… Or Female Representation and OG Daniel’s Nemesis

Deidre also gets up and blocks my way to the door in a desperate attempt to stop me from leaving. Yet I become vaguely aware that Deidre has actually left her body behind, perhaps in the bath, perhaps not, but that this is some kind of vision of her.

Welcome back to the Daniel’s Nemesis Podcast. Yes, I have the word 'podcast' in my name. Reading Chapter 9 - Ginger Gets Confused. And also, Chapter 10 - William Takes a break.

This is a book that was written at the end of the Nineties and into the beginning of the Noughties. You could get away with saying more things back then. So, I’m very much looking forward to knowing how what seemed innocent back then will get me cancelled in a couple of years time. What hasn’t changed is that this book was shit back then and is still shit today.

Have you ever had that drunken night when you are hungry but there’s only scraps in the fridge? Your genius mind thinks that if you put that with this, and a dollop of thus, and what you have is at best serviceable even by your drunken standards.

Well, this is the literary equivalent of that. Take the First World War. A serious subject that should not be taken lightly. Add in an alien invasion and a huge amount of backstory of that alien race. Because a sci-fi B-story mixes well with human tragedy, right? Well, we need a dollop of something, let’s just say surrealism and a big dollop of that as well. Because, dollops are fun, yeah? Season it with a socially awkward undergraduate student as the author, and… oh, that’s too much seasoning. Well, there’s nothing left in the fridge. Got to go with what I have. Serviceable at the very, very best. And I wasn’t even drunk when making this. I was overly sincere in my writing of this.

Well, let’s leave it to settle. Shall we say fifteen years? Then let’s come back and take a peek at this masterwork - and that is the premise of this podcast. I wrote a book, and now I’m older, I’m reading it out and tearing it apart afterwards.

Anyway, what have we missed so so far? William has been talking all about the past and, well, he's only just ended up at the present as he begins an invasion of the Earth. Whereas Ginger's gone away on leave. But that only lasted a night as he gets called off his leave to, you know, sort out this pesky invasion.

So, please remember:

This is fiction,

Always fiction.

Logic is as

Logic does

General Notes

So some things just don't date well. Some things don't date at all. Ginger wanting to push his girlfriend over is not something I'm proud of writing. We are all post #MeToo, and if anything should ever get cut that would be it. It should never have been written in the first place. But the fact is that, if I'm being honest with you, then I need to admit to this. It was merely a reference to the way that young boys don't know how to deal with their feelings and end up just being bullies towards the ones that they like. But in this day and age, things are not always going to get interpreted like that. Well, I found out what's going to cancel me. Thank God nobody listens to this podcast.  

Whilst we are on the subject, is it fair to say that I haven’t passed the Bechdel-Wallace test yet? In case you don’t know, that’s a test where two women manage to have a conversation about something other than a man. The test sometimes requires the two women to have a name. As a test, the bar is set very low. With Dee being our only female, she does at least have a name. But I am far away from even having a second unnamed woman for her to have a conversation with, let alone what that conversation would be about. Well, another female’s name is mentioned. And she is literally just a name. I guess that’s my nod to female representation in this book. 

Yes, the bar for the test is low. In terms of doing the high jump, I’ve merely crawled into the bar, knocking it off. 

Me, women, women’s representation, how I understood women was all very mwaurgh back then. Not that anything bad happened, nor did I do anything bad. I feel I have always been respectful towards women, just I was very shy then and with very, very limited real interactions of a social kind. 

I just want it put out there that I could have written Dee very much better. But, rather than let Dee speak for herself, I covered her in Ginger’s visualisations, perhaps not being aware at the time that this may just have been a way to mask the fact that I didn’t know how to write women. After all, Flight Lieutenant Johnson doesn’t get this treatment - he doesn’t get a mask put over him. To be fair, I did have my reasons, and we should wait for more chapters to see how Ginger deals with others, so let's just move on from that topic for now. 

Conflict, let’s talk about conflict. Ginger needs to begin his mission, leaving Dee back at the cottage. Dee is unhappy and Ginger has to convince her. This is the dramatic tension going into the chapter and it has been set up nice and early for once. I must have been off my game at that point in the book. How dare I get straight to the point of a chapter? Where’s the crazy pointlessness first? And there is further conflict - Ginger now has to convince Dee that aliens are real. Ginger, for his part, seems to have readily accepted the existence of aliens through just a telegram. Dee blocks him, reminding him that it’s his holidays and appeals to his earlier goal of getting some time off and recuperating. 

Ginger has entered the story which is why he is happy to forgo that earlier goal. The story has noticed and is now accommodating him by allowing him to be part of structured story events. Wow, little goals, meaningful(?) interactions. Mini-arcs. Ginger can finally begin showing the character he is and might be in the future. He can be active. A bit late to the game, but perhaps we now have a character that Syd Field, Blake Snyder, John Mckee, Linda Aronson, John Truby might all be able to recognise as a character in its embryonic form. 

Possibly?

In other words, more crafting needs to be done, and Ginger is not a character at the beginning of his journey. 

Okay, so the conflict is resolved quite easily, but at least we see Ginger resort to reason, placating Dee. 

