If you read my previous post, or (let's face it) a lot of my blog, you'll know that I'm in a bit of a creative funk at the moment. And not the good kind. There was a moment in 2024, looking at the physical copy of Mothership for the first time while at Tabletop Scotland, that I really had a wave of inspiration that got me fired up to create something. I did a blog post about it, back in September 2024.
I started thinking about something new to create, but there are some limitations that are holding me back. One day, I'll go into the details. But, after a sudden burst of enthusiasm, of joyous creativity, the reality of the situation crept back in, and my motivation and drive were thoroughly beaten into submission.
Since then, there have been a couple of moments of similar inspiration. One was a video I watched called Pursue Ambitious Projects, which I covered in a blog post last year. It looked at how David Lynch and David Bowie enjoyed the freedom of doing whatever they wanted, without the limitations of commerciality, and revelled in the challenge of an ambitious project that really got them fired up and excited about things.
The other moment of real inspiration was last week, watching a video of a review of the Tabletop RPG based on Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. I'd heard vaguely about the TTRPG, and wasn't sure what to expect, but saw this video come up on my feed about RPGs getting weird and gave it a look.
While the RPG looks great, and I like the implementation of the Cypher System, it's the opening section that really inspired me. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a personal project of Trevor Roberts. He just started posting this weird idea on a Subreddit, and kept building upon it, creating an immersive world where this weird biological entity has been commercialised and mined by a corporation. The amazing world building, the graphic design for this fictional world is fantastic.
It's just really inspiring. I want to be able to immerse myself in a setting and get really enthusiastic about it, just like Roberts did with the Park. Maybe soon...
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In other news, the overlords at Google decided that my blog wasn't frequent enough, or focused enough, to warrant adverts to drag in a minimal amount of revenue, and you know what? I don't care. So, no ads on the blog. Or on the Patreon.
I will, however, try to be a little more frequent than once a month, but not so much that you get sick of me.
In the meantime, check out that video about the Park, and who knows, maybe it'll inspire you too.
The man, the myth, the legend that is, David Bowie
[No, that wasn't a typo. I'm paraphrasing one of the Bowie's song titles.]
I watch a lot of Youtube. I don't know if it's because I've a terribly short attention-span at the moment, but I do enjoy watching those talented crafters like Studson, Nerdforge, Bill Making Stuff and Dan Does. My wife watches all the videos about painting and art, and frequently I get videos appear in my recommendations about creativity. Inevitable I guess.
One appeared on my feed recently by someone called Creative Codex, and it was about pursuing ambitious projects. The thumbnail used an image of that great combo of Davids - David Bowie and David Lynch. Of course, I had to watch...
The end of the video features of a clip of David Bowie's interview in 1997 about creativity. It focuses on a quote which I'm sure you've heard many times before -
"If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting."
- David Bowie
And there was also the rest the video, where it discusses ambitious projects and some creators immersing themselves in a passion project that takes years to complete. It really got me thinking about these passion projects (hence the name of the post) and those times when I got completely and utterly absorbed in a project. When you'd need to keep a notebook close to the bed for those thoughts that surface just as you're falling asleep, or in your pocket for long journeys and your mind wanders and reveals a solution to one of your creative roadblocks.
It got me thinking of times when I was completely immersed in a project that it completely took over everything I was doing.
Drowning in Darkness
Cover for second printing of Drowning in Darkness
Many years ago, we're talking mid-late 80's here, I wanted to write and draw comics. A friend of mine, Pete, decided to start publishing comics under the "Swampland" name, and my first comic, Drowning in Darkness completely consumed my life. It was a small, 32-page A4, comic. Sold a few copies. One comic review magazine called me the "Goth Hergé" which I was really chuffed with. It was a pretty basic story of an ex-government agent turned vigilante taking on vampires. Madness, I know, but I enjoyed it.
Pete wrote a massive sequel called Mirrors of Darkness that I started drawing and inking, but it kinda fizzled out about page 80-something. I also did the usual thing that creatives do, which was to go back and start re-making Drowning in Darkness with new art and an extended storyline. Never finished that one... I still have it all somewhere, though it's probably an embarrassing read.
Ghostbusters: 'Spooky Science' and 'Back to Transylvania'
Very old illustration I did of me typing Ghostbusters adventures.
My two great passions in the late 80s were comics and roleplaying games, and after discovering the Ghostbusters Roleplaying Game by West End Games, I really wanted to write RPGs. More than that, I really wanted to write for the Ghostbusters RPG. This is back before the internet, so this involved writing a letter to West End Games (including 'international reply coupons' to cover return postage from the States to the UK), and waiting months.
