On Writing

I had proclaimed since I was twenty that I would publish my first book by the age of thirty, what this book would be about I wasn’t so sure, but I knew I would publish, I had iron determination. I also felt and expressed that the book wouldn’t be a great book, but a start to a writing career I had dreamed of since reading Stephen King novels during my early teenage years. His characters seemed often to be writers I had observed. To develop a great book, I believed would take time and would evolve from practice and applying oneself.

 

In my mid-twenties I tried to write an abstract science-fiction novel and I focused myself into working daily on this project during an intense period of neuro-biologic illness and malaise. The characters were fantasy creations symbolising ego states or levels of consciousness. The female lead was the wise leader of the group of three and I called her Ahania, a name taken from the English poet and mystic William Blake’s prophetic works. Ahania was almost a sage who had become post-human having being born off-planet on a Lunan colony. The Earth seemed to be stuck in the past to the Lunans, visiting seemed an academic exercise for live history lessons. Earth, was a museum visit. The Earthlings seemed to be weighed down by heavy gravity; the Lunans in contrast had transcended larval-limitations and had become light and ethereal. Analogously, they were noble gases. Racism had been transcended because the Lunans had blended and mixed in unification with other races having started out in their early history as a small collection of several different races. The Lunans even had Grav-cars which I realise seems a dreadfully clichéd trope, but they were easier to utilize in a low-gravity environment that was underpopulated and underdeveloped and so not encumbered by architectonic obstacles. Lunan spelling had become modified somewhat similarly to how American English differs from English English. They would spell the word “of” for instance “ov”.   

 

My aim was to publish the book as soon as I could, and with the money that I hoped to make I intended to pay for a doctor for private treatment of my illness, but around six months into writing the novel I became so ill that I knew that I needed treatment in the immediate rather than waiting for the future possibility of a publishing deal. I’d had such a negative experience with the NHS team on Streatham High Road that I couldn’t bear the thought of re-experiencing these aggressive and hostile high EE risk workers, but I resolved that on my next pay date I would travel into London city centre and ask to see a doctor at Guy’s and Saint Thomas’ hospital on Westminster.

 

On payday I was waiting at the post-office where I received my allowance and I saw that there was an elderly woman standing in the queue who suffered from a condition known as Tardive Dyskinesia. The symptomatology involves opening and closing one’s mouth like a marinal species which seemed at the time to be an irreversible condition caused by neuroleptic medications. I was immediately gripped by anxiety and apprehension, I was a young man, I didn’t want to look like a lung-fish.

 

I rode the 159 bus to Guys and Saint Thomas’ and I asked a nurse at the reception desk of the casualty department if I could see a doctor. I described my symptomatology and she took me around the other side of the counter and gave me a battery of questionnaires to fill out and she presented a small plastic box and said “put your finger in here” and I obliged and a spike was driven into the tip of my finger that I retracted with a pained “ouch!” I was asked to go and sit back in the waiting area where “a doctor will be out to see you for further consultation”. I sat down with a pen and mulled over the novel I had just printed out in the cybercafé and made corrections.

 

A psychiatrist and CPN presented themselves to me, they were Afro-Caribbean and I was warned that depending on what I said, I could potentially become involuntarily hospitalised. The psychiatrist asked a series of questions and upon ascertaining that I’d had a middle-class upbringing recommended a course of cognitive behavioural therapy rather than having psychopharmacological assistance. For the CBT however there was a six month waiting list but I urgently needed to find the off-setting for the neuro-biological complaints I was experiencing. I demanded medication, but having seen someone with Tardive Dyskinesia earlier in the morning I said, “Please, don’t prescribe me with anything that gives one that horrid condition”. The doctor thought the descriptions of the complaints I had given him sounded more like “schizotypy” than “schizophrenia” and he wrote “mild-psychosis” in the printed ink-box of his diagnostic sheet. He prescribed me with a week’s supply of Risperdal. I ingested the first tablet whilst still in the pharmacy section of the hospital and I walked the six miles back to Streatham.

