I’ll let you in on a secret

This is a hard thing to open up about, but right now I’m very scared. Very scared indeed. Clicking fingers of ice-cold fear running up and down my arms. Trembling, goosebumps on my skin. My shoulders are practically conversing with my earlobes. I’m not very good at this at all.

I’m terrified because I’ve realised I’ve backed myself up against a wall and there’s no real way out of this. Over and over again, I’ve tried to come up with some kind of excuse, some way I can avoid it, do something else, something different, but whatever I try I end up miserable within a few months – if not a few days – and knowing there’s only one thing that really suits me. But all my life I’ve been so convinced that I can’t do it that I can barely even summon up the courage to try.

I first started submitting writing when I was 12, which might have been too young but I was being taught by a published author so you’d think he’d know his stuff. Twelve years old is young to put something that is your heart and soul, the thing you live and breathe for, out there into the world for it to reject you – which it did. I didn’t learn the lesson well then. I was uptight, emotional and depressed, a great candidate for gothdom. It was assumed in our household that being published was impossible – my mother worked in publishing so she knew, and my father thought I had to do some job with maths in an office because that would make me a lot of money.

When I was eighteen I walked away from it, jaded by all the rejection and just the sheer torture of writing queries and submission letters. I’ve read about people who get published at 16 but to be honest, I’m glad I never was. I didn’t write fantasy then (Amnar was still brewing at the back of my mind), but short stories about people with subtle little twists. They weren’t up to scratch though, or I never found the right magazine for them. Burned, I decided I would do a science degree and then a PhD and then be an analyst. I talked a lot about writing though because I still did it, all the time, compulsively. That’s how you pass four years in work and complete fourteen manuscripts.

The whole thing terrifies me. I’m not sure if I’m more afraid of failure if I commit to it absolutely, emotionally, with all my soul (which some may assume I have already, but I haven’t), or of it actually coming to something. I imagine if I was actually accepted by a publisher I’d probably explode. I came very close, very very close last year and on my next trip to a bookshop I broke down and cried because I couldn’t believe how near I’d come to my dream.

If you add insecurity, lack of confidence and a big dream that won’t let go of you into one bag it’s an awful combination. You get jealous of people who do it so easily, without thinking about it, and angry at yourself because you’re convinced you’re not good enough, not trying hard enough. It’s not just writing though. I’ve met people who’ve had the chance to go for their dream job, and despite being eminently qualified, manage to forget to apply, or miss the interview, or if they get to the interview somehow mess it all up. Most of the time, it feels better not to even try.

Trying is what you do when you believe you’ve got no chance of succeeding but you don’t feel you have a choice but to do it anyway. You can’t do anything else. I seem to be fundamentally unable to do any other kind of work for any length of time without it somehow coming to an end. I get bored, walk out, the contract ends. Yet at the same time, I don’t believe I’ll ever make it through those hallowed doors of publication, so I feel trapped. I try, fail, try, fail. Work on myself a bit and then try and fail a little more. I struggle with myself because I want to please my parents, who want me to do a stable job which might lead eventually to a mortgage.

In the years since I’ve realised that I don’t have a choice – can’t walk away, can’t seem to succeed – I’ve spent most of that time trying to get to grips with my mind over this. I’ve tried everything, hence the Holosync, the Sedona Method, the Work. But I’ll let you in on another secret. I have a gift for holding on tight to all those limiting beliefs and negativity like nobody you’ve ever met before. Not even I know how and why I do it – unless I subconsciously want to trip up all those over-confident people who promise they can “sort me out” within an hour or with a couple of sessions.

Intellectually, I know all the stuff about beliefs creating your world, and I know the Work well enough to do it standing on my head. Unfortunately, standing on my head doesn’t help me let go of it. When I did the Work with a facilitator he was stunned. I did so well at everything else but when he broached the issue of publishing I flat out refused to do the turnaround. I just kept repeating, “I can’t.” I was too scared.

Still, I keep trying, one way or another. Sometimes people are kind enough to try on my behalf, which is very sweet. I keep on trying because I can’t give it up. Even if I did give it up, which I did once before, it’ll come back.