First it was a letter to see if they'd look at some stuff, and get the Release Form which allowed them to look at it without any legal problems (in case they were working on something similar already), and their writers guidelines. Then, days upon days sat over an electric typewriter drafting an adventure for Ghostbusters.
They weren't great, and their movie-parody style was a little too close to some other major franchises, but the encouraging letter I got back from West End Games gave me the drive to keep going. I spent every spare moment writing those adventures, even doing stupid illustrations for them that they'd never be able to use.
Missing
Covers for Issues 1, 4, and 2 of Missing
After going off to art school (sorry, University), my desire to write and draw comics was bubbling to the surface. Inspired by Twin Peaks, I became totally immersed in the world of Missing. Planned as a multi arc story over around 90 issues, it featured a wide cast of weird characters thrown together at a hotel on the border between Scotland and England, after England had become a US State, and after global warming had raised the water levels.
There were multiple plots crossing over, featuring the kidnapping of the President's daughter, a bunch of 'Neuromatics' - surfing highwaymen who were holding up traffic heading for the border. There was murder, betrayal, intrigue, scandal, and more. It was even funded by the Prince's Youth Business Trust. My mind was filled with plot lines, characters, and plans for the future... but after I lost distribution after four issues due to low orders, I shelved the whole thing and haven't gone back to it. I have one complete set, but looking at it now I feel myself cringe a bit. Definitely a product of its time.
Conspiracy X 2.0
Promotional image for Conspiracy X 2.0
After Missing went... well... missing... I was at a bit of a loss. I started thinking about my next big comic venture which was a post-apocalyptic comic of religion and divine-like alien beings influencing a strange cathedral... but it never went anywhere. I just kept reworking it over and over again.
However, I'd continued roleplaying, and got talking to the lovely folk at Eden Studios (initially about a potential Conspiracy X comic) after a friend of mine told me I needed to read the Conspiracy X RPG, knowing I was a massive fan of The X-Files. I ended up helping with a number of their games like Terra Primate, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Conspiracy X was amazing, but it frustrated me that it wasn't the same game system as the other games produced by Eden that I'd worked on.
I put together a pitch and met with George while he was in the UK at one of the last UK GenCon conventions to convince him to let me convert Conspiracy X to a new edition using Unisystem.
The week after I signed the contract for four books which would adapt and convert most of the existing content into new concise volumes, my father died. I did the slightly unhealthy thing where I squirrelled myself away into our tiny office room, and buried myself deep in the world of Conspiracy X. I contacted American government agencies to ensure everything was up to date after the restructuring with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Pulling in previously unpublished material, I was left to just get on with it and piece together a brand new edition of the game. With the amazing editorial skills of Alex Jurkat, the core rulebook finally came out... and many years later, the remaining three books were released after successful Kickstarter campaigns.
I may have gone a bit deep on that one, but not only did it produce a game I still love, but it helped during a particularly tough time. Unfortunately, one of the stretch goals for the fourth book (the Conspiracies Sourcebook) was to ensure development of the 'sequel' game called Extinction. Set after the Saurian aliens had returned to Earth and decimated the population, it was announced just as I'd lost my mother - rather depressing bookends for my Conspiracy X career - and I just wasn't in the headspace to work on a title that involved so much death and destruction. I'd hoped that someone would take over on Extinction, but I think the Conspiracies Sourcebook was the final Eden Studios release for the time being.
Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space
Cover of the first edition of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG
After Conspiracy X 2.0 was handed in (before the Kickstarters for the remaining books), I started talking to Chris Birch, Angus Abranson, and Dominic McDowall about how a good license could bring in a new generation of gamers. One thing lead to another, and we were pitching to the BBC for Doctor Who. Thanks to my day-job working in a bookstore with a Dalek, I'd been excited to see the series return in 2005, and by that two-part finale I knew that a Doctor Who RPG would be amazing.
Once we had the license secured, I was in the strange position where I was kinda left to it. I recruited a few other writers I knew to help with adventures and some of the sections, but once again I immersed myself in the world(s) and trying to get the game to echo the feel of the series as much as possible. It was kinda weird... a few rounds of massive playtests, feedback incorporated, and then the text went off to Dom and Angus... and then it miraculously appeared in my inbox. A cool boxed set, multiple books, dice, cards. It felt amazing to see something go from pitch to product and hit the shelves.
