The Fantastically Minded Shona Kinsella

It was a dark and stormy night...

Actually it was bright and sunny outside, but the power of the darkness within my soul had created a virtual thunderstorm around Holbrook Towers; black rumbling clouds of discontent, frequently assaulted by sharp splits of electric anger.  

This was my mood, and I was taking out on the cat - I say the cat, because I don't know his real name. he stopped by to introduce himself as my new neighbour some weeks ago.  I didn't like the look of him and so decided that I could make use of him. He has been most responsive to my experiments, and no longer seems to want to leave.

(I call him cat because he uses a Kitty Litter and has to lick himself to wash).

Anyway, my mood was black when the scream of a banshee distracted me from my misery. It was the new doorbell.  I opened the door to find a woman with a book in her hand.  

     "I'm not interested!"  I shouted.  "I've already told your lot that I'm a Wicca-Loving/Satanist/Jedi, I have cloven feet and if a bible enters my house it will spontaneously combust!"

     It turned out that she wasn't from the local fellowship however, but was a wandering author, who had travelled all the way from Scotland after hearing of a mythical castle owned by a dark overlord who loved books.

     I invited her in, threw the cat out of the catflap to chase birds outside, and offered her a chair in front of the fire.  Our conversation I recorded as follows...

Let’s start with your name shall we and a little bit of background about what in God’s name made you want to write?

My name is Shona Kinsella and I started writing on a whim. Well, sort of. I loved writing when I was young and wrote short stories and (bad) poetry in notebooks that I carried about with me. When the film Bucket list came out when I was in my teens, Write a Book was number one on my list. Then exams and life got in the way and I stopped writing.

In 2014, I took a career break to care for my children. My husband and I were joking about what I would do with all my spare time and he suggested that I turn my hand to writing a book, like I’d always wanted to. Well, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head and a month or so later, I sat down and tentatively wrote ten pages. That was the start of Ashael Rising.

Have you got a book out at the moment?  Imagine you are stood in front of a panel of potential film directors (Scorsese, Spielberg, Burton, Branagh, Ed Wood etc.) Pitch your book - what’s it called and what’s it about, who’s your leading lady or man?  Would you think about turning it into a musical? If so what would the song that goes into the Oscars shortlist?

My book is called Ashael Rising and it’s a secondary world fantasy. Ashael is an apprentice medicine woman who must somehow protect her people from the Zanthar, soul-sucking invaders from another world, who extend their own lives by stealing the life-force of others. The Zanthar were banished from KalaDene two centuries before but they have returned looking for a being known as The Vessel; someone who will be the key to the soul of KalaDene itself.

 What was the last thing you wrote? Be honest, even if it was a shopping list.

A text message to my husband. Before that, a meal plan for the week. The last creative writing I did was on the novella I’m working on. It’s called The Longest Night and concerns a tribe living in the arctic, when the sun fails to rise after mid-winter.

What’s the book on your shelf that you have read the most and why?  Could you live without reading it again?

This is tough because I re-read books all the time. It’s hard to know which one I’ve read most. It’s probably The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I know I’ve read the entire series three or four times and the early books more times than that. I would be devastated if I had to live without reading it again. It feels a little like coming home when I settle between those pages. I’m not sure I can articulate why I love it so much. It’s something to do with the epic scale with a western feel to it. It’s the strength of King’s writing and characterisation – the characters feel real to me. It’s how the series sits over the rest of King’s work with threads to be found, all leading back to the tower. It’s the warning that I see in the story, despite it never being stated outright. On top of all that, it’s just a great story!

You are stuck in a lift; everyone else in the building has gone home for the night.  Who would you like to keep you company for the next 12 hours, to soothe away the infinite panic, claustrophobia and need for the toilet?

Is it cheating to say my husband? He’s always the first person I want to spend time with. I guess you mean someone famous though. Honestly, if I couldn’t have my husband, I’d rather have my laptop – can you imagine how much writing you could get done in 12 uninterrupted hours? Hmmm, have I given too much away about myself with that?

