Saturday 30 April 2022

The late, great... Spike Milligan

    A literary hero of mine whom I’ve been revisiting a bit recently is the wonderful Spike Milligan. Born in India in 1918 and serving in the British Army during the Second World War, Milligan was a keen jazz trumpeter who seemed to drift into anarchic forms of humorous entertainment as a response to his experiences in the horror of war, most notably as the frontman of the Goon Show which ran on the BBC radio channels from 1951 and was how I first encountered him, first at the insistence of my father and then at university where my social group held him as a cult icon.





I think the thing that I admire most about Milligan is that he just went for it. So often, especially in modern creativity, there is a great deal of reserve and a feeling that one should be mindful of others’ feelings. I can’t help but feel that this, from a creative point of view, can be exceedingly detrimental and indeed unhealthy. 

Art needs to be passionate. 

Art needs to come from the heart. 

Art often needs to challenge. 

These are things that Milligan definitely did. He railed against authority and all the blind stupidity of social superiors as can be seen in his books about his time in the army. He swung completely the other way from the regimented life of the soldier to the anarchic form of entertainment that we saw in The Goons and then later on in his solo work, some of which is so far off the wall as to be almost unintelligible, yet still bizarrely hilarious.






However, this brash personalty covered a deeply traumatised individual who seriously struggled with his mental health. He suffered from bipolar disorder and apparently had numerous mental breakdowns. This can be seen in his vast collection of poetry. On one hand, many verses are guaranteed to make the reader weep with sadness, feeling futile that there is nothing they can do to help this troubled man. On the other, the reader will be weeping with uncontrolled mirth at the small, precise witticism which has effortlessly flown from Milligan’s mind.


The one thing, though, that for me really illustrates Milligan’s creativity is a story he told in an interview a few years before his death in 2002. He said how he used to leave letters from fairies at the bottom of his garden for his children to find. This resonated with me so much! There, for me was the real Spike Milligan, an individual who found wonder in the little things and wanted to pass that on to the next generation. A true wonder of the modern literary world.




Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.


ASC.

Sunday 24 April 2022

Writer's Block (It's not what you think it is...)

 If you go online and peruse the numerous writers’ groups on social media and the like, there is one topic that is likely to crop up more than anything else: the dreaded writer’s block. There will normally be at least one member of a forum or group bewailing the fact that they are suffering from the affliction and that they cannot drag even the slightest word or description out of their brain. 





So, without wanting to sound over harsh here, I want to say categorically that I feel writer’s block is something which we tend to inflict upon ourselves. It could very well be completely subconscious, but I do feel that there can be a tendency amongst the writing community to feel that at some point in your life you have to have suffered from The Block. It’s as if it is a rite of passage that all future great writers have to endure on their path to fame and fortune.


The thing that I find most oxymoronic about the whole thing is that writers who go onto social media to write that they have writer's block are doing the very thing that they say they cannot, at that moment in time, do — they are writing. Sure, it may just be to bewail their current condition, but isn’t ninety per cent of writing that anyway? The greatest works out there are the writer commenting on their own state of life or those around them.


I was once told, many years ago, by an author who led a local writing circle, that writer’s block does not exist. He felt that if we could not write something about a particular topic, then we were simply writing about the wrong thing. I wholeheartedly agree with this. All too often, those trying to break into the writing business start off trying to write something that they feel will get them published rather than something about which they are knowledgable or which they enjoy. This leads to them hitting a wall when things just dry up or they get bored. Writing is an art form; art is expressive. If the writer wants to pursue this art then they need to write about that which burns within themselves. If they do this they will never run out of material to explore and enjoy.




Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.


ASC.



Friday 15 April 2022

Short Story - Dog Days

 Welcome to this month’s short story where Yours Truly reads the short, quirky zombie story, Dog Days.





