writing – Page 13 – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: writing

  • Selected Short Stories of 2016

    This is a story about a year in review…

    Woz Ere

    Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.

    For anybody following along at home, there are a few highlights buried in the 600,000+ words I’ve written to date. There’s some required reading for anybody making a study of my psyche.

    I decided I wanted to write something more popular and so I drew some graphs explaining mood disorders, like bipolar. It was my most read blog post of 2016.

    Along the same lines, I wrote about the onset of depression and attempts to treat it.

    I wrote a letter to myself.

    I was an inpatient on a secure psychiatric ward, so naturally I came up with a bizarre thought experiment. I even did a drawing of my quantum suicide experiment.

    When I was bored out of my mind at work one day, I wrote a short story called The Factory.

    If you ever wondered why I have a semicolon tattooed behind my ear, this is half the story.

    Everything you never wanted to know about addiction.

    But, is it art? This is a good example of me rambling while strung-out. I’m surprised I could even see the keyboard. I just like the title and it’s a bit of a private joke, sorry.

    There’s a 3-part account of the time I lost my mind and started hearing voices.

    That’ll probably do. There’s a lot to get through there.

    Of course, there’s also the first draft of my novel if you have time to read 53,000 words. I’m going to start editing it tomorrow, so any feedback would be gratefully received.

    I’ve slightly bent the rules, because I have a bit of a warped sense of time, but these are all significant pieces of writing for me, that I associate with the events of 2016.

    Happy New Year’s Eve.

     

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  • You Don’t Have to Write Every Day

    This is a story about discipline & routine…

    Keyboard close-up

    “You can finish that later” she says. Only, there won’t be a later if I don’t have some scaffolding – a framework – on which to hang the shreds of my life.

    Writing isn’t just an idle pastime for me. It’s a project that gives me some control over my own life. It’s something I can work on without some waste-of-space middle manager denying me the opportunity to let my creative juices flow. Who knows when I’ll get another job: it’s not my decision. What have I got to feel proud about? What reason have I got to get out of bed every day?

    When you start taking the odd day off here and there, why not the odd week or two? Why not have a month off, or a year? It’s a slippery slope. I know not many people are reading, but knowing that I write every day does give a reason to keep coming back.

    When I was writing my novel, I was touched when friends would ask where my next chapter was. It was also really hard work to catch up on my target word count when I got behind. I hate feeling rushed, too.

    Of course, you can’t really get behind on a blog, but my target is to write every day, not to attain a certain word count by a certain deadline. However, both disciplines are important, if you’re taking a writing project seriously, which I am.

    Why am I serious about a non-commercial venture that makes me so vulnerable on the public Internet? Why am I so serious about sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings every single day, without fail? Well, it’s because it’s the only lifeline I feel secure about. People can let you down. Stress can get the better of you. Circumstances can conspire to make your life an unliveable Hell. However, I need nothing more than a screen, an Internet connection and a keyboard, in order to ground myself; to feel content that my story’s still being told, by the most reliable source: me.

    Obviously, I’m an unreliable source. I can go off the rails; relapse. But, when that happens I’m acutely aware that anybody who’s been reading occasionally, will notice that I’ve gone quiet: I’m not keeping to my routine. It’s an early warning system and it’s also a role; a duty. I feel a little duty-bound to write every day, in the same way you feel like you have to get up and go to work, even though you don’t want to.

    You could skip work – bunk off – but you won’t. There’s something that keeps you going and going, in whatever you do. There are people who are counting on you. What will your boss say? What will your colleagues think?

    I broke the spell and I have the kind of job where I can take long chunks of time off anyway. Contracting doesn’t mandate that I spend 52 weeks a year flying a desk. If my contract has ended, who’s gonna tell me that I need to keep working? The boss? I’m my own boss. The downside of being in charge, is that I’m free on my own recognisance. It’s up to me to structure my life: find work and try not to relapse.

    I can’t leave my writing until “later” or “tomorrow” because it’s not some job where I’ll get paid my salary anyway. In the world of wage slavery, you know your job will still be there, waiting for you. Until you run your own business, you don’t really understand what an opportunity cost is. Everything can wait until tomorrow, in the world of never-ending made up jobs and make-work.

    I’m not saying what I do is important per se, but it’s important to me. To prioritise writing a novel ahead of looking for a job sounds like madness, but I’ve worked full time for the best part of 20 years, and I was in full-time education for 13 years before that. There will always be more work, or something else to study, but there’s only a finite amount of time and opportunity to create something new.

    While the bulk of humanity is engaged in the rote-learning of facts, regurgitation of other people’s words and slavishly following rules laid down for them, there’s a tiny minority who look at that entire world as absurd and ludicrous. The herd isn’t going anywhere and it won’t be hard to track down when I need it.

    And so, for now, to keep my sanity and preserve my progress, I have to zig when everybody else zags. I have no control over when I’ll get hired and what the contract will be, so to give myself some kind of stability and routine, I write.

    I write every day.

     

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  • Anticlimax

    This is a story about unhappy endings…

    The end

    When things come to an end, it’s hard to re-adjust. Our lives have almost perfect continuity: we segue from school to university to job to job to job… and then we die.

    My life’s been a bit different.

    The conventional wisdom is that any gaps on your CV show that you’re lacking moral fibre. You’re flawed. You’re a failure. You’re malingering. You’re going to be hauled in front of the authorities and be asked to give a good explanation for why you didn’t shackle yourself to your desk, in some dead-end career that barely pays the bills.

    Is it fear or is it poverty that keeps people working full-time, when really it would be a lot better if we could stop and smell the roses? Why is nearly every job a 5-day a week full time one, with at least 7 hours a day doing some dull pointless shit, keeping a chair warm? Surely we could get all the actual work done in 4 hours and then take the rest of the week off?

    I decided to take the whole of November off so that I could write my first novel.

    Now, I’m hunting for a new role in December. It’s hard to find work in December: everybody is in holiday mode. No work is getting done. People are thinking about seeing their families, drinking too much and eating luxurious festive food.