Oh, I’ve got a good one! The Writing Excuses crew! I’d come out of that lift a much better writer and I’d have had a great laugh as well!

“It is braver to open up your heart through your writing than to get into a ring with a very short tempered Mike Tyson.” Discuss.

I agree with this, absolutely. I can’t speak for other writers, but for me, well there’s a lot of me in my work. Many of my characters have aspects of my personality, I write about issues that are important to me, especially around equality and the way that we live with each other and with our planet. There’s a lot of my heart laid out on the page for people to look at and criticise and reject.

Your partner talks in his/her sleep.  One night, in their sleepy babble, they give you the idea for the greatest story that will ever be written.  Do you take the credit/royalties?

Sort of? I mean, they might have given me the idea but if my track record is anything to go by, the end result will have moved quite far from that original spark. I would acknowledge that’s where the idea came from and since we have shared finances, the royalties would be shared anyway!

What is the worst thing anyone has said about your writing and how did you react?

When I first joined Scribophile, an online writing group, my very first critique of the first story I posted, started out with “Let’s be honest, this was boring.” They proceeded to tear the work to shreds. I cried when I read it and considered taking my piece down in sheer embarrassment. I didn’t though and the story went on to win first place in a competition without any changes being made. I think that was a useful thing to go through early on. It showed me that I shouldn’t put too much stock in any one person’s opinion. We all react to art so differently.

What’s the best thing anyone ever said about your writing? You cannot include a family member, that’s cheating.

I was very moved when a member of my critique group said that he had to read the chapter several times because he kept getting caught up and forgetting that he was meant to be critiquing. From a complete stranger, I think the best thing is that they can’t wait for the next book. Or the reviewer who said she sneaked reading the book at work because she had to know what happened next.

Tell me something nice that you’ve done for someone in the past week?  How have you improved the world through your acts of niceness?

I really struggled to come up with an answer to this – my toddler has been ill and I haven’t left the house much over the last week! I’ve been looking after my sister’s dog while she’s at work – does that count? I brought my neighbour’s bins in after they had been emptied. I feel like my kindness standards are slipping. I need to get on that and start spreading kindness about again.

 I have an uncle with an insatiable desire for great new writers.  Where can he find your work?

Ashael Rising is available on Amazon (http://bit.ly/ashaelrising) and from all major bookshops. You can even request a copy in your local library or support Unbound and buy direct from them https://unbound.com/books/ashael-rising

I also post flash fiction to be my blog on a fairly regular basis – www.shonakinsella.com

Is there anything else you wish to tell me or confess to today?

I’m really glad that we ‘met’.



My mood had lightened.  The clouds of misery had parted and a nervous sun poked through to warm my face.  I heard a scratching at the door; the cat was obviously ready for a tin of Sheba.

I waved Shona off and ran to my computer to order myself a copy of her book 'Ashael Rising'.  

You should too.


If you enjoy my blog, please consider supporting my novel on Unbound, Domini Mortum.  You can find it here: www.unbound.co.uk/books/domini-mortum 

You won't be disappointed.

(and I may invite you to the castle)

The More Than Quite Interesting Mr Colgan

It was a quite and dull night in Holbrook Towers, a knock came on the large oaken doors.  Annoyingly it was the butler's night off, and so I was forced to come upstairs from the torture chamber to answer the door myself.  Normally an obtuse and miserable man, prone to violent fits of rage, I was pleased to see a familiar face, one that I had run into a few weeks ago in York, where he gave a most enjoyable talk regarding the likelihood of there being intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Our exchange over drinks was recorded as follows:

Who the devil are you? Why are you here? What is your purpose?

I’m Stevyn Colgan. Author, artist, songwriter, collector of vintage Viewmasters, ex-pat Cornishman and tea fetishist. Oh and I’m one of the ‘elves’ that research and write the TV show QI. My purpose is to be FABULOUS. I am failing dismally.




Written a book have you? What the bloody hell is it all about?

