Lie To Me

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The difference between you and I, is that I say what I actually think, you lie…
No matter what I say, no matter what I do, I am always the one to blame.
Why do I try? Because to do otherwise would be to deny who I am, to do otherwise would be to pretend I think something other than what I do, simply because it might be more convenient to you.
I am often blunt, sometimes rude, I don’t mean to be… but that is the unfortunate nature of the truth; it is unpleasant to hear at times.
The only thing you need bear in mind is that there is no absolute truth; the truth as I tell it is my own. It is not wrong, for it is how I see things, and if I do not like what I see in you, telling me I don’t see it will not make it any less there. Telling me I’m wrong will not make me feel less anguished by what I felt before you so kindly told me I was incorrect.
I make mistakes, everyone does.
You lied to me.
That was yours.
I lost all respect for you in that moment and you shall now never get it back.
My respect may mean nothing to you, but without it, you get no grace; I will speak the truth, or at least my truth, whether it makes you look bad or not.
You have nobody to blame but yourself.
You lied.

I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself…

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A few weeks ago I came across a man. A virtual man. We discussed, at first, nothing but my novels. As that topic progressed we were inevitably drawn into a conversation about mental health - since both Chasing Azrael and Death Becomes Me, not to mention the previously unmentioned Butterflies Eat Dead People, have mental health as their central themes - and the fact that (as it turns out) we are both bipolar. These conversations continued over the course of two weeks, during which time we exchanged hundreds of emails, bouncing back and forth ideas about my book, discussing my experiences with bipolar and very occasionally life in general. One night, I had a panic attack. Nothing unusual for me; it happened, it passed. While I was in the throws however, I fired off a few emails to him explaining how utterly overwhelmed I was feeling. Now, a very peculiar thing happened. He seemed to get angry with me, over the most absurd things. I would say one thing, he would take it in completely the wrong way and lash out at me; I would try to explain, 'no sorry, that wasn’t what I meant at all', and he would again take issue with my explanation. No matter what I said, he was unhappy with it. I was accused of being rude, condescending, evasive, angry, even ‘unstable’. I was not, in my own opinion, any of these things, yet he quite clearly - again in my own opinion - was. The only time he seemed satisfied was when I became so fed up of his ranting (and I mean seriously long rants) that I would blame myself entirely for all that had happened, plead forgiveness and ask that we might move on. While I remained contrite he was happy, the second I was no longer grovelling he would take issue with everything I said once more. Round and round we went, much to my dismay: what had happened to the man I had so enjoyed talking with about literature and symbolism and identity, and my own writing? After several days of this I became completely exhausted and, fed up of crying and feeling guilty over something I was unconvinced was my fault, I severed all contact. He was not happy with this. He asked that we try again. Reluctantly I did, but once again as soon as I had apologised and tried to go back to talking as we had before, he became very angry. He told me he would never be speaking to me again, that he had deleted all I had sent him, and that he would never again read an email I sent him. The latter was immediately proven false as he responded at once to the rather scathing reply I sent winging his way. I resigned to leave it there; I had better things to do. As the days passed I received several more emails from him, again asking that we try to sort things out. At length I decided that I would acquiesce one final time and if, as I suspected, he reacted in exactly the same manner again, then leave it at that. How glad I am I tried that final time. I sent him a very carefully worded email, explaining that I felt we ‘set each other off’, so to speak; perhaps we were each a little overly sensitive and, when we felt we had been insulted, quick to anger. This seemed to fit with the little information he had volunteered about himself, and we had often spoken of his ‘rage’, and the anger that comes with depression. In fact, at his suggestion I put a lot more anger into Ande’s character than I ever realised was there. I do not resent that, I actually thank him for it – I am, and always have been, a very angry person at times. Having two people easily offended and easily put on the defensive, I reasoned, trying to have a conversation cannot be a good thing; perhaps this was the reason for our seeming inability to understand each other? Predictably, he exploded. Despite the fact he had asked me to explain, he did not seem willing to take my explanation into account. I was, quite simply he said, ‘wrong’, and I was once again being ‘cold’, ‘withdrawn’, etc. I attempted to explain that the reason I seemed 'cold' was that I was trying to avoid any further misunderstanding me by being very precise. He saw this as further evidence of my.... What? I cannot put a word to it. Whatever it was, he was - or at least seemed to me to be - very angry about it. At this point, I lost all patience and basically told him where to go. Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of one of my ‘I’m done with you, now please fuck off' speeches will know that they are not particularly pleasant. I am not especially proud of myself for that aspect of this story, but there you are; shit happens. Several more emails followed from him, before I became so sick of him that I simply blocked his address. The last email he sent stated the following: he had never liked me when we started talking, and had only started to like me the night I had made a ‘breakthrough’ (the night I was having a panic attack); when I reverted to ‘the start’ the morning after (i.e. when I was feeling better) he was very disappointed that I had ‘withdrawn’ and he became ‘tired’ of the pretence of liking me. This, if you recall from my own recollection, was the point I first noticed his behaviour becoming odd. He went on to say that every time he thought I was making ‘progress’ (i.e. every time I said everything was entirely my fault) he found he could be civil to me, but at other times, when I was ‘cold’ and ‘withdrawn’ again (i.e. when I was actually trying to talk to him about my writing which was, after all, the reason I was corresponding with him in the first place) he once again lost patience. He admitted that he handled things badly, however from his perspective, what he handled badly was my obvious ‘instability’. He felt bad, as I ‘clearly needed help’ and he had thought that even if he couldn’t provide it, he should be able to find someone who could. He was angry with himself, he said, but had never been angry at me. It was at this point that it became clear to me that the man in question is a total paradox. We have a mutual friend who has never seen this side of him, and I feel horrendously guilty for having placed her in such an awkward position. I sincerely hope that her friendship with this man is not altered by my own experience with him, however I am left to wonder: how is it that two women, who get on very well and have a lot in common, can interact with the same man, in the same medium, about the same subject (writing, with a footnote on personal, often traumatic, experiences) and come away each with a picture so utterly different, you would think we were talking to entirely separate individuals. Such, I fear, is the nature of bipolarity. A person who is bipolar can have three entirely separate individual ‘personalities’ if you will, existing within themselves. One is considered to be the ‘norm’, the ‘real’, one is thought to be the ‘depressed’ and one the ‘high’. Anyone who knew me when I first moved to Suffolk will have encountered the latter and not much more – they would be baffled, in fact, to have a conversation with those who knew me only when I was doing my MA at Bangor, when I was quite ‘normal’. They would be still more confused, to see the versions of me who lived through my first two years as an undergraduate and the last two years of my life to date. There are certain people in my life who know me as all three, who have always known me as all three, and have only since my diagnosis come to understand how it is that I can be three people at one. At least one of those individuals can be and often is, a total Bitch. Could it be that this man encountered my Bitchier self, who somehow only reared her head while emailing him, and ducked back down again for interactions with other friends, family, co-workers and students over the last two weeks? I have never known my cycling moods to be people-specific but perhaps they could be. Perhaps he is quite correct and I have been horrible to him. It may be conceit on my part, but I cannot believe that to be the case – too many things about him are inexplicable to me. Why talk to a girl you don’t like? I mean... really... why spend so much time and effort working on the novel of a woman you apparently can’t stand and don’t think is worth the effort? For that matter, why flip between being perfectly polite and lovely, to being arrogant, condescending, rude and downright insulting, without provocation? I am fully aware that I can, at time, be all of those things and that I have, in all likelihood been all of those things with him; today certainly, if not in the two days of arguing that occurred before I simply started ignoring him. But I understand my actions – he was being horrible to me, I reacted. He swears blind that he was never offended, nor angered by me, because he is apparently above such things, and that while I was reacting to ‘nothing’ he was being wonderfully calm and civilised, aside for the odd occasion when he handled things ‘badly’. Perhaps he is right, and I am wrong, I shall likely never know. And yet, I am not sorry for the time spent speaking with him. It afforded me with the opportunity to stare long and hard into a mirror I would otherwise have avoided at all costs. From my perspective – which I fully admit is limited – I see this man (rightly or wrongly) as being a person with rapid cycling bipolar, just like myself, who is capable of being ‘set off’ by the slightest thing, in certain situations, and once that has happened, he will bounce – just as I do – from high, to low, high to low, civil to cruel, tearful to tantrums, insightful to imbecilic, serene to selfish. On an intellectual level, I knew that I had done this. On an emotional level, I had never before experience what it is like to be the one enduring the perpetual BOUNCE. My friends, my loves, I am so, so, sorry. Truly, I did not realise what you endured. I will do better, in future.   ...I did not know what I had done. What have I done!  