    My last contract finished prematurely when the commercial terms of the project failed to be agreed between consultancy and client. Everybody got the boot. I needed that money to get myself back on a good financial footing. My flatmate had to be kicked out because he was thousands of pounds in debt to me and showing no intention of getting a job.

    Then I finished my novel.

    I loved inhabiting that fictional world. I loved that people were reading and would ask me where the next chapter was, if I didn’t publish one every day. I loved doing something creative. I loved having a goal; a project. I was master of my own destiny, and I achieved what I set out to do. I proved that I can set my mind to a task and be disciplined enough to keep working until it was done.

    Now, I have absolutely no control of my destiny.

    I fire my CV off into the ether, and I have no idea whether the right people are getting to look at it. Agents might filter it. HR people might filter it. Project managers might filter it. Until my CV gets in front of somebody technical, they have no idea what they’re looking at. It’s literally an exercise in writing the right things to get through the dumbasses that stand in between you and the person who’s qualified to make a decision.

    I’m not happy when I don’t have a project; a mission; a goal; a target.

    I’m a completer-finisher and it will be painful for me to have to down tools and spend the Xmas break impotently waiting for the working world to start up again in the New Year. I want ink dried on a contract. I want to work. I guess it’s my fault for spending November writing a novel though, rather than speaking to agents and doing interviews.

    My life goes like this: morning speaking to a procession of agents who phone me up asking if they can put my CV forward to their clients. Afternoon speaking to agents about roles that I’ve already been put forward for… trying to get some feedback and see if the roles are still actively hiring. Evening spent sending my CV out for every contract that looks any good. I also have phone and face-to-face interviews. I can’t keep track of everything. It’s disruptive, having to wait by the phone and speak to agents and interviewers. I’m glad I’m not trying to write my novel while I’m doing this. I hate being interrupted when creativity is in full flow.

    The other thing I miss though, is the time and the space set aside for writing. Friends were excited that I was writing a novel and they would ask “do you need to write your chapter today?”

    People were helpful, making sure I had space to be a novelist, even if it was just for a month. It was fun, to call myself a writer.

    Sometimes surprising things can pay the bills. If I can edit my novel in January, I might be able to circulate it with some literary agents and see if it has any commercial potential. I can’t see why my debut novel would be up to the required standard of a publisher, but it’s worth a punt. I can always Kindle it as a plan B. It’s just nice knowing that I did that: knowing that I have another achievement to be proud of. How many people can say they’ve written a novel in their lifetime? It’s way cooler than saying that I’ve written computer games or business critical software. It’s way cooler than saying I’m blogging. Everybody blogs, don’t they?

    My identity is bound up in whatever I’m doing. I had purpose when I was a writer. I had purpose when I was a scrum master, or a developer or whatever. Now, I’m nothing. Just another unemployed loser. Just another guy stuck at home on the sofa, circulating his CV hopelessly.

    Overcome with depression and frustration, I snipe at the whole bullshit system and flirt with disaster by linking my professional identity and my nom de guerre. I don’t like pseudonyms and I don’t like living a double-life. I’m not a keyboard warrior. I’m not a troll. I feel happier – after some initial trepidation – having as much of a unified identity as possible. Even an old colleague at HSBC – who I haven’t seen for 12 years – somehow knew that I was briefly an electrician. What the actual fuck? I knew gossip travels faster than light, but that’s ridiculous.

    Is it that we are all applauding our colleagues who are brave enough to say “fuck the system” and go off and chase crazy dreams? We want to live a more exciting life – vicariously – through the people who quit the rat race. I’m that nutter who did iPhone apps, dot com tech startups, retrained as an electrician, was a whistleblower, became a novelist. People in offices with good 9 to 5 jobs just don’t do anything that exciting or cool.

    But, the reality is a lot more grim.

    It’s tough at the top. Being your own boss sucks. Dealing directly with customers sucks. Doing the right thing sucks. Being the odd one out sucks.

    Alright, it doesn’t suck, but the stress and the loneliness outweigh the financial rewards. Life is a constant battle when you’re trying to do something different. Everybody’s got 99 reasons why you’re going to fail, why you should give up and why what you’re doing is wrong and shit and useless and pointless. People goad you into trying, but then they secretly think “I’m glad I didn’t try that myself” when things go wrong. I am glad I tried though. I am glad I’ve got those experiences, even if I’m left a little fucked up by it all.

    So now, I’ve got this collection of awesome experiences. I’ve proven to myself that I can achieve awesome things. Problem is, it doesn’t fit the mould. I haven’t approached things from the usual angles. I’ve turned my hand to things that I thought I could do, and I did them. I succeeded, but nobody gives a shit. Nobody’s ever going to ask me in an interview “how many profitable businesses have you founded?” or “how many books and computer games have you written?”.

    What now? What next?

    When you do something different in society, you get a taste of freedom. You realise that things can be done. You realise you are capable. But… it will ruin you forever. The system doesn’t want you back, because you’re an independent thinker and you trust your own abilities. You don’t need to prove yourself to anybody. You answer back. You’re a dangerous inspiration to the drones in the hive: what if other people start questioning whether the 9 to 5 bullshit they do for five days a week is how they want to spend the best years of their life.

    What’s my plan? Milk the system for some more easy money and then go write more books. Buy a yacht and sail away. So crazy. So romantic. So unrealistic. But, what’s the alternative?

    Wage slavery and waiting for a retirement you’ll never get to enjoy because you’ll probably drop dead from stress before you get to spend that stockpiled lucre.

     

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  • Scatterbrain

    This is a story about rambling…

    Crib goch

    I’m self-censoring. I’ve written entirely without a filter for well over a year, but now I’m holding back. I’m watching my words. As a wise friend advised me, I’m writing as if my girlfriend’s mother was reading this… almost. I’m certainly writing with a certain amount of self-consciousness that I haven’t had for the best part of a year.

