Well, 2017 was more or less a write-off as far as my writing was concerned; hoping for a write-on this year, if there is such a thing.

Not that the whole year was wasted. I did much work patching up the relationship with the Beloved Other, and more work putting ghosts to rest in my own head. This partly explains why I was never able to produce for more than a few days at a time; that, and a general want of mental maintenance. The last couple of months, I have been taking apart, cleaning, repairing, and reassembling all the instruments of my own internal orchestra; new strings for the fiddles, new reeds for the woodwinds, new thingumbobs for the doohickeys in the whatchamacallum section. (Is exploding TNT a percussion or a wind instrument? Depends where the gas comes out.) At present the band is tuning up and doing finger exercises, and it sounds as ghastly as that always does.

This week, the Beloved Other began a highly accelerated program of studies at an institution which I shall choose to call Rectocranial Polytechnic, or Wreck Tech for short. It is the kind of institution that Canada, it appears, excels at producing, where the faculty are highly accomplished practitioners in their field, but have long forgotten what it is like to be a raw beginner, and what their students need to be taught, which doesn’t much matter because they don’t know how to teach anyway. Nevertheless, Wreck Tech has a shining reputation for turning out good technicians in many fields. I attribute this chiefly to the industry and initiative and cooperative ingenuity of the students, who seem to have an admirable knack for doing through the grapevine what their instructors should have done in class. At least that is my impression so far.

A minor but typical example of how things are done at Wreck Tech: When you start out as a student, you are assigned a Wreck Tech email account with a default password. This is all well and good. The password is emailed to your Wreck Tech email, which you cannot open without the password. You could not ask for a more classic instance of what I call ‘Can Opener in a Can’.

(‘Yes, I did want a can opener, but now I need another can opener to open the can that the can opener is in.’—‘I can sell you another one.’—‘Is that one in a can, too?’—‘Of course. Can openers always come in cans.’—‘May worms rot all your insides, and may the Great Bird of Corruption come to feast on them and eat your innards instead and leave the worms behind.’)

It took a good deal of effort to get round that one. There is, fortunately, a PDF in the bowels of the Wreck Tech web servers that explains how the default password is constructed for each student, and I was able to find it by a modest application of Google-fu. Needless to say, that information was not given out to the students, either in printed or electronic form. It was left hidden in the monstrous and unnavigable depths of the website.

Institutional buildings are infamous for their bad design and baffling layout, but they are nothing compared to institutional websites. There are physical limits to how convoluted and inaccessible a building can be: for instance, it is not actually possible to build an office block in the shape of a Klein bottle. But the arcane complexity of a computer system is limited only by the diabolical imagination of the designer; and so much better if the designer does not have to use it himself.

Anyway, the Beloved Other is beginning to get the hang of things at Wreck Tech, and I am beginning to have time for my own work again. I wish you all (3.6 Loyal Readers and sundry visitors) a happy and prosperous New Year, and I hope and intend to have some new writing for you soon.

I am heartily glad to see my 3.6 Loyal Readers still here (and with their fractional numbers apparently augmented), and thank you all for your kind comments, and for welcoming me back to active blogging. Your warm reception gives me the courage I need to keep working.

There is, alas, yet another unexpected delay on the Superversive collection. Part II of that book is a survey of seminal works in epic fantasy (portions freely adapted from my 1977 series of posts some years back), with a view to identifying the cause of the growing gap (in my judgement) between what epic fantasy can be and what it too often is. It appears obvious now, in not-quite-hindsight, that my recent piece, ‘Gormenghast and the Great Tradition’, has got to be included in that section; but it will want editing for the purpose, because some of the same ground is covered in Part I.

It also seems to me that I need to explain why it is epic fantasy particularly that I choose as my particular topic for that book, given that virtually any kind of literature (except, perhaps, outright pornography) can be done in a superversive way. The short answer is that epic fantasy offers a big canvas, bold colours, and a great variety of ways in which the moral choices of the characters can directly affect the world around them. These qualities make a story more entertaining, and they also lend themselves naturally to the business of ‘superversion’. It is, of course, convenient that for me, they also make for enjoyable reading and fluent writing; my own ideas for stories nearly always present themselves in that form. I could as easily make my points about some other kind of fiction, but I could not, perhaps, make them so clearly. Even this short answer, as you can see, begins to ramify itself and raise more questions; and so I am having to write a long introductory chapter to explain myself and ‘situate’ the reader.

A couple of small items of late news: A gentleman by the name of Bob Gassel inquires about my series on M*A*S*H, and wants to know if I am going to finish it off and give him some closure. I am happy to say that I have always intended that, and sheepish to admit that it has fallen by the wayside among many cares. Over the holidays, I hope to make time to binge-watch selected episodes from the last seasons of that series, and write a piece on what I find there. Also, I have received an offer which may possibly see one of my books translated into Spanish! My late mother would not have cared to read the book in question, but I think she would be gratified to hear of it.