I Am Shit, I Am Best

Its been a rather odd day today, all told.

It began terribly when I got fired this morning from my awful, minimum-wage job, for committing the terrible crime of...eating a hotdog. A hotdog that was due to be chucked in the bin anyway, as it was the end of the night and thus was not going to be sold.

And so, for that horrendous act (no doubt causing the multi-million pound company for which I work untold damage and distress), I had my employment terminated. After seven and a half years of loyal service, it turned out that at the end of the day I was worth less to the company than an old, discarded sausage.

And as an added bonus, this took place only four days before my birthday. DOUBLE FUN!

Naturally, I was less than pleased and felt completely and utterly depressed by the whole affair.

However, on the flip-side of this particular coin, was the fact that when I got back to my house, I found that an earlier, off-the-cuff suggestion to The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' on Twitter had resulted in Lord Likely's blog being selected as one of the 'Best of the Web' on their website!

BEHOLD!

Obviously I'm a little aggrieved to see my stuff BELOW a LOLCats-based story (especially being the purveyor of high-quality RIPDogs, myself), but still, there it was. A link to my writing, on The Guardian's website.

Fuck me.

Since then, I've been fielding loads of text messages, emails and Facebook comments either commiserating with me on the loss of my job, or congratulating me on getting a link from The Guardian. I don't know whether I should be wallowing in self-pity and sadness, or leaping for joy and hurling myself into fresh writing work.

Like I said, its been a really odd day.

Now all I have to do is find a way to build upon my writing success, and, y'know...actually get paid to do it, or something. I think that'd be nice.

Either that, or its off to McDonald's.

See you in the dole queue!

- Fanton.

What Time Do You Call This, Sonny?

Hello!

I have rather neglected this blog and all my blogging activities of late, for which I humbly apologise and beg for your forgiveness.

I have been struck with a mixture of extreme laziness and apathy of late, but I took some tablets and it seems to have cleared up nicely.

So: I am back, and ready to roll. As well as all my blogging stuff, I'm also working on what may turn out to be a proper, full-paying cartooning gig; as well as toying with some new ideas for Lord Likely...so watch this space.

In other news, I may be a little distracted this week, as I'm counting down the days until the grand finale of the current series of Doctor Who airs. Last week's cliffhanger had me literally soiling myself with excitement, and I simply cannot wait to see how it all pans out.

If you've yet to see last week's Who, then look away now. For the rest of us, here's the teaser for next Saturday's episode:



Oooh! I just did a little more wee.

I'll be back with a better-quality post soon. Until then, take care of yourselves, and each other.

Byeee!

- Fanton.

So Close, And Yet So Far

Those of you who follow the fate and fortunes of the publishing industry may already know that The Friday Project - a small publisher set up in 2005 with the aim of converting the best of the web to proper books - went into liquidation last month.

What you probably won't know is that last December I had quite a jolly meeting with the (entirely lovely and very amiable) folk at The Friday Project, with a view to publishing a proper, fully-fledged Lord Likely book. With pages and a cover, and everything.

The meeting went very well, so this news is doubly sad, as it means the end of what could have been the Greatest Literary Event of All Time. But hey ho, such is life.

I'm making quite a habit of getting tantalisingly close to having my work published or screened. As well as the Lord Likely book, I also managed to get very near to getting an animated series made based around another of my characters, The Carrotty Kid. I got all the way up to the pilot episode stage, before the UK kid's TV market seemed to implode in on itself, and the series never came to pass.

Still, I got a shiny DVD out of it, containing an exciting glimpse of what could have been:

So, I'm still struggling on, and still hoping that one day one of my ridiculous ideas will finally earn me some money.

Now, can anyone spare me a tenner?

- Fanton.

Weekend? What weekend?

I hate it when I get an idea.

Since Friday, when I first thought of creating a new website, I've been plugging away at making the bloody thing, wrote several posts, spent hours grappling with code, made some pictures, and then put it all together.

Now, it's finally done. Hoo-fucking-ray!

Behold the fruits of my tireless labours: gaup, a spoof celebrity news site featuring a whole load of stuff, including a lovely picture of a colon, and a half-naked Billie Piper.

I hope you guys like it. At least pretend you do. You have no idea how long I spent slaving over hot pixels for it.

And THEN I even did a new post for Lord Likely, and now I feel like I want to sleep FOREVER. Sometimes I think I must be a mental case. I have no idea why I do this to myself.

It must be for the chicks.