    When I wrote my book, it was easy. I was in the land of fiction, so I could therefore always say “I made that up” if something didn’t go down too well. However, my blog has always been a mad blend of ‘stream of consciousness’ stuff, unflinchingly honest biographical accounts of mental illness, homelessness, addiction, sex, masturbation and all the other gory details that we repress as deeply as we can possibly can. I’m struggling to switch modes.

    I’m starting to build up a list of things that I want to write about again, but I’m a bit bored of it to be honest. I’ve wound myself up and stressed myself out. I’ve wailed at the moon and yelled at the top of my lungs… and then the world fractured anyway. The bleeding-heart liberals — who care about social justice, equality, fairness and preventing the regression of the human species into some kind of disgusting bestial form — have been beaten by the populists, the racists, the bigots, the xenophobes, the sexists, the chauvinists. Basically, the hand-wringing appeals to human decency have reached a cul-de-sac. I’m bored of being reasonable, rational, measured, fair and even-handed.

    The other thing that’s fun to write about is the stuff that challenges assumptions and prejudice. I like being polite, well-mannered and well spoken enough to lull people into a false sense of security. “It’s OK, he’s one of us” they say, and then I unleash the punchline: “Ha! Ha! I’m actually a mentally ill homeless bum benefits-scrounger junkie addict unemployed loser”. To be honest, it’s the kind of joke you can only do once, and then it’s not funny anymore.

    I know what I’ve written to date has been horrifically repetitive. I’ve laboured some of the same points over and over again. I had open wounds. I was hurting. My self esteem, confidence, self-worth: they were all destroyed. I was caught up with ethical conflicts and I wanted to burn bridges that led back to anywhere I shouldn’t go. I was bitter and angry. I found a platform to vocalise my side of the story, and put some balance back into the world. I was like a little yapping dog, barking “don’t tread on me” as people who sat in idle comfort and security ganged up on me when I was sick and vulnerable. Writing was my megaphone, to shout down a mob of bullies.

    I’ve ended up with a few things worth preserving, by good luck or good judgement. Most of the former rather than the latter, I think. I don’t want to screw up a relationship that’s going really well. I’ve started to reconnect with friends and have some stability. I’ve got a lovely apartment and I’ve managed to offload a third scrounger twat who thought they were going to live on my dime, not paying rent and bills. I’m well positioned to be able to get another couple of contracts that should bring me the financial security that I deserve.

    Deserve??!? So entitled!

    Where do you want to draw the line? Am I entitled to oxygen, water, food? What about shelter, warmth? If you think that kids should be grateful to their parents for having sex, you’re a special kind of stupid, aren’t you?

    Oh God, I’ve really taken this “rambling” thing to heart, haven’t I?

    I think I understand why people write fiction now. Having a fictional outlet allowed me to deal with a load of shit that was bothering me, while also demanding that I fit it to a narrative. I was able to write with structure and express concepts that I’d written about at length, but it was much more cohesive and coherent than trying to write these [supposedly] single-topic blog posts that often go off-piste.

    Anyway, I don’t know why I’m yapping on. My writing serves me well as a kind of heartbeat to let my friends know I’m still alive and kicking, but I need to think about why else I’m writing. Am I a social justice crusader? Am I lifting the lid on mental health and addiction treatment? Am I campaigning for housing reform? Am I a fiction writer?

    I guess if I get another job I’ll be writing because I’m bored as fuck.

     

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  • Truth is Stranger than Fiction

    This is a story about fantasy worlds…

    Sorting office collection card

    It should come as no surprise that a geek like me played Dungeons & Dragons a couple of times when I was a kid. Actually, I played the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game far more. I think I even got to be ‘dungeon master’ one time, setting an adventure in the Marvel world.

    Really, I’ve had little desire to retreat into the fantasy world. When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time day-dreaming, but that was as much borne of frustration with age-related restrictions. In the UK you can’t drive a car until you’re 17 years old. You can’t get a credit card and it’s generally assumed that you’re going to be stuck in school until you’re 18. You can’t get a decent job that pays decent money until you’re 21+ and even then you’re probably going to be too poor to afford any of the things that you really want. However, I took a few short-cuts and I was able to start doing some cool stuff soon after leaving college.

    Writing a work of fiction – a novel – was not something that came from plot lines and characters I’d been imagining for a long time. I hadn’t been inhabiting some inner fantasy world; waiting for the right time to put it down on paper.

    What seems clear to me is that so many of us are keen to escape from day-to-day reality. You’ve realised you’re never going to be a professional footballer or pop singer, so now what’s the best you can hope for? That you don’t die penniless and in a great deal of pain and discomfort? Yeah, the problem is that you’re definitely going to get sick and old, and you’re definitely not going to be be rich & famous.

    To ditch your responsibilities and run away is a widely held fantasy. You’ve got your career, your reputation, your spotless curriculum vitæ, your mortgage and loans, your life insurance, your pension. You’ve got to think about your credit rating and what ‘box’ you fit in. If you quit the rat race, do you even exist?

    I often wonder why people stay in lame underpaid boring jobs, doing shit that’s doing nothing to benefit anybody – at best – and at worst is downright destructive. Everyone must be a damnsight more locked into the system than we dare to talk about. The number of households who would go into mortgage or rent arrears if they missed just one or two paycheques is astounding. We don’t dare to dream because we can’t afford to.

    I’m a sensation seeker, so I must admit that I’m totally comfortable flirting with disaster. There’s no such thing as “rock bottom” in my world. Even in some diabolically awful situations, I’ve been thinking “I really need to tell people what this is like”. Everything that I’ve experienced is an asset not a curse. Writing about some things that I’ve been through has been the payoff for the short-term pain and discomfort I felt.

    It’s alarming to see a world that revels in fantasy. It suggests that we are so downtrodden that we no longer have realistic aspirations. People have given up on the idea of wealth and status, and instead they immerse themselves in the lives of cartoonish fantasy figures: celebrities who live lives of unimaginable riches and fame.

