At some point last year, I took my second novel, Out of the Sighs, off the market. What began as a serialised eight-part story, in 2020/21 (a Covid project), was then edited into a behemoth of a novel. I gave myself deadlines and did my best to work to them, and so what was released was a novel as best it could be in the time I had given myself to do it - great sales pitch this, eh?
But Amazon is not like traditional publishing, this doesn't have to be the end of the story. Within a week, which is how long it takes to read the thing - in-between the day job - I saw this and that and all manner of things I felt the need to rectify. Because it's Amazon, and I have control over the output, I could. My apologies to the 20 or so people who bought that first edition – but look at it like this, it's a first edition. But then there was a second edition, a third edition and now we're on a fifth edition.
At some point last year, with all this in mind, troubled and berating myself (default position), I took the thing off Amazon, with a view to editing it again. But then, life.
Where’s the time to do everything? I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit mad, impulsive, up and down, all over the place – often the world. I’m constantly having to manage myself and regulate my emotions, and sometimes I just can’t do it. Perhaps to say I’m a bit mad is an understatement. I’m not the average mad, like most of us are, when we really look at ourselves. I’m a three-time psych ward, six months in rehab, kicked out of college, failed uni twice, juvenile criminal type of guy - some CV. I’ve seen counsellors for years of my life. I’ve tried to manage myself with alcohol, drugs (legal and illegal), food, money, buying shit, extreme exercise, travel and AA – amongst many other things. When the shit hits the fan, I’m not having a bag of revels and a night in front of Netflix – I might try that option – I’m thinking about self-harm and wondering if this will be the time I get the nerve to kill myself. This is who I am, it’s deep-rooted. I’ve had periods of years of remission from this, but it still simmers underneath and from time to time pops up, sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for a couple of months - this is not a plea for help, I'm used to it.
This is who I am besides being a writer, but then perhaps the two things aren’t interchangeable. Who knows? I know that the things I write are essentially an exorcism. I try to think about the reader (or audience); I try to adopt certain styles, things I’ve learnt over the years; I try to write well, but beyond the fantasy that might surround some of my work, is me. Drinking the Moon is my experience on a psychiatric ward, written in third person; Out of the Sighs is set in the future, but really the nuclear explosion is my madness, the supporting characters my base temptations (perhaps the base temptations of man), and the mostly mild-mannered protagonist is me, trying to keep his shit together, against all odds. I don’t always know this at the time of writing. I remember writing a play, The Meeting, and my sister came to see it and said all the characters seemed like splinters of my personality. I didn’t feel like that’s what I was doing, but it made a lot of sense looking back at it. But then perhaps a lot of writers do this. I often think of Carl Jung’s assertion that everybody in our dreams is actually just us (I heard that in Gollum voice). In fact, I’ve been writing a novel for well over a decade inspired by that thought. We might write/dream about other people as we see them, but it very much springs from our own well, our perception.
The trouble I sometimes have with this writing of self, and it’s the same trouble with writing a blog, which I’ve mostly, but not wholly, managed to resist for this reason, is it all feels a bit narcissistic. And this, for me, triggers the self-criticism. The barrage of negative thoughts about myself, which admittedly all feels a bit cruel, when I manage to step outside of it and look at myself. I try to be a good person, I contribute to my community, and care about people – in my life, and in my job. I mean, why am I sometimes so hard on myself for writing about myself? There’s a whole genre of this, autofiction – I’m still yet to read Karl Ove Knausgaard. Even before this now popular genre, there were the Roman à clefs – famously, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Why does writing in this way, which is an expression not a document of autobiography, and also very much a craft, become something I’m continually having to work through to accept about myself?
Drinking the Moon took 10 years and many bouts of self-doubt to overcome, before I finished it. The Death of John Bacchus – which is the Jung inspired meta-novel – has been 15 years in the making, and at times feels very close, but at other times – like now – seems quite far off being completed. In those two periods of time, which overlap, there have been bouts of self-harm, suicidal ideation, drink and drugs – and the persistent (and currently long-enduring) battle against it.
Which brings me back to Out of the Sighs, the only novel I’ve written entirely in sobriety – I’ve written a few plays and poems, but no novel. When I look at those time scales, is it any wonder that this book, a mere four years or so after I started it, feels incomplete? 180,000 words of unwieldy adventure set in the not-so-distant future in the Black Country, which at the core of it is me. Perhaps it’s because it’s also about the battle to remain sober and that battle never ends. It sometimes feels like it has, but then you get a swift reminder that it’s not done with you when Christmas comes and you put on a couple of stone, because even though the season has ended, the sugar has not – and with it, the negative barrage of thoughts I so readily associate with addiction. The book is the same. It feels like it’s ended, you feel like you’ve wrapped it up, but then you realise what’s missing and it’s just not good enough.
I guess it’s just the process.
The difficulty here is, Out of the Sighs is set in 2028 – 2032. I don’t have 10 or 15 years to complete it. I could, of course, amend the time scales, but it was also an expression of Covid and other things of its time. So, I’ve made the decision to go against myself and put it back out there. A cross between Shameless and The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps Netflix will pick it up.
With all this in mind, it’s as cheap as Amazon will allow me to sell it for, bearing in mind its size. But I really don’t want to make any money off it. This is not a pitch. Amazon will allow you to give the Kindle version away for free for certain periods of time and, as soon as I can, I will. So, don’t buy it in print, don’t buy it yet. Wait and get it for free, if you want to read it.
The truth is, a novel, a film or a painting, whatever the art form, it can always be improved. There is no such thing as perfection. And hopefully, if I put this back out there, it's one thing off the list of life, which seemingly grows every day.
Happy reading all, or sad reading, or sexy, science, thrilling reading, whatever floats your boat!
Comments