Haydn Wilks's Blog

My new novel HIRAETH. is an autofictional account of the pandemic. This list contains the many books I obsessed over during the writing process and made explicit references to in HIRAETH.'s many many pages.

1. The Rules of Attraction

Read by The Main Character in the opening chapter, a hedonistic sprint through South-East Asia just before the pandemic hits in January 2020. The frentic Eurotrip chapter is also heavy inspiration for the opening nos and ket consuming debauchery in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Korea, and Amsterdam.

The (excellent) film adaptation is also referred to later:

"During our first year in halls, me and Giacomo told each other how we’d both hoped university in London would be exactly like Roger Avary’s film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It was definitely close."

2. $hitcoin

My last novel - referred to in HIRAETH. as The Cryptocurrency Novel.



3. American Psycho

Another Bret Easton Ellis book that is referred to repeatedly in HIRAETH:

"Dad finishes reading his David Baldacci book. He says it was “alright”, but he strongly disliked Baldacci’s habit of listing what kind of dress each female character is wearing each time they appear.
I agree with Dad that this is “bad writing” because nobody pays that much attention to what other people are wearing, then immediately contradict myself by referencing American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman’s obsessive cataloguing of every character’s clothing makes the prose click.
I tell Dad he should read American Psycho, which I describe as “the best book written in the second half of the twentieth century.” I open my suitcase to take out American Psycho. Dad laughs when he sees I’ve transported a suitcase almost entirely filled with books back from Korea."

And another example:

"I rub the green gunk of L’Oreal Paris Pure Clay Purity Mattifying Eucalyptus Face Mask over my face after showering. I keep my face rigid for ten minutes after, as I make porridge with Greek yoghurt and almonds and walnuts and blueberries for breakfast. I think about how if I were to describe this skincare regime in literature, it would seem like it was aping Patrick Bateman’s in American Psycho; then I find American Psycho on the bookshelf, and read the opening as I wait for the 10 minutes recommended L’Oreal Paris Pure Clay Purity Mattifying Eucalyptus Face Mask time to elapse. Patrick Bateman attends an upper-class ‘80s NYC dinner party where sushi and Kirin beer are served as exoticities. I think about how Kirin is now regarded as a second- or third-class imported beer, while sushi isn’t seen as particularly weird in the West, though Dad’s almost certainly never eaten it. I wonder what Dad would think if he walked in to see me wearing this lime green face mask. Dad’s self-cleaning needs are entirely serviced by a bar of Imperial Leather soap, one of which remains beside the sink from when he lived here. I think about how comical these differences between us are, and how that could be the basis for writing something."

4. The Pale King

Suggested (unsuccessfully) as an alternative to American Psycho:

"Dad doesn’t want to read American Psycho, so I recommend other things. He tries reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, after I tell Dad that DFW is considered “the best writer of the last thirty years.”
Dad frowns as he reads, then gives up after a page, saying “These supposedly great writers have always gotta try and make things so bloody complicated.” "

5. The Old Man and the Sea

An accepted alternative to American Psycho.

"I tell Dad he’d probably prefer Orwell or Hemingway.
Dad reads The Old Man and the Sea."

Then later:

"Dad has read The Old Man & the Sea (I still haven’t), and expounds on how “great” it is, but “simple”, which becomes a very obvious disguised dig at me making the things I write “too complicated”. "

6. Dial M for Merthyr

The basis for a whole subsection in the chapter detailing the first lockdown:

"I order more books off Amazon, including Dial M for Merthyr by Rachel Trezise. The book is a true account of writer Rachel Trezise following local rock legends Midasuno on tour. The book takes me back to a distant world of gigs and life beyond the living room.

My favourite thing Rachel Trezise writes in Dial M for Merthyr is her description of why she likes Midasuno more than any other Welsh band: “there are ingredients in all Welsh pop music, in all music, which appeal to me; the basic map-plotting lyrics of the Stereophonics, the melancholy of the Manic Street Preachers, even intermittently the gloss of the Lostprophets, but there is something lacking in all of these bands’ approaches to their origins. The Manics wallow in their Welshness like misery. The Losprophets appear to deny it. Funeral for a Friend play on it. Midasuno do nothing more than accept it… for forty minutes every night they make the impossible seem possible - they turn being Welsh and desperate into something akin to sexy.”

I like this because I like it when writers eloquently throw shade, like Rachel Trezise’s paragraph does to every major non-Midasuno Welsh band. I also like it because it describes Midasuno well, and it is how I would like my writing to one day be described. I would like to write things that make “being Welsh and desperate” seem “sexy”.

There’s another line in Dial M for Merthyr that resonates with me: Rachel Trezise writes that she’s “jealous of rock stars” because they get “triple the amount of attention” writers get “for a quarter the amount of work.”

I finish Dial M for Merthyr in two days, then Dad reads it. Dad thinks it’s well written, but “all they seem to do in this band is get drunk all the time.” "

7. The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's masterpiece is a catalyst for the novel's first forays into existential struggle with the meaning of existence:

"I reach the most infamous scene in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan tells Aloysha tales of children suffering horrible abuse, and why this makes him think there is no God, and leads him on to a long poem about Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition that I don’t really understand, probably because I don’t have a good enough understanding of The Bible."

8. The Holy Bible: King James Version

Naturally flowing on from The Brothers Karamazov:

"One of Dad’s books upon the bookcase in the living room is a Bible. I pour another rum & soda and return to the sofa and open The Bible. The first page says it was gifted to my Dad to “mark the beginning of [his] secondary education” at Cwmcarn Secondary School in 1963."

9. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

And from The Bible we arrive at this:

"I drink spiced rum & soda water and read two-thirds of Genesis on the living room sofa, thinking the story of Adam and Eve has clear echoes of the Agricultural Revolution and birth of settled civilisations described in another book I read years ago, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari says that humans discovered agriculture by accident, spilling grain and noticing it grew where it landed. Agriculture became a convenience trap, early human farmers giving up the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers to settle in one spot, to eat a much more restricted but generally more dependable diet, toiling the land and regularly being obliterated by famine. It seems that Eve eating the forbidden apple to gain knowledge and being kicked out of the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for this, and The Bible is really fascinating if you see it as the human societies of thousands of years ago transcribing passed-down tales, trying to make sense of our world as best they could, rather than the definitive Word of God somehow directly transmitted into the minds of many different writers over a vast number of years, which is clearly bollocks."

And referred to again, later, during a pissed & stoned existential dinner preparation scene:

"I relight the spliff and swig Leffe and think about the Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens, where Harari argues the ability to construct and believe in shared fictions is what allowed human society to develop to the extent it has vastly outcompeted every other animal on the planet. (Google, or the Ford Motor Company, or the country of France, are not tangible things with clear physical definitions, yet we all believe them to exist; just as in centuries past, people became convinced of all manner of higher powers and things beyond the surface directing things; Harari argues this mutual belief in shared fictions is the single most important aspect of humanity’s intellectual capabilities and social structures.)"

10. Taipei

The genesis of the autofiction obsession that becomes the basis for the whole novel:

"I discover Tao Lin and a whole alt-lit movement that blew up on the Internet almost ten years ago. I realise I’m completely out of touch with the literary scene I’m imagining myself as the new vanguard of. I spam reviewers of Tao Lin books and read reviews and quotes about him. Tao Lin’s novel Taipei has a quote from my favourite writer, Bret Easton Ellis, on the cover: “With Taipei, Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.” I order Taipei by Tao Lin off Amazon. Then I google the Bret Easton Ellis quote, and see his whole tweet says “...but that doesn’t mean Taipei isn’t a boring novel.” "

"Taipei by Tao Lin arrives from Amazon. I tell Dad that literary consensus considers Tao Lin “the voice of my generation”, which disappoints me, because I thought I would be the voice of my generation.
Dad thinks I’m joking."

11. A Clockwork Orange

Listed alongside the novelists that gave The Main Character a "cool & edgy" dominant goal to aim for after failing as the frontman of an emo band:

"When me and Jake and Mark formed our first band as teenagers, I was convinced we would follow Lostprophets out of the Valleys to global stardom. Soon after being kicked out of the band, I discovered Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk and Hunter S. Thompson and Irvine Welsh, A Clockwork Orange and Kerouac, and realised writing could also be cool & edgy. I’ve been trying to be a cool & edgy writer ever since."

12. What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life

Nestled alongside Tao Lin as one of the cool & edgy hipster NY autofiction superstars The Main Character desperately seeks to emulate:

"Through Tao Lin, I discover Marie Calloway, who wrote a controversial short story called Adrien Brody, which Tao Lin published on his website. The story was controversial because it seems to tell the true story of this precocious young writer Marie Calloway contacting a real New York journalist via email, then travelling to NYC to fuck this married journalist and also fuck some younger guy who pays for her hotel room. (The New York literati identified the pseudonymous journalist immediately.) The short story opens with an email exchange between Marie Calloway and the real journalist, who she gives the fake name Adrien Brody. The writing feels as fresh as Tao Lin’s but the story is inherently more interesting. The story ends with Marie Calloway asking Adrien Brody to cum on her face, and to take a picture of her with his cum on her face, and this photo is published at the back of Marie Calloway’s book What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life. I search for the book on Amazon (because I want to read it, not just because I want to see the cumshot) but I don’t buy it because it’s out of print, and second-hand copies are selling for upwards of £20, and I don’t really want to buy a second-hand book that climaxes with a photo of a real-life cumshot."

13. Lionel Asbo: State of England

Shit upon at several points as The Main Character desperately attempts to establish himself as a cool & edgy literary superstar:

"I write a line that I can use somewhere in my autofictional pandemic novel, a note to self, to comically illustrate the protagonist author’s self-obsessed ego-driven angst at his latest stupid book being another resounding commercial failure: “You are not Bret Easton Ellis, you are not Ryu Murakami, you are not Jack Kerouac, or Charles Bukwoski, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Irvine Welsh, or even Don DeFuckingLilo or Martin Amis - you are just a talentless misguided dickhead.”
And I think this is cool & edgy because of the shade it throws at Don DeLilo and Martin Amis. "

"I think about how empathy and understanding of others is a vital part of being a good writer; the empathy Tolstoy and Dostoevsky display in their depictions of vast swathes of Russia’s social classes, versus worthless shite literature like Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis."

14. The Communist Manifesto

As The Main Character's delusions grow increasingly grandiose, he seeks to make his Lockdown Novel something as world-changing as Karl Marx's riposte to capitalism:

"In the park, I ranted about Brexit, and how Karl Marx was “just a guy”, and “we are the educated class of our generation,” and are just as likely to generate world-changing ideas as Karl Marx did.
Jay laughed.
The German girl said “Do you really think we are the educated class of our generation?” "

And later:

"I talk out loud to myself about what I'm trying to write.
“I want to be a prophet,” I say to myself.
“A prophet receives a vision from God,” I reply.
“I know.”

But Karl Marx was in a sense a prophet, as was Sartre and Nieschze and Kant and Einstein and Hawkings and Jobs and Beethoven and Lenin and Lennon: they transcended human limitations and distilled divine intuitions on the essential nature of things and shared them with humanity.

But how the fuck are you supposed to write something which does that?"

