Carry on, Jeeves – a book review

Wotcher, lovely people!

So this is the first in what will hopefully turn into a series of book/movie/tv series reviews. I’m thinking this could be a good exercise for me while giving you entertainment suggestions for your lazy Sunday afternoons. Win-win, right? Right! So let’s start. This is an oldie. I wrote this as part of my Master’s degree, back in 2013, but don’t you know, I think it holds up pretty nicely. I hope it’s as fun to read as it was to write.

Enjoy! Or not. You do you.

When endeavouring to comment upon the work of Mr P.G. Wodehouse, one must wander around the superlative shop with an eye out for discount offers. Now I don’t want to seem over-enthusiastic or anything, but I will go so far as to say that there is a decent chance the chap might be the most talented wordsmith I have ever had the good fortune to read. He’s got it, don’t you know.

Should you chance to open the collection of short stories titled Carry On, Jeeves, the first in a remarkable series, you will meet characters so alive with clumsiness and colourful expressions that they will have you spout out nonsense like “this guy is so improbably absurd that he must be real”. Bertie Wooster will entertain you with some delightful anecdotes from his eccentric life, all of which involve a “kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie” of a manservant called Jeeves, who quietly shuffles into his life one day and just as quietly takes over the household. About Jeeves, what can I say? The first thing you learn about him is that “the man’s a genius”. These credentials make him the person to ask when, say, you want to get rid of a manuscript you stole, or need to make a young lady understand that your friend is desperately smitten. Jeeves will always come up with a cunning plan to solve the whole thing, and still manage to get his way every single time. If Jeeves doesn’t like your tie, then by Jove you’ll have thrown it away by the end of the week.

Now Mr Wooster, in his own words “an optimist” and “all for rational enjoyment and so forth”, is the ideal narrator. He will have you laughing your lungs out without even trying to make any jokes. In fact, he probably wouldn’t understand why you are not taking him seriously. He will address you directly with a clear “you know” and yet never will you feel like his voice is forced upon you, nor will these addresses ever get in the way of the story moving forward. For Carry On, Jeeves is first and foremost an utterly enjoyable read.

When I picked it up to write a few words about it, I found I could not put it down, although I’d already read it and, in fact, knew it inside out and upside down. P.G. Wodehouse has this way of sucking you in and keeping you hooked. And I don’t mean in a suspense-y Dan Brown-y way. You keep reading because of the writing (as it should be with every book, let’s just put that out there). If you’ve read as much as four books – well, let’s say five, one doesn’t like to boast – you will know a master storyteller when you see one. It doesn’t take an amazing, knows-all-Proust-by-heart-and-in-French-too, reader to recognize that Mr Wodehouse knows what he’s doing. Every story feels controlled from the first word to the last, neatly tied up in a simple but solid little knot. And on top of all that, it’s dashed clever. There is a good chance that reading Wodehouse will improve your vocabulary. Looking for a new way to call your auntie? How about “old flesh and blood”? Or maybe you want to compliment your friends on their superior intellect? Try “from the collar upward you stand alone”. I guarantee you will make an impression.

What I mean to say is: how often do you find light reading that’s also great literature?

When you consider just how cheap the good old Penguin edition is – and even when you don’t consider it, come to that – there is really no excuse for you not to have Jeeves on your bookshelf. Believe me, he is the kind of man you want around the house.

Stuck in Traffic

I’m not much of a writer, but some things are so surprising and incredible that you just have to talk about them. My adventure – and yes, I would call it an adventure – started several years ago. I say “started” because I feel the events I’m going to share with you shaped my life and will forever continue to shape it. I was twenty years old and fresh out of college. Barely was my diploma in my hands that I left the comfort of my parents’ home to travel the world. I had been planning the trip all year, an occupation that had caused my grades to drop a few points. I was going to fly to Beijing, rent a car and visit the country from there. As any young bloke who had never left his hometown, I was filled with ideas of huge landscapes, wild nature and a good deal of “making it on my own” feelings.

Upon my arrival in China, I discovered it was going to be trickier than I thought. I had been teaching myself Chinese for the past year, but actually having a conversation with someone bears little to no resemblance to reading sentences in books. I had the hardest time following when the man who rented me the car warned me against the Beijing-Tibet expressway. If I had understood better, I might have taken his advice and missed out on the most interesting and character-building experience of my life; so, in this way, I would say I was lucky my Chinese was bad.

At first, it looked like any other traffic jam. The highway at rush hour. You know that feeling you can get that you’re going to be here all night. The thing is: even when you get that feeling, you don’t actually believe you’re going to be here all night. Deep down, annoyed as you are, you know it’ll be two hours tops. At first, I thought it would be two hours tops. Time passed and then I thought it would be four hours tops. Then I thought it would be six hours tops. By the time the sun went down, we were moving about two inches every ten minutes.

And suddenly, it happened. The driver in front of me turned his engine off. That’s when I realised I hadn’t grown accustomed to the roaring as I thought I had. The roaring had stopped. I reached over to turn off my engine as well and found myself apprehending the moment when I would admit that I was actually going to be here all night after all. Instead of turning the key, I wind down my window. It had been a very hot day and the air inside the car was barely breathable.

I was busy taking in the fresh air of the evening when my eyes locked with those of the man sitting in the passenger seat of the car next to mine. He was about fifty, his face was wrinkled and very tan. He smiled. I timidly smiled back, and then returned to my steering wheel, which, I grant you, was quite useless under the circumstances. I sighed and finally turned my engine off. The silence rang in my ears for a while. I must say I just felt like crying. I cursed myself out loud for being stupid enough to think I could actually make it on my own. I was all alone in this foreign country without any clue as to how long I was stuck there and all I wanted was to be back home. I crossed my arms over the wheel and buried my face in them.

It was morning when I woke up. Very early morning, but morning nonetheless. I felt sort of numb, my neck was sore and I was starving. I was still fighting with the remains of sleep that were pulling my eyelids down when I heard a light knocking against my car door. A woman was standing there, gently smiling at me. She started speaking to me and I must say I didn’t understand a word she said.

“Sorry?” I said in English. I really didn’t feel like making an effort.

She did, however. She repeated a little slower but it was her gesture towards the front of my car that made me understand we were moving again. I nodded. She nodded.

“Thank you,” I said.

She nodded again, smiled some more and went back to her vehicle. I was able to move my car about three feet before the line stopped again.

Looking around, I saw some people getting out of their cars, so I opened my door carefully and stepped out on the tarmac. It was a surreal experience to walk on the highway. I didn’t dare leave my car – which was silly because it was pretty much like being in a parking lot – so I just stretched my legs and leaned against my car door, and almost fell through the open window. The man who’d smiled at me the day before chuckled. I blushed and looked away, trying to seem cooler than I felt.

I spotted a group of merchants slaloming between the vehicles, selling food and drink to the drivers. They must have come from a nearby village. Suddenly remembering that I was starving, I stopped a guy who was walking past me and proceeded in buying a cup of instant noodles and a bottle of water. I thought I had done a pretty good job in carrying out the transaction entirely in Chinese and was about to pay when the man that had smiled and then laughed at me stepped out of his car, took the noodles and water from my hands, gave it back to the guy and started talking very fast. I watched in a stupor as the vendor left in a hurry with my lunch.

