Player 2 Has Entered The Game

No. No, no, no. How is this real?

But, firstly congratulations to Andrew Michael Hurley, author of The Loney, his début novel. I picked it up this week in Waterstones, seeing it had won the Costa Book Prize for Best Novel and had even been endorsed by Stephen King. 

Stephen KING. My mind buckles to see it.

And I am enjoying this new-to-me horror writer. Creepy in an old-fashioned, curiously British sense, and writhing in unspoken terrors. 

However.

I re-opened it today and saw Hurley's bio. A little further Googling has yielded more facts. Andrew Michael Hurley is living my dream. Quite literally. His bio is very similar to mine and the same genre as I would like to be and the talented bastard got there first.

"Andrew Michael Hurley has lived in Manchester and London..."
(I lived in Manchester for twelve years. Before then, I lived on the outskirts of North London.)

"...and is now based in Lancashire..."
(I now live in Lancashire.)

"...he has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University..."
(me too.)

"...he has been published in the Manchester Writing School's own journal of creative work, Muse..."
(me too.)

"...he was born in 1975."
(YES!!!! He's exactly a decade older!!)

Please excuse my moderate hysteria. For an odd moment in Waterstones I thought I'd been the victim of identify theft. Luckily, I'm just the hostage of procrastination.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. Hurley, I'm coming for you. Challenge accepted!

Dah-Dah-Da-Daaahh

More than 1 in 100 people in the UK have autism. 15% only are in full-time employment. 33% are married or co-habiting.

So, I'm now in three minorities. The Fiancé planned the moment in his meticulous fashion. In order to get my ring size right, he borrowed a ring sizer from his Mum and planned to wait until I fell asleep and then slip it on to my hand. These things look like white plastic cable ties. If I'd woken up, I'd have presumed he was having a Dexter fantasy.

In the end, due to my restless sleep he aborted the idea and instead tried to squeeze my existing fingers onto his baby finger and then guess the number. It worked.

He phoned my Mum to ask for her blessing two weeks before. A beautiful touch that may not have occurred to most people. He blinked at me and asked how could it not occur to someone to ask for a parent's blessing.

We went to the bar where we first met two years ago. He was a sweaty, distracted mess. Our favourite song came on over the sound system. I said how weird it was. No bar plays that band. That song was never even released from the album. The Then-Boyfriend began to burble, squeak and eventually got down on one knee and presented a beautiful silver gold ring. I loved that he never even considered golden gold. It looks awful on me.

I cried, he cried. I said yes and we kissed and hugged like horny teenagers. The bar staff, who were in on the planning, cheered and screamed, 'They're getting married!' Many people offered us drinks. The waitresses took our photos. The bar owner fell in the bar some hours later and screamed her delight at her bar's first proposal and offered us Prosecco at cost for the wedding. I hope she was sober enough to remember that the next morning.

Being stupidly responsible, we cut the night short and got the bus home. We should have stayed out until 2am, dancing and talking and grabbing ass. But we got the bus, which took three times as long because it had to stop when a drunk guy bitchslapped a girl across the face. My ring would have left a lovely mark across his cheek.

Now we have to pick a venue, date, dress, rings, guests, music, food, whose name do we use or do we combine? Oh, and a budget...this shouldn't be too overwhelming at all. And if it is, it'll be for the right reasons.

I have only made one decision so far. I'm wearing Wedding Converse. End of. 

#Amwriting

Two stories knocked out for recent submissions. Two others remain under consideration. Two others published recently. It would be nice if publishers still took on collections of short stories because I've clocked up over 90,000 words of the bad boys, but until that era comes again I'll print and staple them for my friends, my poor poor friends who were expecting...nicer stories. 

I'm rediscovering a real joy (does that sound right?) for horror-speculative fiction. Weirdness, grossness, what-the-fuck-ness. It's what I'm all about right now.

One story clocked in at just under 10,000 words (perhaps I got lost with the plot) and another just under 2,000 (perhaps I never found the plot). 

We'll see what the editors think. I quite liked them, but would love any feedback and a chance for editing with fresh eyes. We shall see.

Now. Recently I watched Sinister. Since the age of 15, I've struggled to watch horror films. I can read it, write it, discuss it and not be disgusted when a client shows me a video on their iPhone of their leg being operated on. But viewing a horror film, particularly one with a supernatural element, freaks me the fuck out. Give me straight up psychological gore any day.

But I got through Sinister, albeit looking through an inch gap of the blanket draped around my head. I earned my bravery hugs. I thought that at a 15 rating it couldn't scare me that much. I stand (and shiver) corrected.

I bought What Really Frightens You? on a whim at Asda. The blurb sounded good (horror writer throws out a call for readers' fears and then all hell lets loose) and the cover seemed to imply excellent effects.