15. Ulysses

One of several James Joyce novels referenced in response to an irritating regular in a beer garden once pubs are permitted to re-open:

"Karl is a podgy balding bloke in a local rugby top. He has a peculiar way of talking, like he’s trying to prove he’s more intelligent than you.
“So you’re a writer?” Karl says when Yannis tells him I’m “a writer”. (I haven’t yet sold enough books to feel validated in introducing myself to people as “a writer”.) “Have you ever read anything by James Joyce?”
I tell him I have: I studied Ulysses at university and I’ve read The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist... and ordered Finnegan’s Wake off Amazon but haven’t read it yet.
Karl bombards me with other writers.
When I try to talk about the writers or their books, Karl throws another writer at me.
Karl venerates the writers I haven't read and denigrates the ones I have, telling me Thomas Hardy is “absolutely brilliant” while Charles Dickens and George Orwell are “massively overrated”. "

16. Infinite Jest

The Main Character's delusional narcissism is on full display as he picks this up, having failed to find any copies of his own novels in a recently reopened book shop:

" I walk to the local authors section, scanning it to see if they’ve stocked my book. (They obviously haven’t.) I look at the W section of the alphabetized general fiction shelves. (Obviously it isn’t there either.) I pick up a copy of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and join a short queue to the counter, wondering whether the girl at the till will be impressed when she sees what book I’m buying; but she doesn’t react to Infinite Jest (obviously), and I chastise myself for allowing my thoughts to become those of such a pretentious dickhead."

17. Kanley Stubrick

An inspiration for the (unsuccessful) marketing campaign The Main Character launches for his Cryptocurrency Novel:

"I roll a joint and open a Punk IPA and get on the laptop to spam Goodreads reviewers. Some of the reviewers I click on are authors, and some of them seem interesting. There’s an author called Mike Klein who has written a book called Kanley Stubrick that has a trippy video trailer, and I think “I should really make a video trailer,” and look on Amazon for Kanley Stubrick (which isn’t in stock) and end up buying Arafat Mountain by Mike Klein (which is)."

18. Loveboat, Taipei

A catalyst for self-reflection as The Main Character desperately seeks to emulate Tao Lin:

"I search for Taipei on Goodreads, to spam Tao Lin fans, and realise the top result for “Taipei” isn't Taipei by Tao Lin (3.29 stars from 6,030 ratings); it's some young adult romance book called Loveboat, Taipei (Loveboat, Taipei #1) by Abigail Hing Wen (3.78 stars from 7,825 ratings).
Lol. "

19. Fight Club

A cornerstone of '90s culture referred to in the writing of an unpublishable mess of an article for Medium - Only ‘90s Kids Will Understand This:

" I read back through the article, and realise it lacks something uniting its many disparate ideas with some wider context. I write a paragraph about the quintessentially late-90s film adaptation of Fight Club, a cult classic which discovered mainstream acceptance on DVD, with Tyler Durdern’s proclamation that “You are not a special unique little snowflake” then later becoming a favoured label for Boomers and alt-right shitheads to apply to liberal/left-wing pro-gay & anti-racist Millennials. I think about Tyler Durden’s other iconic line in Fight Club, about Gen X realising they weren’t going to grow up to be rockstars, and being very very pissed off about this,"

20. All The Places We Lived

Read on a train, with both irritation and admiration:

"I take the new book from my bag: All the Places We’ve Lived by Richard Owain Roberts. I bought it because the author is Welsh and Goodreads reviewers say he’s similar to Tao Lin. As I read, I’m annoyed that I’m not the first Welsh writer to do the Tao Lin hipster lit thing. Richard Owain Roberts even explicitly mentions Tao Lin’s novels and Marie Calloway’s short story Adrien Brody. "

21. We Don't Know What We're Doing

Following directly on from the bit about Richard Owain Roberts - All the Places We've Lived:

"I think about being similarly annoyed by reading We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris and realising I wasn’t going to be the first Millennial writer from Caerphilly to write something contemporary set in Caerphilly. But both are good writers, and after I finish a chapter, and the train nears Rhymney, I wonder if we might make some hipster Millennial Welsh literary clique, like Kerouac and Ginsberg and Burroughs’ mid-century Beat Generation, or Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney’s ‘80s Brat Pack, or Tao Lin and Marie Calloway’s NY Hipster lit scene."

22. Big Sur

A perfect illustration of the perils of becoming your own protagonist:

"I think about autofiction: about Jack Kerouac, Marie Calloway, Tao Lin. The perils of being the protagonist of a piece of autofiction. The need to shape a narrative from real-life events, to craft a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. The need for some kind of satisfactory climax.

Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac goes to a cabin in the woods on California’s Big Sur Coast (a fact I’ve referenced in real estate copy for the communities of Monterey County) where he drinks heavily and eventually sees a vision of Christ. I wonder if Kerouac really did drink and write until he saw the hallucination of Christ, living and writing an autofictional account of a famous writer drinking himself into hallucinatory stupefiction out of the necessity of giving his novel a satisfying conclusion. "

23. Maggie Cassidy

Kerouac is the autofiction king. This novel also provides a moment of reflection of the artform:

"I write the outline for a stupid romance thing where characters that are clearly me and Emma Jones meet during the lockdown, and rekindle old whatevers, and it’s like an interesting contrast between teen obliviousness and jaded adulthood, like in Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac when Kerouac’s autofictional protagonist returns to his highschool sweetheart as a wizened uni lad and roughly attempts to initiate fucking with her. "

24. Women

The basis for further reflection on wtf autofiction is:

"I think about how writing is a bit like method acting, especially writing autofiction, and writers of autofiction typically become the characters they create, like Bukowski the alcoholic dirty old man..."

25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Following on directly from the bit about Bukowski - further evidence of the pitfalls inherent in being your own protagonist:

"...gonzo pioneer Hunter S Thompson, who wound up getting drugged out of his mind alone at his hotel pool instead of covering the Ali/Frazier fight, because the character of gonzo fuckhead had consumed him. "

26. How to Be a Footballer

A counterpoint to autofiction - the (presumably) ghostwritten celebrity autobiography:

"I think about celebrity autobiographies, and how they’re always framed around the development of the celebrity’s public persona (probably, I haven’t read any of them.) Peter Crouch’s autobiography (probably) starts with him as a young kid with an aptitude for football, then talks about him joining a youth team, then joining the senior squad, then being transferred to different clubs and playing for the national team, and finally retiring. Celebrity autobiographies are almost all ghostwritten anyway. It’s the ghostwriter’s job to interview the celebrity about their life and shape the content of these interviews into a cohesive narrative. "

27. Trainspotting

Referred to many times in HIRAETH., most notably in this lengthy bit from the depths of The Firebreak Lockdown:

"I smoke a spliff and read Trainspotting.

I read reviews of Trainspotting (the book) on Goodreads. A five-star review says Trainspotting is so enduringly popular because its central friend group is universally relatable. I think about how the boys align with the main group from Trainspotting.

I am most clearly Irvine Welsh’s avatar of Mark Renton: a confused but cunning mix of intellectual refinement and destructive impulsivity, creating an unstable mentality fluctuating between overconfident arrogance and self-loathing. (Thomas also most closely aligns with Renton.) The most likely to write a book about everyone else, and the most likely to rob everyone else of their money after doing a big heroin deal.

Both Jake and Mark align with Sick Boy: charismatic, cunning where necessary, the second most likely to rob everyone of their heroin deal money, socially adept in any situation, but finding a particularly powerful rapport with the Rentons of the world.

Spud is definitely Yannis: naive, well-meaning, always looking to see the good in people, the least likely to rob the heroin money but also the most likely to fall victim to the impulsive selfishness and manipulative personalities of the Rentons and Sick Boys of the world. (Smithy is also a Spud type).

Fatty is the Begbie of the group: nowhere near the psycho that Begbie is, but still by far the most likely of us to fight, and win fights, and quickest to anger, and the most purely driven by emotions at the moment he experiences them.

Briff most closely matches Tommy: probably the most mentally balanced of the group, and likely the last of us to become a smackhead if we all started shooting up heroin all the time. (Briff settled down with the girl he fell in love with during the teenage emo days; they have a son together, and Briff now drinks far less frequently and heavily than the other boys, which is why he’s barely mentioned in The Lockdown Novel.)

I wonder how common it is for friendship groups like this to form.
I wonder if The Lockdown Novel will achieve a Trainspotting level of cult success.
I am almost 100% certain it will, despite this certainty being an obvious manifestation of delusions of grandeur.

I think about how our group would’ve fared in the tribal hunter-gatherer times.

Mark and Jake would naturally want to assume the role of group leader.
Like happened with the bands, this could easily cause a schism within the group, splitting us into two competing tribes.

Yannis and Smithy would be the most dependably loyal group members. They would fight to the death to save any of us, never leave a man behind, give their all to ensure the group’s success.

Fatty would’ve been the most useful in fights with other tribes. His practical skills would’ve been useful in all kinds of tribal situations.

I would’ve been the most useless at practical matters, but also the most likely to come up with abstract solutions to our tribal problems, e.g. if fire hadn’t been invented yet, I’d be the most likely to invent it.

I genuinely believe this.
I genuinely believe I would’ve invented fire.
Fucking hell.
What an absolute dickhead. "

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS...

I've uploaded a trailer for $hitcoin to YouTube.

You can check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhsH...

$hitcoin.

My first two novels are now available to read for free on Kindle Unlimited.

Check them out at the links below.



Amazon[.]com: amzn.to/304PHAT
Amazon UK: amzn.to/3f3BWa9



Amazon[.]com: amzn.to/39DpjBA
Amazon UK: amzn.to/3jGV8xX

My new novel $hitcoin has just been released this week. I've written a short piece detailing some of the true stories and my own real life experiences which inspired the novel. If you're interested in reading it, you can check it out at https://medium.com/@haydnwilks/why-i-...

Thanks!

I started working on $hitcoin in 2017. It will finally be released this Friday – apparently the Friday immediately before the Saturday on which the lockdown ends and pubs reopen in Britain. After months of spiking book sales during the lockdown. Yeah, the timing probably could have been better on that one. But what’s done is done and $hitcoin is done and now just about fit for public consumption. Those who graciously accepted advance review copies of $hitcoin may be wondering “why the hell did he write this?” Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to share a few blog posts on why I wrote this mad mess of a novel, how deeply I developed cryptomania, and some of the real-life craziness that inspired the insanity my book depicts. First, I’d like to share a quick list of six other works which inspired me to write this book. Five novels, one movie, and a TV show.

1. From the Fatherland, With Love – Ryu Murakami

The second I heard the premise I had to read this one. North Korea invades the Japanese island of Kyushu. Not wanting to risk a full-blown war, the government in Tokyo let the North Koreans keep it. Murakami’s masterpiece depicts all kinds of people living under brutal North Korean rule in Kyushu’s largest city of Fukuoka.

The only Murakami book I had prior to this was Popular Hits of the Showa Era. By most accounts, it’s one of his weakest books. I’m working my way through some of his other novels at the moment and would definitely agree with that assessment but I did find his depiction of disaffected Japanese youth in that book pretty enjoyable. ‘Disaffected’ is maybe not the best term – Murakami’s youths are often complete degenerates. And in From the Fatherland…, it’s a gang of these miscreants who are Fukuoka’s last line of defense against the North Koreans.