    There used to be a time when the fantasy was to get married, buy a house, have kids, a job for life, a trade or a profession. Now we fantasise about being people we’re not; people we could never be. In a pyramid scheme, there’s not enough room at the top for everybody. We all lose out in a pyramid scheme world. I really don’t give a fuck about the land of opportunity because the opportunity doesn’t really exist. On the balance of probability, you’re just one of the luckless fools who’s helping the rich get richer. Every time the pyramid gets a little taller, you get pushed a little lower, down into the dirt.

    A truly remarkable discovery for me was that most people are doing a lot worse than you think. Even though we put a brave face on everything, the free market has evolved to separate fools from their cash very efficiently. You might earn double or quadruple what the average person does, but you shop in a more expensive supermarket, buy more luxurious things and have more expensive tastes. You have pigeon-holed yourself into the income bracket that means that you have more-or-less the same amount of disposable income as somebody in a completely different socio-economic group.

    The fun part of my ‘research’ during the past years, has been to take that journey: from the homeless people in the park, living off London’s unsold sandwiches, to the fakers living a life of pseudo-glamour and trying to present an image of wealth and success. Scratch beneath the surface and you see that the people at the bottom have given up, while those in the middle are hopelessly trying to claw their way to the top, totally unable to see that they’re being pushed ever downwards.

    One final thing: when you do give up, it’s just as fun and liberating as you’d think it would be.

     

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  • Alter Ego

    This is a story about insecurity…

    Self portrait

    Where does your sense of self worth come from? Are you good at your job? Are you a good parent? Do you do good deeds? Do you consider yourself virtuous, or at least not a bad person? Does the fact that you’re loved by friends and family somehow make you see yourself as valuable?

    What happens when you lose faith in yourself?

    I lied as a kid. I lied about having a Game Boy. It was a strange thing to lie about, but I lied. I lied about having Sky TV and having videotaped a music video off MTV. How curious.

    I didn’t lie about being a doctor, causing deaths as I bungled patients’ healthcare. I didn’t lie about being a pilot, killing every passenger and crew member on board my plane. I didn’t lie about being a financial whizz, building an elaborate ponzi scheme and lining my own pockets.

    Why would I lie about such mundane stuff?

    I stopped lying. I was happy with who I was. I was good at my job. I was good at some sports. I had girlfriends. I was getting paid what I was ‘worth’ and people valued my opinion… they sought it out. I was just me.

    Then, shit happened.

    Bizarrely – to me at least – I managed to pick up where I left off. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but the things that I was good at – before shit happened – I was still good at. The job that I’d been doing capably before shit happened… it turned out I could still do it.

    Then, even more shit happened.

    Digging myself out of that hole looked like such a long shot that I didn’t even think it was possible to stay alive, to preserve hope, to go on. I didn’t lie to dodge another bullet. I was a little economical with the truth, but I didn’t lie. When my situation started improving, it was impossible to reconcile with where I’d come from. I went insane with the ridiculousness of the situation.

    Then, yet more absolutely terrible shit happened.

    This was starting to become routine. There was a magic formula that seemed to work time and again. This time I played to my strengths, kept my mouth shut when needed, kissed the right asses. Depressingly, it worked. Is that who I am now? The guy who’s just stuck in a never-ending cycle of near-disaster and recovery? Bust and boom. Over and over and over again, ad nauseam.

    Stop the world. I want to get off.

    Who am I? I had a plan, coming back to London, and it’s worked… in a way. As a friend said though, I can never quite get my head above water. I can get my nose just high enough to inhale enough oxygen to stay alive, but I’ll never get my chin out of the depths beneath, let alone start to rise even higher.

    I know who I was at times. There are identities that I can successfully emulate from the past. There are identities that don’t seem to be me anymore. Perhaps I was never the person I thought I was at times. Perhaps I believed my own bullshit at certain times.

    I know I should just let go of the past, forget about former achievements, status, comforts. Does it seem easy to just let your entire identity go and re-invent yourself… from nothing? Worse than nothing, in fact. If you let go of your advantages, nobody’s going to let you off your disadvantages. My advantages are only just cancelling out my disadvantages, so I’d be screwed if I had to start over from ‘nothing’. There’s no such thing as nothing. Everybody wants a piece of me. So long as I have an address, somebody will be trying to track me down and suck the life right out of me.

    Run to stand still.

    It’s amazing how hard you gotta work just to break even. Just to go nowhere. Fuck it’s exhausting because it’s not going anywhere. Hard work doesn’t pay. Period.

    Yes, I can look back on this or that achievement in the past. Yes, I can extrapolate from my potential. But neither thing is meaningful. Look around. Do you see anyone getting ahead?

    I wrote a book. A whole novel. I don’t even think it’s terrible. Does that make me a writer, a novelist? In theory, yes, but if I was to commit to it, it would also make me a tramp, a vagrant, a bum, a loser. Is that what I am anyway? Is my true destiny catching me up?

    No. Art is for the rich and spoiled.

     

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  • I’m Quitting Facebook

    This is a story about social media suicide…

    Sharp disposal

    Too long; didn’t read? Those 140-character status updates exhaustively summarise my entire state of mind at any given moment in time. Join them up and you capture an entire person. Is their heart beating? No need to worry… they’re still tweeting.

    OK, good, we got the summary text bit out of the way.

    For those of you still following along at home, I have some news: my little social media & blogging holiday seems to have put me back in contact with a few friends. I’m about to have a record-setting month of meeting up with people and going out for social engagements in real life.

    Social media – by which I mean everything including group text messages – is enormously valuable in my life so I’m never actually going to quit Facebook. Anyway, this serves as a talking point tomorrow when people ask “didn’t you say you were going to quit Facebook?”

    As we know, clickbait is a real problem, so people tend to just read the title of anything on Facebook and assume they know the rest. When you assume, you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”.

    “So close but yet so far”

    We’re all hyperconnected. I wake up and start having a conversation with a friend in New Zealand, who’s about to go to bed. After lunch I start chatting to a friend in San Francisco, who’s just woken up. Round and round and round we go; follow the sun. The sun never sets in the world of technology. Is this a good thing? It’s certainly a bit weird, having a load of people who I’m in regular contact with, but I also spend the vast majority of my time physically alone in just two rooms: my bedroom and my lounge.

