June 01 2025, 14:32
Reconfiguration
I’m switching the domain name of this website to michaelwalters.uk over the coming months. I bought it on a whim, but I knew something was brewing, and I was right. I don’t want to lead with my writing persona in public. It’s become a burden. I’m still going to write, but removing the author label frees me up mentally to do other things.
I came across a letter in an old notebook last week. I wrote it in October 2009. It was one of those self-help exercises where you imagine being on your deathbed giving advice to your younger self. It was cheesy in places, but mostly sweet and insightful, for example:
“I was really proud of the quality time I spent with my children. It set them up for joyful, fun lives.”
“Most of the good you will do in your life will be done in relationships.”
“I had most fun making things and working out how things can be made better.”
“There is no such thing as a perfect life, only an engaged one.”
Isn’t that wonderful? What a gift! That’s how I got to be where I am today. I was never interested in climbing the career ladder or making lots of money. I wanted to be sociable, family-orientated and to make things. That’s still true. I’ve been feeling depressed lately at lack of progress in my writing and software careers, but it’s good to remember that I have always chosen my path.
Now the kids have grown up, I can change things up. My mother loved to learn new skills, usually in evening classes at the local college: calligraphy, sign language, glass engraving, embroidery, all sorts of things, and I want more of that energy in my life. She had barely retired when she died at sixty-seven. I’m fifty-two. I want to make smart decisions.
I've been having dreams where I’m walking around big old houses that are run down, leaking water or crumbling in some way. We’ve bought them, and they need a lot of work. Mischievous characters help and hinder. The buildings are expansive, often historical, and full of possibilities. In the one I had last night, I wanted to turn one half a house into a school for the arts. Mum would have approved.
Words are not enough. I want to find new ways to express myself. I want to finish more projects. Creative living includes physical health and relationships. I want to feel playful instead of pressured. In these dream spaces, there’s plenty of room for others. I want to see who else I can be. I want to meet new people.
I feel fired up. This is going to take a while to establish. I’m not in a rush. I want to do more of what was in that letter I wrote to myself in 2009. Friends. Interesting projects. Fun!
May 21 2025, 19:35
Good Morning, Midnight
Author: Jean Rhys
First published: 1939
Penguin Modern Classics. 155 pages, 300 words/page, ~46000 words. First person as Sophia.
Reading the afterword by A.L. Kennedy, this is the fourth novel in a row where Rhys was working with a similar character, as if trying to find the ideal version of her: intelligent, lonely, processing personal tragedy, and struggling with alcohol. I read this in 2018, and I remember being impressed by it, but I didn’t remember the misery and desperation that runs through every sentence.
In Paris, on a holiday from her life in England, Sophia can’t take a step without being overcome with memories of previous visits. Her days are empty except for meals in local restaurants and drinks in bars. She establishes a routine and tries to occupy her time, but finds herself remembering her husband, Ennio, and being pregnant, the various jobs in clothes shops, and the endless hotel rooms she’s moved through, all the same. She’s trying to find a way of living that’s satisfying, no more than that, independent of her family and friends in London, and relying on no-one.
She meets a series of men, none of them very pleasant, and her state of mind deteriorates, but the details Rhys plucks from her experiences are interesting, surreal, often funny, and always with a dark twist. The way Sophia shifts from the present into memories, dreams, fantasies and back again makes Sophia feel real and relatable. It’s something I can use in my work-in-progress.
It’s terribly exposing to show despair as deep as this in first person. I’m not brave enough to commit to first person as my own character’s point of view in Peninsula. Third person feels like a safe pair of running shoes in comparison. First person is terrifying. It might also be the most revealing while I’m still exploring the story. Perhaps that’s a challenge I should take up.
May 14 2025, 09:00
Ghost Wall
Author: Sarah Moss
First published: 2018
Granta Publications. 145 pages, 250 words/page, ~36000 words. First person as Sylvie.
This was a tough read. The prose is lyrical, often beautiful, but the physical abuse Sylvie suffers was hard to stomach . It opens with the sacrifice of a young woman at some time in the past by the community she grew up in. Then we meet Sylvie who, with her parents, is on a field trip with a group of archaeology students in modern-day Northumberland.
Sylvie’s father is a bus driver with an obsession with the Iron Age, and he’s managed to tag along with a professor’s class who are to live as people would have done over a thousand years ago. They wear scratchy tunics, use similar utensils, hunt and forage in the local woodland, and wash in the nearby river. Sylvie wants to be more like the carefree students, but her father is strict and abusive, even in front of the others. Sylvie is attracted to Molly, one of the students, who notices marks on Sylvie’s back from her father’s beatings and decides to take action.
