In my ongoing little quest, whereby I have lost many a dinky shoe in quicksand, to write something that can hold my attention longer than 20,000 words (without resorting to fluffing from there on) I am abandoning all the ridiculous notions I've picked up over the years of what 'good writing' looks like, what 'worthwhile writing' looks like and what 'sellable writing' looks like. I'm going rogue.
Of course, it would be more than delightful to be a published novelist, to have my stories looked upon with an air of validity. But, by thinking so highly of those things I have managed to squidge out the fun of the actual thing: writing. Since studying Creative Writing, all I have done is worry about the final 'thing' when the 'thing' is not even written.
Stupid. Incorrect. Whoops. Where did I ever pick up such bollocks? Answers on postcards to my tutors and careers guidance at school.
Now I'm throwing out all earlier efforts of what I thought fiction to be, where I thought I MUST be literary, where I thought I had to have a dazzling message burning into the retinas of Dear Reader. Instead I am going to have fun. Even if this new project is never published, is never even sent out to publishers, I am going to write it and enjoy it. I will take all the things I love, the strange things I have seen, the noise of places I've been and some seriously messed-up ideas of entertainment and grab it around the throat. What could possibly be more satisfying?
Back to the basics of writing for love, for the ride, for the thrill. Not with those dirty words 'editing', 'plotting', 'motifs' or 'marketability' sending copious amounts of nose blood onto the keyboard. The only dirty things here will be a special counter for the amount of times the word 'fuck' appears in the text.
Locate all previous 'manuscripts' [emits dark chuckle]. Ctrl + A. Del. Ctrl + N.
A new thing, now. Something that takes me back to my first loves: horror and comedy. The things that had my poor parents dragged into school because of Wednesday Adams attitude and chainsaw-heavy stories. Something that indulges my childish humour, my love of the shock and allows obsessional interests research to be fully indulged.
Basically, if Stephen King angrily rammed his car into Jasper Fforde's head and then they both went out and got drunk on Absinthe, ate too much cheese and headed out to save the world with quips and knives from hoards of deluded Londoners. That sort of thing.
Will it sell? Doubtful. Will I enjoy it? Oh, God, yes. This is something I am going to LOVE writing.
Organ pawning, Rippology, bounty hunters, tattoos, lollipop ladies, kebabs and strangely cold steel cupboards, this is going to be something that will make me laugh.
And then consult a psychiatrist as to if I should be laughing.
Recently two short stories have fallen into publication, which has been nice. Three more are now under consideration by magazines and I have another one to write for a particular submission call.
All are horror-speculative fiction. Interestingly, I was very into horror until I was 15. So interested that my primary school staged an intervention due to the frightening stories I was writing at 8:30am. I blame Christopher Pike and the Point Horror series.
Now I'm turning modern-day mental health and mental health care into something that perhaps others can relate to. Something that makes people nod in recognition, makes them recoil in horror, hopefully makes them laugh and then suddenly cry (or vomit).
Is this a soapbox novel? Am I screaming for change in the guise of fiction? No. I'm turning my misplaced decade into something that reflects horror, humour, fear, and surrealism. And I am sad that it is grounded in reality.
I've tried hard to explain what it means to be locked up on a psychiatric ward to many people. How the place of safety for the most acutely unwell has an invisible set of rules, consequences and punishments. How, if you are autistic and don't know, this is definitely not the best place unless you are a severe danger to yourself or others. Was I? Well, clearly I was deemed so, but on reflection, the multiple misdiagnoses are what kept me locked up and what kept me rotating back to the wards. A discreet red flag on my file that indicated that if this person is unreasonable, just order a Section.
I once said it was like prison. I know people who've been in prison. It's not like prison. It is a separate set-up. I said to staff once that I felt I was in prison. They laughed and said, 'Free food, laundry, TV. It's not prison.' I stated that you have that in prison and we all have locks on the doors.
But the distinction is pecking order. In prison there is a strong hierarchy of earning respect. Groups, gangs, organisations. On wards, some people are so snapped off from this reality, that they aren't interested in what is going on. The people you do speak to, you have to watch. Some people lie and manipulate as per their condition, some people are here and are from complete poverty and will steal your cigarettes, money, socks, soap (no lockable areas in the curtained off bedspaces). Some may become temporary friends. But there is no strong hierarchy because some people can barely take care of themselves. On the ward, you need to watch your back for violence or stealing because you can't be sure the staff will be there to watch your back. Friendships on wards, made in extremis, rarely survive on the outside. But in prison, where you aren't encouraged to get too friendly with the guards, here we were all playing the staff. Showing them our good sides so that we could get leave, not be checked when we brought in contraband.
