great for productivity. But it’s hard to divert the brain once it starts wandering down that particular garden path, or to steer it away from concepts like ‘the sunk-cost fallacy’ or ‘the limited opportunities available to Australian writers in a US/UK-dominated publishing marketplace’ or ‘let’s take a heroic dose of ketamine because the future isn’t coming’.

It’s hard some days – these days, right now, in particular – to find a reason to keep trying.

If I was smarter, I’d be capable of giving up.

But that’s not who I am or where we are.

So I guess we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the… okay, this metaphor got away from me, like all the rest.

‘spose I should write something about that.

Categories
ebooks obituarist

Finished, published and affordable – The Obituarist 3 is now on sale

It was 1987 when Eric B and Rakim laid down this dope apology:

It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you
Without a strong rhyme to step to
Think of how many weak shows you slept through
Time’s up, I’m sorry I kept you

Thirty-three years later and I’m here to revisit this apology again.

It’s been a long time, and I’m sorry I kept y’all hanging, but the wait is finally over.

The Obituarist 3: Delete Your Account is out now.

—

Kendall Barber is having a very bad day.

His obituarist business is failing, his relationship is on the rocks and he’s pretty sure one of his friends has been murdered. All of that is bad enough – and then his office explodes. Kendall’s past has come back to haunt him, and it’s coming with guns, bombs and a truckload of regrets.

It gets worse from there.

Before the week is out, Kendall will be beaten, burn, torn up and hospitalised. He’ll have to alienate his closest allies and team up with his greatest enemy. He’ll have to talk to young people about internet security, uncover the truth about his friend’s death, avoid getting murdered by at least two separate sets of bad guys… and he’ll have to decide what kind of man he truly wants to be.

It’s too much to deal with.

The solution is obvious: fake his own death and start over again. But that’s easier said than done. Can Kendall stay one step ahead long enough to assemble what he needs to make a fresh start? Or will his enemies – or worse yet, his own stupid conscience – finish him once and for all?

—

It took me roughly a month to write the first Obituarist novella. The second took around 7-8 months. And the third took somewhere between 3 and 5 years, depending on what point counts as ‘really’ starting work on it.

I could make a lot of apologies for that, but I’ve made those several times by now, so let’s just move on. We’re here now, and the story is worth the wait! I hope!

As for that story… thematically, every book in this series has touched on concepts of not just death, but how we live our lives. The Obituarist was about identity, and how we construct it as a foundation on which to live. Dead Men’s Data was about secrets, and how the ways in which we protect or reveal them give shape to our lives. Delete Your Account… I’m still too close to it, and find the theme a little hard to articulate, but I see it being about endings and beginnings – of projects, of friendships, of enmities, of identities and of lives.

Deep stuff, yes, but it’s also a book full of sarcastic asides, tongue-in-cheek references and big-arse explosions. And it’s a book about change and escalation, inspired sorta-kinda by the ‘trilogy rules’ from Scream 3. Hell, from some angles it’s a book about how my own life and headspace has changed since 2012.

Why write clearly about one thing when you could write messily about a dozen things, that’s what I say. Apparently.

—

Delete Your Account is on sale right now for $3.99 US, and whatever today’s equivalent is in Aussie dollaridoos. You can get it from Amazon, from Amazon Australia or from Smashwords, and it should be available from other ebook storefronts in a few weeks. (These things propagate slowly, because of reasons.)

If you’re a longtime reader of the series, I hope you enjoy this one – it’s a departure, but one that makes sense, provides closure and is still full of sweary humour and desperate action. If you’re new to the series, well then don’t start reading at the end, you goose, start with the first book! Either way, it would be awesome if you left a review on some platform or another – especially if it’s a positive one. (Negative ones… maybe just email me to share your disappointment.)

—

It’s been a long time, and a long and winding road. But we’re all here now, and we all need something to read while we’re in isolation.

This one’s a strong rhyme. I promise.

Categories
obituarist

Stop – cover time!

Hello friends,

We’re all struggling to keep sane and safe during this monstrous era of collapse.

I just hope this helps in some small way – it’s the cover for The Obituarist 3!

…yeah, fair enough, probably not that helpful.

