The other half from the macabre rhythm of the story is stereotypical North: swearing turned to new purpose by shifting down an order of magnitude, linguistic experimentation, friendliness, slapstick and a series of rigorous logical extrapolations from given premises.

It’s lovely too, but art’s hard to talk about. I think the reason it hooked me must be that against all my expectation it has suspense and therefore suits the serialised format. I’m coming to appreciate ever more the art of inspiring the desire to know what happens next, and I’ve been consistently eager to get to the next page and agonised by each issue-end cliffhanger in this.

What disappointed me the most was that I was unable to use the word “fuck” in a satisfactory manner. Your story opens and ends with the word “fuck”, and I suppose by observing this I was trying too hard to shoehorn “fuck” into interesting places.

No I’m not going to send it to anyone, it’s shit! I’m off to watch Battlestar Galactica which is excellent and far better written than anything I could come up with. A big plus is that the characters use a variation of the word “fuck” in the same manner as that not-safe-for-TV word. They say: “Frack you! You motherfracker!” And: “You wanna frack with me?” And simply: “Frack!”

“Frack”. It came from the den. I’d later learn that this was preceded by a much quieter “Oh Frack, oh-“. Not bad eh?