Outfoxed

I used to live in South London, the leafy mirror world of North London that is populated mostly by foxes. Once, I lived in a flat with a garden. The flat was more expensive than I had intended, but I was desperate and it was nice. The garden was definitely not part of my plan. I do not enjoy gardening and gradually it became overgrown. That would be a problem for me when I moved out, but in the meantime it became a haven for the local foxes. I would watch them from the kitchen window in the mornings. There were at least three, and they were a cheerful sight before getting the train to work. 

The foxes in the area were used to people. Sometimes, walking home along a narrow pavement, with nowhere else to go between a wall on one side and line of parked cars on the other, a fox would nonchalantly squeeze past my legs. Occasionally the brush of its tail would tickle my hand. It was thrilling, like being admitted to a secret society. The foxes were my friends.  

After the garden flat, I moved to a flat on the top floor of a terrace house that could only be accessed via a fire escape at the rear. The legality of this wasn't something I questioned. The flat was cheap and I needed it in a hurry. It was so draughty that whenever it was windy outside my curtains would flap around as though possessed by psychic ducks. Still, I reminded myself, a bargain is a bargain. 

One day I returned from work to find a fox waiting by the door. It must have climbed up the two flights of stairs to get there, and now that I was blocking its escape it looked panicked. I moved to one side and indicated the space I'd created with a nod of my head. The fox looked confused. I backed off a little, but not too much because it was my flat after all and I would very much like to be able to get inside it, even if the inside experienced somewhat similar weather to the outside. To my shock, the fox sprang onto the sloping roof that jutted out past the fire escape. Its claws clattered on roof tiles as it skidded in a barely controlled arc. I was afraid that it was fly over the edge, but at the last second it leapt onto the fire escape below me. Then, with a frantic scramble down the remaining steps, it was away into the night. 

The drama over, I went to unlock the door and noticed something on the doorstep. I squatted down to take a closer look and a familiar smell caught in my nostrils. It appeared that the fox had climbed up two flights of a fire escape to do a poo on my doorstep. Perhaps the foxes were no longer my friends. 

Not long after that incident, I was walking back from St Johns Station when I noticed a fox ahead of me. It was dark, and the fox was at first oblivious of my presence. However something must have caught its attention because it paused and looked over its shoulder at me. Then it carried on along the pavement. Eventually it crossed the road and turned down a side street. On a whim, I decided to follow it. It led me down another street before glancing at me again and ducking under a hedge. Feeling foolish. I continued walking even though I was now heading away from home. When I reached the spot where the fox had dashed under the hedge, I paused and bent over to peer through the branches. 

I let out a small gasp when I saw two golden eyes looking at me. 

"Hello there foxy," I said, delighted with this bonus encounter. 

"Excuse me?" the fox replied. My heart skipped a beat. My mind wrestled with the magical possibility of a talking fox. The fox had a woman's voice. It sounded vaguely Welsh. Like sunlight rushing into an unshuttered room, my momentary confusion cleared. Obviously the fox wasn't speaking to me. There must be someone on the other side of the hedge. 

"Sorry," I said, trying a little too desperately to sound sensible. "I was talking to a fox in your hedge." 

"Bloody foxes," said the unseen woman. "If there's one in my hedge, you shoo it out." 

I looked into the fox's eyes. I felt there was a conspiratorial bond between us. It tried to silently impart that I was on its side and there would be no shooing from my side of the hedge. 

"Sorry to bother you," I said to the woman. "It's gone now anyway." 

"Bloody menaces they are," she grumbled. "Shrieking and wailing all night, and you know what?" 

"What?" I asked. 

"The other day one of them shat on my doorstep." 

Perhaps you deserved it, I thought, uncharitably. That would of course have meant that I had also deserved it, but logic had no place in the fox conspiracy. I winked at the fox, straightened up and walked back down the road towards home. 

That night I was woken up by a piercing wail that sounded like babies being murdered. Maybe the woman behind the hedge had a point. Or maybe all magic has a price, and this is the price I pay for the magical moment when a fox spoke to me.

Where Does Writing Come From?