 

When I awoke the following morning I was completely pellucid of mind and spirit. The effect had been much quicker than expected, I had wondered if I might have even been given a placebo, and I sat upright in bed for five whole minutes delighting in the revelry that I could now internally think again. I was back again, hello, where have you been? I thought to myself, this will be such a beautiful day today, and my room was around the back of the house, my curtains drawn with a white sheet underneath the curtains so the cotton was double-layered, we’d also had cloud all through the week and I knew before I stepped out onto the street we would have the hottest day of the year, it was mid-August, there was not a cloud in the azure sky. I was once asked at a job interview where I had applied to work with epilepsy patients “can you recount for me the happiest day of your life?”, and I could only stutter because I could think of any other day.

 

I had begun to notice however that I would see thin hair like strands, sometimes moving through the oxygen enriched environment and sometimes on the page of the book I would be reading. I would attempt to brush the hair away and then again and there would be no hair at all. That evening before sleeping I experienced my first ever dry orgasm and it seemed weird and I panicked. Thankfully, this wasn’t a permanent feature of the medication and business was resumed as usual the following night.

 

I noticed that my writing had become affected and I knew that I couldn’t work on the novel anymore and I placed the writing of six months to one side and never looked at it again. Instead, I started work on writing short stories, gone was the dense and technical Joycean-Pynchonean abstracta and a new simpler and pellucid form emerged. My aim now was to try and publish in a magazine, but I began to notice a paucity of magazines for short story writers and a goal of publishing in Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine seemed unlikely as the standard seemed set too high for young inexperienced writers. They published Stephen King, I wasn’t quite at that level.  

 

The first story that I wrote was a science-fiction fantasy about a twenty-something girl who had recently lost her lover to an accident during an atom smashing laboratory experiment. Her lover was presumed dead, but of whom had actually become this mysterious essence who could exist like a spirit in matter. He would leap across streets from lamppost to lamppost as he followed and observed his former girlfriend from invisible and unseen places. His method of communicating to the girl was perceived and interpreted by her as mysterious synchronicities. There were several such short stories and several such rejection slips accumulating in the mail rack in the communal lobby area where I lived. I found taking rejection and criticism unbearable and so I left the envelopes unopened.

 

I turned to poetry as a last refuge for poor writing, I only had a year left before I reached 30 and the deadline age I had set for publishing. I wrote a poetry book in a way that one should never write a poetry book, the overall message had already been taught by Von Daniken so in addition to its other shortcomings, it was also unoriginal. These were the first pieces of poetry I had written since childhood, and out of the year I put all but two pieces that I’d written into the book. One should reject at least thrice more than one accepts for publication I believe in hindsight. I self-published the book later in the year and shortly afterwards I had the surprising luck of having a piece accepted for a poetry anthology. I kept the letter unopened on the rack downstairs for two weeks until one day I felt so low and depressed that I thought a rejection slip would really make no difference at all, but when I opened the letter it was an acceptance and I was pleasantly cheered of spirit. Frabjous day.

 

A friend I knew from an online UK chatsite told me about a social-media site where I could post my poetry and I became a member. Through this site I met other people like myself who liked to read and write and I became encouraged into writing and posting several pieces a day. In addition, off-line, I was writing a fantasy concept book of poetry and ritual magick called The Rise of the Stormcaller and the work began with a rain-dance chant that I can still remember.

 

“Let the thunder come,

Let the thunder drum,

Cover the earth with rain”.

 

I also wrote a thirty-page piece that was an attempt at anglicising the universe. I knew the universe didn’t really speak English, but I liked the idea and wanted to try to condense the universe into a book if I could, and this work I called, Nuit. I put my all into this piece, but I eventually conceded feeling myself too young and too stupid and dull to complete this highly ambitious project. My aim was to try and publish a book a year. I would have a Woody Allen like work ethic I told myself.

 

The online poetry forum was all new and razzmatazz to me and I befriended a number of writers who I believed had talent and skill at the art, much more so than I, for they had read more poetry and written more poetry and had spent longer durations struggling and fine tuning their abilities than I had. William Blake had been my inspiration, but for them Charles Bukowski seemed to have revolutionised the art form. I began to study and read poetry every day because of this milieu, Cummings, Pound, Ginsberg.