    Somehow, by reducing the amount of energy I put into social media outpourings, it’s created a bit of space for other people to come into my life. Either that or it’s coming up to Christmas and people are simply feeling a bit more social.

    Anyway, what about social media suicide?

    I’ve been blogging extremely candidly for 15+ months. I’ve given a fairly unflinching account of all kinds of personal matters and it wouldn’t make for great reading for any prospective employers or ageing family members of a sensitive disposition. Basically, it’s the kind of stuff that people just don’t talk about. Do I regret it? Not really. Brain dumping has been quite successful, I think, in terms of getting rid of a load of baggage.

    What next? I’m really struggling to re-adjust having achieved my three major milestones:

    • Blog every day for over a year
    • Write a novel
    • Write half a million words

    As you can tell, my thoughts are scattered; disjointed. I’m struggling to get back into blogging, having spent a whole month writing fiction every day. Context switching is hard. Blogging got me through an incredibly boring contract, as well as providing structure and routine throughout a very unstable period of my life. Perhaps it’s good to pick up the blogging again, but I’m squeezing it into a life which is hopefully going to be more balanced, rather than having it as such a major component.

    It’s all so terribly meta but that’s part of finding my voice again, I think. Hopefully it will be a different voice: less bitter and stuck in the past. However, I’ve written that before and then found that there were things I was still really pissed off about that bubbled up and needed to be written about.

    Finally, I’m super pleased that all my creative output is not trapped within the walled garden of Facebook or Twitter. Google is bringing me some delightful characters who have found my website. Apparently the search term “cat drug make me horny” will bring you here, so at least there’s that.

     

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  • Away From Keyboard (AFK)

    This is a story about real life, far from the Internet…

    Dusty Keyboard

    Are you familiar with the acronym “IRL”? By some definitions, it stands for: In Real Life. Many people believe IRL is a synonym for any human interaction that occurs face-to-face. Did you also notice that I always capitalise the word Internet? Ever wonder why I do that?

    If I speak to somebody on the phone, is that real life? If I send them a handwritten letter, is that real life?

    The distinction between ‘real’ life, and the life we live with technology mediating our interactions with each other, has become rather pointless. I’m no great fan of video chat, but it’s certainly an advancement on the telephone. All telephone calls are routed through digital exchanges, and the same infrastructure that carries your voice also carries the data of your Internet connection. There’s nothing much more real about having a face to face conversation, shouting through a wall at your neighbour, making a Skype call (who does that anymore anyway?) or phoning somebody on their mobile.

    The Internet is a real place, hence the noun. People can meet there, trade goods, gossip. “But you can’t physically interact” I hear you wail. “What about touch, smell, taste?” Yeah yeah yeah. Are you saying that the phone-calls you used to make on that old rotary-dial telephone weren’t real life?

    This is the beginning of a piece I’ve been wanting to write for ages. I made a note on my smartphone of the title, but I’d already been mulling the topic since a friend – who I’ve seen in real life only twice since childhood – made the very good point about the Internet being a real place. I was thinking about writing this well before a different friend – who I hadn’t seen in real life for nearly 20 years – posted an article on this topic on Facebook. The timing is too perfect.

    I’ve lived ‘online’ since I saved up my money from my job washing up in a hotel kitchen in order to buy a modem. When I bought my modem, the Internet wasn’t yet a big thing. Instead, I used to get magazines that had loads of phone numbers in them of dial-up bulletin boards. Using technology that predated the Internet in the guise we know it today, I used to be text-chatting online, electronically mailing people and playing online computer games, via bulletin board systems (BBSs).

    Then, I took to Internet newsgroups which were a popular fore-runner to the forums and social media pages we have today. I even met a rock climbing partner on a newsgroup. If you don’t think that putting your life in the hands of a random stranger off the Internet is real life then I don’t know what is.

    I spent thousands of hours reading and contributing to three kitesurfing forums. People who I first met online had countless evenings spent drinking, weekends away and holidays to exotic locations together. All of which occurred away from keyboard but it was very much real life. It was real when we were all talking to each other on the Internet all week long, during our dull office hours, waiting for the next time we could go to the ocean together.

    This is where things get super blurry. I have so many friends I’ve made through social media (newsgroups, forums) and a lot of old friends I’m able to still remain in some kind of contact with because we are connected via Facebook. Would I have been able to pick up an old friendship with school/college friends who I hadn’t seen for circa 20 years, if there hadn’t been some real and somehow tangible tie together, even if it was mediated by binary ones and zeros in the ether of the ‘cloud’?

    The dust has been gathering on my keyboard since I completed the first draft of my novel. I haven’t been blogging regularly for a while. I miss writing and I miss having an open dialogue with everybody and anybody on the Internet. The Internet has brought me friends and fortune. I’ve never regretted the investment of time I’ve made in channelling my creative energies into a public space that creates nothing tangible per se. What is software? What does it mean to publish a blog or a book online? If you can’t hold it, sniff it, lick it… if it doesn’t gather dust, does it really exist?

    There was one slightly embarrassing moment in my recent adventures Away From Keyboard.

    I was out for dinner with another friend. You could say I know him in real life because the first time I met him was face to face… or you could say I know him through the Internet, because he was introduced to me by somebody I know from an Internet discussion forum. Either way, it’s immaterial to the embarrassing story.

    Over dinner, my friend expressed his incredulity at the fact that the value of all the coal bought and sold is a tiny fraction of the total value of all the financial contracts (securities) that are created off the back of the physical commodity. So many more coal futures and options contracts are bought and sold by speculators, hoping to profit from a movement in the price of the commodity, versus anybody who actually wants the real coal. The dirty black lumps of carbon are almost unimportant… the ‘value’ in the financial markets dwarfs the heavy industry that mines coal out of the ground and ships it to power stations and for people to heat their homes.