WILD: Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming
Cover for WILD
With Doctor Who handed in, I worked on a few of the supplements before it became too big a beast (and an award winning beast at that) and Cubicle 7 grew to accommodate it. I was still working in my little retail job, but came out of the cinema after seeing Inception that opening weekend and my mind was buzzing with ideas. It was like someone had hooked up my brain to a Christopher Nolan's creative drive, and I just had to do something. And thus, WILD was born - Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming, an RPG of dreamshare technology. That was 2010. Ten years later, Stoo told me to stop messing about and to actually get something finished for WILD, so that he could run a Kickstarter for it.
Stoo was a legend, sorting the printing, commissioning the awesome cover art (above) by Qissus, and the Tarot art by Gareth Sleightholme who I've known longer than I'd like to admit to. Stoo ran the Kickstarter, fulfilled the shipments - let's face it, without Stoo chivvying me and getting the publishing side organised, WILD would never exist.
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You know what all of these projects had in common (besides me), was that they were a cool challenge, and maybe a little over my head. But I had the love for the story or property that I wanted to see it through.
At the moment, I'm just feeling burned out and unmotivated. I want to feel that drive, that passion (beep beep), that desire to completely immerse myself in something that it infiltrates my idle mind, sparking ideas. I miss that. Right now, my mind is like it's tuned to a dead channel and the white noise is drowning everything else out.
Soon, though... soon.
I'll finish with another of Bowie's quotes from that interview:
"Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations — they generally produce their worst work when they do that."
I’ve always loved movies and TV. Always. From a kid, those first trips to the cinema, or my parents introducing me to movies and series on the TV. I love them. I used to keep a list taped to my wardrobe door of movies I’d seen and even started ticking off how many times I’d seen Star Wars or Tron. Friday nights we’d rent movies from local video store and a group of friends would come ‘round and we’d watch the latest releases.
One week we rented DUNE (yes, I’m using all-caps, it seems more apt). It was awesome, and visually stunning. I hadn’t read the books, and the rest of my D&D group who watched it with me kept pointing out how it was different to the novels, but I didn’t care. It looked amazing, I was baffled by some of it, but visually and audibly it was mind-blowing (and speaker-blowing too - I remember the bass notes of the movie were a little more than our old TV could handle).
Years passed, and I continued my obsession with movies, renting the strangely terrifying and hauntingly dark Blue Velvet. And wow, it was dark. Really sinister goings on there, but the lead was the guy from Dune, and he was such a wholesome, small-town innocent, I just kinda related to Kyle MacLachlan’s character, Jeffrey. I was intrigued, and kept a lookout for Kyle in other movies (The Hidden is brilliant, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it).
Most of the D&D group had gone off to University or moved away, and I spent most of my weekends renting movies from the video store(s) and bingeing horror movies. So much so, I’d watched most of the movies they had on the shelves and struggled to find stuff to watch - after all 50p rental for a weekend, it was glorious. I noticed a new title on the shelves called Twin Peaks, read the back and saw that it was by David Lynch and had Kyle MacLachlan in it, I scooped it up and put it straight on the top of that weekend’s movies to watch.
It was weird, and dreamlike - and lingered uncomfortably long on some of the emotional scenes, but there was Special Agent Dale Cooper in the middle of all this weird, taking it in his stride, with a whistle, a smile, and a thumbs up, he was going to solve this case. But what really blew my mind was the ending. Sure, I’d later discover this wasn’t really the ending - it was a re-edited version for VHS release with an extra conclusion that wrapped things up - but the final scenes, which were used as the dream sequence in the series’ Episode 2, just left my jaw open and I was shocked. This was amazing and unlike anything I’d seen. I was obsessed.
Who is the Dreamer?
Completely and utterly obsessed. When I flicked through my parents’ Radio Times and it announced the arrival of the TV series of Twin Peaks in the UK, I bought a pack of blank VHS tapes and sat, waiting, every Tuesday night, for Alan Bennett to finish his programme before Twin Peaks aired on BBC2. Fingers hovering over the record button, so I could rewatch each episode multiple times to really absorb what was going on.
Cover of the Radio Times in 1990
I bought the books, the soundtrack, wore a trench coat like Cooper, got a Dictaphone, and even expanded on the relationship map that was in that issue of the Radio Times for one of my art school projects.
My art school project, a flowchart of relationships of everyone in Twin Peaks
Obsessed. I followed everything David Lynch did, catching up on projects I’d not seen. It was an obsession and a love of everything Lynch worked on. There was a perfect surreal nature, a dreamlike quality, and an unpredictability that left me enthralled. There’s always a moment that I love when watching something and I hear myself say “I have no idea where this is going”. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s a sign that it’s something that’ll stay with me long after the initial viewing.
