What a minute... What's this? Secret pages in Cosmic Meadows?

You might be wondering right now just why on earth Cosmic Meadows would need secret pages, and what they might contain. Well, wonder no longer, my friend!

From time to time I'll be adding to the secret pages material that is otherwise unsuitable or superfluous to Cosmic Meadows, so be sure to check in regularly.

To start, your humble webmaster has decided to present - for the first time in over a year - the now-legendary Star Trek / Alphaville connections!

It all started when I noticed that Ricky Echolette was wearing a United Federation of Planets t-shirt in some of the publicity photos for Afternoons in Utopia. And then shortly after that, the Universal Daddy single was released, and the b-side song is called "Next Generation". Now, you have to remember that the single was released a year before Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted... I was beginning to wonder just how much influence Alphaville had over the the creators of Star Trek.

Well, many years have passed now, and I've built up quite a list...

Alphaville and Star Trek

Hello there. So, the secret pages have been on-line for quite a while now, and no-one has found them. Okay, maybe that's because they're hidden, but even so I expected someone to have found the link (of course, if you're reading this then you probably have found the link, so you don't need me to tell you what it is).

For this edition of the secret pages, I've decided to include three of my Alphaville-inspired stories. Tobias Prohl - webmaster of the official AV site - requested these stories for his own site, but he simply put a link to the .ZIP file containing the stories. Now, you can read them on-line...

These stories are all © Michael Carroll 1998. Unauthorised duplication prohibited.

That's all I have for the moment, but in time I might put up one or two other stories, so please be sure to keep checking in...

Well, it's been months and no one's found the secret pages. Or if they have, they haven't mentioned it.

The good news is that I've called in quite a lot of favours, and done some digging around and I've managed to track down some very rare Alphaville promotional merchandise from 1984.

Bubblegum Cards

Synth Legends

Date: May 21st 1999

One or two people have found these secret pages the easy way, by just typing in the URL, but the point of the game is to find the path to the pages...

At just over a year since the secret pages were put on-line, someone has finally found the path! Stand up and be proud, Terry Foster! Your observational skills are second to none!

Unfortunately, Terry, you were just one day too late to claim the $10,000,000.00 prize for being the first to find the correct path. Never mind, what would you do with ten million dollars anyway?

At this point, I might as well confess the truth about the above merchandising material: it's fake. There never was a Synth Legends magazine, and Alphaville bubblegum cards never existed. Sorry to anyone who was fooled, but look at it like this: if it was real merchandising material, wouldn't I have put it on the merchandising page?

I made up the merchandising material because I was getting a little pissed off with the staggering lack of response to my queries for information about the real stuff: after five or six queries, there was only one response, from Matthias Böhmer. Not that I was pissed off with the people, as such: I was pissed off because I was beginning to realise how little Alphaville merchandising material there really was.

Unfortunately, Matthias was a mere one day too late to be able to claim the free discarded Pepsi can that was first prize. Instead, Matthias wins second prize, no free discarded Pepsi can.

But there are still quite a few other hidden things to find on this site: some of them with actual prizes. Keep looking, true believers...

Date: July 11th 1999

Yes indeed, Kemo Sabe, I am back, back, back! Not that I went anywhere.

  • Well done to Jeff Jacobs who found the competition on the Compilation Albums page. It only took three months for someone to win... Check out the page to see what he had to do.

  • Waayyy back in the dark ages, on 19th July 1995, I created the very first version of the Alphaville FAQ. In those early days, it was a simple text document that I e-mailed to interested parties. Pretty soon it became clear to me that I was going to have to create a web version... Thus, Cosmic Meadows was born. This means that our fourth birthday is coming up in about eight days. I'm planning a little something for that day: nothing major, no prizes or anything like that, just something... Special. So, be sure to check the site sometime on Monday 19th July 1999, because all will revert back to normal the next day, and the poor souls who don't visit will be missing out on something quite special.

  • Next Friday (16th July 1999) is a very special day for Alphaville: They're playing their very first shows in the US. It's also a special day for me and Leonia, because we're going to see The Phantom Menace. Yes, I know that most countries in the world have already had the movie, but for some reason the distributors decided that us poor folks in Ireland should spend a couple of extra months avoiding any mention of the movie on the Internet, in magazines and on television. They did, however, deign to release the novelisation and soundtrack CD here at the same time they were released in the US. Maybe they think we're all really slow readers.