But still! We have a cover, thanks to the awesome work of designer Sharni Morter!

We have a story, which I rewrote again on the weekend to make the ending more coherent and more depressing!

And soon – before the end of May, I promise – we’ll have a new ebook for you to buy and read, hopefully doing something to make all of this – <gestures around helplessly> – just a little less dreadful.

If only in comparison to the shit I put Kendall Barber through this time.

Stay safe, stay sane, stay with us. I love youse all.

Categories
blogging obituarist

Slowpocalyse thoughts

William Gibson once said, ‘The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed’. I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot in the last few days. About how it was framed as uneven access to positive change, but applies just as well to negative change; about how a grim version of the future might land in some parts of the world, but need time to spread out and take over the rest. How we can feel safe and secure, far away from danger, until suddenly we’re not.

I’ve also been thinking about the way the setting of the Mad Max films changes over the course of the series. In the first film, Max is a highway patrol officer, a cop in a functioning society (albeit one that’s doing it rough, and where eating tinned dog food is just fine). Then the setting – the world, society, environment, notions of what’s ‘normal’ – keeps sliding further and further into the abyss, each new film showing us an Australia that’s more broken, more ruined, more lost. Madder and madder within a man’s lifetime.

…yeah, my head’s not really in a great place, as you can probably tell. It’s my birthday; I’m 49 today. It’s not starting off as being the most enjoyable age, so far.

—

Fiction involving apocalypses tends to paint them as all-or nothing. If they’re something coming in the future, then they’re something to be averted or prevented. If they occurred in the past they look monolithic, their fine details unimportant.

It’s different when it’s apocalypse right now, when things are falling apart around us in real time. From inside the slowpocalypse we can see the uneven rate and intensity of collapse, the highs and lows, the gradually widening cracks in the foundations of our world.

But then again, maybe that means we have a window of opportunity to do something about it. Because if the End Times aren’t a monolithic moment but a protracted and uneven decline, there are lots of opportunities for optimism, for working together, for helping each other, for making a difference. To move just that little bit faster than the apocalypse before it’s done and dusted.

Right now it’s very difficult to consider what life will be like when I’m 50, whether my life or literally everyone else’s. But I guess we’ll all work it out together.

We have to.

—

NON-DEPRESSING OBITUARIST 3 UPDATE:

  • It’s still finished!
  • I reread the MS after a week of mental downtime and revised a few things that weren’t working.
  • The revised MS is now with my alpha readers, and I’m hoping to get feedback from them in 2-3 weeks.
  • The cover is done! I was hoping to share it with you folks today, but I’m still waiting on the final files. Should be able to splash it around this week.
  • Unless things go disastrously wrong – and that’s a caveat for pretty much everyone and everything right now – we’re still on track to publish in late April.

So stay tuned! For as long as that remains possible!

Categories
obituarist

The beginning of the end (again)

In case you missed it on the socials last night: I’ve finished the foundation draft of The Obituarist III: Delete Your Account.

The draft comes to almost 30 000 words, making it the longest book in the series – which befits a book that took more than three years to write.

Well, to be accurate, most of those three years were taken up with other activities – accruing mental fatigue, dealing with depression, working day jobs, losing days jobs, getting new day jobs, moving house twice, dealing with loss and the ever-popular wastinhg my life playing video games.

But still. I got there in the end.

Of course, this is just the start. I need to do a round of last-minute tweaks that keep occuring to me, run it past my alpha readers and respond to their feedback, have it copyedited, finalise the cover, try to do some (shudder) self-promotion…

But still. I got here in the end.

It counts for something.

Categories
blogging obituarist writing

Five’ll get you twenty

Right, it’s been a while between drinks. But rather than dwell on all that, let’s start the new year by focusing on the important things.

That was the year that was

Looking back at previous blog entries, I tend to be bitter this time of year, and ready to discard the past 12 months to the dustbin of history.

  • 2016: it sucked and I got the depression
  • 2017: ‘die screaming, year of fuck’
  • 2018: I literally got a tattoo saying ‘I am going to make it through this year if it kills me’

And now 2019, arguably the most horribilus of this last set of annus, is over and done with. Thank fuck. My 2019 wasn’t all that great but vanishes into nothingness when considering those folks whose homes and families burned, sank, exploded or were doomed to suffer Brexit after all. Let’s respect their survival by jettisoning 2019 and moving forward to a year that… okay, it’s going to have a lot of problems, but perhaps we can handle them together.