There's a very famous Douglas Adams quote wherein he says that "writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds." By strange coincidence, many years before he wrote that, the American sports writer Red Smith offered a similar opinion: "Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed." 

Arguments of originality aside, where do the words come from and how do we get them onto the page? Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Museum of Curiosity, JK Rowling described her experience of a lake and shed. Ideas come from the lake and are worked on in the shed. The lake refills itself through some unknown process, and too much time in the shed can lead to the writing being overdone. There is an ideal balance between lake and shed that has to be maintained. I like this analogy, although I don't personally see a lake or a shed. I'm not that much of a visual thinker. 

There is something like a lake though. A reservoir that fills from an unseen source. While I'm finishing one book, vague notions of another begin floating to the surface. And to go back to Mr Adams and Mr Smith, the process of writing isn't necessarily tortuous. Often the difficulty is in starting. One of the reasons I write this blog is that it forces me site down and get something on the page, even if I don't really know what it will be when I'm finished. It's exercising a muscle, keeping my hand in to use the vernacular. Getting used to the idea of starting so that when I've got a more daunting project ahead of me there isn't quite so much inertia to overcome. 

Some people have no such inertia, and find writing as easy as turning on a tap. If anything I'm even more curious about where their inspiration comes from. Are they just lucky enough to have a stronger internal wellspring, or is there something they do that the rest of us do not? Maybe it's a simple as eating the right breakfast cereal and avoiding social media. 

I will sometimes deliberately go to another place to write. The main advantage of this is that there are fewer distractions than in my flat. Libraries are good. Bars and cafés can be too, provided you moderate your inspiration at the former. Very occasionally, for this is England, I will site in one of London's many parks on a sunny day. In fact I wrote large chunks of my forthcoming book The Gang of Four Ride Again during lunchbreaks in Grays Inn Fields. 

I have written on trains, I have written on planes, I have even written on a boat, but that was just a very silly poem about hipster penguins. I've never written on a car or a bus. Well, I did once write CLEAN ME with my finger on the back of a filthy transit van, but that's more of a rite of passage than a literary effort. Cars lurch all over the place, making my already spidery handwriting completely illegible. Buses aren't so bad, but I feel like I'm missing out if I'm not watching the world outside. Things collect on top of bus shelters, did you know that? There used to be one on the Old Kent Road with an old VHS tape of the horror classic Hellraiser on its roof. It can't all be writing. Sometimes you have to be looking too. 

My pet theory is that our imaginations come from the bubbling swamp of our subconsciousness. Everything we've experienced is in there somewhere, even if it is no longer a perfect memory, or even our own memory. This is why writing can be surprising, because none of us truly know what's down there and what will float on up next. I have attempted to aid it when writing books, having installed a mood board next to my desk. I find this terribly embarrassing. I bought a load of adhesive-backed cork tiles and stuck them to the wall so I can pin picture of things I want the mood of in my book, along with other photos which are more for reference. It is currently covered in snapshots of the 1990s with no other theme connecting them. It's just as well I don't get many visitors. Does it help? I think the process of putting it together helps me think about the level of detail I want to commit to. Other than that it has become something of a ritual. 

Do you have any rituals that help with the mysteries of the creative process, or is it just enough to switch your laptop on?

Doomscrolling the Day Away

I have spent most of the past week trying to shake off a particularly tenacious cold. I'm usually quick to shake them off, but this feels like some mutant covid hangover. Very achy. The days start well but by the evening it has rallied again. It's left me feeling drained, and it is in this feeble state that I've been watching the internet reach a hysterical crescendo on the subject of AI. It is no longer coming for your job, it is here and ready to take it. I am reminded of the "THEY'RE HERE!" trailer for Poltergeist, only this time it isn't ghosts that are going to fuck your life up, it's tech billionaires. Is this a form of a mass psychosis? It certainly feels like something big is coming. As a software engineer, this year more than ever it seems like the coming wave is something that I have to figure out how to surf or get wiped out. It's existentially terrifying. 

If you are also feeling unglued from your previously imagined future, allow me to recommend some places to escape from the coming white-collar apocalypse. 