“What’s going on?” I asked in the best Chinese I could manage.

The man – Bao-Zhi was his name, as I later learned – put his hand on my shoulder.

“Twenty yuans for that, it’s too expensive.” he said.

“I don’t have a choice,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

“Come eat with us.” he said.

For a moment, I thought I’d misunderstood, but the way he smiled and pushed me towards his car left little room for doubt. As much as I tried to protest, he wouldn’t have it. He introduced me to his brother Hai, his wife Dao-Ming and his daughter Jia. All of them were smiling and gladly welcomed me. We all sat next to their car and I was instantly handed a bowl of rice and an orange juice. Bao-Zhi was quite chatty. He told me pretty much everything about his life. How his mother’s birthday was coming up and they were travelling to see her, how he and his brother hadn’t seen each other in six months and they thought it would be fun to make the journey together, how Jia was on her summer break from studying economics at the Beijing University. I was intimidated and didn’t talk very much. They asked me if I was visiting China for the first time, although I think it must have come across quite clearly already. Little by little, I loosened up and started feeling more and more comfortable around them.

I ended up spending the next five days with Bao-Zhi and his family. We passed the time by playing cards, or chess. Hai was pretty good at it. I play a lot myself and never won against him. Once every two hour or so we would climb back into our cars, move forward a few inches and then get right back to our game or lunch or discussion. It was very emotional when we finally saw the end of the traffic jam. On the sixth day, we were able to move more, more often. We knew the time would come very soon when we would have to say goodbye and drive our separate ways. And indeed, by the end of that day, the traffic was almost back to normal. We pulled over on a parking lot and exchanged farewells. They gave me their address in Beijing and made me promise I would come and visit them as often as I could. I gave them my address in London and made them promise they would write. There was a lot of hugging and even a little bit of crying. Then I went on to carry my exploration of the country.

We kept in touch, Bao-Zhi and I, and even now that twenty years have passed, I still go to China every two years or so and visit him. It feels like I have another family always waiting for me at the other side of the world. Which in a way, I suppose I do.

The Village on the Hill

There once was a village, and the village was built on the eastern side of a hill. The people of the village had never been to the western side, for the hill was cut from north to south by a huge chain of rock, like the protruding spine of a bent giant. The village was surrounded by fields of oats and barley and the villagers were mostly farmers. They lived from the fruit of their labour and kept to themselves as much as possible. They did not care for the world beyond the fields and the farms.

There was a girl, who lived in the village. The girl had never known her mother and father for they both had died when she was just an infant. From the beginning of her young memory, she had been living at her grandmother’s house. The girl’s grandmother was the oldest person in the village, so that she was considered the wisest one, one whose speech was always truth.

One day, the grandmother was sitting on the rocking chair in front of the fireplace, sewing a skirt for her granddaughter, and the girl came and sat next to her.

“Grandmother,” asked the girl, “what is there on the other side of the hill?”

The grandmother let out a long wheezing sigh. She had known the day would come when her little girl would grow and start wondering. She had watched the questions form on the child’s face for several days now and she had known that, soon, the questions would find their way to her lips. But curiosity is never a permanent trait. It comes with adolescence and goes with adulthood. If only the grandmother could stall long enough, the questions would vanish from the girl’s face and their quiet life would go on quietly as it always had.

“Grandmother,” asked the girl, “what is there on the other side of the hill?”

“My child, there is nothing on the other side,” said the grandmother.

The questions on the girl’s face grew stronger. Her young eyes sparkled brighter.

“But there must be something! Please, grandmother, tell me what is on the other side of the hill.”

“My child, on the other side there is a dark and deep forest.”

“Grandmother,” asked the child, “what is there in the forest?”

“My child, in the forest there are poisonous creeping weeds and savage beasts with claws and fangs, and their eyes gleaming red in the darkness.”

The girl’s eyes grew wider, but nonetheless she kept asking.

“Grandmother,” the girl asked, “what is there beyond the forest?”

“My child, beyond the forest there is a swamp that sucks all living things into its depths.”

The girl’s face turned pale, but still she asked again.

“Grandmother,” the girl asked, “what is there beyond the swamp?”

The grandmother was very old and getting weary of the questioning.

“My child,” said the grandmother, “the swamp spreads out forever. There is nothing beyond the swamp.”

“Grandmother,” said the child, “how do you know all this about the other side of the hill?”

“My mother told me about it, my child,” said the grandmother. “Just as I am now telling you.”

“But how did your mother know all this about the other side?”

“Well, my child, her mother had told her about it. Just as my mother told me about it. Just as I am now telling you.”

As another question was about to escape the girl’s lips, the old woman raised a warning finger.

“I told you all there is to know about the other side, my child. You must never try to cross the chain of rock, do you understand? There is nothing for you but danger on the other side.”

The girl fell silent and stared into the fire for a very long time, so long in fact, that when she finally tore her eyes from its fading glow, she found that it was night, and that her grandmother was sleeping in the rocking chair.

Presently the girl got up and went to the shed, and she came back with a log large enough to keep the house warm until morning, which she put in the fire. She tiptoed to the front door. There she paused with her small hand upon the handle and looked over her shoulder at the sleeping shape of her grandmother. For a moment, something caught in her throat and she thought that she would not leave. But then she was outside, closing the door behind her and looking out at the village quiet and dark.

She passed the baker’s shop, and the butcher’s, and the barber’s, and she walked in the fields for what felt like days although the sun did not come up until she was reaching the foot of the big rock chain, on the very top of the hill. There she stopped and looked up at the massive obstacle before her. She looked up until her frail neck hurt. The rocks stood tall and impenetrable, stretching a long shadow over the girl. Beyond, the sky was yellow and pink with morning light.

I have been a fool, thought the girl. I will never be able to climb over the rocks. I am neither big nor strong enough. Maybe a grownup could do it, but I certainly can’t. I have been a fool. So the girl leant against the rock and cried, for it was a long way back to the village and she missed her grandmother very much. As she wept, clouds covered the sky above the hill and it started to rain. It was one of the cold rains of wintertime and soon the girl was drenched to the bone and shivering. I must find shelter somewhere, the girl thought, or I will freeze to death. With that thought, she forgot to cry and looked for a place to hide from the rain. She noticed a tear in the rock, like the entrance of a cave, some small distance away. It was almost hidden behind a curtain of thick weeds, but there it was, and the girl walked up to it. She pushed the weeds aside. They were heavy and pushed back against the girl, as if warning her to stay away. But the girl was cold and determined, so that eventually, the weeds gave way. The crack behind the weeds was quite narrow, and the ceiling low, so that a child could just fit in.

