Iron Maiden: six years, six albums (1980-1985) ►
◄ Books: What Is DnD? Dragon Warriors, Knightmare, HQ, etc
That should be Gathering Daisies in Bläck Latex Caves, strictly speaking, but Google does weird things with indexing diacritics sometimes and who's going to type the umlaut? Since it's nearly Valentine's Day, join me as I dig up an unpublished novel I enjoyed around the time I started this site and, whilst I haven't re-read the whole thing recently, a light skim suggests it's aged much better than anything I've ever written. As of now the only Google hit for the title is me mentioning said Adrian Mole style epic on a Transformers forum in 2002.
I got it on floppy disk from APDL (Archimedes Public Domain Library) run by the sadly deceased David Holden, catalogue references L018/L019/L020. The APDL library still exists thanks to the efforts of his friends. At the time Dave described it as: "The 'hero' is a 17-year-old lad who loves heavy metal, has a rubber/latex fetish, and plays in a band with two friends. The novel charts two weeks in his hectic life in a humorous style." You can also download or read it online via the Internet Archive's snapshot of the author's original site.
In an effort to be zeitgeist-y, imagine what the book cover might look like, waste natural resources, etc, I pasted a prompt into a load of "AI" plagiarism generators and one of them hallucinated this that didn't match the prompt but is rather striking and could almost be mistaken for having read the story:
Googling the author suggests born in 1961, lived in the US/Canada/UK and a career GP with a few run-ins with NHS bureaucracy. He doesn't seem like the sort of bloke who'd be bothered by stuff he wrote thirty years ago turning up online again, but just in case I'm not naming him here.
Once upon a time I had it in mind to use this as an example for learning the LaTeX typesetting system, and subsequent to that several epub authoring tools, but the chances of any of that are very slim now. Besides, who really needs more than ASCII text or a bit of HTML? Go and check it out if you feel so inclined.
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