All right. Until further notice, no one will be able to create an account here. As per my previous note on the subject, the spam is ridiculous and I have neither the time nor the inclination to patrol it in search of a potential legitimate entrant.

When I get the chance, I'll try a captcha system or something, but meanwhile, I've disabled the sign-up. Or will have done moments after posting this.

Second twitter test. Sorry folks!

I've just deleted more than 500 user accounts here at Edifice Rex Online.

I'm certain that the vast majority were created by spammers, since I think only one person (and Carl, I fear your account was deleted in the cross-fire) has ever commented here with a username.

In any event, the deed is done and any knew accounts will require my approval before they go live. If yours was a legitimate account and you want it back, please jump through the arbitrary hoops follow the steps below.

1. Go to the registration page and fill in the required fields; and

2. Click here to visit the contact page and send me an email. Be sure to include the username you signed up with so that I can match it with the actual account.

And, y'know, feel free to leave feedback on what you read or see here. Believe it or not, writers prefer to think we're not typing into a vacuum.

Testing twitter integration, please ignore (both of you!). :)

More new/old fiction, more smut. "Strangers of the Flesh" is frankly pornographic and was written as an attempt at seduction. The target quite liked it but we lived in separate cities and nothing ever came of the flirtation. I originally posted it to a private journal back in May 2008. Click below to read it, but — again — it contains graphic sex and language. If such things offend you, avert your eyes (or don't click).

The following is a fiction from 2008, originally posted to a private sex blog I maintained for a while. It is informed by memories of the past and uncomfortable dreams of the future. It was in intention a story and pornography at once, meant to arouse the readers libido, to explore the writer's and to tell a real story as well.

Be warned, the sex is rough and may be offensive or triggering to some readers.

Time travel is fraught with terrors, personal time travel most of all. Whether it is in the discovery that one's ancestors were criminals and murderers, or only that one's youthful tastes weren't as sophisticated as one thought (see note #74, on The Secret Garden here, for one example of that phenomenon).

My own childhood favourites include a surprising number of Brit-lit classics. Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne, of course, held pride of place, along with the likes of Kipling's Jungle Books, Lang's Yellow Fairy Book, Edward Lear's nonsense poetry, Graham's Wind In the Willows, Barry's Peter Pan, Edward Ardizzone's marvellous Little Tim books and the Lonsdale/Turner translations of Tintin (just off the top of my head).

And E. Nesbit's now-105 year-old classic, The Railway Children, which I recently pulled from my shelf, starting another voyage into my own deep past.

"'Only the rats!' said Peter, in the dark." (Read more ...)

In the course of writing something else, I stumbled across a story I wrote back in August 2006. I say 'stumbled' because I had very nearly forgotten it existed. That is, I remembered it when I saw it, but had I not seen it I would not have remembered it.

It's a frankly creepy little story (you've been warned!), but I think it's a pretty good one, if you like stories in which the only action consists of a middle-aged men climbing over a cafe's fence. I've removed a few lines and corrected a few typos, but it is otherwise the same story I wrote four years ago.

I should note that the character of Lawrence is not intended to represent a real person. I did use an old friend's appearance and mannerisms as a cheap and easy way to introduce an antagonist, but that's as far as it goes. The following is fiction, people!. I haven't hung out with Lawrence's real-life counterpart on a regular basis for many, many years and that I have no reason to believe he has chased after pubescent girls since he was a pubescent boy.

"Shall We Walk?"

"Eros starts young," Lawrence said.

Read the full story.

'Everything you know is wrong'

My Own Private (game of) Telephone'

A (very) young Young Geoffrey, fall 1980.

Vern, almost as young (winter or spring 1982).

Well, we might have known, but we also forgot.

The story as I've been telling it to others for years — for decades! — now, and as (I think) we have been telling to each other when nostalgia has struck over drinks, went roughly as follows.

Vern and I had been practicing for maybe two weeks — he on guitar, with me as lead vocalist and (piss-poor) tambourine man — when we decided we were ready to take "Dow and Pineau" out to the streets and start our climb to stardom.

We were 16 years old and determined to begin our careers as buskers at the very top: right in front of the main entrance to the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas.

And so, laughing with adolescent faith in our inevitable stardom, we set out in search of fame and fortune.

Only, Vern started to get cold feet and, even as we approached our destination, he stopped and said he wasn't going to do it, he wasn't going to play.

I tried cajoling, then yelling, but only when I kicked a rock (and hurt my foot), did I get through to him the importance of finishing what we had set out to do.

And so it was we boldly set up facing the Eaton Centre.

Vern laid his guitar case upon the sidewalk and took out his Norman, wrapped the strap across his chest and began to tune up. I nervously banged the tambourine against my thigh, hoping against hope I would not forget the words to "Helpless", or "Run for Your Life" or, especially, to our cover-tune par excellence, "Eleanor Rigby".

At length, Vern began to play and I to sing. And before long a couple of funky chicks (who later told us they were from New York City) stopped to watch us and then began to dance. Between the glorious music and the dancers' enthusiasm, we gathered a crowd that might have approached 50 people and the money poured into the open case.

His didactic materials

When story-tellers fail:
On Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials'

I'll never forget the shocked silence that greeted my ingenuous kindergarten announcement that, "I don't believe in God".

My class-mates, and even my otherwise perfect teacher, Miss Matthews, simply didn't know how to process such a shocking proposition. In Quebec in 1970, a five year-old atheist was nearly as strange and terrible a creature as one with green skin, fangs and a devil's tail. (I exaggerate, but not that much.)

Philip Pullman seems to have shocked much of the Christian world in the same way that I did my kindergarten class. His Dark Materials, a fantasy (or science fiction; see sidebar below) series whose plot revolves around an attempt to kill "god" is obviously at least in part a direct reply to children's books (or "young adult novels") probably best exemplified by the likes of C.S. Lewis' soporific apologia for Christianity, The Chronicles of Narnia.

In any case, the series has been taken as anti-Christian and a quick Google search will quickly find all sorts of horrified and angry reactions to it.

So I, as a both a life-long atheist and a long-time reader of F and SF, am (but for the fact I'm neither a father nor a teenager) am pretty close to Pullman's ideal reader. I approached the first volume with a lot of curiosity and no small amount of hope that I would enjoy it quite a lot.