Written several actually (smug face). The latest is a novel called ‘A Murder To Die For’. It’s a murder mystery set at a murder mystery festival. And, I hope, it’s funny. People who’ve read it think so. One person said it read like Tom Sharpe had written a Miss Marple novel. Stephen Fry liked it enough to give me a cover quote. So did Sandi Toksvig. I trust their professional comedy judgment! I’m now trying to persuade someone to turn it into a TV comedy drama.

Can you remember the first thing you ever wrote that you are creatively proud of?  Was it a story? A poem? A toddlers dirty protest, perhaps a forged cheque?

The first thing I remember writing (that I was pleased with) was a story about a small hairy thing called The Offog. I can’t remember the plot – it was around 45 years ago – but I do recall that it involved the Moon being tethered to the Earth with a piece of string. I suspect my Ricicles had been spiked.

There's a door in front of you. Behind the door is a world without imagination, without spurious thought, where no one has ever thought about writing stories and the idea of a novel is seemingly fantastical and impossible.  Take the complete works of another writer with you through the door (Shakespeare and Dickens are banned) who is the lucky woman/man? And would you pretend to be them?

Wow. How can I pin that down to just one author? Part of me says Douglas Adams. Another screams P G Wodehouse. Yet another howls for Tom Sharpe. But I’ll take the complete works of Rev J P Martin, creator of the extraordinarily mad world of Uncle the elephant. Pythonesque humour, inspired names (Beaver Hateman, Butterskin Mute, Isadore Hitmouse etc.) andwonderfully insane and surreal stories all explosively illustrated by Quentin Bake. Tha t should cheer up No Imagination Land. And no, I couldn’t pretend to be the Reverend due to my crushing atheism.



Tomorrow you expire.  The day after you come back. Which animal would you be, and how would you use your new found animality to wreak revenge on the human world that cast you out?

Probably something like a Tyrannosaurus Rex (Hey, if you can have reincarnation, I can have dinosaurs, okay? I bloody love dinosaurs). I’d quickly rise to the top of the food chain and then sort out the political situation on both sides of the Atlantic. Or maybe a cow. Cows are mellow. Cows are worry-free. And who wouldn’t enjoy being milked?

 Invisibility or shape shifting?  Which would you choose to cause the most havoc?

Invisibility every time. And no, of course I wouldn’t spend the summer hiding in some young ladies’ finishing school. The very thought! It would be shut.

Literary heaven and literary hell. What novel is a dream and which disappointed you the most and should be cast into the pit for all eternity?

A novel that was a dream? I don’t read a lot of sci-fi but the first time I read John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ I was blown away. All of his books are brilliantly written. The sci-fi element hardly intrudes; it’s all about the characters. He throws people into extraordinary situations and then tells their stories brilliantly. Literary hell? Tricky. I’ve read books that I thought were steaming piles of shite but who am I to judge? ‘50 Shades of Grey’ has sold millions. I hated it. Dan Brown is massively successful. I’ve read a few of his books and I thought they were terrible. But maybe that’s just me? The fact is, taste is personal and they have sold many, many more books than I ever will.

Ideas.  Do you pluck them out of the air or do you have to put some work into it?

I am bursting with ideas all of the time. I carry notebooks and voice recorders with me everywhere I go. I’ve never suffered writers’ block. And everyday situations and stories I hear can set me off on a chain of thought that ends as a story - I once wrote an entire novella after seeing a lone glove sitting on some railings. By the time my brain had taken a long ride on the Train of Thought I’d created an entire temporal refuse disposal industry that, in the far future, gets rid of its landfill by dumping it into the past. I then wrote it up as a Doctor Who script and submitted it to the BBC and got as far as discussions with the producer. Ideas are not a problem. Having the time to get them all down is.

“The best comedy is tragedy.” Discuss.

It’s true. The best comic creations are built on tragedy: Reggie Perrin and his deadly dull corporate life; Basil Fawlty’s relationship with Sybil and his intolerance of hoi-paloi guests;  Henry Wilt’s whole life; Tony Hancock’s interactions with idiot Bill Kerr, bullish Hattie Jacques, dodgy Sid James and odd Kenneth Williams; Edmund Blackadder’s lack of recognition and power; poor thick Bertie Wooster’s utter reliance on Jeeves to get him out of every scrape. In ‘A Murder To Die For’, I’ve done the same with my leading characters. They’re all either jealous, avaricious, angry or in some other way discontented. And that leads us to plenty of funny situations.