The story swings between the overbearing world of Sylvie’s parents and the freedoms of the students. Her father has a racist idea of being connected to the original peoples of Britain and believes women should be controlled at home. The professor ignores these attitudes and indulges him in long conversations about how things might really have been. The students know something is wrong, but only Molly steps up to help Sylvie break free. It’s a story about the complex feelings of being a victim of abuse, the suffocating patriarchal structures that exist now and all through history, and how in a group people often don’t challenge authority even when something is going obviously wrong.
May 11 2025, 12:26
Businessmen as Lovers
Author: Rosemary Tonks
First published: 1969
Vintage Classics, Penguin Random House. 145 pages, 9 chapters, 300 words/page, so ~43,500 words. A short novel written in first person as Mimi.
Mimi and Caroline, second cousins and close friends, travel by train from England to Italy for a summer holiday at the house of Mimi’s Aunt Evie. Mimi is grieving her mother’s death, but she’s also newly in love with a Reuters journalist she affectionately calls Beetle. Once embedded in their rural Italian villa, with partners and friends around them, Mimi observes the minutiae of her relationships and the politics of village life. A local doctor, Purzelbaum, becomes a villain in the English visitors’ minds, and after a perceived slight on them, a petty revenge is planned.
Mimi has such a wonderful energy that the story flies along in a blizzard of amusing details and raucous conversation with unexpected tenderness and wisdom thrown in. The foreign climes and middle-class Englishness of the characters make it feel like the twenties or thirties, so it’s a shock when the occasional modern detail appears (modern as in references to Marks and Spencer and TV Centre).
These are rich people with privileged lives struggling with matters of business, marriage and how to live a happy life. Caroline’s husband, Killi, is a venture capitalist who is difficult to live with and obsessed with business relationships. Sir Rupert Monkhouse, their neighbour and host, is a quiet archaeologist with a flamboyant mistress Mimi and Caroline admiringly call La Prostitutess. A white-haired man they felt slighted by on the train turns up in the village, to their distress, and is revealed to be a famously well-connected Persian businessman, Chamoun, who gives them sexed-up tortoises as gifts.
It’s a slight and charming tale, written with wit and tenderness, and an insight into a type of leftover colonial Englishness from the sixties that seems to still pervade the upper classes today. Lovely people; annoying people. I wish them well, and they’re welcome to it. Tonks seems to be affectionately making fun of them, but is also quite damning about the way men in particular use business to avoid real life.
The page on Wikipedia about Rosemary Tonks describes an intriguing but tragic life. She was in boarding schools and children’s homes growing up, wrote from a young age, married a man who became an engineer and successful businessman, moved to Pakistan for his work and contracted paratyphoid and polio, returned to Paris, then Hampstead with her husband, where they divorced (but lived on the same street). When she is left nearly blind after an emergency eye operation the late 70s, she goes deeper into spiritual thinking, and eventually kills her decadent literary life by burning an unpublished novel and converting to Christianity. After that, she only read the Bible until her death thirty years later. Sigh.
May 03 2025, 20:34
Audition
Author: Katie Kitamura
First published: 2025
Published by Fern Press, an imprint of Vintage, which is owned by Penguin Random House. 200 pages, ~50,000 words, 13 chapters, so ~4,000 words per chapter. It’s a short novel. Or possibly two novellas.
The nameless narrator is an actress married to Tomas, a writer, and they don’t have children, but in the opening she meets at a restaurant a young man, Xaviar, who is convinced she is his mother. Feeling conspicuous and judged as being too old to be dating Xaviar, she is thrown into guilt when Tomas walks in, looks around, and immediately walks out. This scene sets in motion a series of events at home as well as in the rehearsal space of the play she’s in.
But then, just as it is building momentum, at the halfway point the characters are shaken around so that Xaviar becomes the narrator’s son, and Tomas his father. This is the plot, such as it is. The narrator is more than unreliable—reality bends and eventually snaps.
The book is about pretending. Is Xaviar a highly skilled con artist? Is that what actors are? Which parts of relationships are real and which roles we play without much thought? The narrator dissects the performative aspects of her family to the point that she doesn’t seem to know anyone, not even herself.
In the first half, she has curtailed her affairs to be with Tomas, her stoic, comfortable husband, but Xaviar kindles old lusts. In the second half, in a jolting handbrake turn, Xaviar becomes her real son, moves back in with her and Tomas, and it’s his girlfriend, Hana, who sends Tomas into an awkward sexual heat.