When Twin Peaks returned twenty-five years (plus) later, Lynch really embraced his art life and did whatever he wanted to do - taking his and Mark Frost’s scripts and just ‘going with it’, And that’s just powerful. If ever I think “What I’m doing isn’t commercial” or “No one’s going to like this” I just think of Twin Peaks: The Return (Episode 8). It’s absolutely genius. The narrative progresses, there’s a great musical interlude with (The) Nine Inch Nails, and then there’s an extended atomic explosion scene, the opera house, the ‘Gotta Light?’ sequence, and more. It’s genius, and not what you’d expect from prime time television, even in this age of experimenting with the format of TV.
Thanks to David Lynch, if ever I’m unsure of what I’m doing or creating, I ask myself if I’m enjoying what I’m creating, or if I’m just making something because I think it’ll sell.
I Read the News Today, Oh Boy…
Sat in a gaming cafe, talking to local game creators about what they were working on, I noticed a message had arrived on my phone. A friend of mine who knew how much I admired and loved David Lynch had messaged to tell me the news.
I was shocked, and felt that initial gut punch but carried on as best I could at the meeting. It wasn’t until later that it really sank in. I loved everything David Lynch produced. He worked with so many others that I admire, like David Bowie and Trent Reznor, who also don’t compromise in their creative visions. Created my favourite TV series (which lead me to discover my other favourite series, The X-Files - both hold that No. 1 spot jointly in my head). Showed us how meditation can calm the mind, free us from the rubber clown suit of negativity. Introduced meditation to schools. Showed us how we could all be creative, how we are all one, and if we only realised we’re all the same we could finally have peace.
My awesome wife, Debs, drew the fantastic picture that started this post, and I had to write something about how inspiring David Lynch is, and always will be.
I can only aspire to have a fraction of his talent. But his inspiration will always be there, and keeps driving me on.
Thank you, Mr Lynch. The driver has left the car, but continues on.
It's no secret that I'm a massive David Lynch fan. I have been since my teens and I first witnessed the wonders of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, the latter sending me on an obsessive journey of fandom and decoding for decades to come. I could have picked Blue Velvet, or Mulholland Drive, to add to my list - both of which I love, especially Mulholland Drive. However I thought I'd go a bit left-field and go with my favourite of all the Lynch movies - Lost Highway.
For those of you who haven't seen it (seriously, why not?) it's a tale of a saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) who starts getting weird VHS tapes left on his front door. As the days progress, the VHS recordings continue, each showing camcorder footage of his own house, getting closer, until finally entering the house. The last tape shows him murdering his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). Fred has no memory of committing the crime, but the evidence is there and he's sentenced to death for her murder.
In the prison cell, he transforms into a completely different person - Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), an auto mechanic who does repair work for mobster Mr Eddy, whose mistress, Alice (also played by Patricia Arquette) looks an awful lot like Fred's wife.
Throw into the mix the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) in one of the most unsettling scenes from any movie... Seriously. He goes up to Fred at a party and asks him to call his own house, because he's in it right now. Fred does, while the Mystery Man looks on, smiling. And the Mystery Man answers the phone...
Messed up.
The whole movie loops back on itself, with a final scene that will confuse and intrigue in equal portions. And that's possibly why I love it so much. It's simply mindbending. You can find dozens and dozens of articles and features on Lost Highway, and what it all means. I like to think it's in the same universe as Twin Peaks, with the Mystery Man being another entity from the Black Lodge.
Add to this a score by Angelo Badalamenti, and a soundtrack collaborated with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and you can see why I love it so much.
I didn't get to see Lost Highway when it came out at the cinema in the UK, I don't think it was on screens for very long, but I remember renting the VHS and loving it, while being equally confused. Like a lot of David Lynch projects, the whole film feels like a dream - a confusing and unsettling dream. Lynch will refuse to explain it, rather letting the audience get what they want from the film. Interpreting it in their own way to mean different things to different people.
Last year I wrote the obligatory "Hey, it's a new year" blogpost looking back at the previous year and everything I'd hope to do in the coming year of 2019. It came up on my Facebook feed today saying "You wrote this post last year" and I opened it, reread it, and thought - "Wow, it's almost like nothing happened..."
So this year, I present last year's New Year post again - with a few modifications in red so you can see any differences.
To quote Talking Heads - "Same as it ever was..."