The great advantage though, of it Not Having Happened Yet, is that I probably would never have invested so much time, energy and money in myself otherwise. I tried Holosync specifically to break the spell about me and being published, the Sedona Method, the Work, Paraliminals. That was the original plan, anyway. Through that I’ve found a kind of peace in myself and progressed more than I’d ever expected I could. Judging by the correspondence I’ve received about what I write about Holosync, my words are helping people, too, because after all it’s easier to make a decision about something like Holosync if you can read honest words about other people’s experiences with it.

Of course, I’m missing the biggest lesson of them all. It’s not that you have to change who you are, fight off the fear, the pain of doing this big scary thing, stop being depressed, anorexic, socially phobic or prone to bouts of random outrageousness (whatever your issue happens to be), it’s accepting it. Accepting it was the key to ending the depression. Accepting is the key to everything. I’m just not very good at it.

All change, please

Next week is the last week of my contract. It’s been officially twelve weeks, about three months. A quarter of the year spent in an office. The next few weeks promise to be at least marginally more dramatic than the last twelve; I’m going down to the Gamesfest 3 event on Friday night, doing whatever it is newly celebritised people do when they have nothing to sign or sell at these things, then coming back on Sunday. On Monday I’m doing some podcast recording. The next Friday is my thirtieth birthday.

Contracts, especially short ones, are odd beasts. You’ve hardly settled in and brought in all your photos and desk knicknacks before you’re being sent on your way. If you’re lucky, you’ll have fathomed out the coffee machine and learned the names of some of the people you work with. Information Services might even have provided you with a computer. Then, suddenly, you’re on your way out again and people you hardly know want to go for drinks and request that you supply them with a range of sugar-rich snacking options on your last day.

There’s no settling in period and no wind-down. Only one of my pieces is getting a formal handover and I’m still managing one of the most important documents for the project, right up until Friday at 4pm when I’ll have to leave to catch a train (we still have them in Britain, just) into my new life. I keep meeting people from the last time I worked at Maggie’s Farm and the conversations are always the same.

“Hi! How are you?” they ask. “How long are you here for?”

“Hi, um, about another week,” is my response.

“And where are you going next?” they ask then.

“Home,” I say. I’m thrilled with the prospect of freedom. I feel like it’s the end of the school term and I can go racing out into the sunshine at the end of Friday, with all the joy of a kid who doesn’t have to think about homework for at least six more weeks.

It’s not the same kind of freedom though. Those who sneer at me that I’ll be just resting or vacationing in the manner of a celebrity can rest assured that this is merely the chance to do one job rather than two at once. For some reason, I can only do these office jobs with a fixed deadline in the near future, knowing it’ll all be over. I have a kind of jealousy and wonder at people who take permanent work, whinge about it every day, and yet know it’s going to go on indefinitely.

I’ve been shattered from balancing podcast recording in the evening with a full day of work, often without breaks, not to mention my compulsive need to exercise, read, and my ever-lasting autodidactism. I feel like I haven’t done any good thinking about Amnar in ages. This is despite having written the re-draft of Book One whilst doing this contract. And doing something you hate is shattering. Somebody smartly told me “lots of people do jobs they hate!” as though having more misery from other people somehow makes their lives better. We should all be miserable for the sake of those whose life choices put them in jobs they actively despise. Just as we should all stop eating for the starving.

And I’m going to be thirty, which is a demanding business, let me tell you. You don’t want to have to do it often and you don’t want to do it around other people turning thirty. I’m excited to be thirty. I wasn’t supposed to live this long, according to my former doctors, and having been briefly dead a the age of twenty, this all feels like I’ve been given a second chance. I’m getting younger, not older. I’ve been released from the burden of being in my twenties and obliged to be constantly drunk or stupid or both. I can now claim that, being thirty, it’s ok that I spend Friday night in with my face impossibly close to a book, for hours. I feel mature and confident and as though I’ve arrived in some intangible but significant way.

Yet I seem to be surrounded by people nearing thirty who are terrified of the impact of gravity on themselves, and making a misery of the whole occasion. No, not me. I don’t have much for gravity to involve itself with, for a start, which Dan the Producer reminded me of recently when I told him about Jack Jett’s boob-comment last weekend. Apparently, women reach full maturity – peak – at thirty something. I think this is good. Being thirty is all about attitude.

