You can now read The Interloper.
-
Category: Personal
-
A Few Notes on The Interloper
Posted at 8:09 am , on October 5, 2021
Soon I will be releasing my story The Interloper.
As I mention in the Foreword, it is a story that I wrote when I was a teenager—over 20 years ago. I have fiddled with the text, but it is largely intact from the original version that’s still located on the same 3.5″ floppy disk shown on the cover.
I do not consider The Interloper to be indicative of my current abilities as a writer.
So, why release it at all?
I am releasing it in order to keep a promise.
And in so doing, a piece of myself—an early, prototypical version of the artist I would become (am still becoming)—will finally have its place in the world.
I will have set it free; I will have set myself free.
Soon.
-
Blue Skies
Posted at 9:00 am , on September 1, 2021
The weather is full of unfulfilled promises.
Would that bad things only happened when the weather is stark and grey and dreary. Would that every heartbreak be acknowledged by the sudden downpouring of rain. Would that every agony of mankind be reflected by the weather, such that the sky became forever turgid with the endless suffering of humanity.
Nothing is as depressing to me as a sunny day and a blue sky.
We are supposed to relish the sunlight. When flowers bloom and seedlings pop their ignorant heads above the soil. Sunny days are here again, they say, and people drink and dance. This is the world—so warm and shining and brilliant. This is happiness: a child sitting with a melting ice-cream in a cone, a dog cheerfully bounding across a sea of grass with a stick in its mouth.
But tragedy is not afraid of the sun, or the flowers, or the misbegotten optimism of the sun-worshippers in their temples. Tragedy occurs no matter the weather.
The weather is unflinching. It does not care. The bumblebee picks at the heart of a flower, gathering pollen. A child sits, crying, with a melting ice-cream in a cone; a stick remains in the grass because there is no dog to fetch it.
These are the unspoken agonies of every sunny day. This is a funeral procession without dark clouds to accompany it. This is the horrible, horrendous blue sky.
For me, that vast blue nothing does not conjure hope, or calm, or peace. Rather it is a vast, unbounded horror. And the sun on the leaves. And the sun on the cement. And the smells in the air.
Ah, such beautiful tapestry does the sun weave. And yet the soldiers still march. Bombs still explode. And in a room somewhere that the light does not reach a hand touches another hand—leathery now, close to death now, and another life slips away.
And it is sunny outside. And people are cheerful and rambunctious. And they raise toasts to the idiot glorification of a sun that persists even when it is cloudy, an ever-explosion of nuclear light in the sky that blinds our eyes and brands our skin.
I hate it. Let the sky pour with the rain of our tears. Let the heavens lament all that we have lost. Let the ground rumble with the articulation of our collective rage.
In the cold and the wet and the grey.
In the pounding of the rain and the cold bite of the wind.
There, I find solace.
-
Pathetic Fallacy
Posted at 10:08 am , on September 19, 2019
In October of 2014, not long after my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I stood outside with a Corona in my hand and watched the most violent and majestic lightning storm I have ever seen strike arcs across the city.
At the time my partner and I were renting a house on the side of a hill: a ramshackle building that groaned and shook alarmingly when the gully winds swept down from Mount Lofty.
It was from this precarious position, atop the weakening, untreated planks of wooden decking that I was afforded an extraordinary view of the storm in all its hideous brilliance; each bolt of lightning blasted away the darkness and cast the world in strange, electric shades.
The lightning that night matched the unspeakable terror that I was feeling. On the precipice of loss, on the knife edge of grief I was yet to experience: the lightning gave form to my pain and writ it large across the city for everyone to see.
I took four photographs that night.
-
Four O’Clock Thunder
Posted at 10:20 am , on July 3, 2019
I check the time: it’s four o’clock. Overhead the sky alternates between shades of bleakness. The wind blows and it rattles the corrugated tin shed. The wooden beams creak. I see flowers shaking, clinging tightly to their mothers. Some of them are dislodged and spin and whirl without a care. Petals fall to the ground like congratulatory confetti.
My eyes are misty, but I blink back the tears. I force myself to exhale: because, right now, not even the simple act of breathing comes naturally. I need to go back inside, but I don’t want to. I don’t want any of this.
But today is not about what I want—today is about what the Universe wants to take away.
The earth reclaims its fallen flowers.
-
Childhood Hobbies
Posted at 10:18 am , on January 30, 2019
So I find myself surrounded by the paraphernalia of my childhood hobbies, now obscure to me as strange measuring instruments viewed through a grimy window.
And yet–locked away inside, I possess the occult knowledge required to have them yield their purpose to me.
Which one of us–the tools, or the man–would ultimately be fulfilled by this process, I could not tell.
-
Who are the Firm?
Posted at 1:39 am , on October 24, 2016
I have recently been fortunate enough to contribute to Story City: a project that uses a mobile app to combine text, narration, music and images to immerse readers in an interactive choose-your-own-adventure* style story that’s set in the real world.
Wanting to be involved with the project was a no-brainer from the moment I first heard about it. The bookshelf above my head is packed full of game books I’ve been collecting since I was a kid. I always loved these types of books because of their ability to grant that elusive wish—to make the reader an active participant in the story.
Story City is in an entirely different league to those old-fashioned game books. The app doesn’t only tell a story, but adds music, pictures and narration to create an experience; an interactive narrative in which the reader is at the centre.
The story that I have written for Story City is a science-fiction espionage tale entitled, “The Firm”. My story has been woven into the very fabric of reality around some of my childhood haunts. It will linger there, invisibly, until you download the app. Not merely a story, but a part of the city.
It is pioneering projects like Story City that are working to define the digital reality that is rapidly appearing all around us. A new sort of real estate has been created: an extra dimension in which we are limited only by our imaginations. Playgrounds can become satellite control-centres and historical buildings clandestine meeting spots. Tour guides can speak, digitally, into your headphones and explain to you the local history of a place as you explore it.
It’s mind-bending if you think about it. It’s fantastic. And, perhaps most exciting thing of all is the fact that we’ve only just spotted the tip of a very large iceberg.
We live in a time where magic is being breathed into the world, all around us, every day. Hand-held computers (that we still insist on calling ‘phones) are the magic wands with which this power may be conjured.
I am thrilled, thanks to Story City, to have been given the opportunity to embellish the streets of Grange with a little magic of my own: conspiracies and ghost-trains are finally coming to life on the very streets where I first imagined them.
Download the Story City app from Google Play or the Apple App Store to experience them for yourself, as soon as the story becomes available.
* Other game books are available.
-
Michael Scott Hand 