This particular story was one of those sit down and write it in one session stories. I was in the process of compiling a selection of short stories for my first anthology Oh Taste And See and decided that I was a few short, so spent a few days bashing out some random ideas that I had bouncing around in my head. One such idea was centring a story around a zombie dog. I decided that I wanted a character that would be gruesome to behold but would be devoted to its creator. I then started to ponder about what said owner might want to do with their new found zombie. The obvious sprang to mind: eliminate someone who let their dog defecate everywhere and eradicate the annoying kids from next door.


Okay, so obvious to me…


As a result, Dog Days  was born.


Fun fact, I normally see this story in a cartoon panels when I’m reading it, with the diary writing protagonist looking somewhat like Dennis the Menace’s dad from the Beano. In fact, at some point I would love to see it turned into a mini comic strip, but that would require me to have a few more hours in the day than I actually posses. So, for now, it remains in Oh Taste and See and the Macabre Collection: Volume One, both of which there are links to here should you be tempted to purchase a copy.



Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.


Take care and keep looking out for what lurks in the shadows…

A.S.Chambers.

Saturday 9 April 2022

Spalluccipedia: Kanor

 Welcome to this month’s little Spalluccipedia article. Today, I want to have a chat about the big bad of Sam’s world, the hooded, brooding figure that is Kanor.





For me, something that can really make a story is having a good villain of the piece, whether it be your Lex Luthor or Kingpin of the comic world or, say, a Sauron of a more literary universe. One thing, though, that really gets the audience to connect to the villain, is understanding why they do what they do. We see that with the above-mentioned adversaries and, as Sam’s world progresses, we start to get hints of that with Kanor. As I say in the video, this is a person who halted paradise. He stopped heaven and Earth from becoming one. Surely he had to have a very good reason?


His creative origins go back to my teenage years when I was writing stories about this vampire called Claw who was battling through a post-apocalyptic land in order to take out its ruler, Kanor. These stories, over the years, have morphed into the Bobby Normal series and the Divergent Lands series and, as we travel through the post-Divergence land that Kanor created, we see that it truly is a horrible place in which to live as a human. 


One thing that I am really enjoying doing with the big bad of the Spallucciverse is leaving a breadcrumb trail of clues as to his identity. I would love to hear your theories in the comments below.



Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.


Take care and keep looking out for what lurks in the shadows…

A.S.Chambers.


Monday 4 April 2022

A.S.Chambers - April Roundup

Good morning all on a rather chilly first of April.

First, all pre-orders, Kickstarter rewards and Book Club editions of my latest book If Ye Loathe Me have been mailed out. These should be dropping through mail flaps over the next few days, so watch out for them. Selfies with books would be greatly appreciated over on my Facebook Page.





Second, it's been busy few days this weekend as I was over at Doncaster for Doncaster Unleashed Comic Con on Sunday. I had an absolutely cracking time and had a hoot being interviewed live on stage with my good chum Kelvin V A Allison. Who knew that pigeons could be so traumatic???

Third, I have entered the world of Reddit. For now, I'm using it as a convenient place to list all my monthly blog and YouTube posts, but, who knows, it might expand as I explore it. You can find me there at https://www.reddit.com/user/ASChambersAuthor/posts/

Fourth, my next Kickstarter launches on April 23rd. This one is for the third in the series of the Bobby Normal books. There will be, as usual, some cracking rewards with chances to bag some amazing artwork, journals and copies of older books that you need to fill your collection. Make sure you’re following me over on Kickstarter to receive a notification when it launches. 

Annnnnnd finally… did you know that I have a monthly newsletter that goes out via email. It is the easiest way to stay up-to-date with everything I do and write. You can sign up in less than a minute here.


Don’t forget to visit my website www.aschambers.co.uk for more details about my books. 

You can subscribe to my newsletter here for up-to-date details regarding all my writing and appearances.

You can check out my Patreon Book Club for advance screenings of my videos and free books.

Right, that's all for now.


Stay safe and I'll see you again very soon.

ASC