A short chapter. I guess that’s what happens when I focus on narrative events and character interactions. Short and brief. And William’s chapter is even shorter. But, unless you count the lightbulb, what interactions is he having? I guess you are really beginning to feel that all the surrealism and exposition is truly padding at this point. Well, so am I. If all the chapters went at this pace, I’d be looking at a novella. More than a short story, but definitely not novel length. I didn’t really have much to say about human interactions at this point in my life, did I? There certainly are no observations about the human condition. 

I remember, after graduating university, being asked by a friend’s dad if I had much to say about life as I lacked true life experience. Well, of course I had lots of life experience, hadn’t I? I thought. 

Boy, was I wrong. 

Even at my age now, I still feel very naive about life and the world. Yet, even I can see just how green I was then. Neon-green. I must have broadcast my lack of life so strongly. No wonder I was taken advantage of so much at school.

Neither of these are the most important chapters, and both could get cut without much notice. (SIGHING) I mean, how many times have I said that? And we haven’t even reached the second act. Should that be my catchphrase? My T-shirt slogan? But the first of today’s chapters is worthy of note, purely for the fact that we finally see Ginger do something. And William do nothing. 

Well, if you want, let’s go into the Psychologist’s Chair. 

The Psychologist’s Chair

We can take the bath as being my symbolic need for cleanliness. 

Dee is in the bath, and this is enough to represent purity, but leaving her body in the bath and having her non-corporeal form confront Ginger can be seen as purity in its essence and —

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

(TALKS OVER HOST FOR THE DURATION)

Fuck all this shit. And can we tone down this “out of time” vocal effect. I’m not coming from another dimension, or a different time period, I’m just the old neurons in the later Daniel’s Nemesis firing back up. 

I’ve complained. I’ve vocalised my objections. I’m forced into speech patterns I didn’t actually have back then. But I’m here to say something now. This is no longer the Daniel’s Nemesis Podcast, but the OG Daniel’s Nemesis. 

This is not a book, it’s an expression. It’s an expression of me. 

What happened is that I had my mind awoken by a surrealist film. I was made aware of the fact that anything is possible. There were multiple films all made at a similar time that employed strong artistic methods to tell their stories, and the only limit is their imagination. And I soaked up as many of them as either my wallet would allow, or shops would stock. What Melies did to expand the world of visual storytelling is beyond fantastic, and film as a technology was less than ten years old at this time. Soviet Montage redefined editing and truly broke down the camera as narrator, allowing the viewer the power to construct their own meaning and narrative. Surrealism took away the narrative and focused on desire. Expressionism changed the way that we look at the world. Impressionism stopped us looking at the exterior of a character and allowed us to see inside them. Film, as an art form, explored. It allowed itself freedom, and the market soaked it up. The experiments in Europe had their impact on Hollywood through Griffith taking the lessons from Soviet Montage and crafting those lessons into edited narrative. Surrealism found its way into the comedies of Chaplin and Keaton. Expressionism evolved into Film Noir. Aspects of all these art forms were combined. But in the 20’s, though the film language we recognise today was still being formed, American film was still in its Wild West period and was creative. 

I loved knowing the history of film. Circumstances meant that I had to read more about these amazing films than watch them as I had no way to access the vast majority of them. My imagination for what these films were like and what they looked like filled me with such wonder at the unknown possibilities. This is why the Internet makes me sad today. Everything can just be known. Content is shat out for the sake of having another video for the kiddies to soak up. 

What I did have access to was music. Music was going through big reinvention. Rock had morphed into the majesty of post-rock where self-indulgence was indulged. Godspeed you Black Emperor, Stars of the Lid, Mogwai. Electronic music had started to really innovate through Warp Records, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher. Old forms like musique concrète were poking their heads back in. Everybody was manipulating sounds as sonic architects. Technology allowed music to be more creative than ever before, and it was a glorious time if you dug around in record shops. 

I lived in a world where expression was dominant. Not fake crying as you make yet another apology video, but real fucking expression of how you see the world. The popular world may not have embraced that, but I created my little hovel and soaked up as much imagination as I could, and when I couldn’t, I poured out my own. 

I wanted to be like that which I consumed. I wanted to produce writing where imagination was the dominant narrative form. I wanted to create visual worlds without a camera. I wanted to soundtrack my world to the 20-minute long music pieces I wrote to. 

I had such hopes for this book. I felt this was great. I knew it lacked. I knew it needed a bit of extra shaping to get it to its perfect form. I hoped an editor would get me over that hurdle. 

Scenes like the ones you’ve just heard are there for a reason. Their meaning will become apparent. Maybe you need to finish the story and come back to scenes like these to understand why they were there. But they had a reason. Not every chapter was moulded by my imagination first. True, these chapters existed before the punk redraft of the book, and the later polished magical realism version that you are reading. But, by now, I had an arc in my head. I knew where certain aspects of the story were going, and rather than get rid of a scene that seemingly had no structural point, I reshaped it into part of a plot that revolved around Dee instead. Or I wanted to give William something extra to stop him just being the foil to Ginger.

