Look To The Future Now It's Only Just Begun.

 2022 then. 

My memory, like my eyesight, keeps getting worse. It's the weight of years as much as anything. While it's a cliche time speeds up as you get older, it's a cliche because it's true. I think some events happened this year, but they might as easily have happened any other year, its all one continuum, they're all just single images in the flick-book of my life. I'm no longer able to place them. It's not too bad. The fog is warm, it's soft. Mmmm. 

The major events in my life this last year were: the death of a friend, we sold our mother's house, I made a film, I finally got Covid after two years of trying, I completed a first and second draft of a feature film, and then another friend died. That's it, really. Not much for a year. An event every two months. Death haunts everything now. 2022 was my first full year as an actual no foolin' orphan. I'm now the oldest of my family. The whisper prickling the back of my neck is "You're next". My social media is now just a list of really cool people who have died and will not be replaced. 

I was walking to a friend's house yesterday as we were both attending our friend Jo's funeral. She'd been killed by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve. As I approached, the road was cordoned off and there was a large hi-viz police presence circling the black shell of a car sitting at a 90 degree angle to the KFC drive-thru. A woman had died. It was a doomy start to a day that had the quality of a uneasy dream. 

In 2023 I shall try and shake off this gloom, though it's in the blood. Higginses are a glass-half-shattered race of people.        

I had nothing published except a few drawings. In 2021 I had five short stories published and was short-listed for Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year volume 13. In 2022 nothing. I've only written two (longish) short stories this year. I find writing short stories harder as I strive to get better at them. That's possibly the issue. It's a fine line between striving for perfection and second guessing everything you do to the point of tearing lines through your work and throwing it all away. I'm having some difficulty walking that line. I'm very aware of my alienation. That I'm not a part of an institution or a body. I don't have useful friends, and it seems impossible to become clubbable, supported or liked. I am a crank and my work, which I long took for original, is the work of a crank. Cranks and outliers do become popular and loved but they usually have to be dead first, and often not even then. 

Applied for a theatrical bursary at the end of the year. Not getting it is an effective death-knell for my playwrighting career. Which should please quite a few people for some reason. I've not made many friends in the theatre. No one is crying out for my wordy plays about sad middle-aged men for some reason.* I guess that's what the 20th Century was for. 

Two of my friends were judging the "competition". Not clubbable, you see. Not liked. How ill white hairs become a fool and jester. 

But it's not all bad.

One area where I've been very happy in 2022 is film making. I've completed my second draft of the Disney film - I'm contractually obliged for four and they look as if they'll make me do it too, and it looks like my producer's option is going to run out for the second time on "Into The Mystic" - an everyday story of fey folk. But it's "Muirgen", the film I wrote and directed in December that's most thrilling, mainly because I have some measure of control over it. I conceived, wrote it, story-boarded it, filmed it and I have final say on the edit. It will look as much like the film I wanted to make as possible.

 It's a colossal leap forward in terms of ambition and scope from "Goat Songs". I love "Goat Songs". It's so me: camp, funny, pretentious and meant. I insist on the cognitive dissonance of being ironic and heartfelt simultaneously. But it's a small film. It's a contained film. It's tight, and constricted, and airless. It was filmed during the lock-down and that's at least part of what it's about. 

In writing "Muirgen", I wanted it to be outside. To be able to see natural greens, the loamy earth, sharp, naked rocks and glittering expanse of the beach, the sea rushing out at the horizon. The infinity of outside. On a cold winter's day grey sky meets grey water in horizonless eternity. There are human bodies too: puckered flesh, hair pricked on end, skin mottled purple by the cold, dark as a bruise. Cheeks are slap-red, and breath visible as it steams from the body. We are furnaces inside. 

And I got that. But I got more. I also got a story. Very nearly a genre story. We have a composer. We had stunt people. There was hair, makeup and costume. There were a lot of people working on this simple two-hander short. But they are going to push the film into something quietly amazing, I think. I have the option of fucking the whole thing up, of course. But I feel confident, perhaps for the first time ever, that I won't. This will be a good film. I can't wait to finish it. And, of course, I already know what I want to do next. 

So, my 2023 looks like editing a film and, mid-January, starting the long road to getting my teeth fixed. My dentist tell me that this may take six months, but the first part of the process is "stabilisation" which involves the extraction of seven of (what remains of) my teeth. He's doing it all in one day. I'm not anticipating enjoying the process. By summer I might have a winning smile again. It's going to cost a lot of money - it's the most expensive thing I've ever bought, in fact. The most expensive thing I ever bought was my own teeth. I suppose this is life from now on - being the owner-operator of a failing human body is going to take up increasing amounts of time and money.  I better get some. Money, not time - that's going. 

2023 will be the year of hustling. Positive hustling. When I'm not bleeding out of my face. My film will be good, good enough for festivals, good enough to get noticed. I've made two good, interesting films - I'm not a flash in the pan. And I have so many more ideas. I'm tremendously excited by the prospect. I'm impatient for this new year. Bring it on. I need to know what happens next.   

Really. What happens now?     

*I've only ever written one play like this but that was the one everyone saw, so I'm assuming that's what they're expecting. Maybe I should write another play about a sad middle-aged man. I call them plays, though I'm not sure that's what they. But they happen in theatres so it's close-enough.