Where can we find you? (not in a stalky type of way, obvs)

When I’m not hanging out at some young ladies’ finishing school, you can find me on Wikipedia or on my website at www.stevyncolgan.com, both of which desperately need updating (any Wikipedians out there?).

I’ve been keeping a blog for a decade and the most recent iteration is at:  http://colganwrites.blogspot.co.uk/ There you can also find links back to my previous blogs and, most importantly, to my books.

My latest book ‘A Murder To Die For’ is out later this year but you can read all about it and pledge for an early special edition by visiting here https://unbound.com/books/a-murder-to-die-for

I’m on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011092957196

On Twitter I’m @stevyncolgan and on Instagram I’m simply StevynColgan

Last, but not least, if you want to email me, send me spam or unsolicited nudity, I’m stevyncolgan@gmail.com

Thank you, Stevyn, you have been most illuminating.  I for one have already pre-ordered 'A Murder to Die for' and am very much looking forward to seeing the postman negotiate the moat in order to deliver it.

Please feel free to visit Holbrook Towers whenever you are passing.  I shall make sure there are milkmaids a plenty next time, just in case you return a bovine.

The Worst Newspaper in the World

“If it’s murder you want then this city is producing it afresh every day.  Nobody wants to hear old news, I cannot sell it." - George Purkess, Domini Mortum

A little over two years ago I found myself at a writing impasse.  I had recently completed my first novel, Memento Mori, and the burning desire to build on the achievement and hurl myself straight into the process of creating another had begun to fill my every waking thought.

I had an issue though; Memento Mori was, I thought at the time, a standalone story, a tale of how a photographer, and expert in the field of the Victorian fad for post mortem portrait photography, had become involved, and become a suspect, in a series of grisly murders in late nineteenth century London.  I had written it to be stand alone, pained over the final few pages tying up as many loose ends as possible  in order to make it a one off story, and had completed it with the intention of moving on to something else completely.

That is until it was read by others.

I have a happy little posse of test readers, they are a small but varied group comprising of close family (who aren’t afraid to be brutally honest with me), friends (who would take great pleasure in pointing out problems and issues with the story), and others who I have only met throughs and pictures the internet (who expressed an interest in reading the novel for me and who gave me some of the more constructive and sensible advice).

The problem that arose was that they wanted more.  They had questions about characters in the story, they wanted to know what happened to them once the story finished.  This is a great thing for a writer to hear. It means that you have somehow made a connection with the reader and interested them enough in the world that you have created to make them want more.  It was a problem however.  The problem posed was, relatively speaking, a good one; what writer doesn’t want their work to have made such a mental affect on the reader that they invested in and even cared for the characters created?  It was a nice problem to have but it gave way to another; do I leave them in the lurch and let them make up their own minds or do I take the story further?  And if I do take it further then how?  I had sweated blood over tying everything up at the end of Memento Mori; how do I start to untangle these very tight final knots that I had created?

The answer came, as sparks of new interest and sudden ideas often do, through mindless internet browsing.  I had been toying with the idea of adding illustrations to Memento Mori; the kind that filled my favourite books when I was younger.  Pictures like the excellent illustrations by Sidney Paget in my Sherlock Holmes books and also in my childhood favourites, my Jennings books which used to belong to my Dad when he was a boy. 

Throughout these books, usually at the start of each chapter, was a illustration of a scene or incident from the pages to follow, usually annotated with a line or piece of dialogue taken from the story – ‘Jennings and Darbishire come up with an ingenious plan to save Binns Minor from a thrashing, much to the annoyance of Venables.’ or something similar or ‘Let me see the evidence, Madam, said Holmes as he firmly grasped his pipe’.  I wanted this for my books.

