May 11 2024, 10:45

Cornish horrors

I took my time with Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End, a collection of short stories I bought in Swansea Waterstones on one of my visits to see my father. The British Library have published lots of themed collections like this. It caught my attention because my work-in-progress is set on a coastal stretch of an imagined part of the UK, and I wanted inspiration from misty Cornish coves, haunted beaches, old houses and folklore. We also haven't been on holiday to Cornwall for a few years, so I think I was missing it.

Sadly, many of these stories were a slog. None of them were scary or even particularly unsettling. They were written by wealthy Victorians based in London who had recently visited Cornwall on the newly opened railways. The repeating themes of people seeking marriage, villagers mistrustful of outsiders, and men returning from foreign wars grates after a while. There were some good stories, of course, but in this instance I learned more from the bad.

Because I tend to imagine there’s a world of literature out there I know nothing about, and that if I read as much of it as I can, I will glean the knowledge and skills I need to feel worthy of calling myself a writer. It’s a sickness. Collections like this are a reminder that much of literature was written quickly, for money, to meet the market demands of the day. Most stories that are published serve their purpose in the cultural moment and disappear.

This collection is an attempt to capture something sociological, not literary. I don’t need to do research like this — looking back is useful if done in healthy balance with pushing forward. Research can easily turn into procrastination.

May 05 2024, 10:03

Impatience

Making art means making a mess. It means tidying up, organising, and discovering something in doing it. There are unexpected emotions. There are doubts and dead ends. There are technical problems. Many books are written about how people make art (or do anything creatively). Keeping moving, paying attention to what’s happening, making decisions, navigating squalls and storms, staying afloat — these are all part of it.

And it’s a lonely business if you’re not in a collective or a group. It’s lonely if you’re in one. You need to be able to handle ambiguity, incompleteness, uncertainty and abstractions. What’s inside wants to come out. Nature contains chaos. Mess can feel unsettling.

In writing software, developers prize efficiency, clarity and elegance, but people are organic — messy. Software programs talk to each other online twenty-four hours a day, all built by people, and at sufficient complexity software begins to look like an organism. This is part of the idea of artificial intelligence we hold in culture. At what point does the software we’ve written begin to act like the ghosts we’ve programmed into it?

Writing software is addictive. The problem-solving is addictive, user interfaces are addictive, the feedback loop of trying something, seeing it fail, trying something else, seeing it succeed, is addictive. If you want to lose eight hours in a flow state, programming is a great way to do it. It’s like an endless crossword or sudoku.

Many programmers like it that way and they’re not interested in the benefits (or negative effects) of the code they’re writing. They want it to be elegant, efficient, bug-free and done (and on to the next problem). As I get older, I’m finding that harder to tolerate in the people around me.

Part of me wants to make art and part of me wants to write software.

Editing prose engages the same part of my brain that fixes bugs in software. If I have an eight thousand word story, I can quickly make that a tight, elegant, efficient, bug-free, four thousand word story.

But, ironically given all the psychoanalytic psychotherapy I had, I find writing that eight thousand word story incredibly hard. Many people are the other way around, which makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong. I understand the value of my stream of consciousness thoughts, my dreams, and how my intuition can make connections. I know this. I should be programmed (!) for making things up by now without all this internal drama.

I’m impatient. It’s a deep-seated trait. It’s always in the background. I’ve been meditating every morning for six weeks now. Ten minutes with the teachers on Apple Fitness+. I wonder if that is why I’m starting to notice how impatient I feel. I’ve written many (many) times about slowing down.

Sometimes I think it’s because I’m getting older, but I was as impatient in my twenties. There’s always been this feeling that I’m going to miss out if I don’t move quickly. The gift is fleeting and then it’s gone.

That’s life. And that’s what it was like in my family growing up.

(Ah, we’re here again. Must it always be about my mother?)

April 13 2024, 10:29

Ligeia

Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, is a six-thousand-word hallucinatory tale about an intense marriage that survives beyond death. The narrator is looking back, remembering his wife, Ligeia, who he idolised. When she dies unexpectedly, he moves to an abbey in Cornwall, decorates it opulently with Egyptian artifacts, and marries again, this time to the ‘fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine’.

Still obsessed with the black-haired, dead Ligeia, who he describes in tortuous detail, he takes opium to numb his grief, and treats Rowena terribly. After a month of marriage, Rowena falls suddenly ill, recovers, but falls ill again, and in opium-infused memories he sees a ghostly form put poison in her drink. Ligeia was sure that she could avoid death through the force of her own will, and the narrator believes her ghost comes back in Rowena’s body.