But we loved with a love that was more than love…

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First of all, before you all presume this will be another tired tirade extolling the horrors of breakups and the pitfalls of love, may I pre-empt your assumptions by making the following statement: Yes, I have just been through a breakup. Yes, I’m all broken up, bitter, dark, twisty and generally melodramatic about the whole this. I’m doing the usual things one does post-breakup, self-recriminations, the blame game, and I can’t seem to fit into a pair of jeans for love nor money, as I seem to be losing weight much faster than I am able to find old pairs in smaller sizes, BUT (and it’s a big butt, although now rapidly shrinking, much to my delight), this is not about that. Honestly. I’ve come to wonder in recent years what all the fuss is about when it comes to love. And in this context it bears mentioning that I am discussing sexual/romantic love, not the other forms. Why do the poets, and musicians, and authors, and artists all expend so much energy prattling about it especially, it would seem, when they most often are discussing the negative aspects of the subject? Valentine’s Day is a thing I hate, even when I am not a lonely little singleton come the day (I have not spent a great deal of my life as a single gal, and perhaps that is part of the problem), and not because of THAT incident with the fluffy bunny bag and the Chinese restaurant (although to be fair that was pretty horrendous). No, the reason I hate Valentine’s Day so much is because it is a complete lie. I won’t warble on about that now as, for the most part, I’m sure you are all well aware of the facts in that regard. What gripes me is that I can happily despite V Day, and simultaneously love a good romance. Pride and Prejudice? One of my favourites. Those subplots that run through most TV shows and Films and Books? The main reason I partake in the majority of those TV shows and Films and Books (although I draw the line at Vampels). The point is, I love a good bit of romance, I enjoy the huge scenes where the guy finally gets the girl, or girl finally gets the guy, or girl finally gets the girl or... you get the point. So how is it I’m such a cynic when it comes to love? The easy answer is that love and romance are not even remotely synonymous. The more complex answer is that the form of love you witness in those big, huge, romantic moments, is of a kind that is seldom seem – at least in the enigmatic real world. I am talking, of course, about what is ubiquitously called love, yet most often is nothing more than changing chemical levels, firing neurons, lust, hormones, passion and, occasionally, boredom. As a person who has spent almost all her ‘adult’ life at the mercy of a mental illness which has, on occasion, caused me to confuse all these concepts with one another and more than once with love, I am perhaps better aware than most of just how different love can be from one person to another and one situation to another. The reason, I think, that the majority of material written on this subject is so depressing is that there are true forms of love that actually live up to the expectation, to the ideal, to the romance of it all. I got to thinking of this when working on the early draft of Death Becomes Me. The main character is ruminating on the subject of love:

‘Love can be transitory, or situational, it can be hot enough to burn, to consume, yet incapable of sustaining itself for long. It can be proximal, physical, emotional or reactional. Seldom is love abiding, transcendent, in a way that leaves you changed forever by its presence and forever attached to the subject of its being.’

Transitory love is self explanatory; it is the reason a couple can profess their love for each other, with complete sincerity, on their wedding day and swear their hatred with equal honesty a few months, or years, or decades later. Situational love is equally easy to understand – certain situations can lead you to fall in love with a person, and then out of love with them again just as easily once that situation has passed. Proximal love similarly can occur when two people, who happen to want to fall in love at the same time, happen to be in immediate proximity to each other at that time. This is the oddest form, in my opinion, for it is the clearest evidence I have seen that love is nothing more than a decision – you decide you want to fall in love, you attach yourself to people and continue to do so, until such a time as one of them – who has also decided they want someone to love – attaches themselves to you in return. You stay together until one decides they no longer wish to be a part of the relationship. The physical is the obvious, essentially lust. Emotional is perhaps the only one that comes close to the romantic ideal – you love someone because they make you feel. They don’t necessarily make you feel good, or happy, but they make you feel. Reactional? That’s the worst kind; it’s the kind that lands you in bed with people you hate, because something really bad just happened. These are the kinds of love that are, in general, lamented in love songs and espoused as having left a person broken-hearted. People really need to understand the difference between a bruise and a break; a bruise hurts like hell but does get better. A break sometimes doesn’t mend, and even when it does, it leaves scars. Real scars. Only true love does that to a person, and such love is a scarce occurrence. So what is this ‘True Love’ that the poets and musicians and authors and artists (and now me) all expend so much energy prattling about? That’s the other kind of love, the kind that most people only dream of experiencing but never actually encounter, the kind that is, quite literally, unconditional. Love without limits, without restrictions, recriminations, love that is always forgiven and always forgiving, that can wait an eternity and last for an eternity, whether those in love are together or separate. This is the kind of love that makes romance not only romantic, but epic, the thing that keeps us glued to the TV set, or cinema screen, or pages, even if the rest of the plot is below par, the characters two dimensional, the dialogue dull and lifeless. This is the kind of love that truly scars, for it leaves indelible marks across a person’s heart that can never be removed, will never fade. If only we could all be as blessed by such mutilations to the soul. I wish you all scars a plenty, and hope that they provide you with happiness along the way.

 