It was as I scrolled through the infinite screen loads of sketches from the Victorian age that I came across various front pages of ‘The Illustrated Police News’.  Now, of course I had seen many of these before, I have an ever growing collection of books on Jack the Ripper many of which include the IPN’s covers showing Martha Tabram and her unfortunate peers.  This time it was different though; this time, I looked a little more in depth at the pictures on my screen and found myself wanting to know more, wanting to know who drew them and how did they go from the eyes and mind of the artist to the front page of one of the forerunners of the modern day tabloid.

Now, I could bore you with tales of carefully drawn pictures sent to those in the offices who would do their part of the job; tracing the initial drawings before intricately carving them into blocks of wood ready for printing… but I will not.

What came of my research however was an idea a way of taking that modern day police procedural concept, so adored by TV companies, and take it back to Victorian London.  Could I write a novel with a newspaper illustrator as the central character, solving a series of grisly murders, like those shown weekly on the cover and within the pages of The Illustrated Police News?  Why not?  And perhaps, could I link this story to my first novel and have said central character investigate and uncover the events of Memento Mori?

Some people would say that I had a ‘lightbulb moment’ but I’m afraid in my case when ideas like this formulate in my mind they are more like a ‘brain on fire moment’  and I found myself senselessly hurling myself into the process of learning everything that I could about The Illustrated Police News and its processes.

There are some excellent resources available for those interested in the newspaper and it's history, and not just those to be found on the internet.  My favourite and most trusted source of knowledge is the book 'Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: The Illustrated Police News 1864 - 1938 ' by Linda Stratmann.

    

It's  beautiful book not just in the sense of the contents, which tell the chronological story of the newspaper from its original inception, through the 'Glory years' of the late 19th century up until its eventual demise, but just through being a lovely object to hold.  It is quite large in size, like one of those annuals which I read and reread when I was younger; Warlord,  2000ad, Victor and the like.With regards to content however,  inside these pages is where I first saw the name George Purkess. 

George Purkess, the proprietor of The Illustrated Police News is the only character in Domini Mortum, who actually existed, although in truth, very little is actually known of him.  There are no known photographs of him, although he is described as “a stout, comfortable-looking man of middle age, medium height, and dark complexion."  Other than that all that I could find out about him was gleaned from an interview tat he gave to The Strand magazine, a rival of his own publication.  

In it he told me all that I needed to know about the man.  Such as the fact that he would never work in the afternoon, preferring to leave the offices for lunch at his club from which he would not return until the next day (This is a a fantastic idea that I still feel we would all benefit from today).  He also gave an isight into the process of collecting stories and portraits to feature in his newspaper.  For George Purkess, getting a good portrait of a suspected killer or victim was worth a lot, he admitted to paying up to £50 for a good portrait, an amount that would be well into the thousands now.  Mr Purkess claimed that a good portrait would do more to prevent crime than to glorify it in any way (apparently he had been told that the criminal underworld in London at the time greatly feared their picture appearing in the newspaper more than anything).

For stories the Illustrated Police News were less bothered Often copying the news stories of other newspapers word for word and adding their own garishly shocking pictures and headlines to fool the public into thinking that the IPN were publishing an exclusive piece.

But what about those headlines; 'Scared to death by a donkey', 'Battle with an owl', 'Topless female bare knuckle boxing'.  Well they obviously added something to the newspaper otherwise why would the front covers of the IPN and their bizarre stories still litter the internet over 100 years later?

But 'The Worst Newspaper in the World'?  I don't think so. Because without it I would never have written Domini Mortum and that is something that I do have Mr George Purkess and his 'Terrible' publication to be grateful for.

If you would like to find out more about the Illustrated Police News, then I would recommend that the best place to start is by visiting my Unbound page at www.unbound.co.uk/books/domini-mortum and pledging your support for my novel.  Once published you will get your name listed in it as someone who made it happen.  You will also be able to read all about the mysterious Mr Purkess and his newspaper, all wrapped up in a beautifully written murderous supernatural story from Victorian London.

Thanks 

Paul 

The Crying Game

"Death is not the end"

The first words of my novel appeared on the page without me thinking about what I was about to write.  I just started typing and there they were.  Those words affected every other word typed by me until the book's completion and the final words of the novel (which incidentally are the same).  It has been a mystery to me since that time, and I gave it a lot of thought initially, until I decided that it was just one of those things and decided not to worry about where the phrase came from any more.  That is until today when I finally, and by chance, worked it out.