Image result for perhaps meme

State of the Patrick

Blimey, that was a bit self-indulgent, wasn’t it? Sorry, I haven’t had much sleep.

As noted, I encountered a few challenges last year – suddenly moving house, suddenly changing not just job but career (still writing/editing, no longer publishing), health problems, the relentless grind of getting old, Australia electing a happyclapper sociopath as friggin’ PM, the slow erosion of my attention span, the feeling that all creative work is pointless because we’ll all be dead in a few more years… you know, shit like that.

Yet despite all that, I’m actually pretty upbeat! Not about Earth and humanity, of course – we’re facing a global crisis that we have to overcome or go extinct. But personally, I’m starting 2020 with a less stressful job, more energy and enthusiasm most days, more time for writing & reading and more determination to finish the projects I’ve started, and to move on to new ones and finish them too.

That determination may sound pretty fundamental to the notion of being a writer, but believe me, it’s been hard for me to find for the last few years. Having a positive mindset in my arsenal should make a big difference to, you know, writing some damn books.

Writing some damn books

I had three writing project goals at the start of last year: finish and self-publish The Obituarist 3, completing the novella trilogy; do a major revision pass through Raven’s Blood to address feedback, then start shopping the MS to agents again; and to start work on a new YA urban fantasy wrestling series that I still haven’t named.

I met exactly none of those goals.

Image result for smdh

But that’s not to say I didn’t make an effort. After a shaky start to the year for reasons, I continued working on The Obituarist 3, since that was already partially written. I won’t claim that I worked on it steadily, but I put in time nearly every week – yet despite that, progress was slow. The first Obituarist novella was written at a cracking pace, one 1000-ish-words chapter each night; now it was taking well over a week to put a chapter together, and I often wasn’t fully satisfied with the finished pieces.

But I kept pushing at it, hoping that I could at least finish the foundation draft by New Year’s Eve. I got close to that milestone, and I could have met it – except that, one day and a few chapters from the end, the story just stopped working. I knew where the plot needed to go, and I could see a path of how to get to that point, but it was a bad path, paved with unconvincing character decisions and lacking the right thematic, uh, let’s say tollgates.

Stymied with my goal in sight, I chewed the problem over during a hot, insomniac night, and realised the problem at 3am – I’d screwed up a third of the book. Specifically, I’d screwed up the mystery plotline running through the story, while focusing all my attention on the thriller plotline and coming up with smartarse lines to repost on Twitter. The roadblock was the point where the two plotlines finally connected – or failed to connect. They felt like they belonged in different books, anchored in different characters who made different emotional choices.

It’s a hot mess.

Image result for earth is a mess, y'all

But understanding a problem is the first step to fixing it, and last night I worked out a solution. Not a quick & easy solution, mind you – I have to write a couple of new chapters in the first half of the book, tweak every other chapter, and rethink the motivations and decisions of several major characters. Still, less work than chucking it all out and starting again, and less terrible than writing a book that even I thought was crap.

Once that’s done in 2-3 weeks (maybe), there’s still taking in editorial and alpha reader feedback, formatting the final MS for e-readers, sorting out the cover (I need a new designer) and working through the Amazon/Smashwords self-pub process. I figure the book should be out around… early April?

After that, it’s Raven’s Blood time; that book need to be 10% punchier and 20% smoochier. Will see how that process begins before predicting outcomes, timelines and next projects.

Oh, and there’s this thing.

Image result for death of blogging

Passage through Bloglandia

‘Dead’ is too strong, but I do think the blogging medium has been pretty badly wounded by social media and podcasting. It can survive, but it’ll take effort.

This specific blog may not be quite dead, but it’s been on life support for years, edging closer and closer to the point where its children pull the plug despite euthanasia being illegal, and hang on I’m sorry this metaphor has gotten away from me.