Serenity, in the strangest of places…

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I am not a person prone to melodrama. I am however, easily angered. I often become irrationally irate at those who make mamoth mountains out of their miniscule mole hills. I tend towards sarcasm, when faced by a person having a panic attack brought about by the prospect of, say, having to catch a train on one’s own, or being unable to eat a kiwi fruit for breakfast when one always eats a kiwi fruit for one’s breakfast. I must admit that, on the occasion of the kiwi incident, I pointed out that the person in question didn’t always eat one for breakfast, since there was none to be had that day and thus for at least one day, she would be forced to go without. The hysteria that ensued as a result of this comment drove me to speed all the way to the closest supermarket that was open at approximately 6.30 in the morning (a distance of around fifteen miles), and speed all the way back again, so that said kiwi fruit might be consumed and end the insanity. It was at the point of watching the consumption of the fruit that I realised the most absurd aspect of the entire fiasco; my sister does not like kiwi fruit. My point, if you will bear with me, is that I tend to be the person who has to deal with fits of melodrama, I am not at the centre of it myself. I find this particularly odd, when you consider that I have suffered from chronic panic attacks, have developed an almost pathological fear of going out in any kind of social context and I am – bizarre as it may sound – physically incapable of remaining calm when in the presence of any form of electrical equipment, which assigns a numerical value to volume, and is set on an odd number. Add to that my terror at the mention of either sharks or garden gnomes, and you would think me the most melodramatic person alive. For the most part however, these things just make me sad, or angry. They do not make me... flap. And screech. I have never been more concerned over the peculiar workings of my own brain than I have been this past year. In the last twelve months a string of the most unfortunate events imaginable has befallen me, in a manner I would usually associate only with a very bad, overly written soap opera character. I am forced to repeatedly check with impartial observers that these things have actually happened, that they are not some cruel concoction of my overly active imagination, for I genuinely struggle to believe it myself. My diagnosis with Bipolar Disorder was not, in itself, a traumatic event – it did in fact help me a great deal in understanding certain incidents from my past and certain episodes I am eager to forget yet seem doomed to repeat on a semi-regular basis. The aftermath of that diagnosis however, was not easy: psychiatrists, therapists, psychotherapists, drugs, reading and reading and constantly reading in an effort to understand me 'condition', all the while dealing with the tumultuous rollercoaster in which my physical, mental and emotional pygmies dwell. For some reason, I have always pictured the inside of my head as a giant playground which, for reasons I cannot explain, is shaped like a giant tea cup and contains all manner of oddities, the most prominent of which being an elaborate rollercoaster. Only one cart ever rides the tracks, but it is populated by a small troop of pygmies, each of whom controls one or more aspects of my personality. From time to time, these little fellows scuffle and, occasionally, one or two of them topple out, leaving a great gaping void within me as I find there is no longer anyone in control of, say, my emotional stability. At times like these I generally find that rather strange things occur, as the poor little folk who have been kicked off the ride endeavour to clamber back into the cart. The cart has, on occasion, come off the rails entirely. In the midst of this I had to endure the sheer hell that accompanies coping with someone you love being diagnosed with Cancer, the stress of which triggered my own quirks and very nearly killed me. Barely recovered from this I had, in quick succession, to deal with my house burning down, the end of my engagement, moving back in with my mother (until I had done it I honestly could not think of a worse fate) and my beloved Nanny passing away after a long and incredibly painful illness. I write this now, two weeks after the latter, for I was previously unable to put pen to paper. There was a day, just after Nanny died, when I stood in the unadulterated wreckage that had once been my home and stared in dismay and the charred remains. At this point, I was eternally grateful to my Nanny that she had chosen to be buried, rather than cremated. A more horrendous thought I could not envisage, that confining her to flames, reducing her to ash, and stowing her in a pot. Perhaps it is due to the numerous times I have excavated cremated human remains that I am painfully aware of the indignity of it in the end. These were my thoughts as I trudged through what had once been my living room. I was so distressed by the site of my special edition leather bound Terry Pratchett books, now melted into the shelf upon which they had been so proudly displayed, that I did not even notice that my boot, sock and foot were being attacked by still-smouldering debris. It was not until I got home and took of said boot that I realised a hole had burnt straight through it, my sock, and several layers of skin. There have been many points in my life when I have genuinely felt that I could not possibly cope with the world. I have hidden myself away from it, attempted to escape it, or simply ignored it. That particular day, I was awaiting the crushing fear to suffocate me once again, as I wandered the shell of my life attempting to find something salvageable, yet The Fear never came. Two weeks later, I am still awaiting its arrival. I do not know if it is the fact that I am now under the care of a psychiatrist who has me well and truly medicated, or if my Nanny was somehow able to bequeath me the Amazonesque strength I had always known her to possess, when she passed on from this world to whatever awaits beyond. Either way, I walked from living room to kitchen, certain that this would once and finally be the end of me, and saw something so beautiful that I was transfixed. When I finally came back to my senses, having spent a considerable amount of time lost in the sight of this, I snapped the photo you see here, on my phone. Somehow, looking at it now, I cannot quite find the effulgent perfection I saw that day, but I tell you, it was there. I was still clutching the phone in my hand, transfixed by this sight, when it beeped, startling me out of my funny little revere. I had received an email, informing me that Chasing Azrael had been placed on the short list for Nemesis’ competition. It occurred to me, in that second, that Chasing Azrael is not a book I ever would have written were it not for the events that had lead me to that very moment. Were it not for my bipolar, that book would quite simply have never taken shape in my mind. I wrote it, quite simply, out of a need to explain to myself why it was so very important – for the sake of my family, if not myself – that I did not take my own life. Those of you who have read it will understand why, those of you who haven’t, well, I hope you soon shall. I wrote it, to explain to myself things I did not even realise I found counfounding. And even now, as I work through each draft and re-write, I find myself finding more and more in it that I ever realised. In that one, obscure moment, I had an overwhelming sense of something I thought would elude me forever: serenity. I stood in what had once been my kitchen, contemplating the fact that a person who was incredibly special to me was now gone from my reach. I saw that I was alone in the world, yet again, for even if the house was rebuilt the relationship that had drawn me to it completely lost to me. And for the first time in my life, I did not despair. I did not cry, or shake, or panic, or struggle to drag air into my unwilling lungs. I felt simply and only that somehow, in some way, everything was going to be just fine, one way or another. You may well be wondering what the subject of that photo is. People have looked at it since and thought it to be the sunset, a cloudy sky, something I had Photoshopped or edited in some way. It is none of these things. It was in fact, a pot of jam. A pot of homemade jam to be precise, which I had left sitting on the kitchen windowsill the morning of the fire, hot water within to soak off the last remnants of the raspberries. I am forced to wonder, given these events, if perhaps there is a great deal more truth to my Nanny’s favoured expression than I ever gave her credit:  