Building a complex fantasy world

I don’t have access to the American iTunes but I’ve been informed by Those Who Do that Amnar has so far received all five stars for the podcast reviews. I’d like to say thank you to whoever wrote them, for your support and glowing recommendation.

One especially made me smile when I heard the basic content. Amnar is complex fantasy fiction. Well, yes, that it is. I have often wondered when I’ve seen books or the like on “how to build fantasy worlds” and realise I could never write one because I’ve never really known exactly how I go about the business of building Amnar, except that it seems to grow organically in my mind. A few years ago, on an old online diary, I posted an entry where I described Amnar’s tax system and at that point a friend frowned and informed me that perhaps I had gone too far. I’ve had Amnar in my head in some form all my life, continually growing and changing. How you’d start from scratch with nothing, I have no idea.

The process, though, is straightforward. I think I have a penchant for detail. I don’t like holes so whenever I come across something as I’m writing or thinking about Amnar, I have to work out how to solve the problem posed by the hole. At other times, all I do is wander along a line of thought about something, asking myself endless questions about how they’d manage to do this, or how they’d achieve that. How is their incredible education and healthcare system maintained, for example? How have they managed to achieve what no government on earth has yet done?

The first and most important thing is to sense the reality of it. Even if it’s fantasy, it has to feel real. I pick up threads, pluck along strings of thought, listening until some explanation feels right. Friends are discomforted when I say “I don’t yet understand how this works…” as though I’m an academic working on a thesis, but this is simply my process. I take time to explore these things. I’ve had a lot of time, and do a lot of thinking, so Amnar over the years has become very complicated not just in terms of the world’s detail but the storylines involved.

The only fantasy I read when young was Tolkien (obviously), a couple of Anne McCaffrey books and one David Eddings. By my teens I was more fascinated by Russian literature and the darkness of writers like Emile Zola, Dostoyevsky and Soltzenitsyn. Since my interests are so wide-ranging, I didn’t end up writing something that is one person’s story, but many people’s stories, set in a world with a complex and detailed history. My father is a historian, and our long discussions over the conflicting world-views of East and West, the rise and fall of states and individuals, has probably had a massive impact on the structure of Amnar’s development.

Amnar isn’t so much fantasy but earth transformed. It seems so different and yet in many ways identical. I don’t doubt over the coming months people will be making more associations with current politics and history as the new book unfolds. Sometimes the most interesting thing is hearing people reach their own conclusions about what I might have meant.

Materialist confessional

I feel I should attend materialist confessional, or something. Perhaps I should stand up and declare to the world that my spending is intended to keep the wheels of the economy rolling. After over a year of being dedicated to poverty, eschewing the pleasures of the flesh, or at least the wallet, I decided that my ragged wardrobe needed updating. I ran out of things, and many of the repaired items I kept wearing to the point where they were no longer items, but just repairs sewn together with thread.

The boots and the coat I’d planned for a while. It’s taken me ages to find The Right Boots, but now I’ve found them I’m elated. I buy few shoes, these days, since I know I’ll never wear them. Instead I hunt down the one pair I’ll wear to death for a year. But of course I’ve been boasting about the uniqueness of the things I’ve been buying, so I shall explain.

Tucked away in a corner of the Barton’s Arcade on Deansgate is Jill Black’s. Jill is her own little business, buying in unique fashions from unusual designers just making their mark on the world, or designers who only make one or two of an item almost as though they are producing a piece of art. You can’t find these clothes anywhere else, but they conform to the rule of the Queen, the very Goddess of Fashion, Coco Chanel’s rule, that fashion fades, only style remains. I like things that are different, glamorous, flamboyant. And amazingly, just because Zuzu only made one of this skirt or Critical Mass only five of that coat, doesn’t mean they are horrifically expensive.

