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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.27.30.20
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 12:27 pm:   

I wrote 'Fragment of Life' in Nem 9, Cerne Zoo.

A pickled egg to Stephen Bacon (or perhaps he'd preferred a Fried one) for guessing right.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.27.30.20
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 12:32 pm:   

In other news, the jacketed hardcover of my PS SHOWCASE book Sanity and Other Delusions is now completely sold out.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 12:44 pm:   

Thanks, Gary, for fessing up with regard to 'Fragment of Life'. I've put a link to this admission on the time-line here:
http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_cern_zoo_page.htm

This is what I wrote about 'Fragment of Life' in my real-time review of CERN ZOO (which perhaps needs to be read in the full context of that review):

Fragment of Life

This ends the book as 'To Let' similarly ended 'CONE ZERO', ordinary life now in credit crunch Britain, and like the recession-islanded pub in 'City of Fashion', property becomes just places for ghosts rather than people. But before that process is ended, here, in 'Fragment of Life' (like one of my all-time favourites stories, i.e. 'Fragment of Life' by Arthur Machen), there is almost a wishful-thinking on my part for a mystical undercurrent to the bare necessities of prose. Yet, poignantly, not for long. This heart-rending story concerns an ordinary working-class family's engagement with childbirth. And its echo in a 'ghost' next door seen with a glass of milk. Almost unbearable. This Ghost Story (for that's what it essentially is in an original way) should be anthologised in future Ghost Story collections as one of the modern greats. I wonder if the milk is akin to that in 'The Devourer of Dreams'? I can speculate forever about some of the implications. Indeed, I feel I am witnessing here a parallel to THEORY as now discovered to be threading this whole book: the future soul trying to speak to its present soul (Dead Speaking through opposite windows in two houses) but in fatal symbiosis?

This story has one of the best last sentences of any stories I've read. So it must be one of the best last sentences of any book I've read, too! I won't quote that sentence but it seems to echo my thoughts on fatal symbiosis above: but in a perhaps more tantalising vein. Not hopeless so much as open-ended.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 02:13 pm:   

I suppose I should also fess up that I wrote Strange Scenes From An Unfinished Film in the same volume...
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 02:34 pm:   

Thanks, Zed (Gary McMahon).

Time-line updated again.

And this is what I wrote in my real-time review about your story:

Strange Scenes From An Unfinished Film

"'I'm not important. I have nothing to offer... I have no story to tell.'"

In some ways similar to 'The Devourer of Dreams', this story has power beyond its own means. It seems half-finished in itself, if not Unfinished. It also shares the fabricated (theatricalised) visions I sometimes see in "Mellie's Zoo" and "The Shadow's Departure"... and it is telling that the 'unfinished film' is on Video, i.e. a spool's slow spinning into which the protagonist is sucked as if into the (unfinished?) Collider in a similar way to how I hypothesised the sucking-into of 'Turn The Crank'. It is mysterious how it also has the power of a famous Nemonymous story of the past ("The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada") and, furthermore, the Director of the film in question in this Cern Zoo story is assassinated before his career takes off, as if the imputed author writing about it is also 'assassinated' by the story he or she is writing and that we are reading. Coupled with elements of deja-vu, this is a remarkable tale that grows on you even as it shrinks in size and diminishes into static, but the visions in its last two pages are surely sufficient recompense alone for buying Cern Zoo. (19 Oct 09 - another 2 hours later)
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 03:18 pm:   

Thanks, des. I suppose I should add that this is a sort of pseudo-sequel to my novella Rough Cut (the first book I had published).
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 03:24 pm:   

Yay!!!!

The Zed man is back!!
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.27.30.20
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 03:57 pm:   

Yeah, hijacking my thread!

Sod off again, man.

:-)
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.204.111.236
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:00 pm:   

And I wrote 'Devourer of Dreams' in Cern Zoo.

Seeing as we're all fessing together.
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Carolinec (Carolinec)
Username: Carolinec

Registered: 06-2009
Posted From: 82.38.75.85
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:03 pm:   

Ooo, I was definitely wrong then. I thought "The Devourer of Dreams" must be one of you two Garys. No-one's confessed to that one yet, have they?