Walking through the girl stopped and marvelled, for what she had first thought to be a cave was in fact a tunnel, digging deep into the rock. This could lead to the other side, thought the girl. So she advanced with her arms outstretched towards the obscurity in front of her. Five minutes passed, and still the girl walked on. The tunnel was pitch black and nothing seemed to indicate that it would end. Five more minutes passed. More than once, the girl thought she should turn back, but every time the thought entered her mind, it was pushed right back by another. What if the other side was close? What a shame it would be to give up just before success. So the girl walked on. Five more minutes passed, and suddenly, the girl saw the tiniest hint of light, far away in the darkness. The girl laughed with relief and the pride of having come all this way on her own. She pressed on with a smile on her face. But soon, the smile faded, for as the light was getting closer, it seemed that the tunnel was shrinking and narrowing. I will suffocate before I can get to the other side, thought the girl. With every step she took, the light grew stronger, yet more inaccessible. From the other side, a breeze brushed the girl’s face and whispered in her ears. Go back, the breeze whispered. Go back. But it’s close, thought the girl. I can’t go back now. I’m almost there. I won’t go back.

And all at once, the breeze and the tunnel were gone as the girl emerged into a forest deep and so dark that she wondered for a while if night had come back already. One could barely see two feet ahead and the air between the trees was still and quiet, so that every little sound rang out like a bell toll in the silence.

In the strangeness of the forest, fear came over the girl. She thought about her grandmother’s words, about the poisonous creeping weeds and the savage beasts with claws and fangs, and their eyes glowing red in the darkness. She daren’t pick up a branch to defend herself, for fear that it would sting her and spit venom into her body.

The stillness soon became oppressing, and the little sounds of the forest shaped themselves into unseen dangers. It was a long way back to the village, and the girl missed her grandmother very much, and wished that she had never left home. So she sat down in the fallen leaves and covered her face with both her hands, for children’s monsters become less real once the eyes are shielded from them. Some time elapsed like this. Five minutes. Ten, maybe. Then a voice rang out in the silence of the forest.

“Good morning,” said the voice.

The girl looked up and standing in front of her was a boy. The boy was peering down at her with his head slightly tilted sideways and his eyes round and quizzical, much like an owl’s. At first, she was afraid of the boy, for she remembered her grandmother’s warning. But as she studied the boy, she could see neither claws nor fangs, and his eyes were bright blue, and round and quizzical like an owl’s.

“Good morning,” said the boy again, and the girl thought that he had nice manners.

“Good morning,” said the girl.

The boy grinned a toothy grin, but his teeth were normal as far as the girl could see, and his grin was friendly.

“Where do you come from?” asked the boy.

“I come from the other side of the hill,” said the girl.

The questions on the boy’s face grew stronger. He stared at the girl with suspicion in his bright blue eyes.

“That is not possible,” he said. “There is nothing on the other side of the hill.”

“But there is,” said the girl. “My village is on the other side.”

The boy was silent for a while. Then he took the girl by the hand and pulled so she would follow him.

“Come to my house,” he said.

She pulled the other way.

“But what about the swamp that sucks all living things into its depths?”

“What swamp?” said the boy.

“My grandmother told me about the swamp.”

“There is no swamp,” said the boy.

He seems to be telling the truth, thought the girl. So she followed the boy out of the forest and onto a moor that stretched all the way to the horizon. There was no sign of a swamp anywhere.

“Where is your house?” asked the girl as they walked through the moor.

“It is in a village, by the sea,” said the boy.

“The sea?” asked the girl.

“Yes,” said the boy.

The girl smiled. She had read about the sea in books, but had never seen it for real. The sea was a place of exciting adventures and she found herself walking faster, and pulling the boy behind her.

There was a village by the sea, and the village was built on the western side of a hill. The people of the village had never been to the eastern side, for the hill was cut from north to south by a huge chain of rock, like the protruding spine of a bent giant. The villagers were mostly fishermen, and they lived from the fish they caught, keeping to themselves as much as possible. They had no care for the world beyond the moor or over the sea. But now a girl was running towards the village, hand in hand with a boy, who lived in the village, and the boy was growing curious about the world on the other side of the hill.

The boy had never known his mother and father, for they had died both during his early childhood. From the beginning of his young memory, he had been raised by his older brother. The boy’s brother was not much older than the boy, but already the questions were starting to fade from his face. Now the boy and his brother lived and worked in a lighthouse on the coast, some little distance from the centre of the village, and that is where the boy was taking the girl. He wanted the girl to tell his older brother about the other side of the hill, for he valued his brother’s opinion above all else and was curious to know what he would think of all this.

The brother was preparing lunch when the boy knocked on the door of the lighthouse.

“My brother, I found a girl in the forest, and she comes from the other side of the hill,” said the boy.

“That is impossible,” said the brother. “There is nothing on the other side of the hill.”

“But there is! Come, she is waiting for us on the beach.”

So the brother followed the boy to the beach. And the girl was there, looking out at the sea, for she had never seen it, and it was huge and beautiful under the winter sun. Seagulls were crying over the waves, sometimes diving for fish, and then coming back up, shaking beads of water from their feathers.

“Good morning,” said the brother.

The girl turned towards the pathway that led to the lighthouse.

“Good morning,” said the girl.

“My brother says that you come from the other side of the hill,” said the brother. “Is that the truth?”

“It is,” said the girl. “I live in a village with my grandmother, beyond the chain of rock.”

And she pointed a finger in the direction of the hilltop. The brother considered this for a while, and then spoke very slowly, for he still was not sure whether it was wise to believe the girl’s words.

“How did you cross the chain of rock?” he asked.

“I went through a tunnel in the rock,” said the girl.

Questions flickered back into life on the brother’s face, and he smiled.

“Come have lunch with us,” said he. “Tell us more about the other side.”

So the girl followed the boy and his brother up the pathway that led to the lighthouse. The brother laid one more plate on the table and they ate together. The girl tasted fish for the first time. She had read about fish in the same books that told stories of the sea, but she had never seen them, for there was no sea on the other side of the hill. The boy and his brother listened as she spoke of her village, of the fields and the farms, and her grandmother’s house.

In the afternoon, the boy took the girl to the town centre, and the girl thought that this was not so different from her village on the other side. There was a baker and a barber, and the villagers looked almost the same. But the air was different. It was damper and there was salt in it. Instead of meat, people sold fish on the marketplace, and the houses were of grey stones instead of red bricks and wood. The boy and the girl roamed the village and the coast until the sun was setting over the western side of the hill. With night, a shadow descended on the girl and she stopped laughing.

On the way back to the lighthouse, the boy tried to make her laugh again, or to make her speak, but she was lost in a pensive mood. The boy did not understand, and he asked his brother about it when they got back.

“Well,” said the brother. “It is quite simple. She is homesick.”

“Homesick?” asked the boy.

“She misses her village on the other side of the hill,” said the brother.

So it was decided that, the next day, the boy and his brother would accompany the girl back to the fissure in the chain of rock. With this decision, the shadow lifted from the girl and she laughed and spoke again. The boy and the girl exchanged stories of their villages for a good part of the night, and when the sun came up over the eastern side of the hill, the boy, the girl and the boy’s brother left the lighthouse.