Anyway, it’s long past time that I make a decision about whether this blog continues, and I actually put in some effort to writing more than four posts a year, or whether I shutter it, focus the PODcom site on project blurbs and sales links, and just spray my fragmented meandering bullshit on Facebook and Twitter from now on.

Ultimately, though, it’s not my decision, gentle reader – it’s yours, assuming that a) you exist and b) you have a strong opinion on the matter. If you meet both those criteria, please leave a comment and share your thoughts. If you neither care nor exist – and frankly, I suspect the audience of this site is 99% imaginary – then your silence will speak for you.

Wait, sorry, that sounded creepy

2020 – time for the Guru

It’s 2020, gang.

Let’s make it science fiction rather than hindsight.

Categories
character ghost raven obituarist writing

Skin deep

One notable thing about the 2010s is how many popular concepts from the 20th century are getting a revival. Some of those popular things are bad, like measles and Nazism. Others are good, like D&D and audio drama.

Let’s focus on the good for the moment. It’s a great time for RPG actual play podcasts, also known as ‘let’s listen to total strangers playing D&D for two hours as if that’s somehow entertaining rather than torturous’.

1000% accurate depiction of ‘Critical Role’

I kid, I kid. I used to think listening to other people roleplay was incomprehensible, but now an embarrassingly large proportion of my podcast playlist is taken up with AP ‘casts. They’re a good way to learn how other players/GMs approach games, after all – and god help me, the best of them are entertaining.

(The worst… look, it’s real easy to unsubscribe to a bad podcast 2 minutes after starting it.)

The successful ‘casts also have big fan followings – again, a concept none of us thought was possible or sane back in the day. The people, they LOVE listening to the D&D. They tweet about it. They tumble it. They patron it.

Anyway, if you check out social media activity around AP casts, or indeed any other form of audio drama/comedy/etc., the number one thing that comes through is that listeners, desperately, desperately want to know what these characters look like.

And that baffles me.

—

The thing I find least interesting, the thing I skip over in any book, the fast-forward-or-fuck-it-delete-the-whole-thing trigger in any audio medium… it’s what people look like. It’s descriptions of clothing. Of facial features. Of ohfuckmedead hair colour. Tell me about the character’s ringlets and freckles and I’m putting down the book/’cast in favour of strong drink.

Look, I get it. I know I’m wrong. I’m the weird one here. It’s utterly natural for human beings, a species that (mostly) uses sight as their primary way of perceiving all of existence, to want that sense reflected in their fiction.

But fuuuuuuuuuck it bores me.

I blame Raymond Chandler, as I often do. He taught me that you could describe characters through metaphor and simile without ever specifying what colour pants they were wearing. Consider lines like:

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.

She had eyes like strange sins.

(Yes, I know Chandler described people more thoroughly at other times, and even what they were wearing. Don’t blow up my spot, I’m on a roll.)

I read lines like that at an impressionable age, too young or dumb to register Chandler’s misanthropy, misogyny, homophobia or general shittiness as a person, and they stuck with me. To the point where I struggle to engage with any prose or audio that takes the time to spell out all the details, and to where I look at fanart and clamourings for ‘official’ artwork of podcast characters as some kind of missive from an alternate reality that I would prefer not to visit, thank you.

—

The principle holds true in my writing. The best description I ever wrote of a character was ‘He had a face like a stab’. That suggests not only what the character looks like (sort of), it speaks to his personality and attitude – and to the personality and thought processes of the narrator that described him.

(I abandoned the project that included that description. But I swear I’ll use it again someday.)

But here’s the thing, and the reason why this is a blog post rather than a grumpy tweet – I realise this might be a problem. That readers – the readers I want to obtain and retain – like knowing what people look like. Especially in YA fiction, which I have decided to keep plugging away at like a punch-drunk bantamweight too concussed to know when to quit.

(Hmm. Might keep that Chandlerism too.)

So with Raven’s Blood, I started working on describing characters more. I’m not sure I succeeded. But as I start planning the next, hopefully final revision pass through that MS in a hope of finding it a home, and indeed to start writing the next novel, descriptions – of characters, clothing, places – are something I’m trying to focus on. And to find some middle ground between a five-word simile and a page-long then I looked in the mirror and listed all of my cute identifying traits monologue. Surely I can manage that.