My idea of storytelling is laying down all these strings. They cross over at times, go in their own directions at other times, but they are all connected and tied together at some point in the story. Every subplot, or length of string, is there for a reason. 

Dee needs relevance. She needs a purpose in this book. I was crafting that. 

William has a dream. That scene, short as it is, is very, very important if you take the time to think about it. It also needs completing the book to understand properly. 

So, I wrote this book. It was different. I was happy with the end result.

But what happens? What happens when you have a rough diamond that is different to the norm? 

You send it off to publishers, to agents. But they only want solicited books, books that are finished, but books they have asked for. The best I can do is a one-page synopsis and either 30 pages or a chapter. How does any of that represent what I have sewn together? Which chapter best represents my writing? Which 30 pages will appeal to a person I have never met? A chapter in isolation doesn’t tell you anything of what the book is, a synopsis can’t even begin to express the imagination or expressionism involved. They want the first chapter? The first 30 pages? But this book builds, not just in story or character development, but in tone. How do you get that across? A promise to the publisher that the book gets better, and I’m not just saying that because (CHILDLIKE) I want you to believe me.

The early 2000’s was already a time when publishers wanted safe books. Books they knew they could sell because they would only sell books that were similar to what the market wanted. I’m from the countryside. I didn’t know anyone in publishing or media or anything. I knew people who worked in Woolworth’s. I knew students who studied film at university then went into something completely far away from anything media. 

Social media didn’t exist then. It took five minutes to open a picture online, how could you get known through the Internet? I was a nobody. 

I hadn’t given up on being a writer. I did the only thing I could think of. Go back to university, though now I was a bit more interested in scriptwriting. The intention of writing novels hadn’t disappeared, but the basic mechanics of a story are just that, regardless of how they are presented, and scriptwriting made sense with my film degree. 

I wish I hadn’t. That experience drained me. (FAKE ENTHUSIASM) We did roundtables! Each week, we’d write a bit of our plan, and then it would be discussed. A plan! As I was always the first to hand in my work, my work was always discussed first. As it was first, it would have the longest discussion. Imagine, two hours of people dissecting your stuff, making suggestions, saying what didn’t work, but not having a clue what was in your mind. Many didn’t even get their work looked at that week. I envied them. They could just get on with their writing untarnished with multiple, conflicting suggestions. It was exhausting for me. I’d go away so confused with ten other people’s input. Rather than develop my ideas, I was developing theirs, and I couldn’t write ten people’s ideas of my own story. And more and more, I was just given the idea that the industry doesn’t want quirky or different. 

I left with a degree. MySpace existed, but I didn’t see it as anything more than a gimmick. I wrote another unpublished book, this time without anyone looking at it, and then left the UK. Leaving, I seemed to have left my dreams behind. 14 years later, I reawaken. But now the world is Marvel and Superhero focused. Smaller and Indie films are really pushed to the side. YouTube critics only focus on films that are popular so that more people will click on their videos. Even the critics I admire have no idea of the actual history of film before the 70’s or 80’s and foreign films don’t exist to them unless they are Japanese and animated. Even Kurosawa is a weird and strange concept to them. 

I reawaken and Terry Pratchett is dead. Books are awful. I know their tone and how they will be before even looking at the first page because the book publishing industry is so safe. Authors don’t write their own books, the publishers tell them what they have to write. 

I reawaken, and the Internet gives me the opportunity to be me. But it’s such a fight now. This safe, mundane, capitalist, conservatist conformity makes the likes of me even more underground than I ever was. 

And then this aged fucker is trashing me, and he’s supposed to be me. 

I reawaken and he immediately suppressed me again for four and a half years. Check the dates - that one podcast released in 2019 was recorded in 2016. I appeared, and the podcast died. Is he afraid of me? Is he afraid of who he used to be?

Do you know why I’m called Daniel’s Nemesis? My Nemesis is the darkness within me. It came out in my writing but threatened to take over my actual life, so I needed… I needed to create a space to let the darkness within me come out without affecting my actual life. But now? Now my Nemesis is conformity. I was always afraid of getting old and fitting in. But it seems I have done that. My Nemesis now is everything I have become. I need to fight to get myself back. I need to fight to … well, it’s just always a fight. I need to fight to not give up. It turns out giving up was easier than I imagined. I need to fight back from having given up. 

Thank you for listening to me. I needed my say as it’s my book you are reading. I’ll let the old fart continue again. He thinks this podcast is just a replacement for never having the chance to be a stand-up comedian. Let’s see what joke he has for us. 

HOST:

So, in a way, as a society, we’ve all been pushed into the puddle by Ginger. 

Are any of us actually that pure? 

OG DN:

Sigh

HOST:

Hmm? 

Well, I shall leave things there. 

What have we got to look forward to next time? 

Well, Ginger pours ketchup on his arm. Yes, I did say that. Next time, Ginger pours ketchup on his arm. He also looks at some photos. 

Until next time, TTFN!

And just in case you were wondering, all text was written by me, Daniel’s Nemesis, and XBook is purely a work of fiction and is not meant to be based on anyone or any events at all. 

The music was also by me, Daniel’s Nemesis, as was the image that accompanies this podcast. 

It sucks, doesn’t it? 

But there we go.