Tuesday, March 30, 2004

WHAT IS RELIGION?
I have been thinking about this serious subject for about the last few minutes and here are my conclusions. You are what you believe. Is that too trite?

hope that helps

Monday, March 29, 2004

SKIN #5
A new day, a new poem. No, this is not something I daily intend to do. No, it's not something Hertzan Chimera intends to do, is it Mike? No, Hertzan, my mind partner, it's not. Wait a minute, who are you? Who? Me? No, you, Star Jewel Smith? I'm the girl who wrote SKIN with you, Hertzie. I run POETIC INHALATION - are you asleep? I told you all this before. Remember? Four or five times at least. I have detailed records, you see, of our involvement; our constitution: here's our fifth amendment, Mike, I mean Hertzie. I mean...

full lips
cusp the glass
hips in heat
sway to a tribal beat
excited nipples
turgid by the shine of his blade

I was there, secreted
under the skin
a riddle of broken dreams in an
upchuck of rotting hunger
the mind maggot
opener

the first incision was a daydream
of blue
strobing lights outside
the ripped net curtain of this
cheap motel
her throat pulsing to the same dark tune

eyes half closed
vicious smile begging
tighten the collar

room spinning
legs spreading
deep 'tween the passage
from mortal to immortal
burning

finger in her pie
pulling out plums
eye-dicer
love-biter
police siren rider


you can read more tales of twisted love in BizarrBooks SKIN

Saturday, March 27, 2004

EROTIC-MATH FICTION - WHAT'S YOUR HC NUMBER?
Most practicing mathematicians are familiar with the definition of one’s Erdös number [that is actually a long Hungarian umlaut over the “o” but we will represent it here by the ordinary two-dot umlaut available in html]. Paul Erdös (1913–1996), the widely-traveled and incredibly prolific Hungarian mathematician of the highest caliber, wrote hundreds of mathematical research papers in many different areas, many in collaboration with others. His Erdös number is 0. Erdös’s co-authors have Erdös number 1. People other than Erdös who have written a joint paper with someone with Erdös number 1 but not with Erdös have Erdös number 2, and so on. If there is no chain of co-authorships connecting someone with Erdös, then that person’s Erdös number is said to be infinite.

In honour of Erdös' collaborative classification, I have researched the first few HC NUMBERs based on direct creative (written or aritstistic) collaborations with Chimera. Use the list below to find your connection to the lower HC numbers. What's your HC number?

HC0 = Hertzan Chimera (of course).

HC1 = Alex Severin, Chad Goulding (a long-time collaborator who proposed this classification), Mitch Philllips (artist), MF Korn, DF Lewis, Paul Pinn, Greg Wharton, Simon Logan, Mark Mclaughlin, Destiny West, Queenie Tirone, Wrath James White, David C Kopaska-Merkel, Stewart Shelley, Vanda Ashante, Brutal Dreamer, Charlee Jacob, Dawn Andrews, Christina Sng, Dave Mathew, Amy Grech, Paul Kane, Vincent Sakowski, the Wordhunger crew, Doll Yoko, John Edward Lawson, Star Jewel Smith, Sean Simmons (artist), Marc Sanchez, John B Ford + Sarah Crabtree (story coming soon)...

HC2 = Kailleaugh Andersson (Alex Severin), Edward Lee, Monica J O'Rourke (both Wrath James White), PF Jeffery, Tim Lebbon, Margaret B Simon, Simon Woodward, Simon Clark, Richard Gavin, Scott Urban, Kirk S King, Gary Couzens, Gordon Lewis, Rhys Hughes, Marni Scofidio, Craig Sernotti, Stuart Hughes, Allen Ashley, Chris Pelletiere, Anthea Holland, Jeff Holland, Keith Brooke, Lawrence Dyer, David Price, Paul Bradshaw, Andy Busby (all DF Lewis), Mythspinner, Dave Bowlin (both Brutal Dreamer), Arthur David Spota, Richard Dotson, Perry McGee, Abel Diaz, Jennifer Barnes, Chris Danaher, J. Scott Malby, Satan165, Justynn Tyme (all John Edward Lawson), Mark Roberts, David-John Tyrer, Christopher Teague, Jeff Vandermeer, Daniel Antil, Trevor Conn, Robin Gilbert (all wordhunger), Michael McCarty, Michael Kaufmann, Lou Badillo, Eric S. Brown, Craig Sernotti, Rain Graves, Matt Cardin (all Mark McLaughlin), Andrew Lundwall (Star Jewel Smith), F. Paul Wilson, Paul Bradshaw, Eddie M. Angerhuber, Gary Greenwood, John Pelan, Tim Lebbon, Steve Lines, Derek M. Fox, L.H. Maynard & M.P.N. Sims, Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Joseph S. Pulver Snr, Steven Lee Climer, Jeffrey Thomas, Paul Finch, Michael Pendragon, Brian Stableford, David Price, (having checked with John B Ford that the round robin work Sailing Into Night is a proper collaboration) Joseph S. Pulver Snr, Michael Cisco, Scot Peacock, Ann K. Schwader, Thomas Wiloch, Steve Rasnic Tem, Matt Cardin (all John B Ford)...