 

I had wanted to create a new book, the epic fantasy poem was a work in progress, and one day I thought, why don’t I ask the people of the forum and see if they would contribute some of their poetry to an anthology. I could work on this project until my own collection had built up sufficiently enough to publish a new work. I knew how to create and publish books online. I had my own publishing label called Tao-Tyger and I thought that an anthology might bind and bond us as poets of a group, like the Beat poets were of a group, and I asked each of the poets in turn for permission to create this book using their work, including some of my own contributions as well. Each writer agreed, not one rejected the idea, had they done the book would have been published without their contributions. The poets submitted nine pieces each that were presented in cyclical stages of three. I created presentation profiles consisting of a biographic that was complete with a photograph of the poet which began their individual sequences and I included interviews and conversations with some of the poets, everything was with permission and consent. I laboured for weeks on this project and I tried to make the product as professional as I could, and I eventually published the book online so that it became available to order from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but I only managed to sell two download copies that amounted in total to £1.25p. I myself accumulated around twelve copies of the work because I would see an error or something that could be improved upon, the first version of the book had been A4 size for instance, which had been a mistake, one never sees poetry books of that size and so it was altered to A3 size. Each new edition became resubmitted for publishing. Two of the female contributors I had sent a copy of the book to seemed very pleased and happy with the product. One of the females, a black lady from Ohio had included my name on her profile page with peons of praise and thanks, it seemed I had made her dream come true. The other lady loved the book but voiced a complaint that if it were possible could I decapitalise the opening letter that began her poems, she had become influenced by EE Cummings years in advance of myself having become introduced to her and preferred her poems presented in lowercase only.   

 

One single male contributor from Australia became a problem, and somewhat of a nemesis for me. He became a kind of a troll under the bridge, a bad apple that ruined the bunch. He saw himself as an exploited writer, he thought of me as a hawk and he demanded payment for his contributions to the book. I had respected him as a writer, I admired his art, and wanted to promote him, but I believe he was fooled by an illusion of his own greatness and this narcissism led him to suspect that this book was a great seller and that I was making high dollar earnings from the sales of the publication. Money had not been my primary motivating factor. I already had a poetry book out and without advertising I was all too aware how difficult it was to make a single sale. He challenged me publically in the forum, he was impolite and rude to the point of vulgarity and he seemed entirely to miss the point behind the creation of the book, “I’m too old and I’ve lived too long to think that anyone would do something out of kindness and generosity,” he said. I posted the revenue chart from the online site into the poetry forum so that the figures showed exactly £1.25p only had been made in profit from this work. There wasn’t an apology to show for a long week of wayward defamation and abuse, but instead he changed the theme of his attack and started to slander and slur my wife with uncouth and vulgar insults, my wife was a quiet non-confrontational person, she avoided public arguing only using the site to publish her simple and elegant poems and of course to chat with oneself and several of her friends. One never heard the exploitation charge from him again, until years later, when I had left the site.

 

The Australian migrant, for he was originally a British man from Manchester, acted like the local village drunk. He was a former convict it turned out of over twenty-two years in an Adelaide prison and it seems the crime must have been so severe that he wouldn’t tell his online squeeze of over three years the nature and details of the events that had led to his incarceration. He complained of conspiracies, because there became so many of us that grouped against him.  

 

I began to notice that his recent poems were on the theme of murder. He wrote about burying people, of wearing “t***y vests”, and one time he publically threatened to murder a Christian in the world outside of the internet each week and he claimed he would post photographs of their dead bodies in the poetry forum for us all to see, he would continue with this practice he said, until all the Christians stopped posting their art in the forum. He had become a tyrant. They had a right to post their art it seemed to me even if it wasn’t my preferred personal aesthetic choice of writing. His threats of murder seemed of serious intent to me and I took his language seriously. He had screennames like Death-before-dishonour and he would delete his profiles every few weeks because his language would be so offensive that with the deletion of the profile the comments that he’d made toward others would also disappear. I started to create a collection of these comments because no sooner had they vanished from view he would deny ever having said such things.

