Morphing

I am really wrestling with one of the basic contradictions of being a writer here. As a person, I am a shy little man who suffers far too much anxiety and basically wants everybody to like me. As a writer, I get the strange, shivery feeling that I am turning into a bit of an enfant terrible in my small way.

Am currently engaged in a collaborative project at the intersection point between pornography, psychology and sci-fi …

I just finished putting an anarchic alt-punk singer into low-earth orbit where she can watch the final demise of global civilization while fantasising horrible things about the players in the doomed political system and singing to a silent world (need to start shopping that one around soon) …

The current novel in progress is a deeply anti-authoritarian slipstream fantasia touching on the East London protest scenes, alt sexuality, stiflment, political rot, censorship, experimental art and music etc. …

Even Hunters will probably raise a few eyebrows when it comes out later this year and that is OLD now – an angry and argumentative book written at probably the deepest point in my own depression.

I more or less gave up battling ideas on Facebook and other comment threads – it was starting to seem pointless in the face of the judgementalism, fashionable mystification, partisan nonsense, wooden-headed conviction, absolutism and sheer cartoonish absurdity of the world around me. But maybe I just ended up funnelling all that straight into writing … because I can. And why the hell not? I always admired books like J G Ballard’s Crash for daring to go there and Kathy Acker’s works for just opening her mouth and letting it all out. I also owe a vast debt of gratitude to Rosanne Rabinowitz for her supremely politically aware and sometimes ferocious writing, demonstrating that it can be done and needs to be done – and can be done well. All of these and others reinforce that writing can be strong and vicious and uncomfortable and deep-diving – and beautiful in that. That’s no new revelation, of course, but that’s kind of what I am staring at right now.

But the basic problem of how to reconcile these two sides of me, I am rather less sure about! Well – they say you can write what you want to be.