They walked through the town centre. They passed the baker’s shop, and the fisherman’s, and the barber’s. They crossed the moor and entered the forest. The boy noticed that another shadow seemed to weigh on the girl, for she was silent again, and her face was set.

“I thought she was homesick,” said the boy to his brother. “I thought she wanted to go home.”

“She does,” said the brother. “But in order to go home, she has to leave here. That is what makes her sad.”

The boy thought about this for a while, and he was still thinking when they reached the fissure in the rock. Then the boy and his brother, and the girl, bade each other farewell. And just as the girl was about to disappear in the darkness of the tunnel, the boy had an idea.

“Wait,” said he. “What if my brother and I came to the eastern side with you? Then we could see your village and meet your grandmother.”

The girl’s face lit up, not with questions this time, but with joy. But the brother shook his head.

“I cannot get through the fissure,” said he. “I am too big. But you, little brother, you go with her. Go and see the other side of the hill before it is too late.”

The boy felt sad, for he loved his brother very much and did not want to leave him behind. But he did want to go and see the other side of the hill. The girl watched as the boy wrapped his arms around the brother’s neck, and she thought of her grandmother.

“Go, little brother,” said the boy’s brother.

The girl saw that he was crying. She wondered if her grandmother had cried when she had noticed that she was gone. She wanted to go back and hug her grandmother and tell her of all the wonderful things she had seen on the other side of the hill.

The boy bid his brother farewell and followed the girl into the tunnel. They walked with their hands extended towards the darkness in front of them. Long minutes passed, and finally, a dot of light appeared far away. Then the tunnel seemed to shrink and narrow once more around them. The boy was scared. He thought he would run back to his brother, but the girl said not to be afraid. Then the breeze whispered into the boy’s ears. Go back, the breeze whispered. Go back. But the girl said not to listen to the breeze. So the boy did not listen.

And all at once, the breeze and the tunnel were gone. And the boy saw the farms and the fields. The girl led him through the country and, soon, he saw the village. They passed the barber’s shop, and the butcher’s, and the baker’s, and walked all the way to the grandmother’s house. The girl wrapped her arms around her grandmother’s neck. She told her about the tunnel and the other side and the boy and his brother.

“Come and have dinner with us,” said the grandmother to the boy. “Tell me all about your village on the other side.”

So the boy stayed, and he tasted meat, which he had read about in books but never seen in reality. Then, the next day, the girl took him around the village and showed him everything.

And when he went back home, he told the villagers on the western side stories of the eastern side. And the girl told the villagers on the eastern side stories of the western side. And soon, it became tradition that young people should cross the chain of rock to see the world on the other side of the hill before they grew.

The rain has gone

Wotcher, friends!

So I have a confession to make.

I am on antidepressants. Escitalopram, 10mg a day. Have been for nearly three years now.

TRIGGER WARNING.

I am about to engage in a discussion that could inadvertently hurt some people. However important the topic at hand – and I do believe it is important – nothing is more important than your own health. If you tend to be triggered by talk of depression, please read at your own discretion.

The first psychiatrist I ever went to told me I had a bad case of the blues.

“You’re still young, you shouldn’t disengage from your life like that.”

I was shaking and unable to talk properly so I just nodded, but deep down I was angry at her. I felt dismissed. I blamed her for not just understanding, for not seeing through my slightly-less-stiff-than-usual upper lip. After all, it was her job to read my mind, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy for someone who hasn’t experienced depression to imagine what it actually does. And that’s totally normal. You shouldn’t be expected to just know. On the flip side, it isn’t easy either for someone currently suffering through it to explain how they feel.

So this is me attempting to communicate some thoughts and feelings, from the easier standpoint of “two and a half years later”. Cue cheesy flashback transition.

It started very suddenly, a little after my landlord passed away. I didn’t know him all that well. He wasn’t a close friend or a family member, and it’s not like I thought about him every day. Yet when he tragically, abruptly, died, something was triggered inside of me.

I started thinking about death every day. Mine. Depression is narcissistic like that. Then I started thinking about death every hour. Then every minute. I had had “the blues” before, but this wasn’t it. This was different. It felt permanent. It felt like I was broken. It involved an endless circle of downs (numb apathy) and even-further-downs (locking myself in the bathroom and crying my eyes out in panic).

Now, you have to understand that my life didn’t suck. Actually, it was quite amazing. But depression isn’t really about all the bad stuff that is going on in your life. It’s more twisted than that. No matter how incredibly fantastic my life might be, depression constantly reminded me that it would still have to end and that all the incredible fantasticness would be lost forever.

In my ill mind, this progression of events:

be born
follow your dreams
get your novels published
find love
be happy
die

… was exactly the same as this one:

be born
die

This is not how a human brain is supposed to work. If it were, then there is a decent chance life would have died out years and years ago.

No.

This is a glitch.

Yet there is a stigma in our society. When I started this post with a “confession”, I wasn’t using the word lightly. For some reason, admitting to being depressed, especially to the point of needing medication to function properly, has become – or maybe it has always been – a confession.

You whisper it, mumble it, beat around the bush. You rationalize it away. “Oh, I’m taking meds for now but I’m going to stop soon.” It has somehow become shameful to take antidepressants.

Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t feel that medication is the right way for you to go about fighting your depression, then I’m certainly not here to tell you you’re wrong. I don’t pretend to know everyone’s experiences, nor do I pretend to be a doctor.

But it seems to me that nobody goes around telling diabetic people to stop shooting themselves full of drugs. When you have a headache, it’s fairly rare for your friends to suggest maybe you shouldn’t take painkillers because then you wouldn’t be yourself anymore.

This is something I have actually been told. I have been told I’m just drugging myself up and that it keeps me from seeing the world as it is.

This is bullshit. Dangerous, radioactive bullshit – go on, take a moment to picture that, I’ll be waiting.

Done?

Okay, seriously though. When you say something like that to a depressed person, you are effectively telling a very vulnerable, sick human being that they will never be happy ever again. Even if you believe that to be true, how sadistic do you have to be to think it’s a good thing to say? It’s not funny or helpful. In fact, it can cause very severe harm.

I wasn’t feeling like myself, and I was deeply unhappy, and now that I take “the drugs”, I’m more able to connect with other people, I feel like myself more often, more easily, and I’m happier. This isn’t to say that the world isn’t absurd and weird and that it’s abnormal to feel alienated by that. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that if you used to be happy and now you’re not, then there’s probably something wrong.

It is not cool or edgy or deep to be miserable.

I take antidepressants for the same reason I take anti-allergy medication. Because otherwise I would be a wheezy, teary-eyed, non-functional mess, unable to accomplish any of the simple tasks of everyday life. Because otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to be myself.

And you know what? Two and a half years later, I am myself again.

A Boy Named Me

Wotcher!

