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Free Cake for 2021

Cake mixing in this world and that

By Ian VincePublished 3 years ago 5 min read
3

Dear Me, Dear You,

I have arrived at the beginning of the end of something negative. That’s an odd way of expressing positivity, but if there's one thing that the previous 12 months has taught me, it is that the old, normal way of doing everything is no longer a viable basis for future plans. Having said that, who doesn't take the year just gone as a template for the year to come? It isn’t as if it could be any worse, after all.

But here’s the rub: I'm never going to get anywhere with that particular millstone around my neck - none of us are. A fresh start is what’s needed. Or, in my case, a fresh tart. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and everybody in between, let me introduce you to my alter-ego: Cake.

Cake is the pixel persona I wear to DJ in a virtual world. Cake the DJ is doing alright. Young, fresh and full of boundless energy and enthusiasm, Cake the DJ entertains respectable-sized groups of other pixel people a few times a week. Cake the DJ collects tips in game currency for live mixing and mashing tunes together in a sometimes seamless flow for two hours on end at a time. Cake the DJ has started to collect followers and fans in a virtual world.

Cake started as a DJ character in a fiction project about alternate realities. Having created the character, I decided to go one step further for research purposes and made Cake a pixel perfect being, fleshed out with personality, ambition and drive. Part of that process meant actually learning how to DJ for real.

So, Cake is many things, but what Cake is not is a 56 year old bearded male. That is: she is not me. Although, come to think of it, she is. Either that or I am her devoted typist, her hairy hands on the decks, her overweight id and her less-than-super superego. I am aware of the contradictions and I embrace them wholeheartedly, even in these catfish-obsessed, gender-questioning times. Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in the first person or, rather, first equine. Was anyone bothered that Anna was pretending to be a horse? Neigh. Walk on.

With Cake's cakes

So, having set out the backstory, reconciled the contradictions and dropped a quick pun, here is what I plan to do with Cake and in the course of it, myself, in 2021.

I love DJing. It marries a little technical ability, music theory, some intuition and lots of practise into an all-consuming, fascinating past-time. But I want to be better at it. I've improved steadily over the years, but 2021 needs to see a quantum leap in my abilities.

DJing is one of the reasons that my mental health improved over 2020, while all around me many were crumbling, quite-understandably, into the dust. Music will help even more over 2021, how can it not? My alter-ego is refreshingly upbeat, she shows a different way ahead, at least until log-off. I have already started to take some of that positivity into the waking, walking, real world around me.

Cake is still only a writing project - though the chapters of fiction I was hoping to harvest from my in-character time have not yet materialised, so my 2021 will see me progress beyond the opening arc of the book. It's relatively high concept, so I've had some nuts and bolts thinking to do about my protagonist's predicament, but the time for chewing Cake over is, well, over.

Progress is something I desperately need and, if there's one thing I learnt in 2020, it is that everything you want does not just arrive. Going with the flow is something that 1990s DJs high on super-skunk, house music and pronoia believed in. As 2020 so ably demonstrated, the only thing Gaia wants is the kind of balance that would be achieved by ridding herself of us. Planetary-level positive feedback is a killer. Go with the flow and you will end up surfing the wrong kind of wave.

The Casbah and Cakehole: where some of the noise happens

So Cake will at least progress in her own world of alternate realities. She starts out as heart-broken, sheltering from the world, when she discovers something really quite strange about her late father's work. As someone who plays Phase 2s in old barns on Cornish moors, she is no stranger to the ineffable mysteries of folklore and landscape. What she finds, however, is much stranger than even the most peculiar numinosity that magical places routinely exude. Part of my plan for 2021 is to explore those liminal worlds of imagination and the hypnagogic realms found just on the edge of sleep.

It's a very different, unencumbered style of writing for me. So, progress will mean not continually cramping my writing style to fit a market. I wrote five non-fiction books up until 2010 and they had the kind of reasonable mid-market success that publishers used to like. The first and last of them were the most 'me'. The ebook of the first of them is available on Shoptly and, yes, I do have a link.

Buy from https://shoptly.com/i/bbsu £3.00

And while we're at it, my last book, The Lie of the Land, is still in print. I had a lot of fun doing this, but the arc of my writing - my own narrative arc if you will, shows how far I have travelled; from my original, profane slapstick satirical roots to a book about British landscapes with jokes in gently subverted footnotes.

Since that last book, the aftermath of the financial crisis and some bad times, I've been pouring a lot of commercial copywriting into the world, but my heart's really not in it. This year will change all of that. Cake is going on a journey and I'm going with her.

I'm hoping that loosening up my style will help other projects as well. I have a film script almost ready. There's a distinct possibility of another, unrelated, film being funded this year (or next) with my input and there's also the script of a game in progress - again, unrelated. Getting some clicks and likes on Vocal, naturally, would be lovely. Even this article is written on the hoof as an exercise in pouring unexpurgated enthusiasm onto the page.

My plan for next year is to take all of the most popular adjectives of 2020 - unprecedented, exponential, viral - and apply them to myself, my alter-ego and all my many projects. Only then can I both have my Cake and eat it.

Happy New Year to Me and to You.

happiness
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About the Creator

Ian Vince

Erstwhile non-fiction author, ghost & freelance writer for others, finally submitting work that floats my own boat, does my own thing. I'll deal with it if you can.

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