I loved everything about From the Fatherland, With Love. Having lived in both Korea and Japan, books which deal with the fraught relationship between the countries are always very interesting to me. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another fantastic read in this niche. Murakami researched the hell out of North Korea for his book and it really shows. Every member of the North Korean invading force is fully fleshed and wholly, often terrifyingly, believable. Just as impressive is the deft with which Murakami captures the citizens living under their new masters. Many quickly turn collaborator and always with completely sympathetic and believable motives. There’s the low-level government official who helps the NK forces with their day-to-day administration of the new province so that she can earn enough to provide her kids with organic foodstuffs. There’s an awkward blossoming romance between a Japanese news anchor and her new NK army co-host. The only characters who come across as less than fully realistic are the miscreant oddball heroes, but their bizarre quirks are described so engagingly that it really doesn’t matter.

$hitcoin has a few outright nods to From the Fatherland, With Love. My novel’s character Alicia stays a few nights in the Fukuoka Hilton, which is where the North Korean forces set up their headquarters and detention centre in Murakami’s novel. But my attempt to tell the interconnected international tale of a cryptocurrency’s rise and fall by showing the breadth of characters invested in its fortunes was purely inspired by Murakami’s novel. I’m sure I didn’t get close to handling such a sweep as expertly as Murakami, but I’d be thrilled if anyone found my book close to half as engaging as I found this one. Murakami’s epic spans close to 700 pages but I read the entire thing in a week. When I had to offload books to friends before leaving Japan for Korea and then Korea to return to the UK, this was one book that I had to keep hold of.

Get From the Fatherland, With Love now at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

2. The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis

I could just as easily have listed American Psycho or Glamorama as influences on $hitcoin as this one, but having been a huge fan of Roger Avery’s amazingly inventive movie adaptation for years, I finally read Rules of Attraction towards the end of writing $hitcoin and it had a big impact on how I approached some of the later chapters. The Rules of Attraction is sort of the story of a love triangle, but it’s a love triangle where each of the characters is completely mistaken about how the triangle’s other corners feel. It’s a tragicomic coming of age story and like much of Murakami’s oeuvre it focuses on disaffected/degenerate youth. If you’re not familiar with the book, one of the central trio is Patrick Bateman’s younger brother, though Sean is less psycho and more nihilistic hedonist.

Get The Rules of Attraction now at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

3. Ulysses by James Joyce

Yeah, I know, it sounds amazingly pretentious to list Ulysses as an influence. Joyce’s modernist epic is purportedly the book that people most commonly lie about reading. I may not have made it through the whole thing myself if I didn’t have an entire module dedicated to it at university. But with a seminar and lecture devoted to each of the book’s chapters, that was easily my favourite module from my university days. Joyce’s magnum opus depicts 24 hours in Dublin through a dizzying array of textual styles. It is the blueprint for all later transgressive fiction and everything I’ve written apes some aspect of it. $hitcoin is obviously nowhere near the level of Ulysses, but then again, what book is? “Certainly not fucking $hitcoin, mate,” you may answer, but I’ll pretend I didn’t pretend to hear you saying that and continue. Joyce’s work is rigorously yet playfully structured and it opened up all later writers to so much freedom in form. $hitcoin has sections that read like a screenplay, non-fiction book extracts, and a newspaper article. Yeah, it ain’t exactly Ulysses, but it does owe a massive debt to it. If you click on the links to buy it below, it only costs £2 for 682 pages. You may never make it through the first chapter but it’ll certainly look impressive on your bookshelf.

Get Ulysses now at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

4. Five Star Billionaire by Tasha Aw

This is the only work on this list I’m not completely in love with or awe of and it’s also the one I stole from most directly. Picasso famously said good artists copy and great artists steal. Tarantino movies are a tissue of quotations with characters and camera shots lifted from his encyclopedic knowledge of film and twisted into something fresh. The character of Alicia in $hitcoin was directly lifted from the character of Phoebe in Tasha Aw’s novel. Like Phoebe, Alicia moves to China from Malaysia thinking she’ll live a glamorous life in a glittering metropolis of the world’s fastest rising economy. Instead, she discovers a world of sweatshops, seedy karaoke bars, and co-workers who look down on her as a Chinese-in-appearance-only foreigner.

A slight digression here that may be of interest to anyone who read my first book, The Death of Danny Daggers: the initial premise of that book was writing a warped Cardiff-set rip-off of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Rory Gallagher is Mikael Blomqvist and Ji Eun is Lisbeth Salander. I’m a big believer in stealing freely from other works in this way. Take elements that interest you wherever you find them, mix them up with your own life experiences and anecdotes nicked from mates and the internet, throw them together, and boom: you’ve got yourself a novel.

Get Five Star Billionaire at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

5. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

This one inspired $hitcoin. in a very specific way. Of the early reviews that my book has received, the most common criticism has been the pacing. On reflection, the pacing is very ‘off’ in the way chapters are arranged. It’s clearly a weakness of the book as many readers have brought it to my attention. But it is a weakness with an origin.

The Pale King was published after Wallace’s death using an unfinished manuscript. The oddness of its structure may have otherwise been smoothed over in later edits. But I absolutely loved one weird quirk of The Pale King’s structure. Wallace’s novel is a unique mediation on boredom, concerning the daily goings on during a brief stint the author had with the Inland Revenue Service. One IRS employee gives an interview to camera for the purposes of creating an IRS recruitment video. The camera’s left running and the character tells an elaborate story of his father’s death with random tangents about the introduction of a bungled progressive sales tax in Illinois. This portion of the novel stretches on for about 40 or 50 pages. This jarring section is completely at odds with how other chapters in the novel are structured. It’s bizarre and something I’ve never quite encountered the likes of in any book.

I had this in mind when structuring $hitcoin. I wanted to create a feel where the reader has no idea from one chapter to the next what the next chapter will entail. Some are short snappy pieces broken up into fast-paced sections. Others are long meandering things running many pages without a section break.

I’m not sure how successful this Wallace-inspired experiment has been. Judging from reviews so far, reaction to that element of the novel is mixed leaning on general dislike. In future books, I’ll probably err more towards creating a structure which maintains reader engagement rather than throwing them constant curveballs. But if you found $hitcoin.’s structure bewildering, frustrating, or just outright annoying, then Wallace is at least partly responsible for that.

Get The Pale King at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

6. Nathan Barley

This series was first broadcast on Channel 4 in 2005 and it’s incredibly ahead of its time. Facebook was created in a Harvard dorm room the year before this aired and the first generation iPhone wasn’t released until 2007. But Nathan Barley spectacularly captures a culture of “self-facilitating media nodes” that was very much a niche concern at the time it was created. Barley is a dimwit desperately seeking the approval of Dan Ashcroft, an edgy writer for a definitely-not-Vice-Magazine London hipster mag played by The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt. Barley owns and operates trashbat.co.ck, a super-cool website registered in the Cook Islands.

The series was created as a collaboration between two of Britain’s most inventive television writers, Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris. Brooker had made a minor name for himself writing a fake TV listings website, one of the recurring shows on which was simply called Cunt. Nathan Barley is the titular Cunt in this adaptation of Brooker’s TVGoHome texts. Brooker would go on to huge success with the similarly prescient Black Mirror. Chris Morris has made a career out of offending right wing newspapers and delighting comedy fans with efforts like satirical TV news shows The Day Today and Brass Eye and the brave and hilarious suicide bomber comedy Four Lions.

In $hitcoin., the character of Graham Jones draws quite heavily from Dan Ashcroft in Nathan Barley. Like Ashcroft, Graham struggles to feel at one with the empty hipster bullshit the magazine he writes for is obsessed by. Ashcroft’s most iconic line in Nathan Barley is “the idiots are winning.” In $hitcoin., Graham finds success in chronicling the idiots’ triumph.

Get Nathan Barley on DVD at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

7. The Wolf of Wall Street

One of the taglines I’ve given $hitcoin. is ‘Wolf of Wall Street for the Instagram generation.’ Scorsese’s epic revels in the debauchery and lack of morality of its protagonist, Jordan Belfort. Leonardo DiCaprio has never been more charismatic than as the stockbroker turned penny stock pusher turned super-rich Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort.

I find this movie endlessly rewatchable. From beginning to end, it’s a whirlwind. Scorsese caught some criticism for glamorising Belfort’s crimes in a film which never explicitly condemns what its characters do. But that’s the reality: Belfort spent a short time in a comfortable prison and then moved into a highly successful career as an author and motivational speaker.

The world of cryptocurrency is even more fast-paced and insane than the off-Wall Street world of shady side finance depicted in this movie. Huge fortunes are amassed and lost at breakneck speed and the debauchery in $hitcoin. is ratcheted up to go along with it.

Get The Wolf of Wall Street at amazon.com or amazon.co.uk

$hitcoin.

Over the coming weeks and days, I plan to share some stories about the real-world events which inspired my novel. Cryptocurrency is full of colorful characters and insane rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags tales. There was a hell of a lot to draw from. Hopefully you’ll enjoy what they’ve inspired.

Read more about $hitcoin.

I started working on $hitcoin. in 2017. It will finally be released this Friday - apparently the Friday immediately before the Saturday on which the lockdown ends and pubs reopen in Britain. After months of spiking book sales during the lockdown. Yeah, the timing probably could have been better on that one. But what’s done is done and $hitcoin. is done and now just about fit for public consumption. Those who graciously accepted advance review copies of $hitcoin. may be wondering “why the hell did he write this?” Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to share a few blog posts on why I wrote this mad mess of a novel, how deeply I developed cryptomania, and some of the real-life craziness that inspired the insanity my book depicts. First, I’d like to share a quick list of six other works which inspired me to write this book. Four novels, one movie, and a TV show.

1. From the Fatherland, with Love by Ryu Murakami

The second I heard the premise I had to read this one. North Korea invades the Japanese island of Kyushu. Not wanting to risk a full-blown war, the government in Tokyo let the North Koreans keep it. Murakami’s masterpiece depicts all kinds of people living under brutal North Korean rule in Kyushu’s largest city of Fukuoka.

The only Murakami book I had prior to this was Popular Hits of the Showa Era. By most accounts, it’s one of his weakest books. I’m working my way through some of his other novels at the moment and would definitely agree with that assessment but I did find his depiction of disaffected Japanese youth in that book pretty enjoyable. ‘Disaffected’ is maybe not the best term - Murakami’s youths are often complete degenerates. And in From the Fatherland…, it’s a gang of these miscreants who are Fukuoka’s last line of defense against the North Koreans.

I loved everything about From the Fatherland, With Love. Having lived in both Korea and Japan, books which deal with the fraught relationship between the countries are always very interesting to me. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is another fantastic read in this niche. Murakami researched the hell out of North Korea for his book and it really shows. Every member of the North Korean invading force is fully fleshed and wholly, often terrifyingly, believable. Just as impressive is the deft with which Murakami captures the citizens living under their new masters. Many quickly turn collaborator and always with completely sympathetic and believable motives. There’s the low-level government official who helps the NK forces with their day-to-day administration of the new province so that she can earn enough to provide her kids with organic foodstuffs. There’s an awkward blossoming romance between a Japanese news anchor and her new NK army co-host. The only characters who come across as less than fully realistic are the miscreant oddball heroes, but their bizarre quirks are described so engagingly that it really doesn’t matter.

