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!
FINALLY! Something that combines my Japanophile/Nipponophile tendencies and my obsession with hunting and buying 'perfect book'...and then not reading it, but piling it up with other such Amazon and Waterstone's purchases.
It frightens me how many books are waiting. Some unemployed booklovers might love this situation. Just sit and read. But between acting like some sort of 1950s housewife and doing job application after job application (for some reason people don't want to hire someone who has longstanding mental health issues...) there are not enough hours in the day.
And, unfortunately, I am in the obsessive state whereby any remotely interesting DVD or book triggers ideas in my head that drives me to the laptop, but I can't focus enough because of the itchy brain. So it feels very...squashed in my head. Too many brilliantly put together stories out there at the moment and my brain can't filter out what is entertainment and what is inspiration.
Such terrible, terrible problems, I know.
In other news, I'm on Twitter now. For some reason, with the ability to tweet a celebrity, I thought it was some massive version of Facebook where everyone carried on conversations.
Nope. I have tweeted Masie Williams, Jasper Fforde, Matt Haig, Augusten Burroughs, Jon McGregor and Ryu Murakami and got bugger-all back. But with 50k+ followers in some instances, this does make sense.
It's also very unnerving when random people 'follow' you. Usually they're writers who have just broken into a publishing contract and looking for exposure. Fair does. I'd do the same. My friend's eleven-year old recently decided to follow me and I made the very correct decision to make sure his Mum was okay with this. She is and frankly, this is a cool kid (comics, rollercoasters, travelling) with cool writer parents and I'm quite nice and don't swear on Twitter.
So, a run-down of the week. Mental health team appointment, job interview, family occasion, Comic-Con, tattoo appointment. Busy busy. But that ain't bad. Nice to have a routine for the next seven days that starts scarily and ends happily.