(As for The Obituarist series… Kendall Barber’s skinny, bald and missing some fingers. And honestly I’m not sure he’s that skinny any more, 5-6 years on. I couldn’t tell you any more than that, and I hope you don’t ask.)

So that’s where my head is right now. Chime in with a comment if you’re so inclined. How important are visual descriptions or depictions to you? Do you feel the need to imagine what characters look like? And what kind of descriptive shorthand (if any) works for you?

—

BORING PRODUCTIVITY UPDATE: We moved house in the long gap between this post and the last, and I took a lot of concentration-destroying painkillers to cope with a knee injury.

But now we’re settled, I’m (mostly) off the drugs and walking straight, and I’m past the halfway mark on The Obituarist III. Which is proving to have a remarkable number of scenes in which Kendall is just wandering around without pants on.

Don’t blame me. I’m just a vessel for his truth.

Categories
blogging obituarist

This year

I’ve been listening to The Mountain Goats a lot this year.

I discovered them very late – only a couple of years ago, when I was told about their wrestling-themed album Beat the Champ. I checked it out because, you know, wrestling, and I found a lot to like, so I started dipping my toes in some of their other works.

Still, it’s only been in the last few weeks that I went further into their back catalogue, and only about a week ago when I listened to their 2005 album The Sunset Tree, and the song ‘This Year’. Like a lot of John Darnielle’s songs, it’s autobiographical to some extent, and based in surviving life with his abusive stepfather. (Given my own father issues, it’s no wonder his songs strike a chord with me.)

Anyway, the song has a short but powerful chorus:

I am going to make it
through this year
if it kills me

That got into my head. And wouldn’t come out.

On Thursday, four days ago, I found out that the Melbourne Writers Festival was running a literary tattoo parlour over the weekend.

And forty hours later, this happened.

—

The last couple of years have been rough for me. 2017 was pretty much lost to depression and self-doubt; 2018 has been lost to day-job workload, which has dropped slightly since July but not as much as I had hoped. That’s two years where I’ve struggled to find the motivation or energy to do any writing; two years where I’ve been contemplating whether it’s worth bothering to write any more at all.

The anti-depressants helped – I’ve stopped taking them now, but I haven’t fallen back into that hole and I don’t think I will again. The prospect of a less insane workload has helped, even though it hasn’t arrived yet.

And I think this will help. Having a pocket pep-talk that I can look to, day after day, in case I need it. Which I probably will.

—

But it’s not only that.

For a long time I’ve been hung up on ideas of preparedness and perfection. I’ve told myself that there’s no point in writing right at the moment, because I need to get the idea right, do more research, find the voice – hold back, don’t rush, wait a while. And that’s led to doing nothing much in 2018 except being indecisive, playing video games and going to bed early.

Then I went from zero to new tattoo in less than two days, and a tattoo of lyrics I’d heard only recently at that. Which reminded me that I don’t have to hold back until everything is perfect; sometimes right now is better than perfect. And it reminded me that I can actually be decisive – that I like being decisive, and getting shit done.

I like it more than stasis, that’s for fucking sure.

In the immortal words of actual cannibal Shia Labeouf:

—

I’d love to say ‘no more faffing about, back to writing immediately!’, but that’s not how it works. I still have a ludicrous workload to manage until at least the end of November, and there are too many days when I literally don’t have time to write.

But there are also days when I have some time. And I’m ready to use that time.

The Obituarist III has been half-done for god, too freakin’ long now. I probably need about 30-odd hours to finish the core draft, then another 10-15 hours of revision and polishing once my editor and readers are done with it. That’s not so long that I can’t get it done before the end of the year.

So that’s the new plan. And I’m going to keep quiet on here until that plan comes through – there’s not much value in sporadic low-content blogging before that point, after all. Not when I could use that time to get the job done.

—

I think this is it for new tattoos for a while, and for Mountain Goats tatts in particular. I don’t want to be one of those guys who’s just too into The Mountain Goats. You know the type.

But still.

I’m going to make it through this year.

If it kills me.