 

His favourite criticism of others seemed a rote mechanical program that came in the form of a three word mantram which he would repeat twenty times a day, every day, “Criminal-stalker-paedophile”. The latter word first making an appearance charged at a Mexican man who had joined the forum six months or so after me and his introduction to the forum came in the form of a female profile called Honeylips that he had created himself to extol and eulogise his virtues for us all to see. The Mexican filled the comments section of this submission with literally thousands of ditties, rhymes, poems, philosophies, each comment pushed the original submission back to the top of the forum and this piece was there for years until the age of the fake profile had changed from 16 to 18 and 19. The Mexican was slurred as a paedophile, the fake profile perceived as legitimate.

 

A middle aged former US military vet, straight and conservative with no such antics was erroneously slurred and slandered as a paedophile, the Cuban electrician who lived in Florida, a man of honour, was similarly slurred as a paedophile for simply questioning the tyrant, his girlfriend was in her mid-thirties. A business man from Manchester who contributed poetry and intellectual philosophical reasoning was similarly slurred quite arbitrarily and irrelevantly as a paedophile. The suspicious may be led to believe that the poetry forum was a licentious den of iniquity for the sexually depraved, but this was not my experience of the forum at all, at all, if one simply went by the observation of language people used on a quantum digital screen which was all one could see and interpret. The tyrant was not an accurate and objective observer. There was never evidence at all for such heinous charges, and I think of him as been like a drunk I once saw who after staggering up and down the street defiling and debasing passers-by walked for the second time into a Morley’s fast food restaurant and without provocation called the Asian behind the counter “a nonce” and “a paedophile”. The Asian was staring at this drunk, who was filthy in appearance and attire, like he was seriously thinking about harming this mental cripple if the opprobrious and erroneous charges continued. My immediate thought of the drunk was that he was protectively talking about himself which immediately inspires its own feelings of hostility. This was my thought of the forum tyrant and I said this. The tyrant had claimed to have been sexually abused as a boy, often the abused grow up to become abusers. When he broke with his online girlfriend, the s**t-hit-the-fan, she spoke about his unhealthy obsession with her daughter. In an online forum the drunk can hide his appearance his avoidable manner and his inarticulation and the language that remains becomes a lingering object to challenge and contest.

 

The forum troll accumulated many enemies. He was openly hostile and aggressive to many different people. His attacks were largely unprovoked occurring spontaneously. One such attack was toward a rather intelligent and beautiful elder lady I had known in an online context and her husband who didn’t use the site at all possessing no interest in poetry created a profile and entered the fray so that he could troll the troll. Even though this individual bore no resemblance at all to myself in either writing style or semantic content this profile became interpreted as a fake or alternate profile of mine and for several months I took the blame for being someone else that I really wasn’t. I eventually figured out who the husband really was, just as I had done the Mexican’s fake Honeylips profile. The tyrant was slow, and acted like a wrongheaded Pitbull with lockjaw.

 

On an evening there were over 80,000 people on the site, our forum would register 6,000 people, and another anonymous man came into the forum for the sole purpose of making the former convict’s life miserable and this person became interpreted as the Mexican and the Mexican had been interpreted as a paedophile and now this new profile suffered the same stigma. In continuation, this unknown man was now bitten with the mantram “criminal-stalker-paedophile”. The forum seemed to become a dark and desultory place to inhabit, one became frustrated and fatigued by the inanity of it all, the language seemed dreadful, why was I exposing my brain to this? and I thought about moving on and away. Many talented writers had done just that before and for similar reasons. One person I knew online described him as “a t**d in a swimming pool”.

 

I would get, “criminal-stalker-thief”, and if I engaged publically with the Mexican or the fake profile presumed to be the Mexican I would get, “friend of paedos and child molesters”. The public exchanges could take the form of, “That’s a great poem you’ve written”, “Thanks”, “How are you doing?” “Fine thanks”, I am the second individual in this exchange; the Mexican didn’t submit so much poetry. This type of public exchange courtesy does not mean that one becomes responsible for any potential past future or alleged crime this individual may or may not have been involved in.