    The embarrassing thing was that I went to speak and then I realised that I had nothing to add. I was left speechless. I’ve written at length on my blog about the staggering ‘value’ of the derivatives contracts versus the real economy. Is it me who’s splitting hairs, expecting us to care about food and housing and water and healthcare and transport? Is it me who’s the luddite, saying that the global financial markets are utter horse shit because it’s all just digital money in the Fintech ‘cloud’?

    Maybe the real embarrassment is that I’d had that conversation before, with a hedge fund manager and a director of an investment bank. We were on our way home from the airport, having been kitesurfing in real life with 20 people from an Internet discussion forum. I was just about to start work for JPMorgan, dealing with Credit Default Swaps. We thought that the financial markets were overleveraged and that there was going to be a crash. That was 2005.

    Did I put my money where my mouth was? Yes. I bought dollars at nearly $2 for every £1 I paid, and bought gold at $550/oz. One ounce of gold cost £225 back then. One ounce of gold is worth £920 today.

    The point is not to be a doom-monger or gloat in a “told you so” kind of way, but to try and express how tired I am by everything. Being Cassandra is shit. Churning out my thoughts into the ether has allowed me to say everything that needed to be said, but it left me kind of breathlessly shocked to encounter anybody who’d arrived at the same rational and reasonable analysis of a ridiculous situation. That’s one thing you don’t get when you’re lecturing the Internet: any kind of feedback that anybody agrees with you.

    So, what’s my closing conclusion? I’m back blogging, because I love writing, but aside from setting out my position clearly for posterity, some time away from keyboard is pretty handy to remind oneself that there are a lot of people out there in the real world who share my values and concerns.

     

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  • #NaNoWriMo2016 – Day One

    Background Info

    National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place every November, when aspiring authors attempt to write a 50,000+ word novel within 30 days. This means averaging 1,667 words per day.

    My 360 odd blog posts to date have averaged 1,246 words per day, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me to write a bit more each day and achieve the goal. Plus, I have the support & encouragement of all the other authors who are taking part in this challenge.

    Since leaving school, I have done very little creative writing, so a whole novel may be rather more difficult than I anticipate.

    Hijacking my blog for the next 30 days seems unusual, but the general advice to authors is “write about what you know” so you may find that my novel is a natural extension of my blog, in actual fact.

    Anyhoo, the working title of my novel is “Poste Restante” and without further ado, I shall begin .

     

    Poste Restante

    Contents

    Chapter 1: The Caravan

    Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

    Chapter 3: The Forest

    Chapter 4: Prosaic

    Chapter 5: The Van

    Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

    Chapter 7: The Journey

    Chapter 8: Infamy

    Chapter 9: The Villages

    Chapter 10: Waiting Room

    Chapter 11: The Shadow People

    Chapter 12: Enough Rope

    Chapter 13: The Post Offices

    Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

    Chapter 15: The Chase

    Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

    Chapter 17: The Holiday

    Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

    Chapter 19: The Hospitals

    Chapter 20: Segmentation

    Chapter 21: The Cell

    Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

    Chapter 23: The Box

    Chapter 24: Jailbird

    Chapter 25: The Scales

    Chapter 26: Descent

    Chapter 27: The Syringe

    Chapter 28: Anonymity

    Chapter 29: The Imposter

    Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

     

    1. The Caravan

    Neil’s consciousness sparked back into existence. This was not like waking up, as if he had been dreaming. This was not like coming round after an operation in hospital, under general anaesthetic. It was much more akin to a sudden re-ignition of his brain activity, after head trauma, perhaps after being knocked out cold by a punch or a blow to the head with some other blunt object.

    At first, Neil’s mind was confused; everything was jumbled up. He could make no sense of what was going on. His thinking was cloudy; cognition impaired. Then, the blurry mess and unfamiliar shapes that had previously filled his field of vision now came into sharper focus. He started to see things in his surroundings that he could identify, even though he still didn’t know where he was or why he was there.

    Neil lay on a bed at one end of a caravan. The bed filled the width of the caravan and extended all the way to the bedroom door, which was wide open. At the opposite end of the caravan was a dining table, surrounded by a U-shaped bench of seating, with windows behind. The bench was upholstered with a pink floral pattern. The table had a wood veneer, although it was clearly made of chipboard, exposed around the edge. A small kitchenette was on one side and a toilet and shower cubicle on the other.

    The interior of the caravan was not in good condition. Mildew stained everything. The ceiling had dark black patterns where the permanent dampness had allowed everything that was water permeable to fester in the moist atmosphere. The carpet, which seemed to have been some sort of dark maroon colour originally, was soggy and stained. Mud was trodden into the pile of the carpet around the entrance to the caravan. The carpet had started to rot and there were patches of blue furry mould growing in places. A lightly coloured textured wallpaper peeled away from the walls in places, revealing a layer of polystyrene insulation, as well as the glue behind, which had now turned an orangey-brown colour as it had aged and dried.

    The bedroom windows were covered by navy blue curtains. These had been neatly stapled to the wall below and at the sides, so that little light could penetrate through each of the three windows at the bedroom end of the caravan. Where the curtains hung on the curtain rail, a small amount of light crept in and it was clear that it was daytime.

    The other windows had been covered with self-adhesive opaque plastic, which allowed light into the caravan, but you could neither see in nor out. The plastic had been applied with little attention to detail: there were air bubbles and the edge had been cut rather raggedly, exposing some of the clear glass near the white plastic window frames. Paper masking tape had been applied around the edges of the windows, to cover the gaps between the plastic and the frame. The large window at the opposite end of the caravan from Neil had newspaper stapled above the curtain-less windows, draped down so that it covered two thirds of the window. On the left hand side, a bedsheet had been stapled above and at the side of the window. The staples were haphazardly placed and the sheet had folds and creases in it, hanging hopelessly from the wall, and no use as any kind of curtain. The staple-gun lay on the dining room table, abandoned.

    In places, there had been small craters scraped crudely in the polystyrene insulation of the walls, so that the thin aluminium exterior skin of the caravan was exposed. In each of these craters in the wall, a hole had been punched through the aluminium. Beams of sunlight shone into the dingy interior of the caravan through the holes. These beams illuminated swirling mists of moisture within the caravan, almost like the silken threads of a spider’s web, heavy with morning dew and shining in the sun.