Jill is wonderful. Deep tan and blonde hair, with a big smile and a great sense of style and colour. Whereas in other stores the assistants are 18 and desperate to be somewhere (anywhere) else, this is her business, and everything invested in making sure people buy the right thing for them. On the ground floor the women’s, in the basement the men’s. I’d like a man who shopped at Phil Black Luomo’s. In the tiny shop, mannequin torsos are draped with skirts, tops and belts; a gigantic mirror overlooks the domain from the far end. The changing rooms are separated with brilliant pink curtains.

Jill is eating soup from Eat and helping a customer choose a dress when I went back in wearing the coat I bought earlier. This is a Critical Mass piece, the last of five coats designed this year with a wide skirt, cinched through the waist and torso to give a dramatic flair. A suit collar style with wide lapels at the top. The colours are dramatic, the pattern reminiscent of paint splashes on a Jackson Pollack canvas. On the sofa behind the display window, a huge leather sofa provides comfort for the menfolk while we discuss what it’s like being thirty (or more), and the fashions we’re exploring. The other customer has sleek russet coloured hair.

The atmosphere is like a living room before a party, a girls’ night in. In front of the mirror, we’re exchanging talk about what suits us best. I wasn’t going to buy – I’d just come from Harvey Nicks where I’d updated the makeup I’d run out of – and yet I saw a pretty skirt with a corset top in a bright red (the red of the number 8, in my synaesthetic world) and a t-shirt that went with it. Jill shows me the write up of the designer Zuzu Couture in one of her magazines. She only makes one of every piece, so the skirt and top are unique. The top, grungey rock-chick stuff, features a heart shot through with a hypodermic in glittering sewn-on fabrics and the words “love addict” across it. I feel like I might be fifteen again wearing it, and suddenly think, I’m nearly thirty, I should be wearing charcoal grey and being sensible.

But you still look like a girl, Jill says. Being tiny and with girlish looks, for some reason I can’t get away from the fact that the floaty, the rockish, the gothic and the young looks better on me than the formal and severe. And no matter how much I try to tone myself down, I’m always flamboyant, dramatic. I’m wearing Hollywood lipstick, after all. I bought the skirt and the top, doing spot calculations in my head and realising that actually, I don’t have to. I’m not eating into the savings I’ve made this summer, just playing a little. Stringent counting of every penny can’t be done forever, I think.

Excuses, excuses.

Eight out of ten Beagles prefer Amnar, survey says

The other two are apparently living with Dan the Producer, who is still working on this week’s episode of Amnar: The Book I Keep Re-Editing. He’s been held up by a Poo Incident. Judging by what I’ve heard so far, puppies are far more difficult to deal with that human babies. At least you can strap human babies down to furniture, cars and the like (they even make special chairs into which they can be restrained), and then of course, there are diapers for babies. Puppies: no such luck.

Instead I went shopping. Dan the Producer says people are curious about our lives and the things that we do, because it adds depth to the Amnar experience. Right now, I’m not sure. I’ve been on a contract now for three months, and finish at the end of this week. I don’t take holidays and haven’t really been able to relax since May, when my finances began to dive into the hell from which the contract duly saved them. As a result, I’ve been too tired to go out and really live life, preferring reading other people’s books and the occasional shopping trip.

It still feels strange, going shopping. There’s no indication today, walking around the glittery aisles of Harvey Nichols and Selfridges that we’re in the middle of the death of capitalism. Shopping is something I haven’t been able to do for so long that I’m almost programmed out of it, preferring to mend everything to the point of death rather than buy anything new. Eventually, however, I caved and decided to have a look around the stores.

My favourite place of all in Manchester is a boutique called Jil Black’s (no relation). There’s a menswear store in the basement, and the women’s on the ground. She doesn’t buy the same-same that everybody else does, and if you show up at the right time, she takes you on a tour of the latest things she has in. You can’t find the things she stocks anywhere else, and often they’re made by small designers who put out just five or six of one design and then move on. Such is the case with the coat I bought.

Everything is so impersonal that I love this treatment, being able to discuss what suits and doesn’t suit me with somebody who really knows what she’s talking about. There is such a range of styles and colours and fashions that it’s easy to get lost in what is such a small place. It inspired, oddly enough, the shopping experience of Amnari life. Amnar has no big stores. Everything is made bespoke, to order, for individuals. Small tailors and draperies abound. In Book One, there is a description of Amnar’s biggest market, the Great West Walkway, which is situated in the High City. In the centre of the ground floor, there are stalls selling the raw materials for making clothes, shoes and anything else you might need, while the tailors are based in the shops carved out of the walls all around.