A CAVE

This is the classic retreat from modernity, as demonstrated by hermits through the ages. With no electricity there's no danger of accidentally doomscrolling the day away on X. I would recommend one somewhere in the warmer parts of Europe as the cave winters can be brutal. Since you'll be avoiding all human contact the language barrier won't be an issue. You can even put a sheet across the cave's entrance to give yourself an extra level of abstraction from the real world.

A BUNKER

AKA a new build cave. This comes with all the exorbitant costs of new build accommodation. On the other hand, bunkers are hot now, albeit very billionaire-coded. They are most likely outside your budget unless you can acquire an old missile silo in the middle of nowhere. A great hack for acquiring a bunker is to get employed as private security for a billionaire. When they inevitably screw the global pooch and retreat to the perceived safety of their own bunker, it will only be a short time before their head of security kills the now powerless idiot who hired them. Stay on his good side and you're golden.

A DESERT ISLAND

Another classic isolation destination. People usually end up there by mistake, which suggests they are easy to chance upon. There is a real danger that the island will sink as increasingly massive server farms accelerate global warming and melt glacial ice. The weather's bound to be good though. Pack a hat.

ANTARCTICA

The aforementioned global warming should make the place a bit more hospitable. The penguins can be quite noisy and the smell of their guano takes some getting used to, so take both ear and nose plugs. On the positive side, I am 100% confident that no penguin will ever be mad enough to add AI to MS Notepad.

THE MOON / MARS / SPACE IN GENERAL

The ultimate isolation but difficult to achieve. Also there is a non-zero chance that you find yourself stuck with Elon Musk.

#booktok

I've spent a lot of time on #BookTok lately. For the uninitiated, #BookTok is the subslice of TikTok that caters to everything to do with writing. It was, at first, illuminating. It is now frequently unhinged. It is everything I hate about the process of publishing a book. Now, I have only ever self-published a book, so I'm aware I'm very much firing shots from afar on this subject.

I'm not going to single out any particular content creators here. There isn't any single person I think is repeatedly giving terrible advice, it's just such a hotly contested subject that the massive spectrum of opinions is bound to contain some clunkers. So without further fanfare or handwringing, here are my favourite worst forms of bad advice on #BookTok and social media in general.

• Cover letters. These are presented with the expectation that their audience is in a cargo cult. I've yet to get representation myself, but if and when I do, I'm fairly sure it will be on the strength of my submission and not driven by the cover letter. Sure, the letter is important. A dreadfully written one could mean an agent doesn't even look at your sample. On the other hand, if the manuscript is good, no agent is going to dismiss you for not having a perfect cover letter, whatever that is. In my very unpublished opinion, agents are people and people have differing tastes. Some of them like some personal details, while others just want the facts of your submission. It's a bit of a lottery as to which is which, although #BookTok is helpful there because some agents are on it. My instinct is to make sure the salient details are first and foremost - genre, synopsis, comps. Anything else is sugar.
• Authorial self-promotion. This is wild. It is the worst. You wanted to be a writer? Surprise! Apparently you also have to be a content creator. I have so far avoided doing this, beyond this veiled alter-ego blog, because it is my nightmare. I like writing. As a creative process it is almost free. You can do it in your head. All that is required to share it is pen and paper. Obviously as a society and industry we have moved beyond that, but the process is fundamentally the same. The difficult part is getting other people to read it. In the past (and this may be the sort of false nostalgia that leads to even worse opinions than I'm expressing here) you would write a book, get an agent, sell the book, and if your publisher wanted you to do some signings or similar they'd sort it out. Otherwise there wasn't an expectation on you, the author, to also be your own PR agency. It is dispiriting. I've seen authors I admire posting relentlessly, and not always about their own work. I sometimes wonder whether this isn't another form of cargo cult. Have they got hard proof that their social media traffic is responsible for their book sales? I hope they do, but in a technological landscape where platforms have the means and motive to present misleading data, I am naturally distrustful. At the other end of this are the unpublished / self-published / maybe-just-experimenting people who I don't mean to cast shade on.
• Live streaming. I find this especially unhinged. Again, I hope those doing it are seeing some sales of the back of it, but I would rather never sell a book again than put myself through it. I've seen people live writing. I've even seen someone live editing. Who is this helping? Are there people out there who find the writing process mysterious and beguiling? Honestly, it is, to quote Douglas Adams, mostly staring at a blank page until your forehead starts to bleed. It can of course be many things, but none of them make for an engrossing spectator sport.
• The bots. That tantalising feeling when one of your posts has received a reply or someone has DM'd you. The latter should immediately get your spidey sense going because bots love DMs. They waste your time with stilted small talk before clumsily trying to sell you an editing/publishing/prostitution service. To be fair I see less of them now. Perhaps they have all been put out of work by Musk's Grok, leaving space for actual people to attempt to sell you editing/publishing/prostitution services in the comments.
• Finally, the endless calls to promote your work. I know or at least hope these come from a place of good intent, but they are endless and appear to do nothing but attract the previously mentioned bots. I suppose they are mostly harmless, but in a social media circle made almost entirely of writers, it feels like we're just a pack of dogs howling in the dark.

