We’re two-thirds of the way through summer already and here in Blighty the weather is only now reflecting the time of year with any real level of commitment. It is a nice afternoon though so I’m sitting in the yard with a cold one musing on the contents of the third and long overdue volume of The Journal of Gerard Arthur Connelly. The Journal is one of the things (alongside the second and third planned sessions of the Black Sword Hack Ultimate Chaos Edition game I began a year ago – watch or listen at your leisure if you’re of the gaming persuasion) that got waylaid by the events of 2023 and again in the first part of 2024. Creativity is a fleeting thing, for me at least, and I need a specific set of circumstances to get in the zone. Unfortunately, the precise composition of those circumstances remains a mystery, but I had a little surge of activity on it over the last couple of days and vol 3 has crept closer to completion.
So that’s good.
On the flipside, however, having such a long time between sections and spurts of writing leads primarily to me looking askance at what came before and wanting to revise and alter. But I don’t have time, so this coming volume will remain, to some degree, a stream of consciousness (mine or Connelly’s is hard to tell). I also came across a piece I wrote over ten years ago when looking through old folders so that’s getting woven in too. By woven, I mean dropped in almost wholesale as an interlude. But I like it so I’m going to subject you to it too. Should you read it of course. No pressure. There may come a time when the originally planned four volumes get broken down, revised and re-assembled as the very first Breakfast in the Ruins Publications one-shit book.
The dream…
Then an all-star supergroup concept album featuring friends of the show like Wayne, Graham, Derek, Dave and Allister T. I reckon between us we can beat the Edgar Winter/L Ron Hubbard collaboration into the dirt.
THE DIRT I TELLS YER!
(You have no idea how many times I’ve almost bought this – and given that Allister T and I have talked about doing an episode about ostentatious SF/Fantasy driven prog concept albums I probably will).
The third thing that got waylaid was the re-recording of chapters 8-10 of the audio version of the Journal. They’re the only bits remaining from the scored audio version of volumes one and two that are holding up Wayne in completing his work and I need to get that done for no other reason than his work on the music needs to be heard. It’s progressed a long way since we first put the sections together that appeared at the end of podcasts in 2021 and 2022 and we have a sort of plan to put it all on Bandcamp as a companion to his two complete and frankly fucking awesome albums inspired by the Journal.
I shall endeavour to complete those last re-recordings soon and then, maybe, even start recording volume three…
On the podcasting front, the next episode on the RPG experience (Reflections on The Void) will be along this week, featuring Steve and his excellent gaming gang. Following that we have a nice little slate prepped and we’ll be looking at a bit of Conan, a Moorcock-edited anthology called Before Armageddon, a selection of alt-barbarian novels from the 60s of varied levels of quality that we’re calling Barbarian Bingo, and a vintage piece of eco-horror that dates back to the days of scanning Pops’s coffee table for booty and finding an alarming reference to my home town within. It’s August in a couple of days too so I’ll be putting out this year’s Halloween poll, watch out for that.
And finally, for now, you’ll see that the header photo for this update is a very tidy Dancers at the End of Time trio that I picked up recently in a very tidy slipcase. I think it’s high time we kicked that series off with An Alien Heat, particularly since we’ve been covering The Coming of the Terraphiles and there are some thematic connections there without a doubt.
That reminds me that we still haven’t done any Bastable, either. So much to cover. So little time.
So, in the interests of time I’ll leave things there for this report.
Stay safe folks and I’ll see you out there… on the Moonbeam Roads.
Breakfast in the Ruins Podcast 