Yup, definitely like this “wotcher” thing. I think I’ll keep it for now. For anyone interested, this is a British colloquial greeting, originating from the South of England – London, mainly – and derived from the phrase “What are you up to?”.
What are you up to?
What ya up to?
Watcha up to?
Wotcher up to?
Wotcher!
And since I am genuinely interested in hearing from you and wotcher up to, it’s quite fitting.
Another reason I now officially love this is that when you type “wotcher” into Google, this blog comes up fourth in line! Ain’t that great, guv’?

Anyhoo – quite like “anyhoo” as well, but we are not getting into that right now or we’ll be here all day.
Today, class, we are going to talk about gender identity. Mine. Yeah, I know, narcissistic much. Hopefully, though, some of my experiences might resonate with some of yours, and that’s just how we create bonds and validation and awareness and all that good stuff.

Now it is not as easy for me to confidently speak up about gender as it is to speak up about, say asexuality. That’s because to some extent, I am still a bit confused about my own gender identity. And I do not wish to convey the misconception that genderqueer people are confused. Just as I don’t want to convey the misconception that asexual people are depressed. It just so happens that I am a mildly confused genderqueer person and an asexual on antidepressants. Coincidental.

Actually, you know what? Scratch that. It’s probably not that coincidental. After all it can be pretty confusing to be genderqueer in a boys v girls, blue v pink, penis v vagina world. After all it can be pretty depressing to be asexual in a half-naked-models-on-every-poster, sex-is-what-makes-us-human world.
Notice how people can flip it around on you? “You’re depressed because of this asexuality nonsense.” “You’re confused because of this genderqueer nonsense.” Well no, actually I’m confused and depressed because of you. You, person who dismisses my experiences as nonsense.

All this raises barriers, both internal and external, that make it harder, but also more important, to talk about these things. I have wanted to discuss gender identity for a long time, so… deep breath… here we go.

I’m a gamer.
This means I go online and play with other people who don’t know my gender or my sex or my hair colour. But while people online would never think of asking “hey, by the way, what’s your hair colour”, the other day, my questing partner – a real nice dude, don’t get me wrong – said this:
“So hey, not to be rude or anything… You’re playing a girl, but are you a girl in real life?”
“There it is,” I said, turning to my partner.
And there it was. Your sex/gender is, for many people, a very important part of how they will think about you. They feel like they need to know this in order to comprehend you as a person. Never would my questing dude have asked me “so you play a Khajiit, but are you a big-ass talking cat in real life?”

Unlikely.

Here’s another example. Discussing Pink Floyd with a family member, I happen to mention my friend Sam, who loves the Floyd. Sam has an ambivalent name by design. They are agender. Sample dialogue:
“My friend Sam is a huge Pink Floyd fan.”
“Who’s Sam?”
“An online friend, from the forums.”
“Is it Sam-boy or Sam-girl?”
“Uhh,” I say. “Neither. Both. They’re somewhat transgender.”
They’re not transgender, though, that’s not the word Sam would use. But I decide to use it because there is no way in all hell that my interlocutor will have any kind of clue what agender means.
“But do they look like a boy or a girl?”

This is how important gender is to people. So when you don’t fit into one of these two categories, or when people keep putting you in the wrong one, it can hurt. And when you’re not sure where you fit in all of this, or if indeed you fit at all, it can be confusing.

There are a few things you might want to consider if you’re wondering whether or not you are transgender, genderqueer, or otherwise not cis. Some of which, tested by yours truly…

1. If you’re even asking the question, the answer is probably yes.

It is rather uncommon for cis people to obsess about their gender identity. It happens. Anything can happen. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if your instinct is all like “dude, what’s up with my gender?” then there’s likely to be something up with your gender, dude.

2. Gender dysphoria.

There are two major kinds of dysphoria – that I know of – and I’d like to share my personal experiences with both of them, if you have time to kill before the next train or are looking for a procrastinating opportunity.

Body dysphoria is the negative feeling that comes from a dissonance between your outwardly appearance and your inner self.
As a teenager, I was dysphoric about my breasts, which developed annoyingly early and were annoyingly prominent. And so I would stand in front of my bedroom mirror, with my back half turned to it and my breasts tucked away, hidden. I would wear baggy t-shirts and thick sweaters over flattening bras. I would walk with my shoulders in and my back slightly bent. I did this to forget for a few minutes that these things were there, making me a girl, categorizing me.

Social dysphoria is the negative feeling that comes from a dissonance between how the world perceives you and your inner self.
It’s the little double-take I have every time a vendor calls me. “Ma’am, can I help you with anything?” Who, me?
It’s the boiling anger when a family member refers to me as a “female Keith Richards” or “Keith Richardette”. Why female? Why can’t I just be Keith Richards, damn it! No, I’m not dressed as a girl version of Oliver Twist. I’m dressed as Oliver Twist!

It might seem trivial, but some people will feel like shit for a month after one of these things happens to them. Thankfully, for me, those are only little things. I can brush them off fairly easily.
On the flip side, my lack of severe dysphoria has made me question the validity of my genderqueerness. It has caused me to ask myself the stupid question that plagues a whole lot of queer people out there: am I queer enough?
After all, any strong dysphoric feelings I had as a teen have receded. Maybe it was just a phase. After all, I don’t really feel like a man either. Maybe I’m just a woman by default. After all, I don’t want to transition. Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel special. After all, after all, after all, maybe not, maybe not, maybe not.

3. Gender euphoria.

Then there is the less known, less talked about opposite of gender dysphoria. Which is a shame, because it’s so much nicer. It is a feeling of rightness in the relation between your mind, your body and the way the world perceives you.
I get it when my friend Anna calls me “dude!”
I get it when my clothes reflect the way I feel inside particularly well.
I get it when my brother tells me that he never really thinks of me as a girl. I’m just “Gwen”.
I get it when my partner looks at me and says “Huh. You look kinda androgynous with your hair like that.”
You get it.

These are small things but each of them is a tiny hint, a fuzzy, heart-warming little reminder that yes, this is who I am, this is what I’m comfortable with.

4. There is no wrong age to know.

Even as a kid I knew something was amiss. It started early on and became noticeable in junior high, when a girl becomes a miss and a guy becomes a mister. Then one sunny Spring weekend, my thirteen-year-old self tentatively voiced it.
“Ugh, I wish my breasts would just go away,” I said, or something in French to that effect.
And the grownup, the authority figure in the room, replied:
“Well that’s because you’re still thinking you could have been a boy. It’ll pass.”
I remember being deeply upset by that response. Even then. Even when I didn’t understand exactly why I was upset. All I knew was that I felt angry and offended, sad and dismissed, and for some reason I still can’t quite put my finger on, ashamed.

There is no shame to be had. This is who you are and it’s not a joke unless you want it to be. It’s not unimportant unless you want it to be.

This is who I am.

I am gender ambivalent. Genderfluid. Androgynous. My body is a girl but my mind is kind of a dude. And a girl. And both. You can call me “he” or “she”, and if you enjoy a bit of grammatical fun, why not try a mixture of both?

I am genderqueer. Hear me roar.

In keeping with the great Internet tradition of offering starchy vegetables in compensation for reading through a very long post, here.

Have a potato.