I was going to call this blogpost something like "It's the end of the year as we know it" or something suitably New Year-y, but it's been an odd one and it's probably best to just get on with the new one...
The last year has felt like one big holding pattern. Circling, endlessly, waiting for something exciting to happen. For that phone call. That email. For someone to come along and say "Hey, I like your ideas. You need to work on that, rather than wasting your days in retail. Here's a handful of cash. Make your dreams a reality."
Of course, it never really happens like that. You have to reach out and grab opportunity by the gronk-nuks.
I had my share of waiting last year. That holding pattern of self doubt. Convinced that after my last professional writing stint that I'd never get a publishing contract again. Convinced that all of my ideas are nonsense.
But I mustn't give up. I can't give up. There have been times last year when I seriously thought I should just pack in the writing and resign myself to my fate - one of retail, customer service and the hell I deserve for my past mistakes. But I can't do that. I've been trying to get into game writing since the late 1980s, got my first published game product on the shelves in 2002, won awards for game design and writing. It's what I want to do. Or something like it.
With Dragonmeet looming at the end of last year, I decided that I needed to sell myself. I needed to prove to someone, as well as myself, that I could do it and that my own project was worth taking a chance on. So I decided I'd produce a small sample - a pitch document, just as we had with Doctor Who over ten years ago - to show my wares and my ideas.
I produced a forty page book - half of it a "pitch" summarising the concepts and ideas of WILD, the RPG I've been working on for years. The other half a sample of one of the chapters, to give a feel for the text, and how I'd envisioned it being laid out.
With the excellent service of a digital printer (www.inkylittlefingers.co.uk) this book was printed, in black and white, with a hardback, full colour cover.
The printed "pitch" document for WILD - 20x20cm, with a very rough illustration on the cover
The printers did a fantastic job of it, with even the images they flagged on the document (the tiny jpgs of the covers of some of the books I'd worked on) coming out brilliantly...
The "Pitch" half of the document summarises who I am, and the concepts of the game.
But seeing the actual pages I'd been working on, with the ink-splat designs I'd had in mind, was brilliant. Great inspiration to keep going and to keep working on my dream project...
Playing with the text, little details like repeated lines, ink splats and blurs. This is what I had in mind...
Awesome. And despite me sending the files off to the printers with just ten days to Dragonmeet, they delivered with days to spare. Three whole copies of the WILD pitch. THREE. Talk about limited edition!
Dragonmeet was cool. Busy and exciting. Huge as well. So much bigger than last time I'd gone. I'd only been there a matter of minutes before Dom from Cubicle 7 dragged me off to a secluded location to record a podcast for "Wibbly Wobbly Dicey Wicey" - a Podcast dedicated to Doctor Who roleplaying. That was great fun - I'll post a link to the podcast when it is published.
I showed the pitch off, and hopefully there will be some news about the future of WILD soon. But I don't want to jinx it. I'm just going to keep plugging away at it. Writing the pitch document has revealed some areas I want to rewrite and redesign, which I'll start work on in the next few days.
[2020] After that, there was a huge silence. Nothing. Nada. Last year's Dragonmeet I went again with a cool WILD T-shirt and hoped it would spark some sort of interest from the big publishers I talked to the previous year, in a "Hey, remember me, we talked about that game last year?" but nothing... With no major publishers interested it looks like WILD may be going the smaller, indie route in 2020. I just need to get back to it.
After Dragonmeet it was a most definite return to the holding pattern - unable to work on anything except the dayjob and madness that is working in retail over the festive period. With just a couple of days before the kids go back to school, things will return to a slower, calmer pace and I can reassign some energies to working on the writing, and what I want to get done this year.
Most blogposts posted to the interwebs on the first of a year is all about the writer expressing their hopes and dreams for the coming year.
I hope to write more - get more written for WILD, unless something bigger and cooler comes along that would actually pay...
I hope to escape the day job - but I know this is unlikely. Gotta pay those bills!
[2020] - 2019 saw a couple of big job interviews that would have meant I could finally escape the hellscape of retail, but while it looked hopeful for a while, even they fell by the wayside. I'm going to be stuck in retail until I die aren't I?
I hope to escape the city - I'm a country boy at heart.
With that, I'll close the blog with a track from my wife's favourite band of the last year. [2020] and this year. She's barely listened to anything else, but "Leave the City" still remains incredibly apt...
May 2020 bring you everything you hope. May it be kind to you, bring you prosperity and good health, and bring your dreams to life.