HC3 = Donna Kuhn, Michael Rothenberg, Louise Landes Levi, Kenji Siratori, Eileen Tabios, Trupthi, Mark Kuhar, Alex Gildzen, Paul Skyrm, Kim Vandorsten, Cynthia Plum (all Andrew Lundwall), Kevin L Donihoe (Satan 165)

my gamble at this point is that even writers like the great Stephen King, Clive Barker and William Gibson are a HC6 or less... :)

Thursday, March 25, 2004

BRAND NEW LOOK FOR CHIMERA'S HORRORWORLD MESSAGE BOARD
For those of you who have never ventured across the pond, Hertzan Chimera has a wicked message board on the HORROR WORLD website in the States. There you can leave H.C. a message and chew some fat or just laze about in the cross-eyed miasma that is THE INTERNET. It has just been given a major graphical overhaul and this more-industrial-surrealism style is soon to be reflected in an overhaul of the Hertzan Chimera Website itself.

green is good - isn't that what Gordon Gekko said? :)

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

HERTZAN CHIMERA ACCEPTS THE COLUMNIST OFFER
God bless Camp Horror. They be running with an exclusive INTERVIEW of all things Chimlike, and a few very favourable reviews of the latest Chimproduct, in the forthcoming April Issue. Not only that, I was in the THWN chat room just last night and Rick Mohr (the editor of Camp Horror zine) offered me the chance to become a columnist for his site. I sent him some sample documents and already he has accepted one particularly Kinky Kolumn for the forthcoming April issue - this premier camp horror column "UBIQUITOUSLY, H.C." may be familiar to one or two or you, but it's aired for the first time in its entirety on CAMP HORROR.

that's the result of the day!

Monday, March 22, 2004

CHIM+HIM - THE TWINS HAVE BEEN SPLICED OUT
I did mention in an earlier post that Chimera is taking over from his human body (Philbin). Part of this process involved people in bars or at author conventions calling me by my Chimera-name and me denying this truth. "I am not my writer name!" I yell. Well, I thought it was time to OUT the little fucker, see how he likes it. By splitting a face-on image of Mike Philbin and creating two faces from the reflected halves, I have unveiled the true face behind the keyboard name Hertzan Chimera.



he's out there now, but I still can't tell which one is which....

Sunday, March 21, 2004

FELLOW BLOGGERS
You may notice a slight redesign to the right hand side of this blog. That's because the community of horror bloggers has been uniting its message, unifying its fire and other stuff that rhymes with BLOG EXCHANGE. More horror bloggers linking to more horror bloggers means more choice for the reader and more readers for the blogger.

I acquiesced and BLOGLINKER'd myself up...

Saturday, March 20, 2004

THE COAT OF MANY CUNTS

she could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing.
she pondered this dark smelly new reality.
abandoned to this new credo, she could do nothing about her plight.

she felt a spasm of movement all around her.
voices began to awaken.
feared for her sanity when she realised she was not alone in the dark.

he spoke to her without words, not in the human sense of words.
she understood every ‘word’.
so wet and warm and exquisite.

it was the first time she had felt such a rush of understanding.
she was instantly on fire.
a new piece of her inner topology reached out into the dark like a rod.

she felt her new framework start to tatter and bleed.
the pain was like sitting on a hot, sharp spike.
if she had ears, she would be digging the workings out with painted claws.

her whole body mass was weeping blood as the pain turned to physical trauma.
then she broke.
like shards of shattered fleshly glass, shattered with pain and blood passing.

his words ceased; no more whisperings of ecstatic comfort in the dark.
the coat of many cunts opened sending burning light across her tender membranes.
she would never believe she could be so easily discarded.

she saw his still erect cocks pounding with scrotal potential.
she saw cuntjuice glistening cocks falling limp now as he rubbed a soap stone all over
she wanted that man in her coat of many cunts once more.

but the coat of many cunts is a trinket, a diamond sticking up out of manure.
no one owns it, no one can ever possess it, no matter how the coat may need the wearer.
she watched the sun setting on the scene and wondered where this hell would take her.

the original version of “coat of many cunts” first appeared in the Chimera/Severin collaborative collection B.F.G.S., available from Massacre Publishing.