The Boy and the Tree

This particular writing exercise was about Hemingway. We were reading The Old Man and the Sea – what a wonderful story, that Hemingway fellow sure knew what he was doing. This was about emulating the way Hemingway describes work, and the fable tone of the piece. The job I chose to describe was random, if memory serves.

The son had never known the great lights of the city. All he knew was the country he had been born in. His entire childhood had been spent in the same small country town, trapped between the deep woods on the West and the high mountains on the East. But the boy was not a child anymore. The fact that his father had allowed him to come to the forest this morning proved that he was now a grown man. Chopping the trees was not a child’s job. This morning, his father had walked up to his bedroom just as the sun ascended over the mountains. He was a tall and strong man, his father, and his huge frame had cast upon the sleeping boy a shadow even darker than night itself.

‘Come, son,’ the father had said.

He had not waited to make sure that his words had been heard. The son had jumped off the bed immediately and pulled on his shirt and trousers in a hurry. How lucky I am, he had thought. My brother had to wait until his fifteenth birthday to be deemed ready to chop the trees. I am only twelve. How lucky I am, the son thought.

Walking into his father’s large footsteps, looking up at his broad back and his unkempt red hair, the son rolled this thought over and over in his mind with pride. The father was glancing around at the trees, now and then interrupting his march to examine one more carefully. He was searching for the one that would make the most beautiful furniture. Although the son knew that the most important part of his father’s job was the working of the wood into tables and chairs and cabinets, he was only interested in bringing down the trees. He hoped to work as his father’s assistant, chopping the best trees and bringing them back to the town to carve.

‘We will take this one down,’ said the father, standing in front of a large oak tree.

And the tree was standing in front of the father, tall and strong and proud. The son watched as his father extended his arm and touched his fingertips to the trunk.

‘Give me the axe, son,’ he said.

It was a bit difficult, at first, to lift the massive axe. The son had to adjust his strength to the weight.

‘Now, stand back.’

The father swung the axe over his shoulder effortlessly, drew in a sharp breath, and swung it back towards the base of the trunk. With a soft thud the axe hit the strong tree. Putting his foot on the trunk just below the place where the axe was now stuck, the father pulled on the handle with all his might, throwing his body backwards to use his weight as an ally.

Again and again the father swung the axe and it looked as if the tool was part of his body. How lucky I am, the son thought, that my father is such a great lumberjack. He will teach me very well and then I will be great too. He watched for long minutes as the axe dug deeper and deeper into the tree. He could see now that the job was not as easy as it had first appeared. The father’s body was strained. His face was white and patches of sweat stained his shirt on his back and armpits. The clash between the man’s body temperature and the cold winter morning materialised itself in little puffs of white every time he released the air from his lungs.

When the sun appeared from behind the high treetops of the forest, the father stopped working and turned to face the son.

‘Have you been watching carefully?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy.

‘Then you try it now.’

The son took the axe in his small hands and stepped in front of the tree. The tree stood just as proud and mighty as he had before and he seemed to look down at the boy with a sneer. Tiny child, the tree was saying, you are so frail, you will never be able to bring me down. We will see about that, the son thought. With his frail arms, he swung the axe behind him as his father had done seconds before. He took a deep breath that froze his insides and sent a chill down his spine. Down came the axe, and landed on the trunk, digging a little further into the wood.

Quite proud of his neat first swing, the son turned to his father for approval, but the father stood motionless with his arms folded upon his chest, tall and strong as the great oak tree. So the son swung the axe again, and again, until the father’s deep voice interrupted him.

‘It is ready to come down now,’ he said.

Excitement began to build up in the son’s frail body. Now was the time he had been waiting for. The father stepped behind him to guide his movements.

‘Swing the axe,’ he said.

The son swung the axe.

‘Now put your foot against the trunk and push with all your weight.’

The son put his little boot against the tree and let his body fall forward. The tree did not move.

‘Your foot should be higher than this,’ said the father. ‘Again.’

The son tried again. He stretched his leg as much as he could and inched his boot up the trunk. The tree gave a long whine.

‘Stand back,’ the father said.

The boy took a step back and watched as the tree slowly fell and hit the frosted ground with a loud crack.

‘You did a good job,’ said the father.

The son walked to the fallen oak tree and lightly rested his hand against it. It was oddly warm and he could almost feel it shiver under his palm. He felt proud to have brought down this mighty giant. You see, tree, he thought, I am not a child anymore. I am a lumberjack now.

The Creatures on the Earth

Another Craft and Experimentation piece. The prompt for this was “a tale of Creation”. Difficult for an atheist like yours truly. In the end, I decided to go with a fairytale kind of voice, and I am rather happy with the result. The ending is a bit abrupt, though, and the last paragraph clumsy. Notice the rush in the last sentence and the slight tone shift? Oh well. Just one of those “learn from your mistakes” moments.

For a very long time, in the great darkness of cosmos, the Earth lived alone.

For a long time, it was alright to live alone, and the Earth had time to reflect on her life and let her thoughts wander.

But one day, as was inevitable, the Earth became bored.

For some time, it was alright to be bored. The Earth started marking the passing of time by counting the number of laps she could run all the way in a circle around her neighbour the Sun.

But one day, as was inevitable, the Earth became lonely.

And it was not alright to be lonely.

So the Earth began to cry. She cried and cried, so that her surface was almost entirely covered in seas and oceans.

When the Earth finally stopped crying, her eyes were swollen into hills and mountains.

Years passed and still the Earth was lonely.

She began to lose interest in everything. She forgot to cut her hair, and it grew into meadows, forests and jungles. Her pacing around the Sun slowed down to a lazy shuffle.

Then, one day, the Earth felt a tickling. It was a sensation she had never experienced before. It tickled and tickled and the Earth noticed that little creatures were swimming in the seas and oceans.

‘What are these creatures?’ the Earth asked her neighbour the Sun.

But the Sun did not know, and indeed had never seen any such things in his long life.

So the Earth began to observe the creatures.

For many years, she occupied her time by observing every little change in the form and habits of the creatures. Some left the seas and the oceans. They grew legs and arms and started digging in the hills and mountains, crawling and climbing in the forests and the jungles. Then they cut down the trees and built houses, small at first, and then bigger and bigger, until one day, the Earth was covered in towns and cities. Then the creatures built roads to connect the cities, and cars to move faster on the roads.

Years passed and the Earth developed a cough.

‘It will go away,’ she thought at first.

But when the cough didn’t go away, the Earth began to worry. She visited the Sun her neighbour and asked for his advice.

‘If you want,’ said the Sun, ‘you can come closer to me and I will burn them for you.’

The Earth did not want that, for she had grown to like the creatures. They had been there to entertain her when she was depressed. If they burnt, she would have to return to her lonely life.

‘You look a bit grey,’ said the Sun. ‘It seems to me that these creatures are a disease, and it might be contagious. We had better get rid of them now.’

‘No,’ said the Earth. ‘No, I think I will keep them for now. Just for a bit longer.’

‘As you wish,’ said the Sun.

More years passed.

