Tomorrow Elephant

Hello. It’s been a while.

As some of you may know, I’ve made a couple of half-hearted stabs at blogging before. I even had a Livejournal at one stage. But none of my blogging projects have ever quite taken off the ground, possibly due to general lack of discipline, but also due to lack of things to write about. It’s not that I haven’t had ambitious thoughts about blogging. I’ve wanted to set up a flash fiction blog, use one to up my profile as a writer, to serve as an idea dump, blog hypertext fiction…. all those sexy, trendy things you’re supposed to do with a blog. And somehow the threshold to start one just got so high that it was easier to mutter about “not having time” than just sit down and do a five-minute WordPress installation.

It was my friend Darren who finally got me off my ass. Having recently started a blog himself, he asked if I was planning to do the same at any point in the near future. I answered with the following:

Good question. I’ve found it difficult to get into blogging again. I think this is due to the fact that most days I write between 1000 and 3000 words of fiction; I’m not sure I have the energy to rant on top of that. I know that some writers (prominently Warren Ellis and Cory Doctorow ) use their blog as a kind of idea dump: but for me, a personal wiki and del.icio.us seem to serve the same purpose. Cory does say that a blog inspires other people to point you to the direction of interesting things, which may be a valid point: and according to Ellis’s “Handbook to Mind Gangsterism”, an active website would be a good way to get exposure. I would like to get into that game…

Darren then went on to point out that my e-mail was actually a pretty decent example of a possible blog entry…

So. This is a blog. If you’ve been living in a parallel universe for the last couple of years, Darren’s got a pretty good explanation here.. This blog will have occasional bloggy things in it. If I were in a pretentious mood (which I often am), I might call them blogjects, paraphrasing Bruce Sterling. My blogjects will be about the future, technology, science fiction, complaining about the harsh postgraduate life, the weirdness of the world, and elephants.

Why elephants? And why is this blog called Tomorrow Elephant?

Well, I have a thing about elephants. One of the first more substantial stories I ever wrote is a novella called The Artichoke Elephant - a fairly shameless James Ellroy pastiche involving the CIA, LSD, wormholes and elephants. Here’s an extract.

In its youth, the elephant was a rogue. It did not fit in the bachelor herds of the other bulls that grazed the edges of the savannah like huge, slow-moving motorcycle gangs. Its mushts were too violent, its temper too erratic to be measured by the standards of pachyderm machismo. When the musht came over it, it would see things: the horizon closing up like an eggshell, lines of light burning in its brain, vast sharp-edged cities rising up from beneath the expanses of the savannah. It would hear voices that had a taste and a smell and a thousand other qualities it could not even begin to describe in the shrill whistles of the elephant-tongue. The visions would burn, haunt and infuriate: and in the end, the elephant went a little mad. It would go on terrible rampages that would last for hours and leave it exhausted and often hurt. Once it attacked an ancient baobab tree when it thought that a shining, multicolored dust cloud was trying to get under its skin. Its right tusk broke, leaving behind only an ivory ghost, a phantom tooth that ached at night.

In some ways, it was a blessing when the elephant hunters came. The elephant was in the throes of its hallucinatory rage and could not escape the tiny white creatures in their buzzing, four-wheeled things. It hated the gunshots and the needles and the pain, but as the hunters kept it sedated for most of the journey to the coast and over the sea, it discovered the joys of oblivion. It learned to relish the artificial, enclosed spaces that seemed to keep the phantasms away. Sometimes the little white things treated it cruelly, sometimes with kindness, but for the first time in its life the elephant slept peacefully, dreaming quiet elephant dreams. In the zoo it even found a degree of happiness in the form of a small-eared female that did not run away in terror when it approached. The mushts became less frequent, hardly worse than those of any of its brothers.

But it always knew that some day the visions would come backToday, it’s a blog. Tomorrow, an elephant.