 

Sometimes the forum troll and tyrant would himself make up with the Mexican, and they would become “friends” and exchange courtesies for periods of time.

 

It seems that in one’s absence which has been six long years, the tyrant seems to believe that the profile assumed to be the Mexicans and of which was duly slurred and slandered daily as a paedophile has become confused in this man’s drunken jumble of a mind and now seems falsely associated with oneself. He perceives oneself as someone that one wasn’t and in any case there was no proof at all of any criminal behaviour from this other individual that I ever saw at all.

 

After I arrived back home in London from marrying in the states I discovered a badly written poem in the forum that was filled with lies. The poem had been written by the tyrant and troll on a fake profile that went by the name Justin-loves-grandma. The photograph of the profile was of an elderly lady perhaps in her eighties and she was pouting with bright red lipstick. I was very angry at the time and in response I created a fake profile of the tyrant using a photograph of Blofeld from the James Bond movies who was sitting in a black chair. This seemed an almost exact like-for-like representation of the forum troll’s profile photograph. They both had bald heads, and wore grey suits, and both were sat in a black chair. It seemed uncanny. This was how I became in his language, “a stalker”. My marriage was really none of his business, he seemed obsessive.

 

Before I immigrated to America the Motorola that I had virtually lived inside for two whole years packed in. It would automatically go zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and then post the message to Facebook so people assumed I had lost my mind entirely. I was waiting to see if I would be accepted for a VISA and I didn’t have the money to waste on a new phone that wouldn’t work if I were able to cross the Atlantic. The VISA acceptance could have been the following week, or the following day.  

I could only get online using the library computers at Streatham for two hour periods a day which I timed for when my wife would first awake. We would communicate through an instant messaging site and I would glance at the forum and see that the tyrant was locked in crossed battle swords with the Mexican and the anon profile who I now suspected was the businessman from Manchester and not the Mexican. The anon profile had told me in a private message that I knew who he was, but he wasn’t telling who. This gave him longevity and a kind of invincibility. Upon opening the forum I also found that I would be hit with several tabloid like scandalous and sensational headlines in the form of dramatic topic titles that would be demeaning and degrading and I wasn’t even available to answer back and fight, he would post them through the day and night and had seemed to develop quite an obsession with me. In addition to this he was sending my poems to immigration services in the hope that he would be able to have oneself debarred from entering the United States and prevent oneself from being with one’s wife. It became a very stressful ordeal at the time.

 

I sat in the Chesterton in the living room and wrote a book of poetry from off the top of my head, I made the same mistake as I had years earlier. Over years I had amassed thousands of poems, some were bound together in collections that I never published at all. I wrote this book in a matter of weeks. This was never going to work. One should only publish the very best of one’s pieces.

 

I published an online version of the book and I posted a link to my open Facebook page. It was only a matter of weeks before I took the publication offline and deleted the book, but in this time the antagonistic rock star from years earlier in my youth had been prowling and stalking and he found the link, read the book, located the site I had been posting poetry to as I had alluded to the site in the book and the rockstar came across the forum tyrant complete with his false and libellous insults.     

 

The rock singer was never impartial or discerning when it came to assessing me, but would take and snatch at anything he could get and seemingly he didn’t care whether the information was true or not. Negative information became an ideal feast for him. The rock singer had a provable history of paedophilia and a pre-scripted agenda. Police profiling at distances in rock song format by individuals of dubious character and decipherable intent doesn’t yield objective results. The rockstar’s game structure seems set up for negative feedback title-tattlers desperate to conform to his intent. The game seems slanted to effectively produce biased results. One need only have a handful of negative interpersonal relativity dynamic transactions from a twenty year duration for these few individuals to run to the rockstar. Have you not ever put someone in their place? or ever had a forum or chatroom troll on your case? Some people only go online to wind other people up. 

 

 

 

The day I arrived in America, I saw my wife at Portland airport and between kisses she said, “You’ll never guess what’s happened?” and I said, “What?” and she said, “The forum’s been closed down!”