$hitcoin. has a few outright nods to From the Fatherland, With Love. My novel’s character Alicia stays a few nights in the Fukuoka Hilton, which is where the North Korean forces set up their headquarters and detention centre in Murakami’s novel. But my attempt to tell the interconnected international tale of a cryptocurrency’s rise and fall by showing the breadth of characters invested in its fortunes was purely inspired by Murakami’s novel. I’m sure I didn’t get close to handling such a sweep as expertly as Murakami, but I’d be thrilled if anyone found my book close to half as engaging as I found this one. Murakami’s epic spans close to 700 pages but I read the entire thing in a week. When I had to offload books to friends before leaving Japan for Korea and then Korea to return to the UK, this was one book that I had to keep hold of.

2. The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis

I could just as easily have listed American Psycho or Glamorama as influences on $hitcoin as this one, but having been a huge fan of Roger Avery’s amazingly inventive movie adaptation for years, I finally read Rules of Attraction towards the end of writing $hitcoin. and it had a big impact on how I approached some of the later chapters. The Rules of Attraction is sort of the story of a love triangle, but it’s a love triangle where each of the characters is completely mistaken about how the triangle’s other corners feel. It’s a tragicomic coming of age story and like much of Murakami’s oeuvre it focuses on disaffected/degenerate youth. If you’re not familiar with the book, one of the central trio is Patrick Bateman’s younger brother, though Sean is less psycho and more nihilistic hedonist.

3. Ulysses by James Joyce

Yeah, I know, it sounds amazingly pretentious to list Ulysses as an influence. Joyce’s modernist epic is purportedly the book that people most commonly lie about reading. I may not have made it through the whole thing myself if I didn’t have an entire module dedicated to it at university. But with a seminar and lecture devoted to each of the book’s chapters, that was easily my favourite module from my university days. Joyce’s magnum opus depicts 24 hours in Dublin through a dizzying array of textual styles. It is the blueprint for all later transgressive fiction and everything I’ve written apes some aspect of it. $hitcoin. is obviously nowhere near the level of Ulysses, but then again, what book is? “Certainly not fucking $hitcoin, mate,” you may answer, but I’ll pretend I didn’t pretend to hear you saying that and continue. Joyce’s work is rigorously yet playfully structured and it opened up all later writers to so much freedom in form. $hitcoin. has sections that read like a screenplay, non-fiction book extracts, and a newspaper article. Yeah, it ain’t exactly Ulysses, but it does owe a massive debt to it.

4. Five Star Billionaire by Tasha Aw

This is the only work on this list I’m not completely in love with or awe of and it’s also the one I stole from most directly. Picasso famously said good artists copy and great artists steal. Tarantino movies are a tissue of quotations with characters and camera shots lifted from his encyclopedic knowledge of film and twisted into something fresh. The character of Alicia in $hitcoin. was directly lifted from the character of Phoebe in Tasha Aw’s novel. Like Phoebe, Alicia moves to China from Malaysia thinking she’ll live a glamorous life in a glittering metropolis of the world’s fastest rising economy. Instead, she discovers a world of sweatshops, seedy karaoke bars, and co-workers who look down on her as a Chinese-in-appearance-only foreigner.

A slight digression here that may be of interest to anyone who read my first book, The Death of Danny Daggers: the initial premise of that book was writing a warped Cardiff-set rip-off of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Rory Gallagher is Mikael Blomqvist and Ji Eun is Lisbeth Salander. I’m a big believer in stealing freely from other works in this way. Take elements that interest you wherever you find them, mix them up with your own life experiences and anecdotes nicked from mates and the internet, throw them together, and boom: you’ve got yourself a novel.

5. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

This one inspired $hitcoin. in a very specific way. Of the early reviews that my book has received, the most common criticism has been the pacing. On reflection, the pacing is very ‘off’ in the way chapters are arranged. It’s clearly a weakness of the book as many readers have brought it to my attention. But it is a weakness with an origin.

The Pale King was published after Wallace’s death using an unfinished manuscript. The oddness of its structure may have otherwise been smoothed over in later edits. But I absolutely loved one weird quirk of the way The Pale King is structured. Wallace’s novel is a unique mediation on boredom, concerning the daily goings on during a brief stint the author had with the Inland Revenue Service. One IRS employee gives an interview to camera for the purposes of creating an IRS recruitment video. The camera’s left running and the character tells an elaborate story of his father’s death with random tangents about the introduction of a bungled progressive sales tax in Illinois. This portion of the novel stretches on for about 40 or 50 pages. This jarring section is completely at odds with how other chapters in the novel are structured. It’s bizarre and something I’ve never quite encountered the likes of in any book.

I had this in mind when structuring $hitcoin. I wanted to create a feel where the reader has no idea from one chapter to the next what the next chapter will entail. Some are short snappy pieces broken up into fast-paced sections. Others are long meandering things running many pages without a section break.

I’m not sure how successful this Wallace-inspired experiment has been. Judging from reviews so far, reaction to that element of the novel is mixed leaning on general dislike. In future books, I’ll probably err more towards creating a structure which maintains reader engagement rather than throwing them constant curveballs. But if you found $hitcoin.'s structure bewildering, frustrating, or just outright annoying, then Wallace is at least partly responsible for that.

6. Nathan Barley

This series was first broadcast on Channel 4 in 2005 and it’s incredibly ahead of its time. Facebook was created in a Harvard dorm room the year before this aired and the first generation iPhone wasn’t released until 2007. But Nathan Barley spectacularly captures a culture of “self-facilitating media nodes” that was very much a niche concern at the time it was created. Barley is a dimwit desperately seeking the approval of Dan Ashcroft, an edgy writer for a definitely-not-Vice-Magazine London hipster mag played by The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt. Barley owns and operates trashbat.co.ck, a super-cool website registered in the Cook Islands.

The series was created as a collaboration between two of Britain’s most inventive television writers, Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris. Brooker had made a minor name for himself writing a fake TV listings website, one of the recurring shows on which was simply called Cunt. Nathan Barley is the titular Cunt in this adaptation of Brooker’s TVGoHome texts. Brooker would go on to huge success with the similarly prescient Black Mirror. Chris Morris has made a career out of offending right wing newspapers and delighting comedy fans with efforts like satirical TV news shows The Day Today and Brass Eye and the brave and hilarious suicide bomber comedy Four Lions.

In $hitcoin., the character of Graham Jones draws quite heavily from Dan Ashcroft in Nathan Barley. Like Ashcroft, Graham struggles to feel at one with the empty hipster bullshit the magazine he writes for is obsessed by. Ashcroft’s most iconic line in Nathan Barley is “the idiots are winning.” In $hitcoin., Graham finds success in chronicling the idiots’ triumph.

7. The Wolf of Wall Street

One of the taglines I’ve given $hitcoin. is ‘Wolf of Wall Street for the Instagram generation.’ Scorsese’s epic revels in the debauchery and lack of morality of its protagonist, Jordan Belfort. Leonardo DiCaprio has never been more charismatic than as the stockbroker turned penny stock pusher turned super-rich Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort.

I find this movie endlessly rewatchable. From beginning to end, it’s a whirlwind. Scorsese caught some criticism for glamorising Belfort’s crimes in a film which never explicitly condemns what its characters do. But that’s the reality: Belfort spent a short time in a comfortable prison and then moved into a highly successful career as an author and motivational speaker.

The world of cryptocurrency is even more fast-paced and insane than the off-Wall Street world of shady side finance depicted in this movie. Huge fortunes are amassed and lost at breakneck speed and the debauchery in $hitcoin. is ratcheted up to go along with it.

$hitcoin.

Over the coming weeks and days, I plan to share some stories about the real-world events which inspired my novel. Cryptocurrency is full of colorful characters and insane rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags tales. There was a hell of a lot to draw from. Hopefully you’ll enjoy what they’ve inspired.

My new novel $hitcoin. will be released on July 3. You can win one of 100 digital editions of $hitcoin through my Goodreads giveaway.

The novel is about a group of students in the Netherlands who launch their own cryptocurrency at the height of the 2017 digital gold rush. They dream up the idea while watching rap videos and fantasising about big yachts, Lamborghinis, and five-star sushi served on the naked bodies of supermodels. Their shitcoin proves wildly successful and they're soon helming a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Chinese bitcoin miners and bar girls, Korean office workers, and drug-crazed American tech billionaires are drawn into their world as the shitcoin skyrockets in value. $hitcoin plays out across five continents in a wild tale of excess, exchange hacks, sex, drugs, betrayal, and death.



Read more about $hitcoin. on Goodreads or at https://deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin

This giveaway is just for the ebook format. A separate giveaway will be launched later where you can win a physical copy of the book.

@location: Groningen, Netherlands.

02.01.

“NEO?”

“It’s like the Chinese Ethereum. Except it isn’t really anything like Ethereum.”

Wesley enters & interrupts: “What the fuck, guys?”

Guus & Aart are sitting together on the middle of the huge quad sofas in the kitchen/living room’s corner-nook, Guus on his laptop & Aart tapping at his phone screen. A Honey Badger music video is playing on the 60-plus inch plasma screen affixed to the nook’s dark green wall.

Aart: “Then how is it the Chinese Ethereum?”

Guus: “It’s a Chinese dApps platform.”

Aart: “What’s the price at?”

“Guys!” Guus & Aart turn from the ever-fluctuating prices on CoinMarketCap to look at Wesley, who’s standing beside the huge table that takes up half of the spacious room’s kitchen area. “Look at this place.”

Aart scans a room decorated with clusters of bottles & cans – debris from the previous night’s party: “What’s wrong with it?”

“The girl is gonna be here in, like, twenty minutes,” Wesley says, sweeping bottles from the table into a black plastic bin liner. “You said you’d clean up.”

“We did clean up,” Aart protests. “This place was really fucked up when you left us.”

“What girl?” Guus asks.

“The girl who’s here to take on Rick’s room,” Wesley says, moving about the room and hurrying bottles & cans into the bin liner.

Guus: “No girl’s gonna wanna live in a frat house. I don’t know why you don’t just get a guy in.”

“Nah, man,” Aart says, standing up & moving to the kitchen area, “he can’t join the fraternity, and you know he’ll want to.”

“But what kind of girl’s gonna wanna live in this place?” Guus says, returning his attention to the laptop.

“Where’s Federico?” Wesley asks, bin liner fully loaded.

“I don’t know,” Guus says. “I think he’s still in bed. Yo, Aart, the price is at twenty dollars right now. It was, like, thirty dollars less than a week ago.”

Wesley: “He’s sleeping? It’s almost 15:00.”

Aart unrolls a bin liner: “He’s Italian, what do you expect? Guus, what price did you buy at?”

Wesley moves to the hallway: “Federico!”

Guus: “I got in before it rebranded from AntShares. It’s up about 600% on then. But now’s the time to get in, man, this dip won’t last. A year from now, it’ll be two hundred dollars, minimum.”

Wesley: “FREDDY!”

Federico groans inside his bedroom: “What?”