You see, I cried this week and I don't know why.

This is a strange occurence for me for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, and most obviously, it was odd because I have no idea what brought it on; it just happened.  Secondly however, and this will appear even more strange when taking into context the first reason, crying is not something that I do very often, in fact I can only remember about four or five significant times throughout all of my 46 years.

Now obviously I must have cried a lot as a child up until the age of about ten, everybody does.  Since then however such displays of emotion are about as rare as hen's teeth, they do not happen with me.  This is not to say that I am a cold person, I am not.  I get emotional in times of intense heart tugging moments as much as the next person.  I get affected by those things specifically designed to make you shed a tear, like charity television nights such as Comic Relief and, in the case of this weekends annual blubfest, Children in Need.  These well orchestrated pieces of emotional trauma and blackmail by media are designed by very clever well trained people, who know exactly the buttons to press at exactly the right time to get an emotional response from the millions of people that tune in.  They have developed their art over the years, they know what works and what doesn't, they know how to stimulate that part of the brain that gets tears and cash flowing.

I am not immune to this, I choke, I shift uncomfortably in my chair, and my eyes fill with liquid.  It's an autonomic response to stimuli designed for this purpose, and of course my body reacts, I have no control over this.  But this kind of damp eyed emotion is not the kind that I am talking about.  The moment hits me but it is not expressed in the extreme, it is not what I call crying; it is something more basic than that.

No, the tears which flowed today, and which I am at a loss to remember happening anything but infrequently since the age of ten, flowed freely, unrestrained and breaking out from the shackles of the pupil.  These tears were matched with other bodily responses; sounds, sobs, sudden and repetitive shoulder shrugs, and a sense of a loss of control, if only for a moment.  You see this week's performance did not last long, I was at work, and filled with the terror that someone might see me and, since I work at a secondary school, that someone might be one of the students.  It is not something that they would forget and it would not be long before I became known as Mr Holbrook; that one that cried.

I felt it coming, you see, and so I scurried off to where I knew I would not be seen and where my actions would not overnight be etched into the annals of school urban legend.  When I had reached a place where it was safe to do so, and where I could no longer hold it together, I let it out, just for a short time, just long enough to rid myself of the feeling so that I could carry on with my day without anyone being any the wiser.  It has affected me though, because it was unexpected and came without incident or reason.

I won't write here about the other four or five times that I have cried in the last 36 years, because there is sharing and there is sharing, OK well maybe one or two of them.

In 1982 when I was twelve, I went to the cinema with my older sister. The movie that we went to see,  thinking back,  was definitely my choice not hers.  Because it was Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.  Now, I never professed to being much of a Trekkie.  Of course I watched series whenever it was on and I also really enjoyed the animated series, sometimes more than the live action original.

I was more of a Star Wars fan though, and still am in a lot of respects, despite my advancing years, but I had been to see the first Star Trek movie and had been one of the few in the cinema that had actually enjoyed it, despite the lack of action and the fact that it didn't hold a candle to Battlestar Galactica, which my Dad had sneaked me out of the house one night to see when my sisters were asleep.

For those of you that haven't seen The Wrath of Khan, where have you been and what is wrong with you? It's a great film,  one that is easily the best of the Star Trek movies, much better than the current crop.

But there is a segment at the end of the film where Spock gives up his life to save the Enterprise and has a drawn out death scene where he talks to Bill Shatner through a glass pane.  Looking back, and I have watched the film a number of times since, I'm not sure why it got to me as it did.  But got to me it did and, ever since that evening 34 years ago, my sister has revelled in that time when I burst into tears because a fictional character from a science fiction movie hammed up his death.  I'm not bitter at all, I don't blame her, that's what growing up with siblings is all about.