There’s a lot more I could tell you about Amnar and its economy, but what you really want to know, Beagles and humans alike, is how they feel about dogs. This is a curious thing. Amnari are funny about the idea of ownership. They can’t understand how you could claim ownership of something that’s been around longer than you and will survive after your death. No housing market (huzah!). Duum was built, ostensibly, by the people who lived there, carved out of the rock of the canyon as needed. They have little government in the same sense that we would understand, so no state owns all property. And since Amnar’s total population is around 6 to 10 million, we’re not talking about it being difficult to house – let alone know – most people.

Ownership is even stickier when it comes to living things. Amnari don’t believe it’s possible to own another living being, even to the point where it affects language. You can’t say literally “my child” in Amnari. You’d say “the child I gave birth to”. The same is true of animals, and although they hunt for food and many of the nomadic tribes travel with goats, they consider themselves guardians. They don’t keep pets in the same way we might, but they do have hunting dogs. They would only rarely live in the house, unless you were a huntsman by profession, but outdoors. Amnari have, as a rule, a great affection for animals, so they could very well understand our love of dogs. Even ones who poo and hold up the release of podcasts.

Washing windows at the traffic lights

I took a walk at lunchtime to pick up a parcel. It’s a stroll through old central Manchester, an eerie combination of Victorian factories turned to car mechanic workshops, empty lots, and big cheap signs advertising big cheap things. Amidst this urban decay springs the tower of the Skyline building, new and shiny and executive, a finger pointed to the heavens.

At one of the crossings I saw two large women in headscarves, obviously immigrants from their dress, manner and faces, standing in the middle of the road with rags trying to wash the windscreens of the cars waiting for the lights to change. I was stunned. I’d never seen this in the UK before, yet such sights have become more and more common. The maimed beggar with two teeth on the sidewalk straight out of some middle-eastern state, the old woman on a stool, incongruous outside Primark with her accordion, playing tunes she knows but have never been heard by any of the passersby. She’s poor competition for the dude with the guitar and mic and his own umbrella, a good routine and a Mancunian accent.

It was shocking, but not because I hate immigrants, or because I thought it was unfair on them that they had to wash windows. They didn’t have much luck at it. The drivers didn’t want their cars “washed”, and didn’t want to pay. You pay for a service you’ve asked for, not one you haven’t. An altercation took place between one car and one of the women. She didn’t speak English, so she couldn’t understand.

It was shocking because I suddenly felt I was anywhere, anyplace. As though all sense of cultural meaning had been emptied from the world and there was no home anymore, just endless continents of strangers who don’t speak your language, don’t understand your customs. And unlike when you’re travelling, you can go home and leave it all behind, it had arrived, and here it all was. I felt suddenly as though everywhere had become as one, with the rich being rich and the poorest of the poor scrabbling at their cars the way they do on the highways in any one of the places I’ve been to in the past.

Walking away from the scene I wondered at my thoughts, and I thought about the need to belong, the sense of being part of something. I’ve been harsh on religion lately in this blog but to be honest, I remain firmly rooted upon the fence. It is faith, belonging, that sense of community that has so often been found in a shared sense of morals and beliefs, so quickly wiped away by a world where every city is becoming identical. I can feel sad for the women for whom standing all day at a set of traffic lights is somehow immeasurably preferable to their previous lives in some unknown elsewhere – yet will they find that just as they were struggling there, they’ll struggle here in a more profound way, because the west is often faceless, anonymous, without soul?

I was raised in a household without religion, and I don’t feel I’ve lost out because of the beauty I still find in the world. I still find meaning and hope and pleasure in life. Yet I was also told that it was important that I chose for myself what I did or did not believe. I found, in the end, after experimenting with many ways of living and thinking and believing, that this state of not-quiteness worked for me. I continually challenge, explore and re-develop what I think about the world. Some dislike me for this because I can’t be easily pigeon-holed. I’ve always been fascinated by the way the unseen creeps into our lives.