Ligeia was first published in 1838, in American Museum magazine, but was revised extensively in future publications. Critics liked it, George Bernard Shaw loved it, and some thought it to be a satire of the gothic fiction of its day. It’s written in an intense, overwrought style, common at the time, and it may well have been deliberately so to make fun of it even in 1838. As the first Poe story I’ve read, it’s hard for me to judge, and it makes me wonder what the others are like.

The narrator’s love for Ligeia is like a son with his mother. It’s unnaturally intense in adulthood, and in the story’s language there are hints of foul play in her death. He paints her as an academic enchantress, which must have been as terrifying as it was seemingly satisfying. It makes me wonder if the narrator killed Ligeia — and then killed his second wife too.

In Archetypal Projection in “Ligeia”: A Post-Jungian Reading, Joseph Andriano sees the narrator as charmed by an anima daemon, a shadow feminine character, who stays alive in him and comes back through his wife-imposter. He ‘kills his mother’, only to find her again in the next woman he marries. Another analysis of Ligeia observes the sex hidden beneath the Victorian veil, and suggest Poe is a ‘genteel pornographer’.

After buying the Blu-ray player (!), I watched Roger Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), which looked beautiful. Vincent Price acts his socks off as Verden Fell, the name given to the narrator by screenwriter Robert Towne. Fell buries his wife, Ligeia, in the graveyard at his abbey, but his grief is interrupted by Elizabeth Shepherd as a persistent, dynamic Lady Rowena, attracted to the abrasive, unpleasant Fell. The story doesn’t have much overlap with Poe’s original, focussing on mesmerism rather than opium or witchcraft, and it ends with the standard sixties gothic trope of an old building burning down, but it’s charming, with excellent dialogue, and pleasingly committed performances for a tightly-budgeted (aka cheap) Corman film. Lots of cats are thrown around. Shepherd has a dual role, which reminds me of Barbara Steele in Black Sunday (1963). I wonder if Corman was influenced by Mario Bava.

I could go in several directions from here — more Poe short stories, more Poe adaptations by Corman (he made eight between 1960—64, his ‘Poe cycle’), more Cornish horror shorts, or coastal horror stories in general... having a small project this week worked well.

April 07 2024, 12:03

Physical media

Continuing my interest in how fiction and films work together, I picked up Cornish Horrors: Tales from the Land’s End, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, a collection I’ve owned for a few years and never read, and when the intro to the first story, Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, mentioned there was a 1964 film with Vincent Price, I saw a project in the making.

Corman’s version, The Tomb of Ligeia, was written by Robert Towne and Paul Mayersberg. It has an Arrow Blu-ray with lots of extras for the curious, but it’s not available on the Arrow Video streaming service, and it’s not online anywhere else either. Amazon helpfully pointed out a well-reviewed six-disc collection of Corman/Poe films, all starring Vincent Price, and all films that I didn’t know, for £30.

Now, over the years I’ve built an extensive collection of digital films, but when I was keen to watch something specific and it wasn’t available online, I bought discs instead. This was when I had an old PS3, which died died about five years ago. I’ve been meaning to get a replacement player for a while, but I go in circles over the point of buying physical media. Underneath my TV I have a DVD of Heart of Midnight (with a young Jennifer Jason Leigh), and Blu-rays of Eraserhead and Daughters of Darkness. None of these are available online.

I committed. I bought a 4K Blu-ray player — a Panasonic DP-UB450EB, not a PS5, as tempting as that was. I don’t want to play video games, and the disc player is pretty basic compared to the standalone machines. I don’t want to become a physical media obsessive (take note, uc); I do want to watch the more obscure films I’m curious about.

It all arrives tomorrow. I’m going to read the short story this afternoon (I haven’t even read the story, and I’ve bought a Blu-ray player!), then watch the film this week and see what shakes out. I’m thinking about gothic stories on coastlines for my work-in-progress. That’s where all this started.

March 17 2024, 12:37

Evening classes

I’ve created a reading list my gut tells me is related to my work-in-progress. I went around the house scanning shelves and pulling out the books that tugged at my attention. One of them was The Complex, which surprised me, but perhaps I need to remind myself of the level I’ve reached before I try to aim higher. It’s all orientation of sorts.

The ideas around the work-in-progress have tremendous energy even after a long break, which is both exciting and a relief. Nobody else has written it. I’m not surprised, but that’s the fear, right?

Sometimes I write summaries of my notebook entries to remember what I wanted at the time and to appreciate progress in spite of life’s curveballs. This weekend I’m trying to understand how five years have passed since I finished The Complex and I haven’t written another novel. I know I write about this all the time, but it’s important to me I try to put a line under it.

I don’t see how I could have written anything last year. Before that it was lockdowns, fear of Covid, fear of Trump, Brexit, but being honest with myself, as much as anything, it was the dispelling of my illusions about the publishing industry and not believing enough in myself.

