If anyone has been keeping up with my correspondence with Barry Hale, you’ll see quite a few references to GAMMA FOUR, my trans-temporal political satire, and probably one of the best chunks of writing I’ve created to date. Tied into a four-dimensional skyscraper, anyone who enters accidentally creates alternate versions of themselves, all existing on a planet Earth where Priti Patel goes to Coachella to find free love in the marijuana, a fractal algorithm that ties all events in history together is hidden on 3 1/2’’ floppies in the heart of Peru, billionaires are fighting over fractal universes to sell concepts for a buck, and all a response to our cacophonous post-truth reality, where Conservatives are stabbed after voting to starve the disabled, socialists are stitched into Voldemort memes on British National television, and even Doctor Who has a pro-Amazon capitalist episode which would have made the third Doctor think he was in a parallel universe himself! And I am not going to publish it.
When I started writing GAMMA FOUR, I was tied to a bed and a chair recovering from surgery, and lived on social media. My comprehension of how reality functioned - who were the good guys, who were the bad guys - was entirely formed by 140 character tweets from pop stars and similarly bedbound activists. My views in regard to the political compass have not changed a dot, but my response to it has. Social media keeps you in a constant state of anxiety, of fight or flight, and summarises concepts vast and complex in ways you can only be angry at. When you leave that space, and have completed 100 hours of counselling training1, and meet local people in their very real lives and talk to them about what is going on, the way to engage with anarchic philosophy shifts dramatically. GAMMA FOUR was a sincere response, but of an old version of me. I want to release the opposite now.
Maybe one day it will see the light of day, along with In The Land of Sleet and Rain (a similarly “sincere” novel at the exact moment I dipped into hallucinogenic depression) and the smattering of notebooks from my childhood where I wrote about how the girl with the eyeliner wouldn’t sleep with me—sincerity is an amorphous thing, an evolving thing. My teenage sincerity is not the same as this pseudo-adult self. If I am to infuse the next chapter of The Oneiriad with a metamodernist adaptation of obscurantist sincerity, then I can’t share work I don’t resonate with any longer.
This realisation took me back to the origins of writing for me. Fun. Remembering I write to organise my thoughts, to hold a fractal mirror up to myself so I can decide which parts I want to keep and which no longer serve me and those I love. That I write because its enjoyable, and silly. I was sat editing GAMMA FOUR and felt this pit of “is this what I want to be doing”, whilst I planned the next series of Red Forest, and a fantasy novel, and the DnD podcast Adam X Smith is doing stellar work on—are these dissociative hippies, angry racists, satirical conservatives populating GAMMA FOR the things I want to throw into the void again? They were when I wrote it, but it felt like a purging. David Southwell described writing as exorcism, and GAMMA FOUR is certainly that; all the rage at an absurdist fascist-leaning world (which I still feel is almost true) placed into an impenetrable labyrinth of cross-pollinating timelines, bizarre caricatures, and fractal kaos magick. It was me. It helped me. But now I need to create something new. I have no idea what that is.
I know the nuance of the world - a phrase that almost makes me flinch with its liberal tonality - does not need another satire about how horrible everything is. It would be true, to some extent, but it creates no answers, forms only a brook where we can all laugh at how strange everything has become. Living in the middle of a pandemic and calling it post-COVID simply because it makes us feel better. Celebrities and stand-up comedians running entire countries, bringing Nazis out of retirement to fight new existential terrors. People trusting The Daily Mail over the NHS! It’s nonsense out there, and GAMMA FOUR would have explored our relationship with that chaos with aplomb (if I say so myself), but it doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t quite hold space for love, for kindness, for the fact every day I see someone trying their damndest to make the world a better place. I tell my clients to write down 3 things that are positive each day, and I don’t do this for myself enough—I drop into anxiety and fear that things will not go well, will fall apart. And yet, every time there is a sun. I saw an Emperor Dragonfly today, and five baby froglets today. We (me and my fiancée) bought our dinner tonight from our local grocer’s. We ate breakfast together. How fucking incredible is that. I could write a thousand billion books, and nothing will match the sensation of eating breakfast with her.