The most fervent of atheists turn it into religion, but you can’t base your life on a hatred of something in whose existence you claim not to believe. That would simply turn you into a vessel of hatred. Despite the fact that I love science, I love the way it explains and yet creates more magic and mystery, I still feel a hum in the world, of something more than this. Nothing humans have made in the form of a god or gods has ever adequately explained the feeling, so I remain without any word that describes who or what I am in relation to religion, other than that I understand it is part of the essential thing that is humanity.

What I felt on the street today was a great sadness, as though the uniqueness of all places was leaving us, and that anonymity seems to be the order of the day.

Making a mockery of you

I’m intrigued to read that there are small provincial towns in England that will still not allow one to watch the immensely witty film “Life of Brian”. It was banned, 28 years ago, because Christian groups insisted that it was mocking Jesus Christ. Yet Jesus appears only briefly, making his speech about the meek inheriting the earth (because, after all, they had one hell of a time).

The mockery wasn’t of Jesus Christ at all, but of dogmatic religionists – the very people crying out against the film were the people the film castigated. You could go deeper. Many of the books that eventually never made it into the official bible document suggested that Jesus rejected the idea of an established church with a doctrine of power based on wealth acquisition (obviously not something the church leaders wanted the general populace to understand) through dogma and fear. If that is so, then Life of Brian, and Brian’s own suggestion that everybody is different and should think for him or herself, is pretty close to what Jesus wanted. So it’s not mocking Jesus, although it takes a good few powerful punches at organised religion.

If the film mocks anything or anybody mercilessly, it’s people who’ll follow along without thinking through what they’re doing. It describes how people pick up on tiny clues and then fight each other over which is more significant (do you follow the gourd or the shoe?), how some people will happily follow any leader, as long as they don’t have to think for themselves (“You must be the Messiah, I should know, I’ve followed a few!”), how we’re so keen to believe in the miraculous when the mundane answer is usually true (“He’s been taken up! Taken up!” “No, no, he’s over there.”). That is what Life of Brian is really all about.

Finding meaning

This is an interesting article about the book Eat, Pray, Love, which I haven’t read, I hasten to add. I might, judging by the article, be the only person who hasn’t. It is interesting that just as the world turns on a pinhead and calamity looms in big finance, people find meaning in helping others. The return to the simple life, or “there’s something wrong with me.” It was reading the article that I suddenly felt no internal spiritual longing, no realisation that my life was missing something. In fact, I felt as though I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and my life is filled with meaning, depth, and essence. Unlike the writer of the article, this happened very recently and was not about introspection, but the opposite. When I got over myself, stopped focusing on me and everything about me that might be a problem, wrong, at odds with who I want to be, suddenly I saw the beauty in the world right now, as it is, financial boom or bust.

I realise I’ve never talked about my personal philosophy and how or why I live the life and do the things I do. My life has been one of conscious, controlled choice for a very long time. I worked out very young that the impact of options can have momentous consequences. Then I died, which helped. Dying is a very good thing to do, on a temporary basis, once. At least having a moment of unexpected total horror when the Grim Reaper is more than just pointing forbiddingly at the salmon mousse. At that point I think I began to realise that I had this one life, this one tiny space of time that is both terribly short but also horrendously long, too long to spend doing something I hated, too short to waste time doing things that don’t matter.

Then it ebbed. I was still drawn in by this middle-class theory that you go to university, get a job, get partner, get house, get children, die. It didn’t feel right, but I was keen to please my parents and back then, still anorexic. I’m a very driven person. Although I was told I would never get my degree, I did, mostly because it never occurred to me that I might not. I don’t think I listened, or the short-term memory loss that I suffered meant if they didn’t tell me I’d never make it, I forgot. It was only when my relationship collapsed and I realised that “this was it” I began to wake up and made that momentous decision to stop being anorexic right there and then.