"Thanks, Fanton!"

Bloody hell. That wasn't very funny, was it?

Well, I think that proves that my brain is officially shutting down now. Plus, I think my eyes are melting. So I'm going to try and catch at least thirty winks.

Tara!

- Fanton.

The Hack and the Slasher

Thomas Peckett Prest must be kicking himself, or at least he would be if he wasn't completely dead, and buried six-foot underground.

Prest is widely considered to be the creator of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a character currently enjoying a blood-soaked revival on the big screen in Tim Burton's gloriously gothic musical-slasher movie of the same name. If only Prest had the immense foresight to predict the popularity of his gruesome creation, then he could have wound up being a very well-off corpse indeed.

Johnny Depp found shaving the Invisible Man very difficult work.

However, Prest was a hack writer, a quill-for-hire who spent most of his life penning comic parodies of Charles Dickens' oeuvre (including such ingeniously-titled classics as Oliver Twiss and David Copperful), and pulpy, schlocky stories of thrill and suspense for the popular penny dreadful publications. These were cheap, lurid periodicals published in Victorian Britain to occupy an increasingly literate working class with undemanding and unsophisticated entertainment. Sort of like the TV networks do in our modern, enlightened times.

Literary infamy was doubtlessly the last thing on Prest's mind, as he was far too busy churning out cheap tat for the penny dreadfuls. Indeed, his lasting creation, Sweeney Todd, first appeared as a mere secondary, supporting character in the completely non-terrifyingly titled story The String of Pearls: A Romance, a sure indication as any that Prest had no idea that he was sitting on a potential goldmine.

When Sweeney Todd went on to prove far more popular than a poxy string of pearls, the character soon found himself taking centre-stage in a theatrical adaptation by George Dibden Pitt in 1846, to great success. It must have been a bitter pill for Prest, as the unattributed author of the original tale, living in less copyright-savvy times - he made approximately zero pounds and noughty-nought pence from this popular stage adaptation of his own work.

By failing to even sign his own work, Prest went on to miss out on further healthy royalty cheques from a multitude of stage and film adaptations over the next one hundred and sixty-odd years, culminating in both the prolific Stephen Sondheim stage musical, and the current Tim Burton movie, itself based on the Sondheim musical. Which, in turn, was based on Christopher Bond's stage play, The String of Pearls. Which, of course, was based on Prest's original, cheap and un-cheerful serial.

Can you hear that sound? It's the sound of money slipping through Prest's skeletal fingers.

The moral of this story is clear. Firstly make sure you get credit for your work, and make sure you copyright it to the hilt. Secondly, don't sideline your best characters in a stupid story about a sailor and a necklace.


And now finally, for those interested in my incredibly important opinions: Burton's Sweeney Todd is a fantastic triumph; a supremely entertaining slice of musical macabre which succeeds on every level and completely fulfills my expectations for a Burton-directed horror musical. The cast are uniformly fantastic, with Johnny Depp turning in another great performance and proving to be more than adept at singing in a mock-Cockney style, resulting in him sounding something like David Bowie, which of course is no bad thing.

In short, Sweeney Todd has made the transition from penny dreadful, to million-dollar wonderful. I loved it.

I think Prest might have liked it too.

- Fanton.



Read The String of Pearls in its entirety, courtesy of the Victorian Dictionary.

And don't forget to read The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely, another completely excellent Victorian tale destined to become a classic for centuries to come.

Bookmark This Poem.

Next month, my daft little humourous blog The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely will be one year old, a landmark I never expected to reach.

It's not because I don't think the Astonishing Adventures are any good (they're REALLY bloody good, trust me), it's just that prior to this, the longest I had managed to keep a blog running was approximately five minutes. I had dipped my toe into the blogging pool on three or four previous occasions, but then I'd quickly get bored or accidentally find myself whiling away the hours looking at pictures of Billie Piper in her underwear, or something.

Now I find myself fully submerged in that very same pool, practically drowning in blogs. It's like I'm trapped in the net, like a digital dolphin.

It's not the blogging itself that concerns me. I love writing, and would happily write all day long if only someone could shovel food in my mouth at regular intervals, and pump coffee through my veins.

The thing that perturbs me is how much work goes into getting your blog seen by other pairs of eyes, especially when you work in the niche field of writing a blog about a Victorian Lord who likes to have sex a lot, like I do. After hitting 'PUBLISH POST' on my latest masterpiece, I am then faced with a bewildering array of options for whoring my latest creation. A bewildering array of options which have lead me to write this little verse, which I like to call:

Bookmark This Poem.

