Please do not lick the windows

THE WRITER’S LIFE

It’s been a while since I wrote in my diary, and personal blog entries have been scant over the last 18 months, while my life has been on hold. Someone let the brake pedal off though, and now my personal liberty has been restored. Now I have money in the bank, a regular modest income, and a life worth living.

This blog started off as a personal journal, but lately I’ve not had much I could write, because of so much unresolved in my life. I can blow off the dark glitter and write my open book once more, now that I’ve won my freedom and been compensated for the trauma inflicted by a battle which lasted a year and a half. It’s a story worth telling once more.

My doubters and detractors (mainly in the other life, away from here) are two distinctly separate but overlapping groups in the Venn Diagram of my social world. They might judge me as someone being paid to do as they please, to sit at home and avoid disease. But they weren’t there over the last 18 months. They didn’t see the consultations, the interviews and the final court tribunal, which led to here and which took a toll on my mental health. They didn’t see the separation anxiety from my family and the loneliness of social isolation. 

Now I receive the Personal Independence Payment I’m entitled to and a Severe Disability Allowance, both of which are the social cleansing machine’s recognition of my condition. It’s a combination of mental malfunctions which no-one judging from a detached position would be able to detect, but which become plain to those prepared to engage with me. It’s worth persisting with life, especially if it winds a few people up.

Much has changed over the last year and a half, including my dad’s health. A retirement home resident, he still remembers me and he’s looking forward to seeing me more, now I have the means to travel. My kids grew up too, although I still managed to see them every couple of months. Now I can spend days with them more often too, and we can do as we please without lack of finance placing undue restrictions on us. On this side of the 18-month war, they’re both teenagers, two of my favourite people and my two very good young friends.

I was out with the kids in London on Sunday, something their mum suggested as money wasn’t such a big issue. I was grateful for that and we enjoyed a full day, starting with lunch somewhere other than a Wetherspoons. With the capital offering the world as our culinary oyster, we went to Nando’s instead.

London wasn’t quiet (it never is) but it was far less busy than normal, even for a Sunday. We’re not too neurotic about Coronavirus, so I just told the teenagers not to lick any windows. They wouldn’t have to, because we had some money.

Later in Piccadilly, we paid an impromptu visit (at £25 for adults; £18 each for under-16s; plus £6 for a locker as bags aren’t allowed in) to Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’ now permanent exhibition of plastinated people, providing a guided tour for the still-autonomous around our shared human anatomy.

More than the tarred lungs of a smoker, or the swollen liver of a drinker, I was struck most by the shrunken brain of an Alzheimer’s victim. If I hadn’t had my two teenage friends with me, I might have lost face and broken down at the tragedy of another shrunken mind in a retirement home, which still remembers me. Then again, those young people have never forgotten I’m their dad, and they didn’t give up on me.

It’s good to have my personal liberty back, especially when I can appreciate it because so much has changed. Funny how life works. Now I need to use it more for the benefit of others, which is one for those Venn segments of my life to suck on.

There’s a crustacean on the dog

THE WRITER’S LIFE

“Lobsters have hands (of sorts), which they could use to pick up the phone every now and then.”

It’s been a while since I confided in my personal diary, partly because it’s online for all to see. It’s a paradox when I’m a writer craving readers, but my absence has been for want of words; not writer’s block so much as too much say and not enough time to tell the story with a sore throat. With little else to do tonight, I thought I’d seek momentary expression in my typewriter, the depression of keys…

As a writer, I should be able to tell my own story just as I can a horror fable, or a story of another life. I’ve always been able to combine the two in the past, placing a part of myself in every story I wrote, some of them stories of various futures which I may inhabit only in part.

The past is a story already written, the future what we make, and the present, how we make it. In reality, we’re all connected and living the same life, however we tell the story. None of us is any further than a few steps from where anyone else lived.

Amidst the dust in my keyboard, there are many untold stories: fiction which I’m trying to use as a medium to explain my prevailing confusion; poetry, in all its forms of speaking sentences with single words; and fact, which is almost overwhelming my mind, there’s so much I can’t unburden it on this blog in the time I can make or create in any space.