But that was only the beginning. A year later I was finally able to leave my ex and move down here. A week before I did, still feeling unnerved and as though it would never really happen, I saw the film Fight Club. Although some of it you can dismiss, the essential philosophy of Tyler Durden woke me up in a way that I’d never imagined. Something chimed with me: May I never be complete, may I never be content. The bland, dry, settle down and just muddle along had never appealed, but this did. And here I was, blowing up my life as Tyler blew up his apartment.

Friends had been to visit the house I was leaving behind. Big Victorian place. Gorgeous furniture, in the process of being renovated. “You can’t leave this!” one of them squeaked. “It’s such a lovely place.”

“But I’m horrifically miserable,” I said.

“But… you can’t leave this,” was the only response they could find. God, I had that sofa problem sorted. The trouble was, the sofa didn’t matter, and neither did the table or the house. I was prepared to leave with nothing, and I knew it was the right thing to do. This might be the fuel that alighted the nomad in me. It wasn’t until I discussed Amnar with a friend that I began to come back to the one thing that has always remained constant in my life. Amnar is pure love to me. I clung to it, writing furiously, during the days and nights when I had no money, no other hope. It wasn’t the thought of publication or great success though, that kept me churning out the words. It was just the love of doing this thing I was doing, with this place that I loved so much.

Depression has been harder to kick. Ingrained habits of thinking were harder to sway than ingrained habits of not eating. The answer lay in acceptance, but I struggled with that. Struggled immensely. Talking it out didn’t work, and although I made a little progress with the Sedona Method, I was gripped fast onto something dark inside and couldn’t let go. This was why I went for the high technology route and began using Holosync. I figured if it could break through anything, it could break even my ferocious resistance to change.

And indeed, it has. Depression itself isn’t so much feeling sad. It’s being so sucked into the feeling, and hating the feeling, and the self, that the whole shebang collapses into itself. I’ve known many friends struggle with it, and most of the time, the depression is largely caused by feeling bad about feeling bad. I have spent 29 years wrapped up in self-hate, convinced that this self-loathing somehow made me a better human being. I noticed as I jumped up a level of Holosync, that at the start of a new level I get very deeply sucked into this negativity toward myself. Enough, I thought, and dug out the “Break the Habit” Paraliminal.

Walking to Maggie’s Farm the other day I suddenly realised that all this self-hate did was radiate outward until it seemed to infect the air around me, and anybody who came into my path. Through loathing myself I was passing the darkness on to other people – exactly what I didn’t want to do. The sense of release was profound, and in that same moment I realised that a lot of the search (friends have often called me a seeker) was about Me and I was so surrounded by thoughts and internal debates and discussions of Me that I couldn’t see beyond the high walls to the world beyond.

Without thought of Me any longer, the world is a bigger, brighter place. People often want to jump on the Go Find Myself bandwagon, forgetting that attaching another spirituality is no different to thinking you can fill up the emptiness with a handbag or Jimmy Choos. I’ve always felt that doing something that really brings joy to you, and meaning, is what brings you meaning in life. In many ways, it doesn’t matter what it is. You can’t go elsewhere and find You. You is going to be right there, with all the baggage and all the issues that always were there, until you choose to drop them.

It all boils down to conscious choosing. As Tyler says: “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You have to realise that one day you will die.” Why should you know, really know, you’re going to die? Because it wakes you up to what’s important, what matters. It could be anything. I don’t know what that thing might be for you, because it could be children, home, family, just as it’s not for me. I have crashed so many times in life that picking myself up has become something like second nature. Recently, I’ve been looking around and just appreciating everything as it is. Appreciating the way financial errors correct themselves, the way that out of the crashing down of financial institutions, the seeds of independent enterprise may grow. After 29 years of depression, I’m hitting 30 and for the first time, I’m an unstoppable optimist.

Radio star (or something like)

So, last night I went on radio in Dallas, Texas, to plug Amnar, as is required of any self-respecting internet writer person. It took a few attempts to get through, and when I did get through, the producer was very kind and although he couldn’t spell my name, he did say they’d get me on quick because it must be costing a small Lehman Brothers’ fortune to call. Actually, it’s not that much. BT has signed me up for some preferential rates thing, in return for a new phone (which never arrived) and my agreeing to extend my contract with them for something like another fifty years. I think I may actually finish Holosync first.

