It’s happenned. My friend Tris has been threatening to do this for a while, and now the baloon has gone up.

He’s put The Alchemist on Youtube.

The Alchemist is the one-hour, no-budget sci-fi fantasy epic that I shot on VHS camcorders in early 1991, when I was the tender age of 16. It’s the first major project that I undertook that I managed to see all the way through to completion- it’s shot through with all my obsessions at the time, it features some wonderfully wooden acting from both myself and Tris, and- like so much of my fiction- it’s basically a tremendously convoluted excuse for a great big chase sequence (which manages to last almost twenty minutes. Take that, Michael Bay!).

It’s rickety and full of problems, but it’s also something I’m still monumentally proud of, and I’m going to be presenting it here, divided up into seven chapters by Tris, hopefully over the next seven days. If you really want to watch the rest of it, you can follow the Youtube links, but this gives me the chance to have my very own cliffhanging serial.

Thrill to the effects. Marvel at the acting. Boggle at my haircut. Shake your head at my gratuitous steal from 2001.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you part one of The Alchemist…