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

MIKE PHILBIN - SENIOR ARTIST MENTION
Just found this one. Some things are worth the wait. A mention for Hertzan Chimera's physical bodyparts in the form of an XBOX walkthrough on this official XBOX.IGN.COM preview.

nice
MIKE PHILBIN - VIDEO REVIEWER
Hey, for those who don't know (and there may be thousands of you out there) I moonlight as Mike Philbin, video reviewer for Video Vista. I like to be sent films that aren't normally reviewed or given air, hence this ecclectic collection:

BATTLE ROYALE.
SHALLOW HAL.
FINAL FANTASY.
TIERRA.
SEX IS COMEDY.
THE MAN WHO SUED GOD.
A WEATHER WOMAN.
DOLLS.
AUDITION.
THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS.
Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN.
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.
ROMANCE.
THE HUNTED.
PI.
LIVE FLESH.
GHOST WORLD.
BANDE A PART.
CLAY PIGEONS.
SALTON SEA.
POSSESSION.
LE MEPRIS.
INTACTO.
ELEMENT OF CRIME.
HARRISON'S FLOWERS.
IRREVERSIBLE.
HUMAN NATURE.
FEAR OF THE DARK.
SOCIETY.

this is the first time I've ever seen them all together in one place - quite a list

Tuesday, March 16, 2004

AUTHOR PAUL PINN RATES CHIMERA'S "FIVE HORNED BULL"
At first I thought the opening graphic was a blood-splattered mammoth, then when I started reading I realized it was Hertzan Chimera doing the business. I was struck by the similarity between HC and Des Lewis, not in style or content, but in the desire to play with words, to over-construct input for the senses, the bibliobrain, and in his case, the groin. Overload, overkill, overshoot until you wonder what the devil is going on, what it's all about, what you are doing there. It spawns questions like: Is HC's wife at his mercy or is he impotent? For he is not normal so cannot have sex with the frequency and passion of normal folk, who do it in normal beds bought from normal shops in normal towns and cities. Does he keep his wife chained up in some awful kitsch-coloured cellar? Does he try out all this stuff he describes before he describes it? Do any psychiatric reports exist? Has he eaten the child seen in the photo that once adorned his website? If not, will this child grow to be like HC? Is the child the beginning of a dynasty designed to obliterate the moral majority and replace it with drug-induced perversions and laws that make it illegal to have normal sex in normal beds bought from normal shops in normal towns and cities? Is it right that the author should have his personal life commented upon. Does HC have a personal life separate from that of his creator? What is his work doing to me? Can I escape it or have I been chosen to suffer the indignities of his imagination for ever and ever Amen?

I can't work out if he liked the story or not :)

Saturday, March 13, 2004

RED HEDZ 2004 - SCREENPLAY
Well, that's done. The first draft (officially) of the old text-format 1993 script RED HEDZ has been redone. It is now in full SCRIPT MAKER format, untidied, there were 117 pages of it. Pretty exhausting work formating a text document into script format, all that SCENE HEADING, CHARACTER NAMING and SUCH.... I left out much of the camera work and other transitions, concentrating instead on making it as readable and visual as possible. I went through it with a fine-toothed comb as there were a few lingering problems with the way it was originally adapted from my eponymous 1990 novel. I tightened up the 117 page version and, as predicted, it came out at 110 pages; that's 1 hour 40 minutes onscreen approximately.

I am determined to get this first full screenplay just right, it's off now with a fellow writer for a dialogue pass on it to make sure it's crisp and clean and modern THEN it's off on it's way to PAUL VERHOEVEN for appraisal.

this is gonna knock his socks off
WHAT IS HERTZAN CHIMERA?
This question dawned on me only recently. Okay, we all know that Hertzan Chimera is a name I dreamt up to write stuff under. It is a special costume that explores the unstaunchable gook that pours out of my broken head. It is a name I use to classify&categorise the writing world with relation to those I have collaborated with. But it is also the name I gave to a scientific principle of light travelling backwards and Universal Equil-librium. But it is also an amalgam of silly things that take my fancy like zero and infinity, like crazy advertising campaigns, like.

I use the name Hertzan Chimera but have no real idea what it is, as an entity. It occurs to me most when fellow writers who I will meet periodically at writer conventions and pub get-togethers in London and wherever that I AM NOT PHYSICALLY HERTZAN CHIMERA. At least I don't feel comfortable being addressed publicly as Hertzan Chimera. I am the person who thought up the character Hertzan Chimera fair enough but, though I want it or not, that Frankenstein's monster is getting a life of its own.