As the 80s turned into the 90s I became obsessed. My first experience of the genius of David Lynch came with Dune, adapted from a book I hadn't read. I loved science fiction, so checked out anything remotely SF, and the movie of Dune was a visual masterpiece. My friends in the old D&D group pointed out the differences between the movie and the book, but while I didn't *get* bits of it, I still loved it.
Off of the back of that, and when most (but not all) of my gamer friends had gone off to university, I rented Blue Velvet. Hell, I rented just about everything from the local video store. I had time to kill. But Blue Velvet was a complete mind-frell. Hey, it had Paul Atreides in it, so it should be good. Oh, it's the same director as Dune. Cool...
After that, I was a bit obsessed. I checked out David Lynch's other works, and being late to the party it wasn't long before I discovered a VHS tape called Twin Peaks at the video store. A "made for TV" movie.
I remember watching it with one of the guys from the D&D group. It was weird, intriguing, and had a strangely sinister feel that was very reminiscent of Blue Velvet. But, what would be known as the International Pilot, wrapped everything up with Laura Palmer's killer, and had a weird epilogue dream sequence that provoked "huh?"s. This was before the internet, so I knew nothing else of it. It was a strangely mesmerising little video that captured my imagination, and I thought it was over.
My parents used to buy the TV guides (remember the days that you bought the Radio Times for BBC listings, and the TVTimes for ITV and Channel 4?) and every week we used to go through the four channels and highlight the programmes we were interested in. One fateful week in 1990 I picked up the Radio Times and found that cover...
(I think I still have that issue somewhere in the loft) ->
That little "made for TV" movie was actually a TV series. There was a diagram in the magazine to introduce the characters for this new soap opera that had taken America by storm. I was ready for it. I bought a pile of blank VHS tapes, and every week on Tuesday nights I would sit there, tuned to BBC2, with that agonising wait through the last ten minutes of Alan Bennett's monologues that seemed to last ten hours. Fingers poised over the record button on the VHS machine to record the latest episode.
(Yes, I still have the VHS tapes of those recordings).
I was quickly obsessed. I wore my Agent Cooper trenchcoat all the time outside the house. I bought a dictaphone. I bought the books, the soundtrack, and rewatched the series on tape.
At art college one of the big projects was to create something to explain something to a newcomer. Whether this was "how to fold a paper plane" or "how to bake a pie", I decided to explain Twin Peaks - taking that initial, simple diagram from the Radio Times and incorporating every character into a massive flow diagram / relationship map. I passed, but I don't think it really explained anything...
When Twin Peaks ended, I was a bit lost. That cliffhanger...
I filled the hole in my entertainment life with The X-Files. It shared a lot of sensibilities. FBI agents investigating the weird, mentions of Project Bluebook, and it had the guy who played Denise Bryson in it.
I never thought I'd see more Twin Peaks, or ever discover the aftermath of that cliffhanger...
Who'd have though it?
Twenty-six years later, I've just watched the first two parts of Twin Peaks season 3 (or Twin Peaks: The Return as it's sometimes called). The first two parts, being the first two hours - shown as one feature length episode. Thanks to Sky Atlantic, they're showing it at 2am in the UK, the same moment the States gets to experience the wonderful and strange.
No, we didn't watch it live - we recorded it and watched it at 9am this morning, with a large box of donuts, and hot beverages - just as Twin Peaks is intended.
I had that moment just before we watched it, and I said to Debs, "What if it's rubbish? I've waited over 25 years for this, what if it's no good?"
In my head I had worked out what I wanted from a Twin Peaks revival.
1) A new murder case. Things should start with a murder case, just like the original Twin Peaks, and the FBI (and Gordon Cole's strange division) should get called in to investigate. That way you can start afresh, and resurrect elements of the original series as necessary to tie things up.
2) Lots of new characters, with a sprinkling of the originals.
3) Some Black Lodge stuff, so we can resolve some of the cliffhanger from season 2.
That was about all I'd hoped for really. And thankfully, all of those boxes were ticked.
Needless to say (and I'm keeping this spoiler free for those of you who are going to watch it on Tuesday night on the normal primetime broadcast slot - ah, 9pm on a Tuesday, it's just like 1990 again) I loved it. Every confounding, uncomfortable, sinister, hilarious, bizarre and mindblowing second of it.
I'm already itching to rewatch it. I'm worried that Debs is going to witness another strangely obsessive phase for me where I sit and stare at the glass for hours watching for something to happen...
Probably not the last post you'll see from me about Twin Peaks in the coming weeks...
