Fankid Part 2

After I posted my previous entry, I went on Facebook and discovered that Matt Haig unfriended me on Facebook. 

That's more than a bit weird. His mutual friends are made up of four Manchester writers I've known for years. They've tutored me, drank with me, I've been to their readings and house-sat for them. But did I do a horribly creepy thing by asking if I could send him a present? Do autistic people never ever bloody know where the appropriate line is?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not so precious that an 'unfriending' would upset me. Only the idea that I might (or to be fair, might not) have been seen as a cyberspace Annie Wilkes who may have been sending something utterly inappropriate, when I thought I might be doing something to make someone smile. 

Or maybe he imagined worse. A six-inch thick manuscript with a begging note for him to promote it. 

Typical world 1. Autism 0.

Never mind. We'll win on penalties.


Yeah. Joking aside, I'm embarrassed. 

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!

Crossover: Colossal Fun or Rat's Nest?

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.

Let's Get Cracking

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.

Shortlisted

I am officially on the shortlist for an anthology of Manchester-linked short stories, being edited by The Manchester Speculative Fiction Group, entitled Revolutions! with my story 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want' - yes, a Smiths lyric. How clever.

I've bounced off a longer short story to a magazine I greatly enjoy, but the chances are never great as I think my style is not their style. As evidence, so far they have rejected me 5 times. But, still, I try. So very few short story magazines out there.

Another entry for the end of this month ready to be emailed off, once some little Sharpie drawings have been scanned, Photoshopped, and put together nicely.

A big short story competition the same time every year rolls around. Bugger that if I'm entering again. It's very...high-brow. In other words, I don't understand any of the damn stories that win. Are they meant to be so obtuse, to have no undercurrent of tension, no discernible resolution? Is that a publishable short story? Am I muppet for not understanding them? In that case, I'm fucked so I'll save myself £17 and not enter.

I am 50+ words into a novel. Again. I write quickly, but this does not make for good writing. It makes for great fun, great brain-scratching, but more time must be loaded into thought, editing, slowly walking around it and studying it from many angles.

This sudden huge word count has been accomplished simply by scrapping the load of utter, utter crap from the beginning of the year (what was I thinking, seriously?), realising what was just padding, and how the same scenes, the same middle of each 'novel' is always the same, whatever plot I employ. This is a story I feel I have to write, and write correctly, so that I can stop circling around it and write something NEW! Imagine: the same damn story in your head for years that you can't purge. Like a reoccurring boil that you finally realise needs a surgical excision. 

It is frightening how very, very wrong you can be about a novel's potential, about its readibility, even its credibility. Rose-tinted glasses perched on a nose shoved against the page. You don't see anything except one damn word at a time.

The Rejection Reaction

It's that time of year when the rejection slips have started hitting my inbox. I am unsurprised, mostly because I see that my last attempt was very much me trying to cram all my ideas and interests into a Word document and pass it off as a novel. My brain has its deep-rooted interests and I find it hard to commit to one thing. I want a a bulging word count of all things that fascinate me. 

This creates a book that is just too...weird to guarantee enough people will buy it, read it, recommend it. Or weird, but also too scattered. I take it on the chin. I learn that once you put out something to be read by a professional, it turns on a light for you and you see its lack of marketability. I learn.

And then I start another. I have a compulsive need to write. I have stories that I am tinkering with already earmarked as to which publication I'll send them to. I have a 'great' idea for another book. A great big mess. But no matter. I enjoy doing it. I don't think, based on feedback, that the syntax is dreadful. More my plotting ability may be so. But I enjoy the fight to be 'a real writer'. 

The latest two rejection slips. Let's look at the encouragement/fuck-off, shall we?

"[...] is not quite the right fit"

=

"This is weird. This makes no sense. Why in God's name did you send this to us?!"

"We have to be highly selective"

=

"You are not in the top percentage of people who qualify as professional."

"We are replying as soon as possible to give you the best chance of finding the right agent."

=

"We don't know who in God's name will sign you, but it sure as hell won't be us."

"Another agent may well feel differently."

=

"Another agent would be a mug to think you have a shot."

Am I disheartened? Nah. I try to find humour in most things. If I can't laugh at my own failures, 'tis a sad existence I would be living. 

Let's keep those e-mails coming! 

A Day Crunched Over The Netbook

Today I had to wait in for two viewings at my flat. Neither arrived. So I cracked on with some distraction so I didn't feel on edge about plans being changed.

Wrote: 
a chapter featuring a school reunion, a barman, and a blowjob;
transcribed a friend's interview that at 22 minutes ran to 3,500 words;
yet another job application...although it's not due for three weeks.

Picked up a book that may just make me laugh, as I'm hoping it's sassy and not soppy.

If not, then I have this to balance me out:

Just Jump

So....I sent a covering letter, synopsis, and sample of the book to a very good literary agency. Fuck it. Enough playing in the shadows and playing 'What If'.

Got my automatic response, so at least it's in an inbox somewhere:

"Many thanks for your submission to [...], we are looking forward to having a read! Due to the large number of submissions we receive every day, it may be 6-8 weeks before you hear back from us with a response.

With best wishes

The [...] Team"

Six-to-eight weeks to find up if it's thumb's up or thumb's down. I'll find something to do. Read, perhaps.

It's Done

The novel is complete. 

Pause for commemorative moment of bafflement that I did it. Probably because there's a deadline creeping up and I'd kick myself if I missed it.

So. Getting feedback at the moment from some readers and nibbling my nails.

How does it feel to have finished?

A bloody relief. Now I can start on something new. And begin the cycle of antisocial behaviour and window-gazing once more.

Not a lot else to say. Other than I recently had some wonderfully artificially coloured ice cream that made me so happy I had to take a picture. 

Bit sad, really.