Categories
obituarist writers

Dead Machines and living robots

Hey friends,

Just a quick post, as I am SUPER CRAZY EXHAUSTED tonight, to say that I was interviewed a little while ago by author and game designer Filamena Young – and that interview is now live on her author page!

It’s here, specifically!

This was a fun interview, and by ‘interview’ I mean that she asked me a handful of questions and then I rambled and swore like one of those blokes who huff paint down the back of Aldi on a Saturday night.

Wrestling, the digital afterlife industry, the way a text can change when read by a different audience, robots, sex robots… it’s all there, man.

The interview was done as part of the digital release party for Filamena’s new novel Dead Machines, a book about giant robots, motherhood and ghosts, and I for one am very intrigued by that spicy combo platter. You can find more about it here, and buy it from all the good ebook stores and probably most of the crappy ones do. So maybe go do that.

Hope y’all enjoy the interview – I might see if I can return the favour and ask Filemena a few in return. It’s been too damn long since I had an interview on here.

And with that, BED BEFORE 8.30 PM SEACREST OUT

Categories
obituarist

CTRL-ALT-Undelete

As I said last time, it’s been almost six months since I had the energy, the focus or the basic self-confidence to do any writing.

I’m not sure that I have any of those things back.

But I’m tired of waiting for them to return. Time to get back to work.

So, in the interests of holding my feet to the fire, here’s an initial teaser from The Obituarist III: Delete Your Account. See? It’s a thing that could eventually exist.

 

—

ONE

I was the only person at Benny Boorns’ funeral.

Seriously, the only person. Not even a priest to give a service. Just me, sweltering in my black suit, standing at the side of the grave and wondering how long I had to stay there before I could leave. Theoretically I could go at any point; it’s not like I would miss anything. But there were a couple of gravediggers loitering at the edge of the cemetery, smoking and waiting to fill in the hole, and I didn’t want to bug out too quickly in case they judged me for it.

I feel like gravediggers are probably the judgey type.

I moved to the left to get under the shade of a tree and away from the morning sun. It should have been cold, dark and rainy; that’s how funerals work on TV, and what can you trust if you can’t trust television? But the weather didn’t give a damn about Benny, or me, and so it was hot, bright and muggy, even though it was only a little after 9am.

Seriously, who schedules a funeral this early in the day, and during the week? Is that why no-one else showed up? Or did the cemetery manager know that no-one would show up, and thus schedule the funeral for the matinee session, leaving the peak-attendance spots for dead people that the living gave a shit about?

Bah. I was just marking time for show at this point.

I looked down into the grave at Benny’s coffin. It wasn’t one of the giant fancy ones that’s covered in silver filigree and takes six men to carry it; it was plain and it was small, an economy child’s coffin, like a black wooden packing crate that might have held a bar fridge. Benny had been a small man, his growth stunted and twisted by a smorgasbord of birth defects and congenital health issues. His wheelchair weighed twice what he had, and they hadn’t bothered to bury it with him. Kind of a shame; at least that way he could have ridden to the afterlife instead of having to crawl.

Fuck, this was a morbid start to the day. I needed coffee and escape from the presence of death.

‘I know I should say something sad and poignant, Benny,’ I said to the coffin, ‘but it’d just annoy you and make me look stupid. So let’s just call it a day, alright?’ And with that I turned and headed for the cemetery gates.

The gravediggers – burial ground custodian is, I believe, the formal job title – stirred to life, walking back towards the grave as I pulled out my phone to get an Uber. One stomped past me, not bothering to conceal that he was still finishing his breakfast McMuffin, but the other still retained some sense of shame, possibly from a Catholic upbringing, and stopped for a moment. ‘I’m, ah, sorry about your friend. I guess his other friends all had to go to work.’

‘Benny didn’t have any friends,’ I said. ‘He was a really unpleasant, antagonistic person and nobody liked him.’

‘Oh. Well, I mean… you liked him, right?’

‘No, I can’t say that I did. But someone had to come and see him off. Might as well be me.’

The gravedigger – sorry, custodian – seemed both confused and offended by what I said, as though a statue of the Madonna had farted in church. ‘Christ, this fucking town,’ he muttered, and went to join his friend in dirt-piling detail.

This fucking town indeed. No argument from me.

—

More to come.

Hopefully soon.