This place – this blog – was something I started when I was homeless, my means to communicate when segregated and sidelined, by a world which didn’t want to listen when I had so much to say, to myself. A means to an end. It’s still that, and a mixing pot of reality and the surreal, life and the fiction I created.

My ongoing isolation is a personal construct coping mechanism, for a life which only differs from the birth of this blog in the roof over my head, and a keyboard which isn’t chained to a library desk. That was when I was drunk. I still drink, the functioning alcoholic, which – not who – few understand.

I’ve been moping around my inner self for a few months now, as I’ve allowed those vascular passages to become compressed by a situation designed with suppression in mind, like being buried alive; the fascist machine which is currently consuming my country and my friends, by turning each on themselves. While I’ve been quiet here, I’ve not ceased the political debate on Facebook and Twitter, none of which will help me engage with a crumbling mental health and social structure, dismantled by a regime intent on social cleansing.

If I regress to that time when this online version of me was in its infancy, when I slept on a packing crate, I’d wear my heart on my sleeve and tell it as it is with me, the body still breathing in the coffin as the shovels pile on the dirt.

Back then I’d have many pages of notes in journals, and limited library time to edit the contents on a keyboard, most of my thoughts falling between the keys to mix with those of others in the dust of human skin. Now I have more time and only my own flesh, eight digits crawling over the typewriter, like a tick on a dog, or a mite on a communal mattress, competing with other tenants; a lobster trying to pick up the payphone.

Given the choice between heating and eating in social accommodation, most humans will perish in a kind of Buridan’s Ass paradox, where two choices share importance, and so separation becomes impossible. In an world swept beneath an invisible carpet, where visiting a food bank is beyond the means of public transport from a remote depository of vagrants, there are imaginative chefs. These people make shepherd’s pie with Pedigree Chum. Any cat food from a pouch is gourmet, and comes with gravy.

I can take a walk among my past self by just reading this blog, a diary of the last few years. I can write on the walls, like so many others left scars in my synapses and arteries. I can talk to myself.

I can still write. All this, without mentioning what’s weighing on my mind the most, the inner and hidden horrors in a wooden casket or an aluminium tin.

I’ve written indirectly about my dad‘s faltering health, and about losing my brother-in-law. I did that with poetry. I don’t know which formation of words can best convey an inner feeling I have, one in myself which is both mental and physical. It’s a lump in my throat which sometimes makes it hard to swallow.

There’s an itch in my mouth but I can’t tell anyone else, as everyone besides me has their own greater self-consuming issues. Those are the people immediately around me, and they don’t need me being needy when they have their own needs. It’s just a shame we don’t all have more time to talk.

Life changes when it ceases to be linear. Although we live in a connected, borderless world, we’re anything but. People don’t talk any more. Humans are unique in their ability to communicate with the spoken word, yet we don’t. Some can’t. We invented the internet, and my means of speaking to my diary, to myself, and to you, has divided and broken us. But I can still speak, at least about me.

It’s personal matters I’ve been keeping between me and myself. This blog is part of both, and I feel a bit better already, having just let my fingers dance. It’s talking through the hands; a sign language no-one’s obliged to listen to unless they look.

When I can’t speak, the incoherence of my words is not through drink, but a frustration with being disconnected; and that disconnection is a problem we all share. If I lose my voice, at least I can still write. Sometimes I ask myself if anyone will read what I write, when it’s impossible beyond telepathy to hear what I’m saying.

Every human life is a horror. Most of us have the same number of limbs, and we’re all connected by quantum entanglement. We’re all living the same life.

From The Human Library

DEAR DIARY

I’m lost in a day with nothing to do, yet there’s so much nothing that I don’t know what to do with it. Rather than go looking for things to do, those have found me. Things are changing, these are nice problems to have and I’d rather be writing, but that’s the same story. These are daily anxieties, always worse in the middle of the week. I never could get the hang of Wednesdays.

Steampunk robot librarian, by Keith Thompson

If I was keeping a diary like I did when I was on the streets, this would be a volume in the teens. Some of those old journals are still here, in the studio. I salvaged or retained seven (of ten) in the end, and most of what’s in them is on this blog, when I used to use the public access machines in the library to get my words out.