In both versions, the action is picked apart with the forensic eye of a highly skilled actress. The narrator is fascinated by the mechanics of what’s going on between the people around her. She doesn’t seem to trust anyone, and her sophisticated mind tips into possible psychosis. As an actor, she craves the moment where she knows her lines inside out and can explore from within the scene all the variations and possibilities. In life, her boundaries are weak. She doesn’t have lines to hold on to. It takes her months to shed a part she’s been playing on stage, and since the novel is set over the run of a play, it’s impossible to know what of her spoken experience is real.
April 30 2025, 14:59
Did not finish
Instead of posting negative reviews on books I don’t like, I’ve decided to take a few notes about what didn’t work for me, put the book down and move on to the next one. I’ve talked before about books I’m not enjoying creating reader's block, because part of me wants to finish even bad books to get that sense of completion and to justify adding them to my reading stats for the year, but then I stop reading completely because reading bad books isn’t fun. It’s ridiculous. Trying to read a certain number of books a year is also a ridiculous. I’m going to sidestep that trap from now on.
Having a DNF (Did Not Finish) pile feels revolutionary in that context. Instead of being miserable ploughing hopelessly through a book I hate, I choose another book. I mean, OF COURSE. I’m fifty-two years old. What am I doing to myself with these insane must-finish-the-book rules? So, here are the three books I didn’t finish this month, and why they weren’t for me.
Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld (2023). I wasn’t interested in the details of how the Saturday Night Live show works. Everything was told without enough showing, and there wasn’t much subtext, so it was a dull read. I didn’t care about the central relationship.
The Final Girls Support Group, Grady Hendrix (2021). The conceit of a someone picking off a therapy group of survivors from slasher-style killings is brilliant, but the voice of the central character was deliberately manic and paranoid and left me cold. Also, I didn’t get pulled into the mystery—police reports and interviews are not for me.
Reprieve, James Han Mattson (2021). Instead of the literary horror novel promised on the back cover, this opens with an extended chapter on a teenagers relationships at a high school, so it’s more of a Young Adult thriller, and what little we learn about the reality show their involved with didn’t grab me.
My wife loved Romantic Comedy, and the horror podcast I listen to loved The Final Girls Support Group, so these things I don’t like are my personal taste. I probably won’t post about my DNF pile again, but I wanted to note the change in my behaviour and the benefits in case someone else is caught in the always-finish trap.
April 06 2025, 14:13
Holding
I’m going through an uncomfortable phase. My creative projects feel stale. It’s an effort not to check the news. My YouTube algorithm has been infected with news influencers. The people I follow on Bluesky are understandably incensed by what’s happening in the world, so the news cycle plays out there too. I need to take some time away from being online.
It sounds pretentious, but I sense there’s something useful for me in the ideas of Carl Jung mixed with Zen philosophy. Both address the work of living from different perspectives. Jung believed in individuation, becoming whole through the work of interpreting dreams, assimilating the Shadow, confronting the Anima, and encountering the Wise Old Man. Zen Buddhism is about accepting all thing-events as equal, developing a still mind, compassion for all living things, and moving in simple, direct ways to do what is right in each moment.
Things are as peaceful in my life as a whole as they’ve ever been. I’m healthy, my family is thriving, we’re secure in our home and jobs. Something is bothering me I can’t pinpoint. There’s movement under the surface of my mind towards change. I’ll slow things down, do some reading, and observe.
April 05 2025, 21:52
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Author: Jennifer Egan
First published: 2010
350 pages, ~105,000 words, 13 chapters, one per character with varying points of view: Sasha, Bennie, Rhea, Charli, Jocelyn, Scottie, Stephanie, Dolly, Jules, Rob, Ted, Alison, Alex.
I wanted a novel, and this pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be, interweaving short stories over multiple decades with connected characters. It’s a work of genius, and occasionally maddening for that, because she represents some of these characters in irritating ways—for example, Alison’s story is a series of Powerpoint slides that require the book to be turned on its side. On the other hand, the range of voices and having to work out who was related to who all the time was getting tiring by Alison’s chapter, so flying through seventy-five pages was a relief.
I can only imagine Jennifer Egan had the lives of each character carefully mapped out, because the variety and number of connections between them is impressive. It opens with Sasha stealing a woman’s wallet in the company of her date, Alex. Then we meet Bennie, Sasha’s boss and record label manager, and from there the story expands until we return to Alison, Sasha’s future child, and finally Alex, Sasha's disastrous date, meeting Bennie for the first time fifteen years later.
Music and the music industry runs through all the stories. Many of the characters have made mistakes and are looking for ways through the moral fog they’ve created for themselves. If I had to say what it’s about, it’s understanding that everyone has a history that has led them to where they are, and those experiences shape who we are, and with empathy we can repair some of the damage we sustain looking for things we need in the wrong places.