I switched it off within five minutes. I genuinely thought the beginning was a spoof, like a film within a film. The next scene of exposition was a huge infodump, somewhat akin to a porn film trying to ram (pun intended) a plot line into the next gratuitous hour or so. Even the acting and camera work screamed of an open casting call and being shot in a trailer in a motel-ridden part of Hollywood.

So what really frightens this reader? That I paid five fucking quid for that DVD and now I can't return it because I took the plastic off.

The Search For Silence Continues

Sometimes I'm quite amazed at how sensitive hearing can be on the spectrum. Years ago I was convinced I was going crazy. Now I know that I'm highly-tuned. But this doesn't make coping much different.

The day has been fine. In the afternoon myself and workmates went to an external meeting. After the noise and chatter settled and it became one speaker in a large, high-ceiling room, I quickly felt sick. I winced and covered my ears, trying not to look too...aspie. 

The sound of the lights, some twenty feet above me, sounded like hair clippers held directly beside my ears. It turned my stomach, made my palms sweat and wanted to vomit. I began to panic as I could no longer focus on the meeting. More frightening is that looking around, no one else appeared bothered. I began to rock gently on my chair.

Come the break, I legged it out the door for a cigarette. When I had to come back inside the buzzing room, I felt my eyes get hot and wet and I feared a meltdown was coming. I slipped over to my manager and asked to be excused. She laughed and said, 'You're not in school. You can just go.' I tried not to cry, grabbed my bag and ran out even as I heard someone call my name.

I didn't recognise town and just turned right and walked straight until I found myself back at my workplace. 30mg of diazepam took 30 minutes to kick in and I didn't want to go foetal in the street. 

Ironically, I went to see the psychologist after work. The rooms are thin-walled and I flinched for fifty minutes at cleaners dragging tables around in other rooms. When I left the room, I gagged and covered my nose at the smell of bleach.

My sensitivity is already high, but I feel like my tolerance is getting worse. I don't know exactly why. I don't think sensory issues can be progressive so perhaps it's stress-related. 

I get home and try and relax. I smell toast cooking through the terraced, but very solid walls of my neighbours' house. I know I'm not going insane. But this feels like a very mad way to be trying to live. 

Could Everything Be Less Noisy/Less Smelly/Less Itchy, Please?

I met for a 1-1 with my ASC worker recently who is referring me to the newly-qualified psychologist on the team (so new, I'm sure I can hear braces on her teeth) to help my 'well-being' and to help with social skills and sensory difficulties.

Social Skills is going to be a very hard one to work on because I've gotten very good at 'passing', however I know that what I'm saying is completely without feeling and is invariably copied from TV or the radio. In fact, the things people laugh at are just quotes from films or sitcoms. When I get really, really comfortable with people I will 'pass' less i.e. I will feel able to be more like me. Unfortunately, where I feel most like me, most comfortable is around the emotional age of 14. It's like my cognitive reasoning kept maturing, but my emotions didn't. So, when I'm happy around people, I will run around, blow raspberries, swear, wear silly t-shirts, giggle and then eventually make what I'm told are inappropriate comments such as, 'Are you limping because you fucked last night?'

The plan is for me to either work on passing (which I very much hate doing) and understand that sometimes you can't tell people how many times you've had sex this week or that you think some people are completely irredeemable thundercunts, without getting into trouble. I don't think that's an honest way to live, but apparently it's correct. 

Or I just say that I really don't care what other people think of me. Maybe that's worth a go.

The other issue is sensory difficulties. Reportedly of all the people that have been assessed, under Sensory Difficulties I've come in as one of the lowest scorers (1-2 (most people are coming in at a minimum of 5)) and have been the topic in supervision, mostly because I explained how I can hear electricity or bubbles popping in a glass of Coke from 14 foot away. 

For years, psychiatrists thought I was hallucinating. I thought I was hallucinating. But it appears I'm very in tune with sound, smell and light/colour. For example, my 1-1 was in a different room. I was about 4 foot away from a small wooden coffee table. It stunk. It smelt like untreated wood and that it had been stored in a musty second hand shop and previously owned by smokers. I asked my worker if she could smell it. She couldn't, but dutifully put her nose on the table and only then could she smell what I described. I could smell it freely in the air from a distance of at least 4 feet. 

It's no surprise then that I'm constantly jumping around my house and workplace trying to work out noises that are deafening to me or smells that seem to be taking over, but don't bother anyone else. That's a lot of energy spent chasing intangibles. 

Maybe just watch this video from NAS about a kid in a shopping centre and imagine that that level of noise is normal and makes you feel like the world is about to explode, you will implode and everything will cease to make sense unless you scream your noise over the top of it and move your body to shut out other people's noise and pointless information.