I’ve looked at some challenges a fictional young girl faced, to help with my own. I find other people’s issues easier to deal with than mine, perhaps because detachment helps me to step away and see things as a bystander. My own issues remain the internal ones I have to deal with alone (sometimes while I stand there), but it’s nice to have someone around to talk to, even if it’s not about what’s confusing me in my head. And there’s always more of that when those other people aren’t around, like separation anxiety. But there’ll be more stories.

My fictional side has had to sub-divide like my actual life, as more and more writing seems to land in my lap. A small job I’m very much enjoying at the moment is reading some children’s stories for another writer, after they asked in a writing group if there was anyone they could approach, and I found myself referred. They’re stories with more than one level, very much like my own children’s book which deals with life issues, but more about life’s small matters and manners of etiquette, much of which can be applied to a more grown-up context as well. But in these stories, those small eggshells are about equally important things, like letting the slowest one catch up in a race.

I have enough of my own stories to compile The Unfinished Literary Agency collection, but there are more short works in progress, so the final running order isn’t finalised. There’ll be 17 stories, with possible bonus material, some previously published in various places, and others unique to or adapted for the book. By my own admission, this second collection is better than the first as a stand-alone, but the two also work together as 42 short stories. I should have the book compiled and edited soon, so that I can get a page count (and cover price), then publish in January.

Some of those other stories are only at the planning stage, as the inspirational basis for them is in development itself. The one with the most potential has a bit of the Cyrus Song about it, wherein a young doctor brings a rescued cat to live with a writer, and the author and the cat sit up talking at night using the Babel fish. There’ll be a third anthology yet, so it’s nice to have so much developing to write about.

Silent Gardens is still doing its quiet thing in the background (I’m writing it, quietly) and my fervent appetite for interesting things is being rewarded, as I find out more of the history connected to the people and places around my parents in history. That book is still very much out in March, and I’m far more confident now that my chosen style will gain it a wider audience than the small one it’s written as a gift for.

Before any of that, there are two more fictional tales published over the next couple of weekends, ‘August Underground’s Diner’ (a restaurant review), and ‘Another Nativity (a Play)’, my alternative nativity, adapted for the stage.

There’s much more I could write about, with all that’s in my head, but there’s simply not time. That’s why it’s sometimes nice to have someone around to just talk to, or at least a lot to write about once it makes sense. Most of the time though, the socially anxious writer just writes.

I’m glad I have you, my diary. I think I’ll get the hang of this.

And you’ve been so busy lately (time in the think tank)

THE WRITER’S LIFE

If I could hang my hat on a short story I wrote, it would be Echo Beach. If I can hang my hat on a novel, it’ll be Cyrus Song. If anyone were tempted to read one article on this blog, I’d point them here for now.

There are many more short stories planned, as well as whole new books. But recently, I’ve had to move things around a little. I’m planning what I think is a very appropriate Christmas gift for my parents (and I’m out of the horror market for now). When you’re given the opportunity to look forward five years, certain plans take shape.

In my last blog post, I mentioned a book which I was planning for my dad. Now that I’ve had time to start plotting it out, it’s going to take longer than I originally thought to put it together. But I’ve resolved to make this book before I move onto the next one. Why would I post this here, in a public forum, and now indelible? The reasons are as simple as the ones I have for writing the book: To hang my hat on a blog post, step forward and offer the chance of final judgement for those who still hide in the background, and who will remain there.

I don’t seek forgiveness from any false deity, nor do I repent for my sins in the eyes of an unseeing God. My debts on Earth are repaid to the humans who matter to me, and those who will come after them. And they will attest to this, but not in a kangaroo court.

What went on (that would be me going into meltdown), is all squared with family and real friends: I got drunk. I was addicted (I’m still an addict, and always will be), I was on anti-depressants, which, combined with alcohol, can result in blackouts. But I re-live it, as it is not to be denied. I’ve got a medical record which convinced two tribunal panels that I am mentally ill, but otherwise well in the situation which took so much effort to win, and which now sits around me: A modest, secure home, with a social landlord, meaning long-term security. Now that I have that, I live as a diagnosed functioning alcoholic with chronic depression and anxiety. But I live: Perhaps some people will never be happy with the outcome. Finances are still lacking, so I have to make things. But I digress.