Finishing a novel and getting published is the first move in a bigger game. If that novel doesn’t catch people’s attention then you have to write another, but it’s tough to find motivation when you have no agent, no contract, no deadlines, no community, no external structures, and you know the odds of you having much cultural impact or getting any financial reward are close to zero.

There are people with incredible levels of belief in their own talent and the quality of their work. They might even self-publish, whether to prove a point or try to make more money. I suspect many writers who don't break through stop after a while and do something more rewarding. Others enjoy the practice of writing enough that they keep going even knowing only a few friends will read what they’ve written.

Creative writing is an art, a craft, with all the pleasures available that people get from pottery or painting. My mother loved going across the road to the community college one evening a week, and over the years learned sign language, glass engraving, embroidery and calligraphy. I’ve done that in the past with Italian, counselling skills and, yes, creative writing. One of my neighbours makes wooden love spoons. My father-in-law made garden furniture.

There are pleasures in making independent of external measures of success. (Crazy, right?) They are the most important part of the experience. That’s the energy I’ve started cultivating.

March 07 2024, 21:11

Losing myself

I finally sorted the two big bags of books I brought back from Dad’s last weekend. He loved Stephen King, and he bought lots of King’s books as first edition UK hardbacks. I don’t currently have shelf space for this many books. I don’t know how much time it would take to read this many books.

Time has become a (falsely) scarce resource. There’s no time for fun. A stern look and, no, that doesn’t get you where you want to go, and no, not that book either, nor that film. Keep looking.

Losing myself in a book feels wasteful. Enjoying a trashy film feels dangerous. If I’m not careful, I’ll never be the successful writer I always dreamed of being (which hurts because it has truth to it, even knowing that success is my flexible friend).

If I lose myself in writing though, that’s good, because it’s creating something, a piece of art that didn’t exist, a piece of me that is not me. As a child, I could lose whole afternoons between the covers of a book. That was a sign of intelligence, sensitivity, but also a defence mechanism against family arguments. My mother taught me to numb myself with fats and sugars, sweet compensation for the difficulties of love.

Is the flow towards beauty, intimacy, or towards a hole in the ground? Am I connecting or avoiding?

Writing requires a diet of nutritious literary foodstuffs. Films contain drama, and drama is part of writing, but more important than drama in written fiction is language. Sentences. Paragraphs. The internal worlds of characters that a screen can’t show. In writing, there are no cameras to move, no actors to talk with, no special effects, no budgetary constraints — it’s all language. If it can be imagined, it can be written (and then re-imagined differently by every reader).

I’m getting lost in these thoughts. Dad had a talent for losing himself. He was impossible to know deeply. He had an astounding capacity for an internal life. That frightens me as much as it attracts me. I have the ability to do the same. I can make time disappear.

That’s my greatest fear. One day there will be no more time and that will be the end. I too will disappear. There’s too much life out there for me to lose myself in here. Books are only one aspect of life. There’s much more. I can lose myself without losing myself. Where am I heading when I am not lost?

March 05 2024, 20:18

Writing is simple

I complicate things unnecessarily. Writing is simple. You write and edit until the piece of work feels complete and there is nothing more to do.

Writing in my notebook, the sentences disappear behind me unedited, a raw trail of thoughts, and I can’t write good sentences first time, so it’s like a conversation with someone rather than a piece of writing for others. It helps organise my thoughts.

As a writer, I want my sentences to be crafted for clarity and expressive power, and I want to think they might be read by an audience. Publishing on a website is one way of making myself pay more attention to what I’m trying to say and how I say it. To publish means to prepare and make available for a readership. It implies a degree of pride and care in what is being presented.

As I develop this piece of writing, I can already feel an urge to publish it. Is it complete now? Perhaps. Instead I’m going to reflect on why I want to stop at this point.

I think the end of that third paragraph is the completion of an idea, and three paragraphs is how long I’ve tended to make the many film pieces I’ve published on here. There’s an established length in my mind that I might be working to. And then there’s seeing it appear on my website, available to the world, which gives me a hit of dopamine. That’s addictive. It takes effort to delay that gratification.

A tweet (yes, I know) takes moments to write and can be published immediately. A novel might never get published. It’s my responsibility to decide what I want to put into the world, what risks I’m willing to take to do that, and how to build tolerance for the ambiguous present and unknowable future.

February 20 2024, 20:54

The joy of making things up

It took optimism to enrol on a creative writing MA — I can be a writer! I can be published! — but as I get older, I've also developed a pragmatism, tipping into cynicism, which can easily become procrastination, or even complete avoidance.

Writing feels dangerous. I have a strong, sometimes brutal, censor. It’s safer emotionally to not write the weird, violent, embarrassing, possibly shameful, STUFF, and I’m an engineer for a living, so there are endless projects and problems for me to lose myself in. I’ll write a post for my website, hell, I’ll rewrite my website in a new programming language, but I won't write a few lines of dialogue to get a new story started.