    Clothes were scattered throughout the caravan. Some were torn, others stretched or unusually knotted; all seemed ruined in some way. There was the debris of habitation: discarded food wrappers, dirty plates and cutlery on the floor. There were many other objects made of bits of broken plastic, rubber and string that seemed to be the twisted, mangled and knotted remains of other things that had been dismantled, torn, bent and otherwise manhandled to the point that they were no longer clearly identifiable as anything in particular. Things were strewn all over the floor, with no discernable pattern.

    There were many containers distributed around the caravan: plastic bottles were filled with fluid in various hues of yellow and orange. Then there were mugs, saucepans, bowls and glasses that were filled with orangey-brown liquid. A glass on a shelf near Neil’s bed had a layer of red at the bottom, then an opaque layer that was milky pale yellow and the topmost liquid – which filled the majority of the glass – was clear and brownish in colour.

    After his sight, the second of Neil’s senses that returned was his sense of smell. His nostrils were assaulted by a strongly pungent but not putrid smell. The smell was extremely unpleasant, but not so much so that it was causing Neil any feeling of nausea. The smell had a kind of nasty allure, like a strong ripe cheese. There was the smell of mould, damp and decay of soft furnishings, mingled with the smell of bodily odour, and distinctly a smell of urine. Sweat intermingled with the general dampness in the caravan and ran down the walls in droplets. The windows were completely misted up with condensed moisture. The cheap sponge of the upholstery and bed had soaked up a lot of this foulness. Clothing and bedding had also absorbed some of the humidity from the air.

    Neil’s memory of how he found himself in this position now slowly returned to him. Things made little sense to him. They had found him; they had surrounded him; they had been readying themselves to storm his little stronghold and they would tear him from the private surroundings which he had attempted to create for himself. They had antagonised him; they had spent an incredible amount of time making noises and assembling themselves for the onslaught; the invasion of Neil’s privacy, now that they had found him. They had hidden in the shadows and attempted to remail unseen, but Neil had seen them: fleeting glimpses, as he looked out of the peepholes. Counter-espionage: they were spying on him, so he would spy back at them.

    Neil had no idea what their motivation was. Why was he so relentlessly pursued? Why were they so voyeuristic, wanting to intrude on his private world? Why were they so childishly antagonising? Why did they tirelessly toy with him, so close, but waiting and waiting before they made their move? He was angry with them. Quite rightly too. He had gone to such incredible effort to create a bubble of privacy, far away from anybody he could possibly disturb, or who might happen upon him by accident. He was in such a remote hidden location. How could anybody have possibly taken offence at his presence?

    His final memories before he blacked out were of a night filled with terror and blind panic as the people he had tried so hard to avoid and evade were now making their final advances. All the dim shapes he could make out in the surrounding gloom of the trees were of figures, coming towards the caravan. He could see the movement of people in the shadows that danced on the ceiling and walls of the caravan. He could hear twigs snapping underfoot as they were stepped on. He could hear the sound of bushes being brushed past and branches being bent to make way for the advancing horde.

    He passed out. When he came round they were gone.

    Tentatively, he started to try and sit up and make his way to one of his peep holes so he could look out, but he realised he had blacked out with his leg jammed awkwardly underneath himself. His foot had gone to sleep. Incredible pain swept through his leg as the blood started to flow again and the feeling came back into his numbed limb.

    There was momentary relief as the pain in his leg subsided, but then he was flooded with pain from multiple parts of his body. His hips ached, many parts of his legs seemed bruised and swollen, his back and neck were very stiff and painful; his body was covered with cuts and grazes, especially his knees and elbows.

    In agony, Neil managed to prop himself up by the nearest of the peep holes and pushed his face up against the wall so he could look out. He saw nothing. Just trees. Where had they gone?

    How long had he been unconscious for? It had been night time when he had blacked out and now it was daytime, but there was no way of telling whether it was the next day, or the one after that. He had lost all sense of time: days and nights had blurred into one.

    Neil had spent a long time, afraid to leave the caravan. How long, he couldn’t be sure, but he knew that they had laid seige to him and now his situation was desperate. He was dying in that caravan. He was so thirsty. He was in a great deal of pain. It was clear that there was a lot of blood in his urine. He felt so weak. He really didn’t want to confront his persecutors and he had hoped that they would act first so that he didn’t have to make the decision. Now he was confronted with the dawning realisation that they had won. Surrender was his only option if he wanted to live.

    He collapsed back onto the bed to contemplate his next move, not at all able or willing to fully comprehend the staggering unpleasantness of the situation he was in.

     

    Next chapter…

  • Feedback Loop

    This is a story about reality checks…

    Valves

    When you’re amplifying a signal – for example, a microphone connected to a public address loudspeaker – then you have to be careful that you don’t get the microphone too close to the speakers, or else you will get horrible feedback.

    My blog is read by friends who’ve known me for years & years, but I very rarely meet up with them. Sometimes I get an email or a Facebook message, and it’s jaw-dropping that they understand me and what I’ve been going through so well. The usual trite platitudes (e.g. “why don’t you try getting more exercise?”) are certainly applicable to anybody and it does show that you care, but it’s a wonderful experience when I communicate with friends and they’ve got all this background info on me.

    Regarding my blog, only very rarely will anybody ever present an alternative opinion, or challenge me. I think I have a fairly persuasive manner of putting a point across, and I write with a great deal of certainty; forcefulness. It must be somewhat intimidating: the idea of potentially entering into debate with me.

    A strange thing starts to happen when you think about things in isolation too much. Because I work with boolean algebra for a living, I start to think of everything as binary: there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. I can use a lot of deductive reasoning to arrive at a set of beliefs that evolved purely from logic – a priori – as opposed to being shaped by experiences, discussions and human relationships. I labour the same points, over and over again, becoming ever more certain in my convictions and better and better at defending my position; entrenched in my stance.

    It’s quite satisfying to present your thesis quod erat demonstrandum.