My mum (always affectionately referred to as ‘The Mothership’ here (Hi mum), because she gets me: she was a conspirator in making me), sometimes reads this blog. So am I spoiling a surprise? No. What this post does (if The Mothership reads it) is make a promise to her, in public. She trusts me now, based on the last three years of drawing ever closer as a family. So she knows that I won’t break my promise. And I know that I will be able to refer back to this post in five months or so and be vindicated in the eyes of remaining doubters. To be honest, those people bother me no less than an infection which can be ignored. My point with all of this, is to raise two fingers, with a sharp chop to my inside elbow and a reflex raising of my left hand. It’s my cure for cancer.

Will mum tell dad? Maybe. It doesn’t matter. The book I’m planning is one which they can both look forward to seeing in print. I’ve expanded my research a little, just into the history of the house and village where my mum lived, before she and dad lived together. The rest of dad’s life was spent with mum, in the same places. What occurred to me at first as a way to give a temporarily fading memory something to hook onto, has become more as I’ve plotted it. Now it will be a story of two people and how they left marks together, like names carved in a tree.

Every fine garden which my dad created and tended, will always bear his footprint. Every meal which my mum cooked, back in the family unit day, fed labour, and the imagination of a kid. My parents created the means to tell their story. I am that thing which they made, and this book seems an appropriate way to give something back and say a simple thank you.

I can write, compile, edit and publish a book, all from my desk. There will most likely be only a few copies given away, but the book will have an ISBN as part of the publishing process. My parents and those who know them will have a book. Anyone will be able to buy the book; a slice-of-life story from the Kent countryside (beware of spoonerisms). The bottom line is, I can immortalise my parents: I think that’s a nice gift from a writer, who was given the gift of writing (albeit unwittingly) by his parents. It’s something they can share. They gave me this IQ of 147, and now I know what it’s for.

And they are a proud couple, with every right to be. They are proud of me, and I will always give them every reason to be. They are proud to have such as a strange thing as a writer. I write bedtime stories for my kids now. So I can write a book which tells a brief history of how it all started.

All of which means I’m able to agree with myself that my future publishing schedule should go something like this(ish):

Cyrus Song: Now late August / early September, with 12 days left for final test reader comments.

Quietly, Through the Garden of England: Now the working title, being as it’s the journey of two people who would otherwise have gone unnoticed, but who made such a difference. I’m resolved to December publication.

Reflections of Yesterday (still the working title for an anthology): July 2018. I’m writing the fourth of 17 shorts for this: Longer stories, written in different personal circumstances from The Perpetuity of Memory‘s 25 tales. 42 in total.

Cyrus Song II: December 2018. If my confidence in the original is vindicated, this would be the right time.

Infana Kolonia: July 2019. This is still planned as a sci-fi epic but the current plot takes it to 1200 pages, so it needs some work.

Forgive me No-one: May 2020: My uncensored autobiography, if it’s noteworthy. And that all depends where eight published books gets me if I make 50. I don’t seek forgiveness from any false deity, nor do I repent for my sins in the eyes of an unseeing God. My debts on Earth are repaid to the humans who matter, and those who will come after them. Despite what’s in my head sometimes, with this plan in place, I hope I live to be my parents’ age. Maybe then I’ll be half as wise as them.

In the meantime, The Afternaut is shaping up into something really quite original, but which still sticks to the brief sent into the Unfinished Literary Agency. It should now be out in the first half of August, and I think the idea donor will be pleased: Not just with their idea being turned into a story, but knowing that it’s out there and that anyone could read it, if they had time.

And you’ve been so busy lately
that you haven’t found the time
To open up your mind
And watch the world spinning gently out of time
Feel the sunshine on your face
It’s in a computer now
Gone are the future, way out in space…

(Out of Time: Blur, Ben Hillier, Marrakech, 2002).

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Separation anxiety in nostalgics

DEAR DIARY | THE WRITER’S LIFE

Despite suffering from diagnosed chronic anxiety in general, the separation kind is the specific one which I’m able to deal with most effectively. Obviously my main separation anxiety is with that from my children. But we all agree that things worked out in a funny way for the best, so the month between each meeting is one spent looking forward to the next. The most difficult separation to deal with at the moment, is the one from my own fictional characters. And then there’s the one my dad has, from the past…

Simon Fry, Hannah Jones and the others have been away with test readers now for three weeks. Those readers still have just under two weeks left to do their thing, then Cyrus Song will be out not long after. While the manuscript has been out, I’ve finished all editing, other than any which might be suggested by the beta readers. So now I’m restless.