That’s the next book, right here:
I ate breakfast with my one true love.
But this article is called Going Against The Manifesto. When I started this I was damned sure I needed to make the work as accessible as possible. No paywalls. No borders. Life is hard enough for everyone as it is, without me being pretentious enough to think people should buy (after already paying for the internet, in a home they probably rent) improvised surrealist blog posts where I don’t even edit for plot holes. With the amount of privilege I have - a home, three cats, loved ones who support me - the idea of putting a pay barrier between you and my writing felt, on some level, rude. And yet, the beady eyed of you will see a new tab for Tumbledown Ave.
I was meditating in the bath when I saw a vision of a giant squirrel. I was in the car another day and I knew the title of the next thing would be Tumbledown Ave. I saw a lovely lady dropping her shopping. I knew some answers to the unanswerable queries of The Oneiriad would maybe get a chance at transmogrifying into something semi-answered—and so that is what I began to write. And I’ve put it behind a paywall.
In the most basic of senses, if I am to support my family, and those who have paid my way to get to where I am now, I need to generate income. I have my counselling, and I have my tutoring, but the writing is just… there. I wanted to set it to £1, but substack have a minimum limit, so I put it to the minimum. But why did I do it?
In some sense - and in the interests of being honest, metamodernist, just a better person - it is because my fiancée is doing this incredible podcast and it’s going to help us in so many ways. I can see how much effort she puts into it, and how much joy it is bringing her audience, her friends, and - most importantly - herself, and I thought to myself maybe I should trust my creativity in the same way. There is a touch of selfish copycatting going on there, I recognise that, but honestly, just seeing how amazing she is, her trust in her abilities, her light she shines on things that have been so difficult for so many, is just inspiring.
In another sense, it is talking with Barry about an artists relationship with money, and maybe I’ve just matured, or grown, or given-in; the child in me is saying I am a sell-out, but in truth, it’s thinking outside of my bubble. When I was just me, myself, and I, publishing for free or expecting nothing from the pay-what-you-feel store is quite enough, but now my responsibilities extend to one fiancée and three cats, and just letting my words churn away without the possibility of it helping pay for heating and food is selfish in a whole other capacity.
I feel selfish in another sense though, that I have gone against my desire to make everything I create completely accessible in a world where saying “this only costs a cup of coffee” is an insult to every homeless, jobless human soul who can’t afford coffee, and all the underpaid indigenous folk who have picked the beans for my caramel blend super juniper extra hot nonsense frappé2—I have done the one thing I said I would not do, which is make my writing just that little bit more difficult to read.
Selfishness, I have realised, is a constant battle for me. It once was anxiety. Then it was control. Now its selfishness. This is the next demon to let go of and throw into the void of pure zen, whatever the fuck that means.
Suffice to say, Tumbledown Ave. is only available to paid subscribers because I need to help my loved ones out whilst they’ve supported me between jobs, loved me at my worst, and been on the other side of every dark tunnel of the soul I’ve been through. It’s also so I can trust my abilities, and treat my writing as something more than what it has been so far. My anarchic sentiments need to be rebooted and reformatted and reenergised for this new future me, knowing its a fine line between acceptable internal shifts and liberal cheese & wine evenings where you chortle at the troubled. It’s about evolving with my environment and recognising those changes, in the world around me, and in myself; that I am not the man I was, that I can now enjoy things! And if you have some cash to spare, please throw it our way, so I - we - can keep making the stuff that brings us joy.
Joy, perhaps, is the salve to all this myopia.3
That’s right, I just finished my training, waiting for the next stage to start practicing. And its been such a privilege to work with people for those 100 hours already. People are incredible.
Which, incidentally, I will have so so so many more of because they bring me joy, and I’m too tired to fight myself on the ethics of it any more; I’m not in charge of Starbucks. They can be better, putting the onus on me gives them a free pass to be dicks.
The opening track is Shedding Skins by Fia, which I used in my Doctor Who Fanfic, and I think you can see what I was shedding when I wrote that.