    Weirdly, if nobody calls you out on anything, then you assume that you must have made a valid unassailable point. When somebody does call you out on something, then things get a bit more fun, because you have to decide whether to dig into your trenches and defend, or whether to concede the validity of an alternative viewpoint that had not been considered.

    I used to have a certain attitude that could be surmised as follows:

    “Fuck you. You’re wrong”

    Once you have constructed a fairly infallible piece of logical reasoning, being told “no, I disagree” is the most frustrating thing in the world. You can’t just disagree with something. It’s point/counterpoint. You need to make your own reasoned counterargument. Contradiction is just stupidity. It’s very frustrating to deal with people who don’t even realise that they’re complete idiots.

    I deal with idiots for a job: they’re called computers. If I tell a computer to jump off a cliff, it will do it. Computers just follow my instructions to the letter. Computers follow my logic with 100% precision. Being a computer programmer quickly teaches you how to logically reason things, leaving few loopholes. If you leave loopholes, these are called ‘bugs’. Bugs will cause rockets to explode, trains to derail or aeroplanes to crash.

    And so, a computer programmer arrives in the real world, and they’re experts at spotting cognitive dissonance. “Fucking immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs”… but, but, but you’re an immigrant, stutters the programmer, incredulous that somebody could be so stupid as to not see the flaw in what they’re saying.

    Anyway, I’m not even part of the debate. I’m watching from the sidelines, writing my manifesto; proselytising my theology; broadcasting my dogma. Nobody is questioning the validity of anything I’m saying. Nobody is challenging my assumptions. Nobody has yet said “you’re wrong, and this is why…”.

    Even to say the word manifesto sends a shiver down my spine. I fear that I might have gone mad. There are so many vilified people and policies, linked to a manifesto. In Britain we are not particularly terrified of communism. Being called “red”, “Marxist” or “Trot” is not even pejorative, to me. However, if you were to point out that Anders Breivik also wrote a manifesto, and so did Hitler, then I start to feel a little defensive.

    But, how the hell are you supposed to develop a political ideology, if you don’t write it down? If you can’t express a set of values and ideals for the betterment of humanity, then what? Am I only allowed to select from a menu of just a few mainstream choices? Of course, this is what party politics wants. The idea is that we should vote for party, not policy. If we voted for policies that we wanted as citizens, we’d be getting dangerously close to having a democracy.

    If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.

    I worry like crazy about how isolated and weird I’m getting, honing my ideas and developing my system of values, without very often discussing what I’m thinking over a pint of beer, with a good friend in the pub. Obviously, one must be mindful that Mein Kampf was conceived while Hitler was in hospital, and started when he was incarcerated. It’s mad to speak this aloud, but I’m always asking myself: “am I more like Hitler or Jesus”.

    Christian values are actually pretty cool. Forget the ten commandments, because, I mean, rape isn’t even on there. Graven images: no frigging way! Rape: no problem.

    Jesus Christ was an awesome dude. He basically founded the Occupy Wall Street movement when he turned over the tables of the money lenders in Herod’s Temple. Does that make him an anti-semite though? Could that have been a hate crime, given that it was an attack on Jewish businessmen, in a holy Jewish temple. Certainly a controversy worth pondering.

    Then you get to thinking that Jesus Christ, The Prophet Mohammed and Adolf Hitler, all thought that earning interest should be abolished. Hitler was a socialist, as was Stalin, but then so was Tony Blair and he started an illegal war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. It’s all so damn confusing.

    To my mind, if you have a political system that’s successful for the vast majority of people, the educated bourgeois can go to hell. To hell with your freedom of speech. To hell with your attempts to pervert government to better serve your own needs, at the expense of the majority. Go buy yourself a desert island if you want to run things in your own selfish interests.

    Eventually, I arrive at the decision that it might be better to just write a utopian novel that merely disguises my manifesto. It should be no surprise that I’ve extensively read Orwell and Huxley. However, the dystopian novels seem to have become instruction manuals for our governments. Perhaps novels are powerfully influential, in all the wrong ways.

    I love the Roman idea of the forum. The Internet discussion forum is a wonderful invention. The online communities are a lovely place to inhabit.

    My writing and debating skils – or lack thereof – were honed in the arena of the online discussion forum. In a way, I did a lot of growing up, by reading, writing, trolling, debating and very often being shot down in flames.

    Now, I have brought those writing skills, and the skill of making a reasoned argument expressed in a succinct and persuasive manner, to bear in the world of blogging.

    I deliberately chose a non-Wordpress platform, because I wasn’t looking for yet another blog and to connect with yet more bloggers. All the bloody comments sections are filled with other bloggers, link building back to their own blogs. It’s such a ridiculous echo-chamber of people all clamouring for readers. How can you compose your thoughts and reach conclusions, when embryonic ideas are critiquéd so immediately?

    I could have started to write on Medium, and I’m thrilled that my friend whose startup powers this blog, is now working for them. It might sound like intellectual snobbery, but there is a higher standard of writing and comments on Medium, than anywhere else on the ‘Net right now.

    But really, the biggest win for my blog has been to inform a bunch of my old friends from my discussion forum days, what the hell happened to me when I “went off the rails”. It’s been an opportunity to defend myself against malicious rumours. It’s been an opportunity for me to ward off the shame and sense of failure, for things that happened.

    Finally, the nicest thing happened the other day: I met up with a friend at the pub, and he reassured me that I’m still the same person who he knew, all those years ago, before the whole horrid mess in the middle. It’s an immense relief to know your personality hasn’t changed, your brain hasn’t been damaged and the person that friends once knew, still lives and breathes and hasn’t been replaced by some demonic creature.

    Life is pretty hard without feedback, but equally, it’s been useful to write at length without the debate that so ground me down and made me unwell before. It’s a horrible thing, to be so misunderstood, and to feel like the people who are supposed to care about you are working against you. It’s so hard to argue with multiple people at once. It’s so hard to defend yourself against a mob.

    Publishing is super powerful. Publishing is like a megaphone, to shout down the bullies.

    However, the occasional reality check has very high value.

     

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