  • What else is new? Oh yeah, I was laid off on Friday. I am now officially unemployed. Which is weird. See, a lot of people in the company have had no work in just about a year. And I mean no work. These people have had nothing to do except send e-mails to each other and play Boxout, Tetris, Ballistics and so on. I was not one of them. I have been incredibly busy since I joined in April 1998. Back in January and February of this year I was putting in an average of 50% more time than I was being paid for. But now all my projects are finished, tested, working and installed, and there's no more work for me. They said that the lay-offs were done purely clinically - last in, first out - which meant that to let go someone who was in before me, they had to let me go too. Or so they say. What a bummer. Well, it wasn't a very nice place to work, anyway, so I'm not that upset. The lucky thing is, if it had happened a couple of weeks later, I'd have been in big trouble, because I was just about to buy a new car.

  • One last thing about the job: Now I know why I got that strange reaction on Friday morning when I filled in a holiday request form so I could take the day off on the 16th to go and see The Phantom Menace...

    • Okay. Time to wrap up. Check back soon for more scintillating news!

    Date: August 9nd 1999

  • So, Cosmic Meadows' fourth birthday has come and gone. Those of you who missed it may be wondering what the special event was... Well, I guess it wasn't all that special. I managed to find a very early copy of the Alphaville FAQ from 1995, so I put it on-line, along with a fancy new one-day-only logo and a brief history of my involvement with Alphaville fandom. Check here if you want to see what it all looked like.

  • Still haven't got a job, though to be honest I haven't been trying as hard as perhaps I should. So far, I've been checking out a few places unofficially (i.e., companies where other people I know work, or companies that have been recommended), but I haven't gone to an agency yet. Still not sure whether I want to remain as a programmer. Ideally, I'd become a full-time writer, but that's just not cost-effective (mortgage, you know). At least I'm getting a taste of what a full-time writer's life must be like... And I have to say it agrees with me. Maybe I'll just find some job where I can work from home...

  • Here's a horror story...

    On the night of Monday 26th July, after all the good TV shows were over (didn't take long), I did what I usually do: I came up to the office where my computer resides and turned it on. It didn't work.

    That was about 22:00 GMT. Six hours later and I had almost everything working, with the exception of my modem. I decided to give in and try again next day. Next day, I still couldn't get the modem work - It kept trying to convince me that some other process was already using the modem. So I pulled out the modem and tried the old 28.8... Still no luck.

    At about midnight on Tuesday, I gave up on the modem. I have no idea why it's dead. Plus, what with all the powering up, attempts to "detect new hardware", re-installing of Windows, and so forth, now my Zip drive also doesn't work. And any time I attempt to get the PC to find the modem or the Zip drive, the PC locks up, refuses to boot into Windows properly, and I have to re-install Windows again.

    So... After consultation with my good lady, we decided that it was time for a new PC. A quick phone call to Gateway later (actually, several phone calls to Gateway later), and I placed an order: a 450 mhz PIII with lots of goodies, such as a DVD drive, built-in Zip drive, 3D graphics card, 13 gig hard drive, etc. I made the order on Thursday 29th, and elected to collect the PC myself, rather than wait for them to deliver it (which would also cost extra). The nice lady at Gateway suggested I phone on Tuesday 3rd to check on the machine's progress.

    I phoned on Tuesday: got the nice lady's voice-mail, left a message, but no response was forthcoming. I phoned on Wednesday, same thing happened. I phoned on Thursday, left a message, and the nice lady in Gateway did phone back (about five minutes before she left for the day) but I missed her call. So... I phoned on Friday, and finally made contact. The nice lady told me that PC was ready for collection! She put me through to the shipping department, who confirmed that the machine was ready. On a hunch (perhaps it was the Force) I asked how long the PC had been ready... "Since, let's see, the 30th of July."

    So, I was without a PC for an extra week all because Gateway didn't bother to let me know I could pick the machine up... Nice, eh?

    However, the new PC is a gem: It only took me about ten hours to get most of my software up and running and the 7.0 gig hard disk from the old machine installed. And as for games... Populous runs so smoothly it's unbelievable, and Quake II really kicks ass.