“I don’t know, man,” Aart says, slowly picking up & crushing Hertog Jan cans & placing them in his bin liner. “I think Bitcoin’s about done dropping. It’ll probably be worth like six thousand dollars in a couple of months.”

“It’ll be back to zero before the semester’s finished,” Wesley snaps, returning to the room. “Guus! Get the fuck off the sofa and grab a bin liner.”

Guus sighs dramatically & closes his laptop.

“I thought you said Bitcoin was already six thousand dollars,” Wesley says, unrolling another bin liner.

Aart casually smooths out the crinkles in a Hertog Jan can before bagging it: “I said I had six thousand dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. But that’s before the price dropped.”

Wesley side-steps Guus to tackle an accumulation of bottles surrounding the quad sofa: “So how many Bitcoin do you have now?”

Aart: “I’ve still got 1.5 bitcoins, but the price dropped.”

Wesley: “So what’s that in real money?”

Guus stops at the door to the hallway, intrigued by the sound of Federico conversing with a female: “Is that the girl you’re talking about?”

“I don’t know,” Aart says, picking up an ash-covered Hertog Jan bottle that’s stuffed half-full of cigarettes, contemplating whether such a thing is fit to be thrown in with the recycling. “Today, it’s a little less than five thousand.”

Wesley: “Five thousand Euros?”

Aart: “Five thousand dollars.”

Guus: “Wes, I think the girl’s here.”

“Fuck.” Wesley drops the bin liner at the side of the sofa & moves to the doorway, turning back briefly to admonish Aart: “Why do you measure everything in dollars? You’re not fucking American.” Wesley stares down the hallway, where Federico has just turned away from a closed front door: “Did she leave?”

Federico: “Yeah.”

Wesley: “What the fuck?! Why?”

Federico stares at Wesley, Federico’s handsome Italian features as befuddled as his tousled just-out-of-bed black hair. “She had to go home.”

They stare at each other for a moment before Wesley speaks: “Ciara?”

Federico: “Who’s Ciara?”

Wesley: “The girl.”

Federico: “What girl?”

Wesley: “The girl who’s looking at Rick’s room.”

There’s a long pause before Federico makes sense of things: “Oh, that girl. No, that was Lina.”

Wesley: “Who’s Lina?”

Federico: “The German girl.”

Wesley: “What German girl?”

“The German girl I fucked last night.” Federico opens the bathroom door & flicks a light switch; Honey Badger’s hit ‘Fuck Me (Like a Badger in Heat)’ plays automatically as the cupboard-small bathroom’s walls covered with pics of big-titted blonde models are illuminated.

02.02.

Ciara locks her bicycle among the scores of similar bicycles lining the pavement outside the JUMBO supermarket on Oosterstraat, a bustling single-lane street lined with bars, shops, & restaurants running up to the medieval Dutch city’s Grote Markt central square. She looks up at the apartments above the street’s businesses, wondering which is the place, & whether she has enough time to smoke a cigarette before heading inside. She takes her phone from her pocket: 14:57. She taps at Google Maps and then starts walking towards her destination.

02.03.

“Hey,” Wesley says, smiling as he opens the door to her. “You must be Ciara.”

She’s as pretty as he’d hoped: fair hair, pale freckled complexion, a very London beige overcoat underscoring her Britishness.

Ciara smiles back at Wesley: he’s equally all that she’d expected of a Dutch frat bro – tall, blonde, with a baggy Rijksuniversiteit Groningen sweatshirt hanging off his sports-honed frame.

Introductions are exchanged and Wesley leads Ciara through the hallway, pointing out the bathroom door & hoping that Federico doesn’t open it & potentially scare her away with the garish array of big tits inside. He stops along the hallway at Rick’s room: she looks at the cosy desk & double-bed & nods approvingly: “Yeah, this looks alright.”

It would have to be pretty bad to stop her accepting the place. She’s spent the summer travelling the continent – Munich, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Split, Sarajevo – & returned to Groningen just a day before the semester started, expecting no problem finding a place to stay in a city that must be 50% short-term student accommodation. But she hadn’t reckoned on the scores of students doing the same as her, and with a few perfect places being snatched away when on the cusp of signing a contract, and having spent the past two weeks on her friend Jurate’s sofa, she’s more than willing to take on the wild novelty of a year as the sole girl in a frat house.

The tour continues through to the kitchen/living room, Wesley explaining that Rick’s spending a year’s exchange in Pittsburgh, & stopping to introduce Ciara to Guus & Aart: “Ciara, this is Guus—” – a slightly-pimpled and awkwardly skinny guy with an oddly intense demeanour & almost-shaved short hair that protrudes into a ridiculous ‘90s-style gelled spiked fringe – “and Aart.” – a far more attractive though equally odd frat member, with hair matted into dreadlocks along the centre of an otherwise completely shaved head.

Aart: “Nice to meet you.”

Ciara looks around approvingly at the bar-style central living space, with dartboards & beer advertisements & basketball hoops & other paraphernalia covering almost every inch of wall space, more than a dozen framed photographs of past iterations of the fraternity being the most intriguing item.

“And this is the patio,” Wesley says, leading Ciara outside.

“What do you think of her?” Aart asks Guus in hushed conspiratorial tones upon the sofa.

“Yeah, she seems okay,” Guus says, fully engrossed by his laptop. “This project sounds really interesting. They want to create a bridge between blockchains, a kind of go-between interface for interconnecting pre-existing cryptocurrencies. It’s $3.51, down from $4.10 yesterday, with a four-hundred-million-dollar market cap. It might be worth buying a few hundred bucks worth.”

Aart: “I don’t know why you screw around with all these alt-coins, man. You know Bitcoin is gonna outperform all of them.”

“How much money do you think I made on Ethereum?”

“Yeah, but there’s a limit, man. No way all these coins can survive long-term.”

“They don’t have to. They just need to survive long enough for me to make Lamborghini money.”

“If you want a Lambo, bro, buy more Bitcoin. It’ll be ten thousand dollars by next spring, man, I’m telling you.”

“Yeah, which is like a 350% return on investment. The stuff I’m looking at is like a 10,000% return on investment.”

“But anyone can make a coin, man. Slap some code together, get it listed on an exchange – boom. Make a quick buck off idiots looking to get rich quick, and disappear forever to an island somewhere.”

“That’s why you’ve gotta do your own research.”

“But, like, me and you could probably make a coin.”

“I probably could. You couldn’t even set your own wallet up.”

“Well why don’t you then?”

“Maybe I should.”

Aart stares at the television screen. Honey Badger is in some tropical island paradise, dancing at the poolside in a suit, surrounded by big-titted bikini babes and chimpanzee butlers. Still a little stoned from his hangover-staving wake-up spliff, Aart is mesmerised by the jiggling girl bits and chimps in bowties for a few moments before speaking: “How much money do you think Honey Badger’s worth?”

“Probably a few million dollars.”

“A few million dollars,” Aart mutters, a thought forming. “And how much did you say that coin you’re looking at’s market cap is?”

“Four hundred million dollars.”

“Four hundred million dollars…” Honey Badger is on the deck of a yacht now, at night, pouring what looks like an extremely expensive bottle of alcohol over some woman’s cleavage. “And the people who made that coin probably kept a couple for themselves, right?”

“Probably.”

“They probably kept a lot for themselves, right?”

“Probably.”

“And right now they don’t even have a working product or anything, do they?”

“This one does… I think. But a lot of them don’t.”

“And you think you could probably code your own cryptocurrency?”

“Probably.” Guus looks up from the laptop at the television; Honey Badger is in the yacht’s master bedroom, fanning himself with a wad of hundred-dollar bills as two girls in lingerie dry-hump his legs.

“We should do it, man.”

Honey Badger is now in the yacht’s dining hall, using diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks to delicately remove a piece of sushi from the crotch of a fully-naked big-titted blonde who lays splayed upon the tablecloth.

“Maybe we should, man. Maybe we should.”

Wesley leads Ciara back into the kitchen area: “What do you think?”

She struggles not to gush too much enthusiasm: “Yeah, it’s great.”

02.04.

The cycle back to Jurate’s place is blissful, the beauty of canal-bisected Groningen’s centuries-old buildings & crispness of Dutch autumn overwhelming all Ciara’s earlier fear, uncertainty & doubt. As her bike flows with the thousands of other cyclists traversing the city’s narrow streets, she knows that all is right & well in her life, & that this year will be even better than the last.

When she enters Jurate’s house, Jurate is drinking coffee at the kitchen table with her housemate Vallya, who is considerably less blissful: “…and so I cannot work without the Dutch citizen number, this BSN, and they cannot process this without the official document from the university in Moscow, and the university in Moscow only can give this in Russian, and the City Hall here will only accept this in Dutch or in English, unless that I get a legalised translation, which it has to be legalised by the Russian Consulate, which is wanting to charge maybe one hundred Euros, and maybe taking more than three weeks, which is time I cannot do working during…”

Jurate briefly disengages to greet Ciara: “Hey.”

“Hey.”

The interlude leads a frustrated Vallya to bring her story to its end: “…and it’s just nyet, nyet, nyet from every direction, and my parents say it is now too much to send me more money, and I do not even know what in the fuck I should do about everything.”

Hearing Vallya’s bureaucratically-inflicted agony, & being reminded similar pain may yet await her whenever Britain finally leaves the European Union, Ciara again dampens her enthusiasm when Jurate asks her how the place was: “Yeah, it was great – well, the best I’ll get at this point,” & she answers Jurate’s follow-up question about how the guys were with an emphasis on Wesley’s tall Dutch jockishness, & Jurate says, “You’ll have to invite us to one of their frat parties,” & asks Ciara what she’s doing tonight, with Vallya & Jurate having plans to go out; “I’m working at Mountain at nine.”

Vallya: “Oy! All I want is to work while I study. I do not know why must it be so difficult.”

02.05.

The overnight shift at Mountain Bar isn’t something Ciara would recommend to anyone, though €7 per hour & free alcohol through the night is enough to make it bearable. She parks her bicycle among the ever-expanding sea of bicycles beside the Grote Markt, the streets beginning to fill up with the first of the student-city’s night-time revellers. Ciara walks the narrow bar-lined side street to Mountain. Inside, Ibrahim is at the counter & a few young Dutch guys are knocking back 1 Euro Heinekens. A few others trickle in to order 1 Euro beers & shots during the first hour, European EDM blaring & echoing off the walls of the almost-empty room. The population swells at 10pm & gets bigger as the night progresses, Ciara becoming busier & busier behind the bar. By 11, she’s in constant movement, racking up beers & Jaeger Bombs & tequila shots, knocking back the few that are bought for her by drunk guys trying to hit on her. Every hour, she slips into the crowded smoking room at the back of the bar to roll & smoke a cigarette. As the time creeps closer to midnight, more & more groups are asking for NOS-filled balloons to huff, falling into dizzy drunken laughing fits after each bout of inhalation. When Ciara next enters the smoking area, a clearly-underaged guy is stumbling about, annoying everyone. Ciara ignores his presence, a stance she regrets fifteen minutes later when an irritated German student comes to the bar and says: “Somebody has been sicked up all over in the smoking area.”

Ibrahim is conveniently dealing with a large drinks order: “Do you mind cleaning it up?”