‘Sufficient unto the Day is the Evil Thereof’

Matthew 6:3

 

Chasing Azrael

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I'm both delighted and astounded today. I entered Chasing Azrael into a debut novel competition being run by Nemesis Publishing a while back. I just received an email to tell me it has made the longlist (of about 20 books). I'm literally gobsmacked. And unbelievably excited. I'm just going to take this opportunity to say that - whatever the outcome - I love the fact that Nemesis are running a competition like this, and giving anyone a chance to enter. I shall now be awaiting the end of the month, and the announcement of the shortlist, with breath that is baited....

Let them eat Cake….

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If Marie Antoinette ever actually uttered these words, she really was onto something. For years now I have struggled with the age-old conundrum of how to make students actually DO THEIR WORK. I remember being an undergraduate, I know how often I actually did the reading for seminars myself, I do sympathise with them to a certain extent. I also recall that the laxness lasted until the end of first year, and then I actually started to do the work. In fairness to me, I was doing an Archaeology and Ancient History degree, and I’d just completed an A Level in both subjects, so I’d already read everything I needed to read for first year.... Most of my students cannot say the same. I’m joyous this term as I do not – for the very first time – have first years to teach. I have them next semester, but until Christmas I’m blissfully free. As a result, I have become determined to ensure that my second and third years are lavished with the attention I am usually giving the young ones. Consequently, I’ve turned my efforts to ways I can make seminars as fun – and productive – as possible, and of course, ways to make them do the reading. As it turns out, making them work is considerably simpler than one might expect. I simply informed them that there would, in future, be CAKE. If they had done the reading and were able to contribute to the seminar and complete the exercises/tasks/questions I set, they get cake. If not, they get to watch while everyone else eats cake. Day one of this experiment was yesterday, and I have to say, it was a huge success. Not only did they enjoy the seminar, they actually engaged well with the material, learned a lot, answered and fully understood the questions they were given. I’ll say it again, because its such a wonderful tactic: LET THEM EAT CAKE!

Vampels

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I was really quite distressed the other day. Upon entering WHSmiths in order to peruse the new releases section, I was startled to find a new section had been inserted next to ‘Teen Fiction’. This section was entitled ‘Books With Bite’. It was an entire section dedicated to the phenomenon that is teen vampire novels. Yes, it is true. No longer confined to the realms of YA and Teen Fic, vampire novels are officially taking over the literary world. Not only do they have their own section – particularly noteworthy since Fantasy and Science Fiction have to share a section – there are more books in this section than can ever be found in the aforementioned Fantasy/Sci Fi section. While some of these books were simply novels which happened to include vampires in some form (one of which a Dr Who novel, particularly distressing since the ‘vampires’ in question are actually aliens), the majority contain one very simple plot: boy meets girl, boy turns out to be a Vampire, girl falls madly in love with him anyway, worlds collide. There is usually some form of a subplot involving the girl being placed in mortal peril, most often as a direct result of her contact with the boy, but other than that they are wholly predictable. Now I freely admit that, having grown up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer since the age of twelve, I am very much a diehard Buffy/Angel fan. That said, Joss Whedon had the wisdom to ensure the pair never remained together for too long before they were parted permanently. Such romances are doomed to failure. The issue with the endless string of teen-vampire/human-romance novels is as follows: 1)      The complete lack of discernible plot. 2)      The presence of what are, for the most part, entirely two-dimensional characters whose only legitimate personality trait is the tendency to fall hopelessly in love with one whom they can never reasonably have – its Romeo and Juliet in a world of juvenile fantasy, a realm in which the last original thought appears to have been thunk well over a decade ago. 3)      The inexplicable popularity and borderline obsession that springs up whenever one of these books is published and the repetitive nature of each and every offering. It seems that talent is not a pre-requisite for a budding author peddling such manuscripts, for some of the ones I have read (which I admit is not EVERY one so I cannot comment on the percentages of crap to reasonable to decent) have been dire. I will admit to a passing liking for the Twilight Series, although not for the plot. The plot is predictable, repetitive, completely unoriginal and lacking in any form of imagination which, considering it's a fantasy, is bordering on absurd. I enjoyed the writing however so after I read the first one – as I often do to see if the hype is deserved – I read the next two. Still haven’t got around to the fourth. There seemed little point as I already knew exactly what would happen and, nice as the writing was, it wasn’t nice enough to endure more of the clichéd stupidity. The real question though, is which is worse – the bite or the hype? By ‘bite’ I mean the quality of the actual books which, although they do seem to be hugely popular – are in my opinion for the most part not worth the paper upon which they are printed. It’s really the trees I feel sorry for in this situation. The hype however may be worse, for I am of the firm belief that the reason so many people read these books is because they are told, repeatedly, that they’re really popular and really good. The good little sheep go out to read them so as to avoid being excluded and thus they become instant hits and the hype gets worse. It seems to have reached a point where a little bit of Vamp in your books guarantees itself as a bestseller before anyone has even read it, so long as it has one very simple thing: advertisement. Really, all you need to be able to do is tell enough people that a new vampire novel is coming out, and let the sheep do the rest. The real result is an ever increasing number of Vamp novels – now grown so large that WHSmiths have a dedicated section, even in small branches – and an ever decreasing market for any fantasy novel which DOESN’T include a bit of un-dead action. It almost makes me think I should just write a Vampel and have done with it, get it published, presumably become an instant success, and then get to writing the serious stuff. Two things stop me: first I can’t actually bring myself to do it, for while I love a bit of fanged mischief I prefer it to be original and not in the context of a human romance. Second, there MUST be more to it that this, really there must, because if it was that easy to become an instant bestselling author, surely everyone with even an iota of writing skill and little integrity (or a genuine love of such stories, I’m told these people do exist) would be doing it...   ... oh wait. They are. Buggar.