Part of the angst is anticipating the forthcoming launch of the book. I’d convinced myself it was a good book a long time ago, which is why writers need test readers. I’ve re-read the book after doing my best to ignore it for a month, and it’s still good. I’ve had positive comments and reviews from casual readers, but it all hinges on the two remaining test readers with whom I have contracts. As I’ve said recently and in the past, being an optimist or a pessimist makes no difference to the outcome, but the optimist has a better time leading up to it. And I still miss my characters.

I’ve started plotting the sequel to Cyrus Song, I’m writing new short stories (The Afternaut will be the next one, in a week or two), and I’m working on some freelance projects. I’ve also started a small personal project, which will benefit very few, but for those very few, it ought to be a nice thing. A little recent history will help to place things into context:

My dad (75) has had some neurological issues for some time now, and he was recently diagnosed with excess fluid around the cerebellum of his brain. He’s seen a consultant and had an MRI scan, and the hope is that the fluid can simply be drained to alleviate what is hopefully a temporary condition. An intelligent man, my dad has grown frustrated at times, because his condition affects his short-term memory and his orientation. Just as I envy my own children and the technology they will have available to them later in life, so it is quite tragic that my dad and many others don’t have access to, nor understanding of, current technology.

Dad is interested in many things, but mainly history. A labourer all his working life, he worked at stately homes and public schools, with all of the history and stories which such places hold. Like me, he’s not only interested in things but how those things work and how they came to be, and how we have moved on since. He’s interested in the history of places and things which he has a connection to: It’s a classic case of nostalgia.

Well, my dad’s own son (that’s me) is a writer, with access to technology and research tools. After some searching, I’ve managed to track down a reprinted copy of a book from 1917 about Ightham and the surrounding area. Ightham is the village where myself and my sister grew up, where our parents worked for a wealthy family and we lived on their private estate, in the grounds of Oldbury Place. It was a childhood filled with hopes and dreams, in a 19^th century stable cottage built of Kentish ragstone, set in the middle of a private woods.

Beyond the grounds of the main house is Oldbury Hill and Oldbury Woods, with its caves and remains of an Iron Age hill fort. In Ightham itself, there are many buildings and places of note, the most famous of which is Ightham Mote. The village and surrounding areas have been populated by historical figures, landed gentry, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. It’s a small Kent village, absolutely stuffed with history and fascinating facts.

My dad’s not really one for reading, although my mum is. I’ll give the 1917 book to my mum as a keepsake, but short of her actually reading my dad bedtime stories, he wouldn’t gain much from that arrangement. So before I hand the book over, I’m going to do some additional research of my own, to pull in some points of interest specific to my dad. Then I’m going to write a book: A very small book, in large print and with pictures. It won’t be a commercial release; It’ll be a one-off. I can use the publishing process I’d normally use for a mainstream book and order printed book proofs at relatively low cost. So what my dad will get, will be a personalised historical record of some of the places he’s attached to, in an easy to read and digest format: Oldbury and Ightham, Yotes Court (an 18^th Century house), and Tonbridge School (founded in 1553). In comparison to the places he’s worked, my dad is very young. And I want to take him back there with his book.

Perhaps there’ll come a day when I’m no longer judged by some people for my wrong deeds (which I made amends for and pay the price for daily). Maybe those same people might undertake some research of their own, so that they can see how alcohol and anti-depressants can lead to blackouts. They might one day even ask me themselves, rather than continuing to judge. Frankly, I have nothing to say to such people: It’s all in this blog. And a lot more besides, about the various ways I’ve helped others and continue to do so.

What I’m keen to be judged on, is the new novel. Hopefully, in a couple of weeks my separation anxiety will be over, when my characters return to me. Then me and them can get out there in the wider world, while we write a sequel. And soon my dad will feel younger again.Cyrus Song should now be out around the end of August. A Personal journey through the garden of England is pencilled in for December (with a Staedtler Noris 122).