    It was weird and oddly lonely not being able to get on-line... I even considered dropping in to an Internet Café, that's how bad things became. Still, work proceeds on the new book, the new new book, several short stories I've been meaning to finish, my HTML scanning program (already well worth the time I've spent writing it), and my old 3D CAD program (one of those "pet" projects all programmers seem to have), which, incidentally, runs about five times as fast on the new PC.

  • And speaking of the new book, after much consultation with my publishers, we now have a title and a cover. It will be released next June. Sorry, I can't reveal the title just yet: We're still undecided on whether to go with my own name or a pseudonym... You see, the book is aimed at the female market, and it is written in the first person from a woman's point of view (one of the reasons there were so many drafts). That means that if we use my name, we could be alienating a good portion of the readership, because a male author's name may make many readers see the narrator as male. On the other hand, if we use a female pseudonym, we won't be able to do the usual publicity things such as interviews and signings.

  • Recommended listening while waiting for a new PC: 15 Minutes by Nik Kershaw. Totally brilliant... Not a dud song on the whole album.

  • Finally, another nice thing about the new PC: the DVD drive works brilliantly. The CD drive on the old machine had a terrible tendency to skip, particularly right in the middle of Elegy and Days Full of Wonder (my current favourite songs from Dreamscapes). But with the new PC I was able to use AudioCatalyst (wonderful piece of software) to convert all of Dreamscapes to MP3 files, and it only took about an hour and a half.

    Okay, that's it for now. Thanks for listening!

    • Date: November 28th 1999

    Something wonderful has happened...

    I have met Alphaville, and witnessed them in concert!

    The photo on the right shows me, Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd and Erlin Loving at the after-show party.

    For more information, check my report on the official Alphaville website: www.alphaville.de

  • Something I didn't put in the concert report: I asked Marian and Bernhard to sign a copy of the Flame single... Why did I choose this particular single? Because on the label side of the CD there's a little history of Alphaville, and I'm the one who wrote it! Yes, another great secret revealed! The text is reproduced on the Cosmic Meadows' discography entry for the single.

  • I've recently made some major changes to my website (not Cosmic Meadows - my own home page). Check it out at www.michaelowencarroll.com.


    • Date: June 12th 2000

    Wow, has it really been that long since I updated the secret pages? Sorry if anyone's been feeling left out...

    Actually, it's been a long time since I did any real work on the site. There are good reasons for this and they come under the banner of "writing stuff."

    It all started around the end of December last year: I received a phone call from Poolbeg (my publishers) telling me that they wanted to move up the date of publication. The book was scheduled for March 10, but the good folk who run the bookshops in Dublin Airport decided that they wanted an "airside" edition of the book in the second week in January. I still hadn't seen the finished cover or had a chance to proofread the pages, so there was a bit of a panic...

    Leonia and I ended up proofreading the entire book over one night - not an easy task as it's quite large. But it was worth it: we caught some really dumb mistakes (mostly my fault). There are probably still a few in there, but considering that a vast majority of the 100,000 words are okay, I'm happy enough.

    The release date for normal shops didn't change, and so on March 10 we got to see it on the bookshelves for the first time. Unfortunately, about a week before it was released, word got out that this new "woman's" book was actually written by a man... In terms of publicity, Poolbeg handled this really well: we decided that there was no point in pretending any more, and "came out" about the whole thing. This meant that all of a sudden I was bombarded with phone calls from newspapers and radio station. It generated a lot of publicity for the book, so I guess it was a good thing in the end.

    And then the reviews started to come in... The first wasn't so great: the reviewer seemed to be annoyed that I was masquerading as a woman. His review column was for some reason littered with horse-racing metaphors, and he described me as a "ringer." I've looked this up, and it means a horse that has been entered into a race with a false identity. I'm still not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

    Most of the other reviews were positive - some incredibly positive - so I'm pleased about that. It's nice to think that all the work I put into the book has paid off. The book has sold out its first print run, and will be launched in the UK in September.

    And for those of you who have been following the subject in these secret pages (and who haven't looked at my own home page recently), the title of the book is If the Shoe Fits, and the name I'm using is "Jaye Carroll."