I don't intend any of the above to sound mean-spirited. Promoting books is difficult, and everyone has to do what they're driven to do. I've even heard some lunatic is planning on releasing their book on cassette for the ZX Spectrum! This could open new avenues for literary promotion. I should consider re-releasing my novel Dead Penguins on a dead penguin. I'm sure ZSL London would cheerfully help out for a suitable donation. That said, the shipping could be expensive as well as legally problematic. So maybe posting writing tips to #booktok isn't such a bad idea after all.

Something on the Piccadilly Line is Eating the Trains

Something on the Piccadilly Line is eating the trains. I am aware that this is an extraordinary claim, but I have no other explanation for what is happening. For background, I live on the Piccadilly Line. When it runs well, it's great and gets me everywhere I want to be. However, recently there have been many times when I have wondered what the point of a tube line is if it doesn't have any trains running. According to TFL, this is because the current stock is old. It suffers from wheel flats, and frequently requires repair while we impatiently await its replacement. Its replacement, a shiny new walk-through model similar to that on the Circle Line, has been delayed for reasons that are unclear. According to TFL, partial line closures are required to make way for the new stock, but I think it's clear by now that there's something TFL aren't telling us. And that is that something is eating the trains.

Consider the evidence. A lack of trains has often been blamed on wheel flats, which is where trains skidding on slippery rails wear unevenly. But couldn't these unevenly shaped wheels also be explained by something chomping them?

I wondered whether I was the first person to make this connection, so I did a little digging in the obscure corners of the internet. It was there that I learned of the Beast of Boston Manor.

The first mention of the beast is in 1975, a mere two years after the introduction of the current Piccadilly Line stock. A westbound driver reported seeing something leap from  the platform and under the train. Fearing the worst, he hit the brakes but after inspection there was no sign of the mystery leaper. It was subsequently ruled upon return to the depot that several of the wheels appeared worn flat, as though something had eaten away at them. This was the first reference to wheel flats on the line. The driver could add little light to the shape he saw dash under the train. It was brown and hairy, and exactly the same size and shape as an Alsatian dog.

There were no more sightings until 1988, when a train inexplicably lost power on the eastbound platform. In his incident report, the driver noted that immediately before the power cut, he had been surprised to see a passenger on the platform who looked uncannily like the writer / wizard / mall Santa / Rasputin impersonator Alan Moore. However subsequent detective work has determined that Alan Moore was in Northampton at the time.

As time passed, the age of the rolling stock became a convenient cover story for the beast. With trains being taken out of service all over the Piccadilly Line, is was clear that the beast had developed quite an appetite. Some have even speculated that it has nested in the Heathrow Loop, specifically at the suspiciously closed Terminal 1. The real reason for the delay in introducing the new stock is that during a test run, one of them was eaten there.

TFL have unofficially stated that there is no silver bullet for getting the new stock online, but they have been stockpiling actual silver bullets in stations around the network.

I attempted to contact TFL for comment, and after a couple of days received the following via email:

"Chew chew choo choo. Chomp chomp chomp. Beast will eat every train. Beast will eat everyone. Good service on all other lines."