I can Digg it, Sphinn it, Fuel it and Furl it,

I can Zoom it, Fire it, Blink it and Spurl it.

I can Technorati this, and Stumble Upon that,

I can Riff on anything, I Reddit on a Mac,

I can join BlogCatalog, BlogLog or Blogging Fusion,

Bloggeries or BlogFlux - now it's a Blog Explosion!

I can send it to Simpy, Squidoo, Slashdot or Spotback,

I can put it on my MySpace, or shove it on your Facebook.

I can make it deli.cio.us, but by then I'd be de.lirio.us.

I can give it to Google - Hi5, Yahoo!

I could Twitter all day long

but I've got blogging to do.


Fin.

Well, I'd better go. This post won't promote itself, you know.

- Fanton.

PS: Don't forget to actually bookmark this. No, really.

Flash Men and Likely Lords

Last week, British literature lost one of its very finest comic writers, when the author George MacDonald Fraser passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-two.

For those unfamiliar with the writer in question, Fraser was a writer and journalist, who found considerable fame and fortune with the publication of his Flashman novels.

In these brilliantly funny books, Fraser took the simple conceit of plucking the unlikeable character of Harry Flashman from Thomas Hughes' Victorian novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, and then developing a whole new series of adventures for the bullying rascal, chronicling his life after being expelled from Rugby school on account of his drunkenness.

In the first of the series, we catch up with Flashman as he becomes a soldier caught up in the midst of the British retreat from Kabul in the first Afghanistan war (1839-42). Despite the horrors taking place around him, Flashman still delights in drinking and sex, whilst trying to save his neck during the conflict by any cowardly means possible.

The book deftly combined painstakingly researched historical fact with high farce and bawdy comedy, a mixture that proved to be extremely alluring to the public. After the success of his solo debut, Flashman went on to get embroiled in Custer's Last Stand, the Indian Mutiny, and the Charge of the Light Brigade, amongst other notable events over the course of the series, which spanned twelve books in total.

I only started reading the astonishing tales of the Victorian rogue and bounder last summer, which may surprise readers of my other blog, The Astonishing Adventures of Lord Likely, in which I chronicle the astonishing tales of another Victorian rogue and bounder.

It was through Lord Likely that I discovered Flashman, (as opposed to the other way around), when I was directed to the Flashman books by fellow blogger Scaryduck, who suggested the two characters might be related. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about, so set about getting hold of a copy to see for myself.

Upon picking up the first novel in the series, my heart sank. Not because it was awful, or depressing - it was truly excellent - but because it seemed everything I was trying to do with Likely had already been done - and much better - by Fraser. The cover alone (above) seemed to capture the very essence of Lord Likely better than I could have ever managed.

Upon reading the novel, however, I realised that there were differences. The first obvious one was that Flashman was a regular guy, whilst Lord Likely is, well, a lord. Secondly, Flashman was a terrible coward and reluctant hero, while Likely is much more proactive, seeking out adventure and intrigue to alleviate the boredom bought about by the tedious routine of his aristocratic duties. Finally, Flashman is much more of a solitary character (save his wife, Elspeth), while Likely rarely travels anywhere without his long-suffering man-servant, Botter.

Of course, Fraser's work was much more rigourously researched, while the Astonishing Adventures favour crudity, farce and slapstick over historical accuracy. And I need not point out that Fraser's writing is much better than mine, but then again Likely's cock is undoubtedly bigger than Flashman's.

I was relieved to discover these differences. I hadn't set out to ape the exploits of Harry Flashman, nor rip-off George MacDonald Fraser. If anything, I'd set out to pay homage and parody Sherlock Holmes and Charles Dickens. As well as making dozens of penis jokes.

Happily, there is room enough for both takes on the Victorian hero in this world, and in fact reading Flashman has encouraged me to up my game and try harder. Why, I even did some actual research for Lord Likely's American Adventure! I used books and everything. Whatever next?

So I continue the adventures of Lord Likely unabated and more inspired. In fact, in the very latest episode, I have even had his lordship meet Harry Flashman, as a small tribute from one humble blogger, to a master of comic writing who paved the way for whippersnappers like me to stomp noisily all over it, treading mud all over the beautifully paved metaphorical path.

Mr. Fraser, sir, I raise a glass of brandy to you. Cheers!

- Fanton.