With a sigh & a shrug, Ciara takes a mop to the smoking area, where the idiot teenager is slumped in a chair. “Where are your friends?” she asks him, sloshing his vomit over the floor with the mop.

“I think they left already,” says a Dutch guy smoking a joint. “You want some of this?”

She accepts the spliff & after a few tokes continues mopping, the strong Dutch high-grade inoculating her to the grossness of her task.

And then the lads from the frat enter.

Wesley: “Oh, hey, Ciara!”

Fuck.

She laughs & talks with them, fully preoccupied with trying to overcome her stoned inoculation & the embarrassment of her puke-mopping predicament.

Ciara then returns to the bar, FMLing, as Wesley, Guus, & Aart re-join Federico & their other friends Jako, Wander, & Max on the packed dancefloor.

The Honey Badger & Cheap Ho song ‘All Fucked Up from Fucking You’ hits & the lads spill Heineken as they raise their glasses & shout along to the lyrics. Guus is deep in the throes of inebriation, having huffed a NOS balloon just before the song hit. He closes his eyes as he sings & sways & spills beer, picturing Honey Badger in the dining hall of the yacht in his music video, eating sushi off the genitals of a beautiful big-titted blonde with diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks.

“We gotta make the coin, man,” Guus says, spilling beer onto Aart’s shirt as he leans toward him.

“WHAT?!”

“We gotta make the coin,” Guus shouts over the booming music. “We can be richer than Honey Badger.”

Aart: “Fucking A!”

The ratio of guys to girls on the dancefloor at Mountain Bar is decidedly harming the lads’ chances, so after bidding adieu to Ciara & having a final Jaeger Bomb for the road, they’re out onto narrow student-swarmed streets, weaving between Wednesday-night revellers, Wesley & Federico & Jako arguing over whether they should go to Twister or Kokomo or Ocean 41. Wesley wins the debate & the gang take a right at De Negende Cirkel & enter the small bar-rammed square containing Twister.

“That’s Nguyen!” Guus shouts, the Vietnamese name sounding garbled & incomprehensible to Aart, who follows Guus to the bemused Asian guy standing in the street swigging from a bottle of premium Belgian beer, as the rest of the gang continue on into Twister.

“This man’s a genius,” Guus gushes. “Nguyen, I was telling you about the coin, right? We have to make the coin, man. We can be richer than Honey Badger, man. Yachts and boats and chimpanzees and eating sushi from model’s pussies with fucking diamond-encrusted chopsticks, man. Helicopters and big piles of cocaine and fucking everything, man. Lamborghinis. Two Lamborghinis, man.” Guus is rambling & swaying, eyes focused on nothing, the intensity of his slurred speech being met with a confused & slightly nervous smile from his Asian classmate. “Hey, Nguyen, where are you going tonight?”

Nguyen: “I don’t know, I was just—”

Guus: “Come to Twister with us!”

Minutes later they’re inside, the trio shoving their way through the densely packed crowd in search of the rest of the frat lads.

Jurate & Vallya are at the bar awaiting service. Federico leads Jako & Welsey toward them: “Hey.” Federico leans in to Jurate, talking quickly, his Italian charm producing schoolgirl giggles, as Wesley & Jako stand either side of Vallya, trying & failing to say something to bring a smile to her unmoved Russian face.

Once drinks have been served, all five move into the swell of the dancefloor. Federico’s hands are at Jurate’s waist as ‘Despacito’ blasts through the club, the many Spanish students dotted throughout the crowd belting the lyrics out. As the second chorus hits, Federico leans his face towards Jurate, who closes her eyes and thrusts her lips at his, & their tongues cascade in & out of each other’s mouths while Wesley & Jako jerk their bodies to the song at either side of Vallya, who’s looking alternately at the floor & ceiling & rest of the crowd, trying to focus her eyes anywhere but on her potential Dutch suitors.

Guus, Aart & Nguyen push their way past another group to reach Wesley, shouting something about having been looking for him, creating a distraction that Jako seizes upon to offer a hand to Vallya, which she reluctantly accepts.

When Wesley turns back to face them, Jako & Vallya are dancing an awkward semi-tango. He turns to Guus & Aart, irritated, though he smiles on seeing two girls approach who were at the previous night’s party – a German & a Spanish girl, Lina & something – Lina – and as Wesley greets them both, he realises Lina is the girl Federico fucked, & when Federico pulls his lips free of Jurate’s & gazes dreamily into her eyes, Lina spots him, & her mouth drops open, & Federico glances at her, & instinctively thrusts his hands away from Jurate’s waist, &

02.06.

Sometime later, Guus, Aart, Nguyen, & Wesley are in the smoke-filled Dees coffee shop, on a narrow alleyway running between the bar-filled backstreets and Oosterstraat.

“I don’t know how he does it, man,” Aart says, forming his words slowly, bloodshot eyes staring into the middle-distance.

“He’s Italian,” Guus says, the words bubbling up from his throat in a way that renders them incomprehensible.

Aart: “What?”

“He’s Italian,” Guus repeats, with force; the force tickles his cannabinoid-coated respiratory tract & sends him into a coughing fit.

Wesley’s watching Nguyen toke on the spliff with great interest. Their short & unthreatening Asian companion sucks deeply upon the spliff for as long as ten seconds at a time, filling his lungs completely with smoke. Nguyen then half-chokes on the smoke & half-swallows it, turning his head to the side & lifting his right arm across his mouth to block the cough. Then he returns the spliff to his mouth with his left hand & repeats the entire process.

“Hey, Bogart,” Wesley says, “you wanna share some of that joint?”

Nguyen stares at Wesley for a few moments, face completely red, understanding none of what was just said to him. The silence & stares of Guus & Aart fill Nguyen with dread. Smoke rises from the joint & wafts across his field of vision, & it suddenly clicks. He hands Wesley the spliff, then turns his head & returns his right arm to his mouth & coughs & coughs & coughs.

“Bogart,” Guus repeats, toying with a frayed piece of roach material on the tobacco-strewn tabletop. “That’s an old reference.”

“It’s a classic,” Wesley says, before inhaling deeply.

All are silent for a moment. Then Aart speaks: “Do you think Federico’s fucking that girl right now?”

Wesley: “Of course.”

Guus: “Which girl even went home with him?”

Wesley: “The German one, I think.”

Guus: “Which was the German one?”

Wesley: “The one from last night.”

Guus: “Where was the other girl from?”

Aart carefully ponders all the memories & knowledge of Federico he can summon as Guus & Wesley speak. He thinks of the shape of Federico’s nose – prominent, Romanesque; the tan complexion of his skin; his height – reasonable, but unremarkable, particularly here in the Netherlands; his easy-going personality, which is surely a factor in Federico’s seeming irresistibility to women. Aart then begins wondering how he could be more like Federico. Each point seems an impossibility: a nose job is possible, but might make him uglier than before; fake tan and sunbeds exist, but they might make him look ridiculous; Aart’s tall enough already – he might even have a few centimetres over Federico; and the personality… he ponders for a moment, & concludes he’s already reasonably easy-going…

Aart: “Do you think I should try a different hairstyle?”

Guus & Wesley stop speaking and stare at Aart. They’re struck first by the question’s weirdness, then they both take the time to really examine his odd shaved-sides & dreads-on-top look.

“I think it looks cool,” Wesley concludes.

Guus: “It’s distinctive.”

“Thanks,” Aart says, accepting the spliff from Guus.

Wesley: “I think your friend’s passed out.”

Guus looks at Nguyen, who’s hunched over the table, resting his heads on top of folded arms.

Guus: “Hey, Nguyen, you okay man?”

“…yeah…”

“You want a Coke or something?”

“…imalright…”

Nguyen’s condition is quickly forgotten as the others fall back into conversation about Federico’s effectiveness with women.

“He talks to girls,” Wesley says, sweeping aside Guus & Aart’s focus on the superficial. “It’s that simple.”

“You talk to girls,” Guus says. “I don’t see you fucking anyone.”

Wesley: “I got a phone number.”

Guus: “You think it’s a real one?”

“Yeah,” Wesley says, tapping at his phone & thrusting it in front of Guus’s face. “I got her on WhatsApp.”

Guus looks at the profile pic of the smiling brunette: “She looks okay.”

“But Nguyen was approaching everyone,” Aart says, confident Nguyen’s too inebriated to hear him. “He must’ve talked to six different girls, and every time they just laughed at him, or told him to go away.”

“That’s because they’re racist,” Guus says, scowling. “Dutch bitches are the worst for that.”

“You’re Dutch,” Wesley laughs.

“I’m Friesian,” Guus says. “And that’s all the more reason to know what Dutch bitches are like. They’re the most superficial cunts in Europe.”

“Woah,” Aart laughs. “Fucking chill on the red pill, man.”

“I’m just being serious,” Guus says. “Real talk. They want a tall man first, a white man second, maybe a black dude if they think no-one’s watching. Asian guys fall pretty far down their list. Unless they’re rich. If you’re rich, you can be a 90 year-old Chinese midget, and every 20 year-old blonde in Twister’s gonna suck your cock.”

“Fuck, man,” Aart says, choking on smoke as he falls into a laughing fit.

“See, this is why you don’t get women,” Wesley says, taking the spliff off Aart.

Guus: “Because I’m honest?”

Wesley: “Because you’re a fucking sociopath.”

It takes Aart a while to calm down, while Guus sits & stews over Wesley’s appraisal of him. Once Aart’s stopped laughing, Wesley holds the nub of a spliff that remains up for the group: “Anyone want BLTs?”

Guus snatches the nub of spliff from him & sucks on its scorching end.

“Come on, let’s wake Nguyen up and go to Warhol,” Wesley says, standing up.

“Hey, Nguyen,” Aart says, shaking Nguyen’s arm.

Nguyen doesn’t respond.

Aart shakes his arm harder.

“Come on, wake up.”

Nguyen meekly raises his reddened face, eyes lolling in their sockets: “Ithinkimgonnathrowup.”

“You’re alright, man,” Aart says, almost at the exact moment Nguyen throws his head to the side & cascades vomit all over himself.

02.07.

“Goodnight.”

Ciara lights her rollie as she walks away from Ibrahim & Mountain Bar, the previously busy bar-lined streets eerily quiet in the gently rising early morning light. The only person in the street is some junky in a tracksuit, who immediately stops fiddling with some random bicycle & eyes Ciara suspiciously as she passes. The scent of long-roasting meat hits Ciara as she passes a kebab shop at the end of the street. She thinks of ending her night/starting her day with some greasy sustenance. She pauses & watches the hacked-at lamb spin slowly against the grill through the window & decides to hold on for home & something healthier. She drops her rollie to the floor & continues on to the huge bike parking area at the edge of the Grote Markt, with about a dozen bikes now dotted around it. She heads to the spot she left her bike at, but doesn’t see it. She walks slowly around the parking area, scanning each bicycle carefully. When she’s finished, she circles around back to the start. She does this three times, each time suppressing a growing fear, a developing sinking feeling in her stomach. After the third search, she admits defeat.

“FUCK’S SAKE!” Ciara yells, startling a bumbling old bloke & some pigeons.

Her bike’s been stolen.

02.08.