There are so many interesting approaches to writing from a character’s point of view in these stories, I’ll definitely return to it when I want ideas. It’s a fizzing, beautiful thing.
March 29 2025, 13:55
Success
Author: Martin Amis
First published: 1978
220 pages, ~75,000 words, 12 chapters, one per month of a year, each chapter split in two by the first person voices of Terry and Gregory.
Sex-obsessed half-brothers Terry Service and Gregory Riding share Gregory’s London flat, where Gregory is living an abundant life of money and sex, and Terry is miserable and impotent. When sister Ursula becomes old enough to join them in their adult lives, their fortunes start to change.
These are two unpleasant characters with misogynistic, homophobic and racist views. Terry was taken in by the Ridings when he was nine years old. His father's murder of his sister was on the national news and fifteen years on he's still traumatised. A couple of minor asides to the reader reveal Gregory and Terry are both making a case, and both wonder what lies the other might be telling. As the months pass, Gregory’s rich life begins to unravel, and we begin to see he’s deceiving himself as well as us.
As the working class usurper in the upper class home, Terry lacks confidence and has a chip on his shoulder, made worse by Gregory’s narcissism, and they clash repeatedly over the flat, work, money, and most often women. In the opening chapter, Gregory tries to pass a girlfriend he’s bored of on to Terry, who can’t seem to get any success with women. Later Gregory steals from Terry a woman Terry’s been obsessed with for months but can’t seem to seduce. This back and forth is a tragic mirror of where the story ends up.
Amis is darkly playful with his language, a maestro really, but he's not for the faint of heart. He goes to town with Gregory, who sees opportunities for pleasure everywhere and spends most evenings at dinner parties with the wealthy Torka in Mayfair which inevitably become orgies. The elaborate descriptions and mannerisms are absurdly funny. He is a fool, and Amis makes merciless fun of him.
Terry’s psychological rise comes through his job in sales. His fear of being sacked is transformed into power when he accepts his role as assistant to the powerful union figures appearing in the company. By the end of the book, he is making more money than he knows what to do with, and certainly more than Gregory. On publication, the UK was at the end of the Callaghan Labour government, and one year later was the election of Margaret Thatcher. Success mixes the dourness of seventies London with the hope of the eighties when the culture came to believe that anyone could make money. The collapse of the entitled Riding family and the rise of Terry, the working class boy made good, is a glimpse into the future.
March 22 2025, 14:58
Lost in the Garden
Author: Adam S. Leslie
First published: 2024
446 pages, ~130,000 words, 72 chapters, each around 1,500 words. It’s roughly the same length as Super-Cannes! The point of view is third person limited, switching between three protagonists.
Heather, Antonia and Rachel are adults, but they live a child-like existence in a rural England that is in a forever summer, and the dead wander lost in the streets. Heather’s boyfriend Steven sets off for Almanby, a place everyone knows to never go to, vowing to return, but he doesn’t, becoming another of their friends who has disappeared. When Rachel has to take a package to Almanby, she recruits Antonia because she has a car, and Heather tags along to track down Steven. The three set off on a journey through an endless, ever-changing countryside, dodging the dead, and looking for a place that feels like the centre of all that is wrong.
The first half follows the trio as they try to find Almanby. There’s a lot of banter, some of it funny, and the three personalities bump pleasingly against each other as they navigate the increasing weirdness of the world they’re driving through. A radio station plays Steven’s voice saying nonsensical things. People from the women’s pasts keep showing up as the wandering dead. The day they leave never ends and they hardly notice. Strange images come to them when they doze. They pass empty cars on the road that seem to have just stopped working. It’s eerie, amusing and involving.
Eventually they reach Almanby, and the second half of the story goes harder into the realm of English nostalgia, squidging together memories, cultural history and folklore into a thick goop of strangeness as the women try to get to the heart of what’s happening. And pleasingly, they do find out what’s happening—I was worried several times through the book that the author was having too much fun to ever draw it properly to a close.
Nostalgia will eat you alive if you let it. The characters are content to live in the comfortable fug of their rural village well into their twenties, horsing around, watching people leave and not return. They never talk about older people still being alive, only as the walking dead. The underlying threat of evil fits with their medieval existence seen through a nineteen-seventies lens. England requires sacrifices. The countryside is not safe.
Things I liked: the descriptions of the countryside and strange goings-on were immaculate, there is a proper ending with no ambiguity that manages to not feel false, the characters were distinct and felt real.
Things I didn’t like: some of the circular conversations went on far too long, I wish it was 100 pages shorter, Heather’s repetitive mania felt out of place and pulled me out of the rhythm too many times.