The Final Bio?
I used to write my author bios in the third person, as though I was talking about someone else. That ends here, with this: the latest and, perhaps, the last encapsulation of who I was when writing and what happened while I did it.
My career has already been over for some time. It began with MEAT (Beautiful Books, 2008) and ended with WEED (Horrific Tales Publishing, 2021 – cancelled before release).
Honestly, it’s not a journey I remember fondly and it’s not a path I can recommend – especially if you want to make a living. The rare, exhilarating highs were drowned by soul-stomping lows. I wouldn’t change any of it, though. It has largely contributed to who I am in this moment and I like this guy. A lot.
I was late to the literary party, arriving just before I turned thirty. I had immediate success with short stories but it took six novels before I placed a work of full-length fiction and finally got started.
It was turbulent from the get-go.
My first publisher went bankrupt, owing me money. I had a crazy series of agents, ranging from sublime to useless – mostly, the latter. Deals fell through. A publisher ripped me off. Movie producers hooked me with charming bullshit, never to make good on their word. I wasted years following traditional submission routes. I pitched ideas to my agents, wrote novels based on their encouragement, only for them to refuse to take the completed works to market. During the plandemic, I had a publishing contract cancelled simply for speaking what I feel is true.
But it wasn’t all bad.
I taught novel-writing in an adult education program and ran a writers’ group at my local library – rewarding work. I won the British Fantasy Award and a competition or two. One of my novels had five translations and was optioned for film, though it was never made. I wrote a children’s book with my daughter when she was six, gave talks and workshops in schools and ran my own self-publishing imprint for a while. I’m known for Horror but I’ve written Poetry, Comedy, Sci Fi, and Fantasy amongst other things.
About a year ago, when I was on the point of relaunching every single piece of previously published work with exciting new covers and layouts, I came to a hard stop. I deleted everything and closed my Amazon author account.
I was done.
Done with the way writers are separated from readers by market-and-money-obsessed gatekeepers. Done with paying dues to share my stories. Done with being taxed on my creative energy and labour. Done with writing being about networking and marketing and getting reviews.
More than that, I was done with attempting to create anything of value in this laughable, inverted and brutal system. Publishing is just another tentacle of an ancient control grid. Even we – beautiful, soulful spinners of the magic yarn of stories – even we are prisoners in invisible cages.
I had nothing left; no energy for genuine, unaffected, unmolested creativity. No desire to try any more. Writing had been a Sisyphean task from the start and, suddenly, I wanted nothing more to do with it.
But it wasn’t just writing, it was everything about this fiction we’ve been sold as reality. It all felt wrong. Yes, I am talking about the deep, wide, cunningly premeditated and (almost) flawlessly executed global, generational machinations to hobble, enslave and parasitise mankind.
Our world should be a paradise but we’re all so mind-fucked we can’t feel a moment’s peace or contentment – the subject of another article, perhaps. The point is, ‘getting the next book out’ felt like adding yet another bar to my unseen cage.
If you’ve ever read anything of mine, you’ll know I often reach for truth in my stories, no matter how dark they might be. It turns out that the truth about our world is very, very dark indeed. Far worse, in fact, than any horror I’ve ever written.
Sometimes, I feel there’s more reality in fiction than there is in the world as we’ve been programmed to perceive it.
It’s this kind of talk – real, honest talk – that finished my traditional publishing career.
Like most who write, I reached for the stars and fell to Earth. I’ve come to Substack as something of a ghost. I’ve let go of almost everything except the desire to write, to share what feels true through both articles and fiction.
If I can connect with readers like this, if enough people want to explore the words and worlds that pass through me onto the page, I intend to release previously unseen novels, stories and poetry – possibly even some lesser-known works from the past.
Maybe this way I can write with authenticity. Maybe this way you can read me without the matrix getting in the way.