Trolls and Tribulations…

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In recent days I have become very aware of the fact that the internet is a place of danger and confusion. I speak not of the obvious hazards of predators and strange sex sites, but rather of the seemingly normal people who frequent forums which are, ostensibly, for the purposes of discussing rational and relevant issues. Why is it that so many people are angered by the glib comments and flippant remarks made on forum threads? I count myself as one of these people, as I am often enraged by the comments people make, usually because they are totally unfounded. It is so, so easy to misunderstand something that is being said when you are reading it in text format, rather than hearing a person speak aloud. I have the same problem with texts messages: jokes are misread as serious comments, sarcasm is totally missed, and an innocent question can suddenly become the gravest of insults. Trolling is quite the opposite of course, for there are people who seem to be on internet forums for the sole purpose of causing trouble and insulting people. What on earth is the motivation for this? I have no idea. The mentality that leads to picking fights with anyone and everyone for no apparent reason is something I have never, and will never, understand. What troubles me is the ease with which it is possible to misinterpret a comment, or a string of comments, and come to the erroneous conclusion that a person is doing this, when in fact that was not their intention at all. I am very much of the belief that everyone is entitled to their opinion and entitled to voice said opinions. The problem, so far as I can tell, comes in the manner in which those opinions are phrased. I have recently taken issue with a number of people, not so much because I disagree with what they are saying (although in some cases this is so) but more because of the way in which it was said. Disagreeing with someone does not mean you have to personally insult them, yet for some reason a lot of the time when one person disagrees with the other, the conversation degenerates into a string of meaningless insults which were, for the most part, founded on a misunderstanding. Person A disagrees with person B, person B misreads the comment as a personal insult and responds in kind, person A, not realising that person B thinks they have been insulted, believes they have just been on the receiving end of an unfounded and unprovoked attack and goes on the defensive. A verbal battle ensues which has nothing to do with the original disagreement and everything to do with the fact that both parties believe they have been unjustifiably insulted. I have been a part of such discussions – either as person A, person B, or a friend of either/or both parties – and the results are never pleasant. I wonder why it is so easy to misinterpret, and why people are so quick to see the negative in everything. I know why I do it – I have low self esteem and simply assume that everyone is insulting me – but this cannot be true of everyone. And why is it, when text is such a misunderstood medium of communication, that books have provided us with such a rich and varied means of communication and idea exchange since mankind first realised they could record their thoughts, feelings, theories and stories? Does every person reading a book come away from it believing it said the same thing, or does each individual read it in a different way and come away having read an entirely different book? I always say that my favourite books are those that make you really think. I’ve often noted that such books are not the ones that hit the bestseller lists, are not the popular genre novels, the serialised characters. I wonder if this is because every person that reads them thinks, being as they are individuals, so very differently that the book itself becomes a dimensional convergence: the book exists at one point in time and space but simultaneously occupies multiple dimensions, in each a different version of the same book, created when a new person reads it. To my mind, really good books are the Schrödinger's cat of the literiverse...

Loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud…

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Shakespeare had a real thing for flowers. Lilies, daffodils, roses, carnations, poppies, violets, lavender... Marigolds for some strange reason. What are we to make of this? Shakespeare could have been an obsessive gardener but it seems more likely that he was simply commenting on that elusive thing for which he had such a keen eye: beauty. Being Shakespeare however, it isn’t nearly as simple as various characters noting that flowers are pretty. No, flowers tend to represent something, a concept, an ideal, some dig at a chosen establishment. I like this notion; flowers as beautiful representations of concepts of beauty. While we can certainly say that there are many instances where the flowers of Shakespeare are there for the sake of the image – Titania lulled to sleep in a bed of flowers is a particularly lovely one (A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 2, Scene 1, 259-260) – there are equally instances which make me think. Possibly the best know flower related quote from Shakespeare’s numerous works is Juliet’s immortal line about the rose, the one that by any other name would smell as sweet (Romeo and Juliet Act 2, Scene 2, 45-46). Juliet wasn’t really talking about a rose, just as Ophelia wasn’t commenting on primroses when she spoke of the path to libertine decadence (Hamlet Act 1, Scene 3, 46-51). Juliet’s rose was putting forward a very simple thought - what matters is what something is, not the name by which it is known. The Name Game has always intrigued me. The English Rose is the name given to a particular type of women with soft features and classical beauty; a demure, kind and undeniably feminine woman. Prim on the other hand is a word used to describe a person of straight-laced correctness. Combine the two and you have a prudish beauty that looks rather like Keira Knightly. This is what I tend to think when confronted by a primrose – a prim rose. Shakespeare’s path of primroses could not represent anything more diametrically opposed to this image. Strange how things change. Another way to paraphrase Juliet would be to say ‘never judge a book by its cover’. I disagree. A book cover is essential for several reasons. I have to say I often judge a book by its cover. I remember the first ever high fantasy novel I ever read. I was about fifteen at the time and had been buying books for about a year – at that point I believe my purchases were limited to TV tie-ins of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel – and I saw a book, in a shop, which I immediately bought. I didn’t read the back. I didn’t flick through. I didn’t even notice the title. I liked the picture. It conjured images of a magical realm in which I desperately wished to immerse myself and so I did, that very night. I read the whole thing straight through and then trundled back to WHSmiths the following day (not an easy task for a fifteen year old living in the middle of nowhere) and bought the next in the trilogy. I was distraught at having to wait what seemed like an eternity for the final instalment. This was how I became enamoured with Fantasy novels. My collection has steadily grown since and while I admit that I don’t often chose a book now based solely on the cover picture, the cover is still important. A title can capture your imagination. The familiar name of an author you know you love, is enough to compel you to buy the book even though it's currently only out in hardback and outrageously expensive (something, you note in consternation, which never used to happen with this guy’s books, back in the days when nobody knew who he was and you could pick up his newly released paperbacks from about £4). And yes, the picture is still enthralling at times – you see dragons and pick it up to see if it’s any good, why? Because you love dragons. If the cover had been plain and dull, you would never have picked it up, but because there was a dragon on the front, breathing fire, you buy it, and the next one, and the other seventeen currently published in that series not to mention putting in a pre-order with Amazon for the next. Covers are important. Names are important. Titles are important. This is not to suggest that the content is not equally, if not more important, simply that when the outside is appealing, a person is more likely to discover what is on the inside. If a rose smelled like horse manure, would we still notice it was beautiful? If it looked like the wrong end of a partially decomposed skunk, would we notice that it smelled nice? And if it was called a dung bush, would we really be inclined to pluck them for our significant others on valentine’s days and anniversaries and times when you have inadvertently spent several weeks lost on your laptop and failed to notice they’ve actually left you... Everything is about pitch in publishing – you have to pitch your book to an agent, they have to pitch it to a publisher, the book itself has to have a pitch on it to entice people to buy it and thus encourage both agent and publisher to take notice of the next pitch you make, for your next book... Even if you have a great pitch, they may well ignore it completely, because the appearance of it is all wrong (the author has neglected to consult the formatting guidelines for submissions and has submitted it, horrors, 1.5 spaced instead of double), the name isn’t right (they don’t recognise it, therefore the author has no previous publications, therefore it is probably worthless), and the author has committed the cardinal sin: there is no teen vampire love triangle involved. In a world where hugely successful authors turn out book after book of drivel, which people buy simply due to its packaging (known author, nice cover, and a lovely ‘from the bestselling author of....’ tagline across the top), one wonders why we bother to keep writing. Even if, and I stress the word IF, you ever manage to produce something that is genuinely good, getting people to notice that its good is virtually impossible. We live in a materialistic world which, for the most part, care more about liking what everyone else likes, because someone else told them to like it, than they are with actually forming an original thought and deciding that, yeah, it's different but that's why I love it! And there is another problem – originality. Is there any such thing as an original story anymore? I was told repeatedly that the Harry Potter books were simply amazing and like nothing I had ever read before. When I eventually got around to reading them I discovered that they were quite correct, for while I had read everything in those books numerous times, I had never before come across it couched in such terrible prose and involving so many two dimensional characters. Why keep writing? It’s clearly pointless. Except it isn’t, for there is nothing worse than I person who complains about the state of something and yet does nothing to change it, a person who would rather continue to read drivel and complain about it that knuckle down and do a better job of it. No, it really isn’t as easy as it looks and yes, it will probably prove utterly fruitless when all is said and done BUT:

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;

Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,

And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.