Now regularly the Sun reminds the Earth of his offer. But every time the Earth declines, for she cannot bring herself to part with the creatures.

The Cyst

An early exercise about memoir writing. This is a true story. Maybe a boring story, but a true story nonetheless.

A cyst, that’s all it was. Just a cyst. Benign is what it was. But I still wanted it off. It had been here long enough. Years, in fact; and I would even go so far as to say five years. More than five years maybe. Anyway it was there and protruding and staring back whenever I looked down at my wrist and it was bad enough. I had been roaming the Internet in search of ways to get rid of it, which was definitely not the right way to go about it. You see, the only people who actually take the time to post anything on forums are the ones who have had a bad experience and want to complain. I had surgery a year ago and now it’s come back and it hurts like hell and my wrist is stiff and my doctor is an incompetent fraud and I hate the entire universe, that sort of thing. Scary as all that sounded, my brain and my mum suggested that I seek the advice of an actual medical professional before deciding whether or not it was wiser to just keep the damn thing on my wrist for all my life.

The doctor I saw about it I shall always consider a true hero. I showed him the cyst, and here is what he said: “Oh, it’s a synovial cyst, it’s not dangerous but it’s a nuisance, you have to get rid of it. Here is the name of a great surgeon.” Not “you have the option of surgery”. Not “you might want to have it removed”. He made the decision I was afraid to take, and I must say if he hadn’t phrased it like he did, I may very well have chickened out. He probably saw that plain on my face.

I called the surgeon. Two months later, I was checking into the hospital. Minor surgery like that is usually done in one day. Walk in, get sliced up, get stitched right back, walk out again. But due to a latex allergy, I had to spend the night. They wanted to make sure I would be the first one to be sliced up the next morning. Spending the night in a hospital room proved to be the worst part of the experience and one of the weirdest creepiest things I have ever had to endure. Needless to say I did not sleep. I don’t think anybody sleeps in hospitals at night. For one thing the smell was unpleasant. It was the smell of wrongness, like if you went to sleep, you might never wake up. And for another thing a woman was moaning and whimpering and calling all night. It was quite hard to judge the distance in the dark. She might have been in the next room, just as she might have been at the other end of the corridor. Felt as if the hospital itself was crying for help. “Please” the hospital moaned. “Please, help please!” And a tired nurse’s feet would shuffle by my door to wherever the plead came from. “What is it, ma’am?” “Please, I want to get up!” “You can’t get up right now, ma’am, you just had surgery.” “But I need to get up.” “No, you can’t get up right now, ma’am.” All night long. When I got bored of feeling sorry for myself, I started feeling sorry for that nurse.

Then, in the morning, she came in, handed me one of those blouses they give to patients to make sure they’re quite uncomfortable, told me to go take a shower and mispronounced my name. I felt less sorry for her.

After that, the rest was a piece of cake, really. It probably had something to do with the tranquilizer the anaesthetist put in my IV. The surgeon was definitely not an incompetent fraud. The cyst has been gone for more than a year, now. It hasn’t come back, it hasn’t tried phoning, and I received no postcard. It is a small thing, but I’m just a little bit happier than I was before. Although I had promised myself that if the surgery was successful, I would talk about it on forums to balance all the negativity, I did not. I guess happy people are quick to move on.

My Little Sister Sally

Wotcher!

Here is the first piece of fiction I am adding to this blog. I wrote this back when I lived in Scotland, as part of one of my “Craft and Experimentation” classes.

This was an exercise titled “Inspirations”. We were basically given total freedom to find works that inspired us to write our own piece. My Little Sister Sally was inspired by a combination of Lewis Carrol’s poems and the wacky wordplays of French Canadian storyteller Fred Pellerin.

My little sister Sally used to be an honest girl.

She was overflowing with truthfulness.

Then, one day, quite unexpectedly, she was all truthed out.

Deprived of her legendary truthtelling, she adopted a silentness of the grave kind.
But silentness is not a state which can easily be maintained. One needs to speak, provided that one is lucky enough to be endowed with the ability to do so.

So Sally began to lie.

The quality of her fibs was of course inherent to her newness in the industry. Her fibbing was pretty see-through.

Pinocchio, my parents called her upon discovery of her enlyingment.

My parents, truth be told, were under the impression that lying was one of the human nature’s most unpleasant characteristics. Sally, as a result, endured many a scolding from our ruthless parental entity.

Yet she continued pinocchioing and pinocchioing.

She pinocchioed so much that, eventually, the whole family developed a concern regarding the permanentness of the situation.

A kindly aunt suggested that the mistruthing girl should be brought before a doctor.

At my parents’ earliest convenience an appointment was made.

The doctor enquired as to the reason of my parents’ discomfiture.

‘Our Sally has become lieful,’ my father said. ‘Is there anything you can do to truthen her again?’

The doctor examined my little sister.

‘The reason she has assumed her current liefulness is quite clear,’ he said. ‘You have been dragging her truthward for so long that she must now compensate. Let her go lieward for a while. When the truths and the lies have been balanced out, she will go back to normal.’

At first, my parents were rather uninclined to modify the strictness of their nature. But as the doctor insisted that it was the only solution, they agreed to accommodate.

Years passed, and still Sally mistruthed, lied and pinocchioed. She mistruthed her way through middle school, passed her high school exams with lying colours and got into a prestigious university by pinocchioing her interviewing panel.

Then one day, quite unexpectedly, my little sister Sally started truthing again.

But the doctor, we discovered, had lied, for she never went back to her former self. She truthed most of the time, but now and again, in all her truthing, she threw a lie.

On the Joy of Left-Braining It

Hey folks!

So here I am again, with a sorta kinda essay-type post that I went and lazily pulled from my previous blog. It’s still relevant, I should think, and doesn’t make me cringe. Yet.

My first novel has evolved a bit since I wrote this, and I might make another post on the topic soon, as I am currently working a lot on revisions.

Hopefully this will be the first of many more posts about writing techniques, musings and advice – to take or leave as you see fit, eh? I ain’t the boss of ya. So let me know what you think, let me know if you’d like me to tackle any particular topic, let me know if you think I ramble on too much.

Here we go…

When we were little, my brother and I used to play with something called kaplas. Kaplas were these small pieces of wood that you could pile up in all sorts of ways to build constructions. I absolutely loved them. They were the simplest toys ever but there was no end to the possibilities. Just as I loved kaplas, I now love stories. With these simple little things that are words, you can build sentences and shape paragraphs. It’s not easy. You have to be smart about it, and careful, because a story built on a shaky base will eventually fall. A word too many on one side of it will impair the balance of the structure.

I grew passionate about the workings of stories, in a compulsive and geeky way. I began reading extensively on the subject. John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, Yves Lavandier’s La Dramaturgie, everything I stumbled upon, really. A bit formulaic, maybe, but in these recipes I found some useful tips as well as the reassurance that the craft I wanted to learn was indeed a craft, and that it could indeed be learnt. But as much as you can know in theory about how to tell a story, in the end you still need a story to tell.