Another time where I went 'Full On Tear' is also related to a movie, but is not anything to do with a generic space opera and certainly has had more of a lasting effect on my life.  This is because it is my favourite film of all time. A lot of people that know me, if asked what my favourite movie was would probably say Star Wars or 'Some bloody awful horror movie from the sixties'. This is not the case.

My absolute all time favourite piece of cinema ever created is The Elephant Man by David Lynch.  It is just a beautiful thing and, although I have only seen it twice, it holds a very special place in my heart, the way that only the most special things should.  You will notice that I said that I have only seen it twice, and yet I call it my favourite;  I have seen all of the Star Wars films (even the crap ones) 20 or 30 times, The number of times I have seen Theatre of Blood is well into double figures, and The Lost Boys probably most of all.  But The Elephant Man only twice, why is this if it's my favourite?

Well it is precisely because of its power to reduce me to a blubbering wreck at the end.  I can happily watch the film all the way through, it is what filled me with my love of all things Victorian and made me want to write stories set in those times in fact.  But the last 5 minutes of that movie get me every time, uncomfortably so.

The first time I saw it, I was shocked at my reaction, I was with friends, who it did not effect and who looked at me like some kind of freak.  The second time I was alone, safe from outside eyes and prepared for the ending.  It still got me.

Which brings me back to this week's incident.

After my sudden flood of emotion today I began to think about my tears and why they had happened. I still don't know, which is worrying as that means that they could return at any time and I could still yet be the subject of classroom banter as 'that bloke teacher who burst into tears int he middle of English'.

It was as I desperately soul searched for the reason, and thought about those rare things that bring me to tears, that I remembered the ending to The Elephant Man, and with it came the answer to my inspiration for the first and last lines of Domini Mortum.

"Never.  Oh never.  Nothing will die.  The stream flows, the wind blows, the cloud fleets, the heart beats.  Nothing will die."


If you would like to read Domini Mortum, you can, I would highly recommend it.  There is a catch however; in order for it to become readable, first it has to be published and getting it published is entirely in your hands.  Domini Mortum is being crowdfunded by those lovely people at Unbound.  Please visit my Unbound page to find out more about the novel, read an extract and perhaps pledge your support.  There is nothing that will bring me to tears more than achieving my dream and you can make it happen.

www.unbound.co.uk/books/domini-mortum

Thank you.

Should the Dead stay Dead?

Should the Dead stay Dead?

I’ve been having a look back through old bits of writing lately, I say old but most of them were done in the last five years.  There are lots of bits of unused stuff there, the odd short story, ranty bits (that I produced when trying to get myself just writing anything) and then there are the unfinished novels, fully formed story ideas that are deep enough to make the grade.  Should a half-finished, once abandoned, opus ever be resurrected though?

I have about half a dozen unfinished novels in various states of repair, most of these were created in what I like to call my ‘golden age of writing’, a nine month period in my life when I seemed to be so full of ideas that I couldn’t get them written fast enough.  During this time my brain was flooded with ideas on a daily basis and I was constantly hammering on my keyboard or frantically scribbling in one of the many notepads that now litter my desk and to which I return to when feeling particularly short of ‘writing oomph’. I flew through novel ideas regularly during those times and it is quite weird to now look back on some of them and wonder just what was going through my mind.  Some of these ‘uncompleted masterpieces’ are just a handful of pages of scribble; character names and back stories, scenes and scenarios and sometimes pen pictures for the first few chapters.  Some of them however moved forward from this scribbly stage to actual content.  These pieces found themselves at the mercy of the flurry of imagination and drive created by my mind, which I now find difficult to recreate.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to why this period was so fruitful for me, despite most of the ideas and concepts never actually coming to much, and for the most part I think I can blame it on the medication I was taking.  Let me give you a bit of context;

About six years ago I suffered from a traumatic head injury, nothing too serious; there was no hospital admission, no surgery or life threatening interventions, but it was a head injury all the same.  I received sudden and repeated blows to both sides of the head over a very short period of time which, although having no physical effect on me, caused me to suffer from constant migraines and general head pain for about four months afterwards.  During this time I was off of work and spent my time at home, either asleep (my head didn’t hurt me when I slept) or in a world of silence; no television, no music, no computers, nothing through sound and vision which caused me to recoil in agony.  It was a difficult time, both for me and for my very understanding close family. 