Statistical modelling that should be second nature to him is somehow leaving Nguyen completely confused; he checks variables, consults Google, but still keeps returning results that make no sense whatsoever.

“Why in shit isn’t this result significant?” Nguyen moans, the effort of pushing the words out in English making him aware of the thick-cloud of the-night-before cloaking his every thought & action.

Guus takes a quick look at Nguyen’s screen & tuts loudly: “You are mixing the European and English decimals.”

“What?”

“Here.” Guus highlights an entire column of data on Nguyen’s computer, opens Excel, copies & pastes the offending digits into a new spreadsheet, then performs a quick search & replace, changing every ‘.’ English-style decimal into a ‘,’ European one. “We use commas for decimals,” Guus says, copying the altered data & pasting it back into the SPSS data modelling software. “Now try.”

With a few quick button presses, Nguyen returns the statistically-significant result he was looking for. “Damn,” Nguyen mumbles. “I knew that.”

“You’re still fucked up from last night, huh?”

“Mmm.”

“You remember puking all over that coffee shop?”

“No.”

“I don’t think you can go back to there.”

“Ugh.”

They sit in silence for a few moments, each working their way through their data analysis homework, as Guus thinks of more ways to annoy Nguyen. He thinks of teasing Nguyen about the many Dutch girls Nguyen threw himself at, but then remembers the hope-filled conversations he had with Aart about the potential of making their own cryptocurrency: “Hey, remember I told you that me and Aart are thinking about making our own coin?”

Nguyen doesn’t answer, frowning in concentration at some difficult-to-decipher English-language sentence on his problem sheet.

“Do you know how to make one?” Guus continues. “You’re usually pretty good with that stuff.”

“What, making a cryptocurrency?” Nguyen asks. “What makes you think I’m good at that?”

Guus: “I don’t know, just making things in general. You made your own phone apps, right? iOS and Android. And computer software.”

Nguyen: “Yeah, but I never set up an entire blockchain.”

“I don’t know if you need to create an entire blockchain. I thought you can make it like an app on Ethereum? Same as making an app for a phone or something.”

“What, you mean like setting up an ERC-20 token?”

“Uh… yeah…”

“Sure. That’s easy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ve set a few up on testnet just to play around with it. It takes like twenty minutes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You’ve just got to copy and paste a pre-existing smart contract and swap the variables out to meet your specifications.”

“…yeah?”

“It’s super easy. It couldn’t be easier.” The fog of the previous night is lifting, Nguyen’s spirits rising now he’s found something pure to distract himself from the garbled English grammar of his data analysis problem sheet. “What do you want your token to do?”

“I don’t know… it doesn’t really need to do anything. We just thought we could maybe make a lot of money.”

“Well then it’s super easy. Incredibly easy. A baby could do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Look, watch this…”

02.09.

It’s already passed 4pm when Ciara’s dragged her tired self from the university to the Grote Markt & on to the bar-filled streets beyond, and the bike hire shop at the far end of the boozing district, facing the canal.

She’s at the counter, rummaging through her pockets, in a panic: “What happens if I can’t find the key?”

The women at the counter’s previously-friendly face grows suddenly serious: “Then you must pay us for the cost of the bicycle.”

The repairman at her side, fiddling with some disc-shaped bike part, adds gravely: “We’ll take it from the bank account you registered with.”

Ciara: “And I still have to keep paying the rental fee each month?”

The woman: “Of course. You signed a contract.”

Fuck’s sake.

Back out on the square, stumbling in a half-awake sleep-deprived daze. Ciara’s thoughts tumble over themselves, until she stops outside a bar & takes her phone from her pocket & connects to wifi.

“Hiya, Mam,” Ciara says, once her Facebook Messenger call’s connected. “I’ve got a bit of a problem.”

“Oh, you don’t need to borrow more money, do you?” Ciara’s Mam asks, sounding worried.

“Well… last night I went to work at that bar I’m working at, and I was working until early in the morning, nine til six, then when I got out, I went to where I’d parked my bike, and…”

“…because I just lent your brother two hundred quid, and we’ve just had to get the double-glazing done on the windows, and I’m down to my last pennies now…”

“Yeah, it’s just that I can’t find the bike key, and they say without it, I have to keep paying every month, and I still need to get a new bike for getting around, and it’s a few weeks until I get paid again…”

“Can’t you ask your father?”

Ciara sighs: “You know what’s he like. And he’s already lending me the money for the deposit on the house, he’s not gonna give me any more than that.”

“And I thought you were working?”

“I am, but I’m only making, like, six hundred Euros a month, which after rent is barely fifty Euros a week to live off…”

“…and I thought you were getting money back off the Dutch government?”

“I am, but like one-hundred sixty Euros a month…”

“So can’t you buy a bike with that? It doesn’t have to be a fancy one, does it?”

“…no, yeah, but… I mean…” She sighs, defeated, deciding to steel her mind for the final ordeal of the long walk back to Jurate’s, & the long walks from there to & from university until a new bike’s sorted. “Alright… I’ll figure something out.”

02.10.

“Hey, Aart, check this out,” Guus says, bringing his laptop into Aart’s room, cold autumn rain lashing the streets outside the frat house.

“What’re you doing?” Aart asks, as Guus sits upon his bed and starts tapping at the laptop.

“Here.” Guus places the laptop beside him on the bed & motions for Aart to use it.

Aart sits & stares at a line of zeroes on the laptop screen: “What’s this?”

“Move the mouse around.”

Aart drags his finger across the laptop’s touchpad; the zeroes are replaced with a string of random letters and numbers.

“Write the number down.”

“What is it?”

“Your private key.”

“For what?”

“For Pussy Sushi.”

Aart stares at Guus in confusion; Guus stares back, bearing yellowed teeth with an enormous grin: “Pussy Sushi?”

“Like the Honey Badger video,” Guus explains. “This is our ticket, man. Lambos, yachts, and banquets of sushi served on the bare bodies of beautiful big-titted blondes. Write the key down.”

Aart stands up, grabs a sheet of paper, & jots the key down: 5xBee23aZc41nErd1AsddDNeXfg543009ah18EfnM. He clicks continue. “You made this yourself?”

“Nguyen helped me.”

“So I’ve got a wallet,” Aart says. “What happens now?”

“What’s your public address?”

Aart reads the numbers out, Guus meticulously tapping each onto his phone screen. “Okay, now wait a minute… wait… wait… anything happening?”

“Nothing…” Aart hits refresh. “Nothing… nothing… nothing… oh, sweet.”

The zero balance on the wallet has suddenly become 15 followed by six zeroes.

Guus: “You are now the owner of fifteen billion Pussy Sushi coins.”

02.11.

“This place is crazy,” Jurate says, twirling in the frat’s bar-like main living space.

“It’s cool, yeah?” Ciara’s enthusiastic, & happy her friend shares her enthusiasm.

“It looks like a bar,” Vallya says, betraying no emotion.

“Can I get you a drink?” Wesley asks. “We’ve got beer, vodka, gin, whiskey, bourbon, white rum, dark rum, tequila, sambuca, ouzo, Aftersock, absinthe—”

Jurate: “Beer’s fine.”

“But what are you supposed to do with it?” Jako asks, sitting on one of the corner-nook sofas.

“This exactly what I say to them,” Federico says. “Is fucking useless.”

Guus: “It’s a proof of concept.”

Jako: “But what concept have you proved?”

Guus: “That we can make a coin.”

Federico: “That you can make a fucking shit coin! The coin you’ve got is no use to anyone!”

“So we’ve got the proof of concept,” Guus says, ignoring Federico. “Now we just need a use case.”

Jako: “That’s, like – how you say? Carriage in front of the horse. You’re doing it backward.”

Federico: “Exactly!”

Jako: “Surely you find a problem first and then design a solution for it?”

Federico: “That’s what I tell him!”

“Think about mouthwash,” Aart says, knowing Jako, Wander & Max are much more likely to be convinced by marketing-focused explanations than technological ones. “Mouthwash had no obvious use case; in fact, the guys who made it thought it might be used for floor cleaner, or toilet cleaner: they had no idea it would take off as an oral hygiene product until the marketing guys got hold of it.”

“And that’s where you guys come in,” Guus says, smiling smugly.

Jako: “Well, my opinion is you need to change the fucking name first!”

“What, you don’t like Pussy Sushi?” Guus asks.. “It’s like in the Honey Badger video…”

“Just call it Fucking Shit Coin,” Federico says, sharing an awkward half-second of eye-contact with Jurate as Wesley brings the girls over.

“Hey, guys, this is…”

Introductions follow, bottles of Hertog Jan are clanged together, & space is made for Wesley & the girls on the sofa. Time passes, conversation flowing, the rate at which beers are sunk increasing.

“I’m sorry about the time before,” Federico says to Jurate. They fall into drunken forgiveness & flirting.

“I heard Putin’s really into blockchain,” Guus tells Vallya, who tells him: “I don’t know anything about it.”

& so on, empty beer bottles accumulating, cigarettes being smoked, joints rolled, harder drink turned to – beginning with tequila shots – , the night getting progressively messier, the chatter getting louder, music videos playing on the television, & then the Honey Badger one comes on – the one which inspired Guus & Aart in the first place, where’s he’s on the yacht eating sushi off a model with the diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks.

“And so tomorrow I have to go again to the place,” Vallya pouts. “Oy.”

“That sucks,” Ciara says, though she’s honestly fed up of hearing about Vallya’s endless bureaucratic issues getting Russian documents approved in the Netherlands.

Guus: “You know, that could all be solved instantly with blockchain.”

“Really?” Vallya asks, showing genuine interest for the first time all evening.

“Yeah,” Guus says, one eye on the television, awaiting the triumphal moment when Honey Badger brings out the diamond-encrusted platinum chopsticks. Guus launches into an in-depth explanation of the transformative power of decentralised distributed ledger technology for all manner of cross-border record keeping, Vallya rapidly losing interest as it becomes apparent he’s offering no immediate-term solutions.

“Would you shut up about the Fucking Shit Coin?” Federico says, arm now around Jurate a couple of seats away.

Everyone laughs, & Federico leans back in to talk seductively to Jurate, who’s very much into it, Federico playing up his accent for maximum effectiveness; & Jako & Wesley both draw Vallya’s attention away from Guus; & Guus stares at the television, as the Honey Badger music video gives away to Gucci Mane living the high life in some lush tropical island mansion; & Guus keeps pinging the two mantras off each other – Vallya’s issues with the Russian documents, & Federico’s repeated denigration of “your Fucking Shit Coin,” & Guus’ mind swirls as more alcohol’s sunk – a double berth of sambuca & ouzo shots – & the night wears on, much booze drank & weed smoked, & Ciara & Aart & Guus & Max & maybe one other one who’s too fucked to say much are in Aart’s room, smoking another joint & drinking Jack & Coke, & Guus is ranting about blockchain & the potential use case for the Coin Formerly Known as Pussy Sushi, & how they need a high-quality whitepaper written in English, & Ciara would maybe be perfect for it, & everyone else is too fucked to say much, so Ciara’s indulging him, & trying to comprehend Guus’ jargon-laden rant, & Aart’s getting tired of listening to him, & when Ciara says for the fifth or sixth time “I don’t really get it though,” and this time asks after “How can you stop other people stealing your coins from you?”, Aart pushes past Guus (who’s still ranting) to open a desk drawer & pull out his paper with the private key for his Ethereum wallet on it, & he’s excitedly explaining to Ciara how “this key is completely unique, and as long as nobody else sees it, nobody can access anything, and your public key is a totally different number that you can send money to,” & now that he’s interrupted from his rant, Guus is left to rock back & forth in his stoned drunkeness, & he suddenly blurts out what he’d been looking for: “I’VE FUCKING GOT IT!”