Why did we do this? Probably rebelling. Most of us were on Sections. Staff could take our phones, our belts, our lighters if they deemed it in our interests. If someone died in front of us, we were not counselled or debriefed. If we found someone cutting patterns into their arms and we called for a nurse, we got no support. When we witnessed a late night seizure and the night nurse didn't know who the person was, but you were punished for dragging the nurse by the sleeve to the right bedspace. If there were no beds and we slept on mattresses on consulting room floors, that was thought to be okay. To be discharged after three months with no warning when you crave routine and planning...no, this did not sit well.
We hated the medications that made us wet the bed, lactate from our nipples and make us cry, wondering if we had breast cancer. We hated the predatory agency workers who seemed more interested in sex than our care. We kept trying to escape because that is the natural instinct when locked up. We hated that eight versus one, use of headlocks and locks that we warned would break our arms if we struggled, were considered okay. In the mornings, we would count our bruises and name them after the nurse who gave them to us.
A type of prison, then. Even down to the kangaroo courts of a MHA Tribunal. Reminiscent of Josef K's ordeal.
Now, I sometimes go to wards in a professional capacity to see my clients. I feel my stomach crunch when I go down the corridors, when I see people drifting around dayrooms, bored and angry.
These are the practical things of being on a ward. The physical stuff. It doesn't even cover the reasons that brought you there or what is inside people's head, struggling to come out. All you see are people walking around naked or putting spoons in their knickers and you do mental gymnastics to work out how this person got to this point. Why they have been left in the same clothes for three months.
So, now I am untangling it, flattening out crumpled mental notes into a story that will not show the healing side of mental health care, but the bare reality of what it is. No bias, truly, just factual research blended into a modern-day horror story.
Angry? Of course. Hung-up? No. It happened and it's fantastic story fodder.
The other Saturday, The Boyfriend suggested that we cross the border to an abandoned hospital that we could explore. It would be an hour's drive and with several hours of exploring we might not get back until very late. We love sleep, worship the duvet, bow down to fluffy socks and pillows. But we thought, fuck it. With energy drinks and cameras, we drove off.
We found ourself at Lluesty Hospital, shut down in 2007, half of which is a Grade II Listed Building - looks very unsafe in an Amityville sort of way. We explored the more modern side that we believed may have had psychiatric wards. I felt uneasy as the person we were meant to be there said they'd broken down and couldn't make it. But The Boyfriend and friend were brave so I went in.
Surprisingly, no security. Not even a token gate or sign that says No Trespassing or Security Services Patrol This Area. We crawled through a broken window, dodged a nest of mattresses and open needle wrappers and explored a smashed and dripping facility.
Bizarrely we found ourself with a ghost-hunting party who had a spirit box and reckoned they were picking up energy that was being transferred into a digital voice selecting words from a database of 10,000. DISASTER, COLD, QUIET. You get the drift. We heard footsteps down the corridor, clearly slow footsteps that stopped after five.
We felt fine until we went upstairs and found what had once been a locked ward. There we all felt strangely uncomfortable. A warmth / restriction in our chest. Hard to explain for sceptics as us, but undeniable proof to the ghosthunters that spirits were here. Perhaps we had just absorbed their own anxiety. They wanted spirits. We wanted research, photos of abandoned buildings. With no light, it was a question of point and hope the flash would help us focus in time. In future, we'll get better.
We finally crawled home at 3:30am after having needed to pee for seven hours. I felt uncomfortable taking a piss in the hospital. What if I had pissed on a ghost?
Just one interesting thing: as soon as went inside, both The Boyfriend and my cameras' brand new SD memory cards flashed up as corrupted...
Another story has found its way into an anthology. 'Damaged' is in Robbed of Sleep: Issue 4 - An Anthology of the Horribly Strange and Strangely Horrible.
Our editor, Troy Blackford, @TBlackford3, describes the contents as:
Twenty-four fresh tales of the exotic, the fearful, and the downright nonsensical from some of the best and brightest voices emerging in horror and speculative fiction today.
Ain't that nice? It's doing very nicely in the Horror Anthology chart and last I heard was holding steady against contributions from Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.
So it's available now in paperback and on Kindle. Click away...