    Book two (it's a three-book contract) is currently being worked on by my editor. I've had some feedback from my "reading staff" (Leonia and our friend Paul), and the consensus is that the beginning and the ending need some work, but on the whole it's not too bad. It's less humorous than If the Shoe Fits, but that's deliberate. The working title is The Sweetest Feeling, and it should be released March 2001.

    Lately, I've been plotting book three. This one is going to be tough (for reasons I won't go into here), but if it works, it'll be worth it. It should be released March 2002 or thereabouts.

    After that, I'm planning on writing a novel I've been toying with for a few years. On top of all that, there a few other writing projects on which I'm working - more news will appear here as and when it happens.

    Date: January 22nd 2001

    Uh, oh... Here he goes again, writing about himself when he should be writing about Alphaville... Fear not, I'll keep it concise this time...

    On the writing front, If the Shoe Fits has done quite well. The second book, The Sweetest Feeling, is scheduled for publication at the end of June (2001). The third book took over eight months to plot, and seventeen days to write the first draft. I know that sounds fast, but believe me it was a tough seventeen days: I didn't get more than four or five hours' sleep a night during that period, and I don't think I left the house at all. In fact, here's a little extract from my work diary (in which I record everything that happens relating to my writing career, from phone calls to publications):

    After that, I took a few weeks off from the book and then read it through in one sitting, making copious notes as I went along. Then I spent another couple of months working out the problems before starting on the second draft. Luckily, because I plot so carefully, the second draft didn't require too many major structural changes: I did end up completely rewriting the first ten thousand words, and there's barely a single sentence that hasn't been touched throughout the rest of the book. I delivered the second draft to my publisher in December, and she loved it, so that's a relief. It's now in the hands of my editor. The book is due for publication in June 2002.

    That will be the last book of my three-book contract with Poolbeg, but there's good news: we've now signed another contract, this time for four books, the last of which will be published in 2006 (the year I turn 40!).

    In other news, I'm delighted to announce (though I announced it ages ago on my own website) that I have five books coming out very shortly in the USA. The publisher is Wildside Press, and they's going to publish four young-adult SF novels (the Pelicos trilogy and a stand-alone novel) and what will be my first published adult SF novel, The Throwback.

    I'm currently planning what I hope will be a HUGE science fiction novel - if all goes well, it will be about a quarter of a million words (two and a half times the length of If the Shoe Fits). Plus, I'm planning a collaborative work with a well-known author, and I'm developing a screenplay based on a novel by a (different) well-known author.

    So things aren't looking too bad at the moment! Of course, I'd still be earning more money working in McDonalds, but it wouldn't be as much fun (nor would it have as much potential).

    Okay then, self-indulgent mode off! More news in another few months.

    That said, I have absolutely no idea if anyone has ever read this page...

    Date: February 12th 2002

    Wow! It's been over a year since the last time I updated this!

    Since then, what's happened...? Well, The Sweetest Feeling (the second Jaye Carroll book) was published last July. I've finished the third, Loving the Stars, which will be published this coming June (2002). I've also completed the second draft (which is the first one my publisher sees) of the fourth Jaye Carroll book.

    Aside from that, I've also had five books published by Cosmos Books in the US - they're a rather small outfit that mainly concentrate on "print on demand", but, hey! I'm not complaining!

    Also last year I wrote the first draft of a commissioned screenplay - though I doubt that anything further is going to happen there. The planned collaborative novel with that other well-known author didn't work out, which is a shame. I'll almost certainly end up writing the book on my own (since the other author didn't actually contribute anything to the book, it's all my own work).

    Still haven't done any "real" work on the big SF book I mentioned last time - though I've done a hell of a lot of research on it. The problem is that I expect the book to take about a year, and I still have three more "Jaye" books to write. I don't want to have to stop in the middle of the SF book for six to eight months to write a "Jaye" book!

    I've also been toying with a few other ideas - nothing definite yet, though.

    In other news: I've just upgraded to a new PC. This one is a 1.8ghz pentium 4, with 256mb RAM, 40gb hard disk, DVD, CDRW, 64mb graphics card, etc. It's pretty cool, except that the operating system is Windows XP, which I've discovered stands for "eXtemely Patronising".

    All righty, then... Coming soon will be my AtlanticPopes page. It's nowhere near as big as Cosmic Meadows, but give it time... Cosmic Meadows