Only recently, one magazine editorial quoted my paintings from the late eighties and early nineties were the work of Hertzan Chimera. Well, they weren't. I wasn't using the media currency 'Hertzan Chimera' back then, this alter-ego hadn't inflated to that great a volume then :) But that bastard, that charalatan, that ill-conceived creation, Chimera, is taking over - I can sense him plotting my actual demise. My "official" website has had 13,000 hits in the last few years but I get very little feedback from readers ... I do not know how many dedicated readers Hertzan Chimera has but everyone is beginning to know who Hertzan Chimera is. Maybe they know more than me? I should ask them to tell me what I am. There may be more well thought out ideas of my psyche out there, my pattern, my theology.

One day I will sign this blog AS Hertzan Chimera with total conviction that that is what and who I am. I will refuse to answer to my real name in public. I will have been consumed by my own creation, lost in commercial denial.

I can sense that day approaching with masochistic inevitability

Thursday, March 11, 2004

MEN'S ARSEHOLES
There can be no God. What sort of God would allow a man to be born with such a delicately-membraned, insufficiently-lubricated love-canal as the arsehole. Were one to be able to afford plastic surgery one could a) have a properly functioning vagina inserted, or failing that due to anatomical constrictions b) have one's arsehole properly serviced so that the skin was made as rugged as vaginal skin and as well lubricated........

sorry, did I just say that out loud?

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

THE RED HEDZ SCREENPLAY
Well, I got hold of the Script Maker (a Word 2000 template) on a 30-trial basis to adapt an old screenplay I wrote of (my first novel, published by Creation Press back in 1989) RED HEDZ that both Barker and Cronenberg cast their beady eye across in the very early 90's while NightBreed was in its post production phase. And for the last few days I have been totally rewriting the text-only original.

I have looked long and hard at this old, raw screenplay (the things my more mature writer mind wants from the narrative in cinematic form and the characters in dialogue form) and for the last few days I have been totally rewriting the first 30 minutes (pages) of the screenplay.

I have now completely rewritten how RED HEDZ starts and now have Paul as a despondent mute, only expressing his feelings with images from his paintings in cut-away. The sense of tension this builds up is quite effective. He only really starts talking when he meets JANE...

more progress reports as the new screenplay evolves

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

ANIMAL INSTINCTS IS A BESTSELLER
Only one week into it's release, the fully-illustrated oversized paperback ANIMAL INSTINCTS has already made it onto the Shocklines (the US's premier Horror Distributor)'s Bestseller list. It charted this week at #5 - which was nice.

update one week later - it fell from the Bestseller list like a lead balloon *sigh*

Monday, March 08, 2004

BIG NEWS HEADLINE
Here's the news: I did "fuck all" writing or other creative endeavours this weekend.

Things to do:

1) get professional screenwriting template for Word2000 - done.
2) sort out my non-Playboy adult outlet for SKIN CLUB - doing it tonight, fuckerZZZzzzzzz

message ends with a soft whimper of inconclusion

Thursday, March 04, 2004

KING ANGEL
Remember back, back through the mist of blog entries, I was prattling on about some angel short story that I had almost spec'd out and just needed to fill in the gaps if only the mud of inertia would stop dragging me down.....

Well, today, it ALL FIT INTO PLACE. The reason why it wasn't gelling, the reason why it was going nowhere despite such promise, is it not a short story. A short story wouldn't do the story justice. That would be a mere sketch, a table of contents. KING ANGEL (provisional title) is a book. Hell, it's a trilogy. THREE BOOKS all in one. I can see it now as clear as day. I have the angel's motivation, I have the setting, the raison d'etre of all the characters in the piece. My first true, fully planned, fully structured, fully themed and thought out blockbuster of a project.

After a couple of abortive attempts to get going on the research and content, I am happy to report that work is now "officially" under way (I won't say at full steam but certainly at full intention, the structure is coming together nice and the research is moving on).

actually, now that I've got this far with the planning of it, it's likely to go on the back burner for a decade or less :)

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

AUTHOR OF THE MONTH AT CAMP HORROR
This has been a wild first week of March already. On top of two wonderfully glowing reviews of my novel UNITED STATES and my collection of horror-author interviews SPIDERED WEB and an in-depth interview at Midwest Book Review. There's also a review of my sexhorror poetry collection SKIN (co-written with Star Jewel Smith of POETIC INHALATION) also at M.B.R. And I hear there are to be two or three glowing reviews of my other books over at MBR next month, I discover this morning, some insane person has made Chimboy the author of the month over at CAMP HORROR - there's no point going there, as it's just a link to HERTZAN CHIMERA'S UNGODLY HELLHOLE OF FILTH AND TWISTED PIGEON NECKS but the thought was nice

which is all fine and dandy but after 14 years of mind-numbingly boring self publicity I am clearly never gonna make a living from this and the purgatory of paid employ will be my burden until I die