Sonnet 35.

When nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.

As it turns out, Mufasa was right…

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As a child my favourite film was undoubtedly The Lion King. I watched it repeatedly and, I have to admit, bought it on DVD a few years ago as I’m still very fond of it. A couple of weeks back, I found myself thinking of the same line from that film over and over again. I couldn’t get Mufasa telling Simba ‘everything you see exists together in a delicate balance...’ out of my head, and while I was trying to figure out what it was about this particular line that was so important, I suddenly realised – Mufasa was right. Call it karma, call in physics, call it whatever you will, but I truly believe that for every force in the universe, there is an equal and opposite force at work. Several years ago, I started writing a book. This book has now gone through so many incarnations that I can’t even remember what the original was, although the main characters – Ronan and Aiyana – have always remained the same. Those who know me from Authonomy.com will know that Aiyana is my screen name. The reason for this is simple: of all the characters I have ever dreamed (and there have been many) Aiyana is the most important to me, so much so that when I finally finished the design for her tattoo, I got the back portion of it done myself. The world in which this book takes place is named Aäden, and what started out as a single book developed into a quartet, which in turn developed into a sixteen book series, which I have called Sagas of Aäden. I hope that you will at some point see them in print, but until you do the basic premise of this entire series is very simple - balance. The reason I love Aiyana so very much is because she is the embodiment of a concept that has been very dear to me for a long time. I have often wondered why this notion of balance was so important to me, then last year the most startling thing happened. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It has taken me the better part of a year to come to a point where I understand this diagnosis enough to put my feelings about it into words. I still haven’t got it all figured out, I doubt I ever will, but one thing has become blindingly apparent: balance is far more important to me than a simple notion flitting around my head. Mufasa was right. A person needs to understand that balance, firstly in order to maintain it – which for me, and others like me, is of paramount importance to mental health – but also in order to understand themselves, the things they have done, and the things they are likely to do in the future. How strange it is, that for years before I had any idea what was wrong with me, my subconscious was telling me how to make it better. Moreover it was in my writing that this feeling, this belief, most prominently displayed itself. I have no idea if my work will ever be published, although I would dearly love it to be seen in print, but what I do know is that I will never stop writing. My Aädenian books provided an outlet for a lot of issues that I didn’t even realise I had at the time. I learned to deal with the inexplicable aspects of my life by channelling it into characters I created; I gave them my pain and then found a way for them to deal with it. In so doing I found I was better able to deal with it myself. This was astoundingly helpful and kept me from being quite such a misanthropic, self-pitying lunatic. The mad woman still occasionally ventured out of the attic, but for the most part my writing kept her firmly locked away where she couldn’t bother me so much. Once I finally had my diagnosis, I found myself relying on this ‘therapy’ more and more, for knowing what was ‘wrong’ with me actually posed more questions than it answered. So I wrote Chasing Azrael, a book which is extremely personal to me and which I would dearly love to be read by others, not because I want to be a published and successful author (not that I'd mind), but because the one thing that has become blindingly apparent since I was first told I was bipolar, is that the world is sorely uneducated on the subject of mental illness. I fully admit to being guilty of this myself before I found I actually have a mental illness and began to educate myself. What I would dearly love is for people to read my book and find themselves coming away from it with a deeper understanding of what it means to suffer, not only from bipolar, but also from various other mental illnesses. The way I see it, if one person reads my book and walks away from it better able to deal with the world, my work will have been worth it. But how am I to reconcile the fact that I somehow seemed to have known on some level, from the time that this condition first manifested, what was wrong with me? Is the cosmic balance at work in the universe (or at the very least in my own brain) the manifestation of some divine being? I find this difficult to believe, since it would necessitate the conclusion that those who suffer from any form of imbalance within themselves have somehow offended the gods. Or perhaps they have pleased the gods, and the reason they are so unbalanced is that they have been gifted with some super-human power to see the world as it really is.... I’m kidding. Although that would make a great book :-) Suffice to say that I have yet to find a reasonable explanation for the manner in which my writing explains the world to me. One would think it impossible for something I wrote myself to tell me anything I did not already know, but it really isn’t. The only thing I can say by way of explanation is that I have faith in whatever powers that be allowed such a thing to happen. Perhaps it is as simple as my subconscious finding a way of explaining things to my conscious mind. Perhaps there really is some divine being out there. Perhaps it really doesn’t matter – as long as it makes me feel better, I will keep writing, for who knows what else my subconscious knows that I have yet to figure out. If you are interested in my writing I’m flattered. If you like my artwork I’m delighted. If you find you have anything to say on either then please, feel free to comment. But until I hear from you, I’ll leave you with another quote from one of my very favourite things to watch: Faith manages...