On the subject of ‘Who Rowney Marshal is?’, I must say the perspective above is biased in the extreme. To me, RM is just convenient shorthand for a pain in the neck. Spare a thought for the body that RM infests. Trying to get any serious work done is problematic in the extreme when you always have to be repressing the drive to write down all the collectively-autocatalytic sets of self-narrators requesting time with the hand. Imagine the depth of that body’s inhalation and dropping shoulders as it finally relaxes after months of such repression of RM in order to fulfil the creature’s contradictory vision of self-publication.

It didn’t have to form a company, learn how to use Photoshop to design (aah! Just design in visual media is enough of a challenge), learn how to make print-ready documents and work through the credit crunch effect on printer-on-demand providers, set up a unit of capitalist exploitative potential in order to recoup costs (minimum aim) and separate taxation rules from the individual person attached publicly to the body, design (again, aagh!) and build a website and now the damn products need marketing to sell and have the desired effect of being read.

Only now it transpires that the persona of Rowney Marshal has to usurp, at least for some of the time, the physical body in public. I don’t remember that being in the deal when I decided to allow professional amounts of time to constructing the written effort. Some (few) people don’t want to go out. After all, the up side of having RM in my head is the places I go from my armchair. I want to stay home and let RM out to play. I had been doing the producing a product work item by new item, since I didn’t know how to do any of these tasks, so I had allowed myself to postdate any research into marketing, it never having entered my purview hitherto. I reckoned vaguely it would all be possible anonymously via the wondrous communicable disease of the internet. Now RM wants my face too.

Of course, RM has been a part of me of so long that, in a way, it feels like coming out to become Rowney Marshal. But it also seems to be a fiction, especially since, without the feedback of an audience, that small circle of hell known as fame, to feed its construction, the persona will have to be a choice I can generate alone, preferably one I can live with. RM is no help in this matter. Getting RM to conceive of a fixed bodily form is almost as hard as getting Vanity to choose what it’s going to wear to the ball. So no help with any part of the costuming then. RM shrugs...

humanity and its’ fashions and selfconsciousnesses are a bit beneath it. Lots of stuff is when you’re off tiptoeing between universes in a ftl fugue. Believe me, I have to work hard to follow RM through some of the longer clauses and denser concepts, and I did the bloody research. I just don’t have the memory buffer for the recall without a level of stuttering RM despises, along with the rest of the limitations.

On the other hand, it strikes me as a bit rich that I should have to give up my privacy to publicize the MemeQueen’s alternative views of what might have been. It’s not like my life experience wasn’t massively illuminating to the development of those opinions – some would say, obsessions. If I got past them, why hasn’t the Author? But, as MemeQueen, she hasn’t got past thinking the chessboard has pawns, such as me and my longsuffering siblings, which are there only to sacrifice themselves to her gameplan and defend her corner in perpetuity, or at least until defeated. I can’t even see the enemy, meself. And life is never black and white, even when life and death, but then again, I have trouble with the Vulcan version, never mind one in multiple dimensions and parallel branchings, so who am I to talk? Which is part of my argument against turning into RM as a public entity. I’m not reluctant to give my voice in the cause, because I’m articulate enough, but do I want my functionality as a professional citizen of a constrained utility undermined by the imaginary concepts which RM might be required to discuss? So far, ‘alien sex?’ has been the most consistent response to the information that I, the body, wrote these novels. Not, for instance, Kauffmannian spirituality (Stuart A).

Content aside, I may be the disappointment. The spirit being willing, the flesh has not been maintained by any attention to potential public display coming in the future. As for the standards, the dogwalking wardrobe could upgrade to tramp with advantage. Et cetera...

RM desires a cessation to the whinging at this point. Just deal with it.

That’s told me. So I’ll just stop and play Oasis, D’You know what I mean? at the creature very loudly for a bit. (It doesn’t disturb the neighbours, as it’s within headphones) unless I shout along – I just might.

The Black Knight.