There were two things that I found that I could do though that didn’t hurt as much and they were writing and baking.  The baking had the terrible side effect of causing me the gain weight, through the continual production and ingestion of biscuits and cakes.  The writing however, that was a different thing altogether.  You see I had never tried writing before, not anything of any length or value, and I found that I liked it, it made me feel better.

As the months wore on and my headache slowly faded into the background thanks to regular medication I finally returned to work… and decided that I hated it and hadn’t missed it at all in the four months that I had been away.  It’s not that I wasn’t good at it; I think I was. It’s just that the job satisfaction element of it had gone altogether.  This lack of enthusiasm for the job, combined with having to catch up with all the work that I had missed led me to fall into a funk which I found it impossible to shake myself out of, and which eventually led to me resigning after falling foul of those in power.

I found another job quickly enough, albeit one for half the salary, but the funk remained and I found myself very quickly sat in front of my GP, unable to crack even the most feeble of smiles.  Her response was to increase the medication that I took for my headaches, they were antidepressants anyway as apparently they had a dual use for treating chronic headaches.  The effect on my mind was almost instantaneous.  As well as helping to lift my mood and give me a better opinion of myself, I also found myself to be bursting with ideas for stories and novels.  I remember reading an article back in 1995 about Bernard Sumner of New Order.  In this article he recounts how he used Prozac to lift him out of a 15 month song writing drought.  He claimed not to suffer from depression but, at that time, there was a lot of research and discussion about the use of antidepressant, particularly SSRIs (Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors), as a creative tool.  I can certainly concur that this was the case with me, as I almost bordered on mania at times with the amount of ‘brilliant’ ideas that I was producing when I took the tablets.

Whilst writing this I have looked back at these articles and found something else pertinent to me and something which I now see when going through my old scrappy notebooks.  This is because of one of the main outcomes of the studies conducted with ‘creative types’ is that, although output increased and writing blocks could be broken, the actual content was probably not actually that good.  Quantity did not breed quality it would seem, and being a little down on yourself could actually be a good thing, and help to act as that filter that is needed to weed out the dross.

I don’t take medication to deal with my mental health issues any more, I’ve found that, on most days, the actual process of writing is enough to stamp on the demons in my mind and ‘bring the black dog to heel’ a bit (although he often howls outside my door).  I have been tempted to return to them though.  Sometimes when things have been so bad that I can see no real worth in myself as a whole, let alone words that I put together into stories, at these times I think of going back to see my GP just to get that little creative boost to get me writing again (better to write crap and exorcise the demons than not write at all).  I have resisted going back though, for now, and have looked at other avenues to get me writing, which brings me back to the whole point of this piece.

I decided to give NaNoWriMo a go this year, something to push me into writing, a way of putting myself into a headlock and squeezing something creative out of me.  I had a problem though, I am in a low and there are no great ideas for novels popping into my head.  And so I returned to the dross from the notebooks and the half started novels from a time when the reuptake of Seratonin was being thoroughly inhibited. I feel like I’m cheating a bit, using something half started to write a novel in a month, but really I don’t actually care.  The end justifies the means and all that.

The half-novel I’ve restarted is, I think, a good one, something worthy of resurrection, and reading back I wonder why I abandoned it in the first place.  I’ve added 10,000 words to it in the last week alone and at this rate I should easily meet the NaNoWriMo objective of 50,000 words in a month.  The most bizarre thing about the whole enterprise though is that it is a comedy and I find myself taking heart from the fact that some of my favourite comedy writers create funny from a dark place… and I know all about the dark places.

Hopefully my new novel will be fully written by the end of the month and past its first edit and drafting by Christmas.  If anyone fancies being a test reader for me please get in touch, and we’ll discover together if it was actually dross.

In the meantime if you would please consider supporting my crowdfunded novel Domini Mortum then I would be very grateful indeed.  Visit www.unbound.co.uk/books/domini-mortum to read an extract and find out more.

Thanks Paul