Jack E Jett is fun. It’s impossible to refuse a man with upwardly mobile blond hair, a sharp black suit and yellow marigold glove. He is obviously prepared for every eventuality. And I love American accents – as well you know. I listened in to the adverts in the breaks and I realised why Americans are so paranoid. Every other advert is a warning about something, usually some unknown product in the food they eat, the clothes they wear, or the substances with which they use to clean the aforementioned items. How terrifying it must be to hear that all the time.

This was, however, a refreshing respite from the outbreak of Severe Doom that has taken over the Western world lately. I have noticed that we have a severe reticence, not to say allergic reaction, to positivity. I’m not sure if it’s just over here in the UK, but we do as a species in the West have some kind of addiction to negativity. Even if something good happens, we’re liable to see the worst of it. Everybody says this is the worst thing to happen in finance since some other occasion they’ve picked that was very bad. The obvious answer to that is to say, “And look, we survived that. It’s not the end of the world yet.” I’ve given up the news for the moment on the grounds that the only person with any sense of the positive is Anatole Kaletsky, and he doesn’t write often enough.

Meanwhile, I sat and listened to the radio show and had my few minutes of fame. We talked Manchester a bit until Jack realised that he wasn’t talking to Jaely but Joely Black. I was stunned when he said I was beautiful and had seen “the photos” of me. Especially when, to my bafflement, he mentioned that I had great breasts. I was at first tempted to say “What photos?” quickly followed by “WHAT breasts?” since I know of several walls bristling with jealousy at me even as I write. I’m feeling mildly paranoid now. To the best of my knowledge there are no photos of that nature out there in the world, so maybe there’s another better endowed Joely Black out there, of whom I was until last night totally unaware. Still, one never rejects a compliment when offered.

This leads on to the introduction to the new Amnar series, which Dan The Producer launched yesterday morning shortly before dashing to fetch his new Beagle puppies from Staffordshire. I can guarantee to all listeners that based on photographic evidence (better than that provided for my cleavage), they are cute enough to be considered weapons of mass distraction. I did wonder though at his introduction to the utterly adorable dogs before plunging listeners into the darkness of 4785 pre-apocalyptic Amnar. Something of the non-sequitur there, I feel.

And we do plunge, rather. Amnar Book One opens with Tascha, a woman so well-endowed in so many respects that she could give Wonder Woman a run for her tightly-clad money. She is one of my favourite chaacters, mostly for her no-nonsense attitude combined with full-on curvy warrior sexiness. She walks a harder, mouthier line than any of the other female Servants but she has a class to her that’s undeniable. This new book introduces a number of elements I kept hidden in the former volume, and they are presented here in Tascha’s entrance to Amin Duum – the secret infirmary in what was Dedicated Lower City West.

There is something about hospitals that inspires a sensation of haunting, of death and creeping gloom. I had this feeling when, many years ago investigations were being conducted on the electrical activity of my brain and this, for some Frankensteinian reason best known to my consultants, had to take place in what began life as a Victorian asylum and then became a large, looming hospital on a dark hill surrounded by a large forest. Hollywood could not have planned it better. Walking those dark corridors, filled with broken hospital furniture, would have inspired a hundred films to match Session 9, and perhaps has lent the backdrop for the shadow-swathed infirmary where Book One now begins.

What a way to start

There are a lot of things in this world I’ve done, a great many I haven’t, and one of those things that falls in the latter category is calling into a radio show – on the invitation of the DJ. If I hadn’t been asked, I’d never dream of doing it, or at least, until a week ago I wouldn’t have. A lot has happened in the last few weeks, and I haven’t had time to talk about them.

Anyway, today is also the day that the first episode of the new Amnar podcast series went live. Now placed in the care of the Producer, it’ll be even better than the last one, mostly because you won’t have me doing anything but reading the new version of Book One. We discussed some time ago whether he should do the chit-chat and take over from Joely “I hate self-promotion and feel like a fool doing it” Black, but I was surprised when he said, as we discussed the new series, that he would do the patter. It is easier though, considering I’m preoccupied with a few million other things right now.

Regardless of all this, welcome to the new series, and another look at the events of late 4785 in Amin Duum.