This website is also called ‘Notes from the Peninsula’. During lockdown, I got into podcasts, and I had an idea to start one of my own where I pretended to be a writer in a fictional seaside town talking about the uncanny, ghostly happenings he observed as he tried to write a novel. There was enough energy in the idea for me to create a Patreon account, buy a microphone, research recording tips and record a dozen episodes of me talking about what I'd been reading and watching.

“We are called to become more fully what we are, in simple service to the richness of the universe of possibilities.” - James Hollis

Writing rarely energises me like that. My natural enthusiasms are all over the place, and I’ve spent too much time fighting my desire to diversify. Getting a novel published felt like a validation, but it also made clear writing had to be a hobby because the economics of publishing is stacked in favour of the big publishers. Considering the amount of energy, life force, and years of effort required to write a literary novel, it’s sensible to ask — if there is no money and little chance of success, why bother?

Or more usefully, why make art? And what is success to me?

Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being is about making art. He believes artists channel the universe/nature through their work, which is a bit hippy-dippy for me, but if you replace nature with the unconscious, I’m in. This unconscious material comes in dreams classically, but also fantasies, slips of the tongue, play of all kinds and especially improvisation. These all bypass the censor, and if we’re doing it well, they’ll bring to the surface unexpected feelings, weird images, dark thoughts and surprising connections. This is the raw material of art.

“One engages with work because it is meaningful, and if it is not, one changes the work.” - James Hollis.

If I want to write more stories, I need to rediscover the playfulness and joy of making things up with words. I want to finish more stories and make them as good and true to themselves as I can. That is real success. How they are received in the world is out of my control.

February 17 2024, 11:04

Back to the path

I spent the weekend before my father’s funeral sorting through his books. He had them on shelves in different rooms, but they were also tucked in drawers, stacked at the bottom of wardrobes and piled behind old televisions. Some went straight to the tip because of damage or being completely out of time, but there were also entire fantasy series, thrillers, horror, that people would still want today.

On a whim, I called in the local library, which is now community-run and needing funds, and I offered them his collection, and amazingly they said yes. Taibach Library is where he took me for my first library tickets when I was five, so it’s part of my story as well as is. He would love that his books are going back into his community.

Dad’s death wiped clean my imagined year ahead and brought up some big questions, like why bother doing anything if we decay to nothing? But his energy lingers in his objects and spaces. When I hold the TV remote I see him in his chair, and when I pull out his books I can see him smile. I’ve created these intense associations from decades of being with him: lottery numbers, glasses cases, his cereal bowl, the knife he preferred, his favourite radio station, the way he liked the recycling bins to be put out, the bird table, fluorescent tubed lighting in the kitchen, golf clubs, his favourite pruners and gardening gloves. I project my memories of him onto the space through the objects I see.

That’s like reading. We turn sentences into our own version of what the author imagined. In that way, our lives are a gift to everyone who spends time with us, because they create versions of us for themselves. Both my parents live on in me as memories I can talk with whenever I want.

The path I’d imagined for 2024 was vague. Dad’s deteriorating health was a constant threat to any plans, so I found myself being reactive and anxious. Sometimes life needs us to step off the path we think we're on and go into the woods. I lost my literary ambitions for a while. It’s been ten years since I enrolled for the creative writing MA, and five years since The Complex was published. Dad won’t read my next book. His reaction to The Complex was that he liked it. That was it. He wasn’t one to articulate feelings, especially love, so that had to be enough, but it’s a tender spot, because part of me was writing for his approval.

Anyway, I had a dream where I wanted to take an important kick in a rugby match, but an old friend with more natural talent pointed out that I didn’t have the power. I knew they were right, and that I had to get serious and practice. That's about as literal as dreams can get short of dreaming that your house is on fire and waking up to find your house on fire.

January 27 2024, 12:39

My father died

Dad died last week. He was eighty-eight. Looking back, it was a miracle we got him home from hospital for one final Christmas. A week into the new year he fell and was taken back in with an infection, and after twelve months of fighting the symptoms of heart failure, his time was finally up.

His chair is empty and the TV is off. I stayed in Wales for a couple of days and threw myself into the admin because it was something I could do to help and as a way to process the loss. I went through his drawers for bills and bank accounts details and insurances and pensions with focussed ferocity. Then I came home and spent time with my own family. Most things can be done from a distance. I’m a six-hour drive away, and I’ve always wished I was closer. He was independent to the very end. We got him to the finish line as he wanted. I’m proud of that.

I’m tired but coming to terms with things. It was a good ending. He had a long life, he was loved, and he left peacefully. The year is going to be different to how I imagined.