& Max stirs on the bed, & whoever’s lying beside him’s woken from their slumber by Guus’s cry, & those two & Aart & Ciara stare at Guus in half-comprehension as he bring his rant to the climax he’s been looking for:

“Fucking Shit Coin! FSC! Federico’s a fucking idiot, but he’s got a thing for marketing, right? FSC! Got a good ring to it! So we use it to sync the documents, so Vallya’s situation’s solved on the blockchain, right? So her Future’s secured on the blockchain. So there’s Synergy between the documents issued in Russia and Nederlands. So there’s Synergy from past to present to Future. So that’s what we call it, right?”

Guus stares at the others, awaiting their enthusiasm.

“…sorry…” Ciara mumbles, “I’m don’t get it…”

“Future Synergy Coin!” Guus shouts. “FSC! It’s fucking gezellig! A decentralised blockchain platform for the secure cross-border storage and access of the important documents of the citizens of all the world’s nations!”

Max opens & closes his mouth a few times, too fucked up to say anything.

Ciara stares at Guus, then at Aart, still utterly confused.

Guus looks at Aart, eyes pleading with him to be the first to understand him.

“Yeah, I get it,” Aart says, mostly out of sympathy. “Future Synergy Coin… because it synergies with your future…”

“Exactly!”

& the rant continues, & all rapidly interest, but Guus is enthused through the next ten drinks, & as the others pass out & disappear into the night around him, he becomes the last person awake in the frat house, sitting on the quad sofas beside a passed-out Wander, furiously scribbling a rough abstract for the Future Synergy Coin whitepaper across a bunch of McDonald’s napkins found in a kitchen drawer.

02.12.

“…and we can pay you,” Guus says.

Ciara’s trying to listen to Guus, she hungover, barely able to focus, until he says those magic words: we can pay you…

“Yeah?”

“Of course. I’ve made a bunch of money from crypto already, but I’m sure this idea’s gold. Future Synergy Coin is gonna make a thousand times more than whatever I’ve made buying other people’s coins.”

“But… a whitepaper?” Ciara leans forward in her seat, between Aart & Guus on the quad-sofa in the party-ravaged frat’s main living space. “I don’t even know what that is…”

“It’s like a research paper explaining what the coin does,” Aart says. “It’s not much different than an essay you’d have to write for your course.”

Ciara’s relieved that Aart’s stepped in: he explains everything so much more calmly & understandably than Guus.

“You just have to look at some other whitepapers from successful cryptos,” Aart says. “You can pretty much just copy their background sections, take a few bits and pieces from different papers, and put it into your own words.”

“But I don’t get why you want me to do it,” Ciara says. “Surely you both know a lot more about this crypto thing than I do?”

“Because the English needs to be perfection,” Guus says. “The whitepaper is everything. The whitepaper is what convinces people this isn’t just some new Fucking Shit Coin; this is Future Synergy Coin. This is something world changing. Something they have to invest in.”

“Yeah? Well… I suppose I could write something like that…”

“Of course you can,” Guus grins. “And as I say, we’ll pay you. We can pay you in cash – say, 500 Euros?”

Fuck. Ciara imagines the bike that €500 could buy.

Aart stares at Guus, shocked he’s offering so much.

“Or we can pay you some part in cash, some part in Future Synergy Coins,” Guus says. “I can almost guarantee the price will rocket. Every coin’s going up at the moment.”

“500 Euros is fine.”

“Excellent.” Guus leans back on the sofa, clasping his hands behind his head, triumphant. “I’ll tell Nguyen to start working on the website.”

ICO.

Ciara completes the whitepaper in a few days’ rush, desperate for the €500 & a new bicycle, pulling together sections & strands & diagrams from a dozen pillaged & semi-plagiarised pre-existing professional efforts, rejigging sentence structures & paragraph orders to avoid plagiarism-detecting algorithms – a skill her university course has taught her well – while Nguyen rustles up a rudimentary website, then makes adjustments & adds swirling graphics of blockchain-signifying spiderwebs of interconnected nodes under Aart’s direction, while Guus suggests a few slight changes to both the whitepaper & the website, feeding Ciara & Nguyen the details to make the whole thing a success: giving the coin a total supply of 10 trillion, a high enough figure to make each coin seem unbelievably cheap compared to the likes of Bitcoin & Ethereum, even if FSC’s marketcap was to soar into the tens-of-millions-of-dollars range (a goal Aart laughs at the impossibility of), with 50% of coins available to the crypto investors via the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) crowd sale, 25% split between Aart, Guus, & Nguyen, & the last 25% allocated to the Future Synergy Coin development budget; fluffing the resumes of the team to be listed on the website, vastly overinflating the success of Nguyen’s previous coding projects, making Aart out to be an elite Dutch business bastard & an expert in every topic touched upon in any of his university modules, while Guus depicts himself as the genius at the center of it all, an incomparable fusion of tech & business savvy, a hip young master of the future tokenised economy; & the hard-cap on the ICO is set at 15,000 ETH, a figure roughly equal to $4.5 million, & at this point Aart & Ciara are convinced this bold project will come to nothing, that they’ll never find enough people stupid enough to fund a project with such ambitions from a group with such little track record: & because of this, Aart balks when Guus asks him to contribute his 1.5 bitcoin, with Guus adding 1.5 of his own, to bribe a leading ICO review website into giving their project a 4-star rating (a 5-star rating cost far more Bitcoin than either possess or can afford); but Guus promises Aart the potential returns are astronomical, far outstripping anything he could get by simply hodling & hoping for Bitcoin to increase in value: & against his better judgement, Aart gives in to Guus, & transfers his 1.5 BTC to the ICO review website; & the 4-star rating appears, & on 17th October 2017, the Future Synergy Coin ICO goes live.

$hitcoin. will be released through Dead Bird Press in July 2020. For more information, visit https://deadbirdpress.com/shitcoin/

Layers of excrement peel off the walls like clams peeled from shells – not without struggle, but satisfying nevertheless. Something of the waste of one life becoming the sustenance of another. Gobby pops poop into his mouth and chews like he never tasted shit before.

“They had a right rich diet, whoever crapped this out.”

“Shut up, Dobby,” Alexander says, wrenching human expulsion from the walls and smearing half of it over his lips and nose as he greedily ingests all he can.

These past few years have been tough times for the people of Layalexia. What was once a gold-paved land of cow and bee juice has been reduced through folly of the leadership to a place where the sons of once proud men sneak into the septic dens beneath foreign cities to find something to fill their barren bellies with. It was only thanks to the few remaining geniuses of the elder generation that pills had been deduced & mass produced to turn each of Layalexia’s citizens’ stomachs into burning cauldrons of acid so potent that no bacteria from any ingested filth could survive inside them more than half a nanosecond.

Having not eaten in days, Dobby and Alexander clear the walls to the point their rancid stomach acid is ravaging the tips of their throats and would still continue if not for sound above:

“Fine job this. Why don’t they have one of them foreign gops doing it?”

“You know what them lazy guffwits are like,” another voice replies. “Come here to plow the buxom wenches, not fields. Their sodding desert lands are so deprived of sustenance all their womenfolks’ tits have turned into lolling socks slopped full of curdled milk.”

“Yeah, then why the bleppo are them gops in some cushty office while we’re wading through fucking human shit all day?”

“They do speak the lingos, don’t they?”

“I speak a little Varawhili.”

“Alright them. Ashken caramoosh?”

“Ashken… ashken….”

“Yeah, go on. Ashken…”

Alexander and Dobby take their eyes off the light-beaming hole above them from which the voices are coming.

“We should leave,” Dobby silently mouths.

Alexander shakes his head firmly: no. If the cleaners are up above, then the flushing crew’s likely positioned at the grate they snuck in through.

“Ashken… cabadoza.”

“Yeah, well if it takes you ten guffing minutes to say ‘ashken cabadoza,’ you’re not gonna be much good on a trade comittee, are ya?”

“Oi!” A third voice comes from the direction of the grate but is bellowed with enough force to echo through the guff chamber and out through the small hole above. “You two gong lickers gonna chat about guffing Varawhili greetings all day or are you gonna get the clorking pipe on? We got twenty of these gops to get done before lunch time!”

“Yeah, alright, alright, keep your lips dry.”

The light pouring through the hole is slowly eclipsed as the pipe end’s fitted over it.

“We’re gonna drown,” Dobby whimpers.

Alexander thinks for a second Dobby may be right before he steels himself: “Bellneckers we will. They don’t fill the things fully. That’d be a waste of the guff fluid.”

“Yeah, but they got a surplus of the guff fluid now,” Dobby says, voice getting louder as industrial doings outside become loud enough to conceal any sound they might make. “Didn’t you hear what Tash were saying in the Moggy last eveningtime?”

“Shut up, Dobby.”

Alexander starts feeling at the walls, trying to find shit clumped thick enough that it might be possible to use it to clamber upward and keep his head above the ensuing guff fluid rush. He finds a clump high up on the wall that seems promising, but as soon as he distributes any weight to it, the piece snaps off.

“Oh guffing heck, oh guffing heck, oh guff me,” Dobby repeats as mantra.

Alexander grabs the big ripped-off clump and gnaws at it fast as he can. Though his belly’s full to the point of acid almost being forced into his sinuses, this is the last meal he might enjoy in a fortnight.

“Right, here goes!” the third voice says.

Seven-tenths of a nanosecond later, the chamber they’re in is filling with guff fluid, it surging from the gates’ direction, reaching their ankles near-instantly, then a half-second after that flowing through with such force to knock them back against the wall. Both are submerged within the murky water, struggling against the guff current. Alexander thinks Dobby might be crying, though it’s impossible to distinguish guff from tears at this point. From Alexander’s point of view, this chamber might be his death hole, but better that than death via starvation.

At the point Dobby gasps, opening his mouth and letting guff fluid in, the great sucking sound starts above, and the chamber’s fluid is slowly pulled upward. The last drops fly through the hole as Dobby and Alexander collapse to the floor of the now clean chamber, breathing as deeply as if they’d just escaped the womb.

“Right then, get that guff pipe off and let’s get onto the next one!” the third voice shouts.

“Arabencha,” one of the voices above the above hole says.

“Don’t let frog tickler hear you say that,” the other voice says.

“Why? He do speak less Varawhili than you do.”

“That was a near one,” Alexander says, grinning now the danger’s passed.

Dobby’s still gasping for air as the pipe slides off the above hole and light beams back through it.

They take some minutes to regather their strength after the voices have moved on to the next shit hole. Then it’s back out through the grate and on to Layalexia, bellies full and a grand story to regale with at Moggy’s.

The Legendary Sons of Layalexia is due for release through Dead Bird Press later this year.