The premise of my first novel, Half the World Away, did not come to me. I went looking for it. You see, as much as I love the developing part of writing, the whole plot-characters-voice business, I’m not overly furnished in the ideas area. This lack of whatchamacallit – could inspiration be the right word? – used to be the source of great shame and a whole lot of worries. How on earth was I to be a writer if I only got a decent idea once in a blue moon? And worst of all, my brother was riddled with them. Somehow it seemed like an unfair deal that he got all the ideas and I got all the allergies.

This was because I used to think, as people often do, that any idea that’s not entirely original, that hasn’t come to you from the depths of your brilliant artist mind automatically belongs in the trash.

To be deemed worthy of the title, a work of art has to be the result of some touch of the Inspiration, or the Muse, or whatever higher power happens not to be too busy at the moment. Not to be rude but this is just utter bullshit. Terrible – and dangerous, if you ask me – misconception. One discards a lot of potentially excellent material.

This particular material was waiting for me in the form of a French writing competition. This particular short story competition was themed, and here, loosely translated, was the prompt:

Invent a future in which all women have disappeared and men rule the earth. Main themes: science fiction, action, romance.

Quite specific, as you see, and yet this was precisely the starting point my unimaginative right brain needed. From there, my much better equipped left brain began working, covering sheets of paper with tiny handwritten notes. Shall I bore you with the details of the process? It involves bubbles, arrows, columns and quite an impressive amount of tea bags. No takers? Ah, well, let’s just fast forward to what came out of it then.

About women’s rights – the obvious subject skilfully hidden in the premise – what can I tell you? In my teenage years, I was desperately trying to keep far away from anything feminist. I sighed heavily at anyone who went all girl-power all-men-are-bastards on me. For the most ethical reasons, you understand. I simply wanted people to regard and speak of men and women as part of a single undistinguished group. Gender equality was not something we should have to fight for. Except it is, of course it is. It’s a terrible thing, really, but sometimes you have to tug very hard at the blanket just to get an inch of it back to your side of the bed. And as much as you love that person on the other side, well they are bloody annoying when they drag the whole blanket to themselves, aren’t they?

At this point, you might be telling yourself something along those lines: “that’s a great theme but if it wasn’t her idea to write about it, maybe it means she’s not that interested in the subject of her own book.” To which I would answer quite simply that I would never have chosen this prompt if I wasn’t interested in the subject. It is a bad idea to write about something you are not interested in. In fact, it may well be impossible.

And if you still feel there is something dishonest about that method, consider this: when you are creating from a prompt, you want to make it your own. So it is going to be about men and women, about how the ones think of and treat the others. Possibly a good start, but this is not enough. What you want now is a point of view, an angle to approach the theme. This is where you have a huge margin for originality. This is how you create a personal story, one that could not be told by someone else. One of the many great things about working on an idea that didn’t come from you is that it removes the temptation of skipping this necessary step. Because as long as you haven’t found your angle, a nagging guilt constantly reminds you that the story you are telling is not yours.

It took me some time to work out my angle. Months, maybe a year. Trying to find a way into the subject, I turned the thing over and over in my mind, looking at it from every possible side I could think of. There I stood in a world totally devoid of women. Why were there no more women on earth? They had been exterminated. What triggers a mass killing like that? Hatred, no doubt. What triggers hatred? More often than not, incapacity to connect. The trail of thought led to communication issues, which was not strictly speaking a surprise. In everything human that ever existed, there was always the problem of communication. We need other people, we want to connect, and at the same time, we have the hardest time getting it right. And getting it wrong has all sorts of consequences, ranging from unpleasant to catastrophic.

Imagine you are, say, in the pub having a friendly chat with your mates. Suddenly, an itchy subject creeps into the conversation. Let’s say politics. Chances are that around that table is someone who disagrees with you on every point. This otherwise charming person is your friend and you really don’t want to fight with them. They state their point of view while you roll over and over in your mind the vehement sentences you couldn’t possibly say aloud. By the time they are finished, smoke is coming out of your ears. If you’re going to say something, it’s now. You should say something. He or she got it all wrong. You should say something. But you hesitate one second too long and then it’s too late. The subject has been changed again. Everyone has moved on except for you. This kind of frustration eats at you for weeks.

Here is the point: one needs to speak.

By the time I figured all this out, the submission deadline for the competition was well behind me. Well, don’t you know, it didn’t matter anymore. When one spends so much time with a story, one tends to become sentimental, you understand.

It is a wonderful feeling to narrow in on what you want to say. Everything around it clicks into place. You get a picture of what the book is going to look like and you can start moving stuff around so that the actual thing matches the picture in your mind. At this point, the canvas, as you may imagine, was not blank anymore. You do not wait until you’ve figured out what you want to say before you start building. Maybe some people would say you should, although I’m not convinced it would lead to better stories. Anyway, the fun part is the moulding of the characters and the world and, for better or worse, that is what I tend to start with.

Because they are human like us – well, most of the time – characters are our most immediate and emotional link to the story. They are among the first things I think about when I write and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that other writers work the same way. But, ideally, you want the characters that will be best suited to illustrate the point you want to make, and to achieve that, you often need to refine them so that everything fits better together.

Sid is an overly self-aware, slightly paranoid, twenty-seven-year-old pizza delivery guy. Jamie is a thirty-year-old freelance journalist, disappointed by the world and bored out of his mind. When we meet these guys, they have given up on communication (linking them ever-so-subtly to the theme). They are not trying anymore. To stop trying is the worst possible thing to do, but it is easier and can get very tempting at times. We all have a well-rehearsed reproach-proof excuse at the ready in case we should stand accused of not trying. I’m shy, is my excuse. It’s more difficult for shy people, you can’t deny it. Sid will tell you that nobody would take him seriously anyway. He’s paranoid. It’s not his fault. Jamie firmly believes that people are stupid and not worth the trouble.

As for the world, it pretty much came naturally from the premise. Although the novel was obviously going to be a science fiction of sorts, the subject matter called for a feeling of reality, so it became more of a dystopia. Had I tried to add flying cars, robots and whatnot it would have felt wrong. Or rather, it would not have felt wrong enough. One big thing that goes crazy in a world of normality attracts more attention. No women meant a slowly dying mankind, a feeling of impending doom that would have a considerable impact on the atmosphere of the story. I chose to make it slow and oppressive like a dying animal struggling to breathe, with sporadic outbursts of violence, as if the creature were kicking in protestation against its fate.

After a lot of building, tearing down and rebuilding, this is how the story came out.

One night, Sid and Jamie come back home to find somebody waiting for them in their living-room. Olivia is one of the only women who escaped the killing, she’s traumatised, scared and she wants to speak. She has an urgent need to establish a connection, to communicate. This is why she has the potential to propel the other two into action, which is exactly what she will do.
Half the World Away is the story of three people struggling to bring communication and truthfulness back into their lives, in a world that has not seen either of those things in years. And once you’ve let them slip away, well it might be hard to get them back. The story came from a prompt, but it sure as hell is my story.

Gwen’s Writings

A big mess, mostly.

Tag: blog