Excellent stories, both - I loved them!
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Carolinec (Carolinec)
Username: Carolinec

Registered: 06-2009
Posted From: 82.38.75.85
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:03 pm:   

Ahhhh, we were posting at the same time, Steve - it was you then? Nice.
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Carolinec (Carolinec)
Username: Carolinec

Registered: 06-2009
Posted From: 82.38.75.85
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:05 pm:   

BTW I'm glad I didn't enter the "guess the author" competion in the end - I've been wrong on every one so far.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.27.30.20
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:08 pm:   

Thanks, Caroline.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:19 pm:   

And I wrote 'Devourer of Dreams' in Cern Zoo.
Seeing as we're all fessing together.

======================
Devourer of Dreams by Stephen Bacon

This is from my 'real-time review':

The Devourer of Dreams

"...the balance between madness and sanity tipping many times before I wrestled it straight."

I really think this story is even more horrific than its own author may realise and even beyond the scope of its own words. It mentions an Isle of Cern at the beginning (matching the island in the previous story) but search how you might it is only linked in some obscure corner elsewhere in the raw text to a zoo - whence the text's huge spider-like creature (that both milks others and is milked itself for dreams) derives. This story itself makes you think you are its imaginative creator by dint of reading about that creature for yourself. It's a sort of story that milks the reader to feed itself. I cannot emphasise that enough. It's circular like the Collider and your head starts spinning at the implications. Not only a shadow from the future disguised as the past but a shadow of itself made double by being you as well as itself. (19 Oct 09 - another 3 hours later)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 04:28 pm:   

Tony Lovell has already fessed up elsewhere on RCMB regarding Pebbles

From my real time review:

Pebbles

"...the clouds threatening a rain that had not yet come..."
A simply beautiful short tale of a girl collecting pink pebbles from a beach and the boy protagonist who met her. Ending with a dying fall that contains a poignant contentment at impossibility. It seems a shame to mould the meaning further than that. But did she really seek just one pebble, one particle of our existence? The story does not give the answer to that question because, I suppose, it does not ask it.
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.204.111.236
Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010 - 11:52 pm:   

Thanks very much, Caroline. Flattery indeed!
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Ian Alexander Martin (Iam)
Username: Iam

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 64.180.64.74
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 12:43 am:   

I wrote none of the stories in Cern Zoo, but I have a copy of Volume #7 and #8 on my bed-side table.

Please, please, keep the cheering down to a minimum…
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.204.111.236
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 11:55 am:   

I can also confess that I wrote 'Cone Zero' (page 147) in #8...
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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.56
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:16 pm:   

I must fess up that I wrote all the stories that noone has fessed up to yet under a series of pseudonyms.

I must also fess up that I am a compulsive bullshitter.
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:29 pm:   

Surely that falls under stating the obvious, Weber?
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.204.111.236
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:46 pm:   

I might try an fess up that I wrote the anonymous story from Nemonymous 2, 'The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada', but I think that someone else who posts on here might take exception to that...
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:53 pm:   

Categorically, nobody who visits RCMB wrote 'The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada'.
des
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:55 pm:   

The title sounds like Jonathan Carroll to me... am I right?
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:55 pm:   

When I say 'visits', that of course excludes any non-posting lurkers of whom I would be unaware.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 03:57 pm:   

Stephen, the author of that story wanted anonymity in perpetuo, but what I say above about not 'visiting' RCMB is strictly something I should not have said as it reduces the number of writers it could be!
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Stephen Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 04:02 pm:   

It does sound like him though... one of my favourite authors of the modern era.

Of course it could just as easily be Jeffrey Archer, I suppose?!

Sorry for trying to guess, Des.
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Karim Ghahwagi (Karim)
Username: Karim

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 193.89.189.24
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 04:04 pm:   

I am just never going to figure out who wrote Emmanuel Escobada then! :-)
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Steve Bacon (Stevebacon)
Username: Stevebacon

Registered: 09-2008
Posted From: 90.204.111.236
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 04:20 pm:   

Perhaps you were just trying to create a smoke-screen, Des? Apologies, though, if I shouldn't have posted that.

I can genuinely say, hand on heart, that I don't know who wrote it. I just assumed something based on an acknowledgement in a book I read last year. Looks like I'm wrong again.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 217.43.29.197
Posted on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 04:37 pm:   

No problem, Steve. But genuinely what I say above is a fact. No smokescreen, only a stonewall imposed by the author in 2002.

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