The Vacuum

 One of the problems with writing or, more specifically, one of the problems I have with writing, is the certainty no one cares if I do it or not. No one has asked me to do any writing. No one is tapping their foot and folding their arms, waiting. They aren't camped out by their letterbox hoping my latest opus will plop onto their welcome mat. My works are unbidden. They're volunteered. I do occasionally get paid for them. Less often, people do ask me to write something for them. But mostly I'm a self-motivated auto-creator. I have no fans and no cheerleaders. I sit down and I make things up, continually, compulsively. Counter-intuitively. 

I write in a vacuum. And in my dining room. There's no cause, no effect. It's a scream in space. I'm propositioning an empty room. My work, if it can be called work, is not required. No one has asked me to do this. I either do it or I don't, and the only person it's inconveniencing is me. I rarely even get anyone to read works-in-progress any more. 

I'm hardly complaining. At the moment, I'm sitting in a beautiful room on a sunny day. I can see the garden, the grass long and green, lively with butter-yellow dandelions. I can see my "Duke of Earl" tee shirt drying outside. I've just eaten half a Twirl duo and I'm listening to Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert. I'm surrounded by books and pens and paper, and I haven't had a drink in three days, which means my mood is returning to normal after a fractious interval. Though the insomnia's back. 

I'm staring at the laptop. I'm 130 pages into a new novel, though I don't know whether my most recent one will ever be published. I have short stories that require editing, because everything requires editing, all the time. Nothing's ever finished, merely abandoned and, as my writing improves - and I would suggest it does - it becomes more difficult to resolve anything. Writing requires patience, care, sudden inspiration and merciless pruning, and any of these can happen at any time, whether it's the first draft or the twenty first. That's my lesson here: good writing is harder than bad. Though you will find a lot of people are perfectly happy with bad. 

There have been a number of knocks recently and I'm not getting any richer. I'm not even treading water. If I told you how much a short story sold for you'd laugh Rivita cracker dust into my stupid face for even trying. Spell-check wants to turn Rivita into "trivia", which shows it's more than usually on the ball. 

There's been a major hoo-hah among the writers I know. Meta has stolen all their books to teach its AI how to do their badly paid job for free, though it's not actually free, as AI just eats up the planet. The business model here, then, is to stop employing talented people who survive on scraps, so you can press a button and get an uncanny valley, close-but-no-cigar version of writing that will chomp through the planet like a peckish Galactus. These are the smart guys, yeah? The entrepreneurs we're supposed to admire? Okay, culture. 

Meta actually took the info from a pirating company, which means the authors were robbed twice. My social media was full of furious biro-jockeys fulminating: "I, and every writer I know, have been robbed by Meta!" The Atlantic Magazine - properly on a roll at the moment - had a special search button where you could see if your work was in Meta's big, fat Yoink pile. All you had to do was type your name. My brother was in there. My friend Jackie was in there. My friends Paddy and Aislinn too. Lee had poems she'd forgotten she'd written pinched from her. Guillermo Stitch was fleeced of both his published novels, confounding robots, and forcing them to think about their empty lives. He's the variable that will set them back weeks. Our best weapon against The Singularity. 

So I had a go. 

You know where this is going. 

I had not been picked for the team. I was still standing on the touchline with a plaster over one lens of my glasses. There was no teacher in a Daley Thompson tracksuit to force someone to take me. 

The burglars had entered my house and found nothing worth stealing. They'd tidied up. 

I've had a memoir and a novel published. Dozens of short stories on both sides of the Atlantic. What about my criticism? Hundreds of reviews and editorials: theatre, books, comedy, art. Nothing. AI had sent them back like cold soup in a Deli. What was I? Chopped mist? 

I said this to my author friends but they were confounded by my grievance, given they'd actually been robbed. I signed the letter of protest. Of course, I did. I sign all the letters of protest. They do nothing. 

I return to the laptop screen. I stare into its baleful eye, a bashful abyss refusing to meet my gaze. I'm thinking of putting together a book of short stories. I'm writing this novel. There's a book about being old I occasionally tinker with. There's another novel that's like "American Psycho" if Patrick Bateman was middle-aged and from Surrey. "Suburban Psycho" then, or, "The Home Counties Killer". "The Countryside Annoyance". 

I mean, not that, obviously. Well over eighty pages into that one too. 

People say to me, "John, you're so incredibly prolific! How do you do it?"

I do it by writing. Just writing. I don't go for coffee. I don't have meetings. I don't do interviews. I don't teach. I don't interview other writers. I don't hang out in bookshops doing photo-sessions. I'm not on retreat, staring at a redbrick windmill, and hoping the muse descends before drinkies with the other patrons at six. I'm not doing radio and TV spots. I'm not curating. I'm not podcasting. I'm not standing over you while you read the book. I'm not forcing you to spread the word, though it's nothing to you and a lot to me. I'm not at the opening night in the theatre. I'm not conspicuously "living the life". I'm not doing the things you're apparently supposed to do when you're a popular and successful writer. I'm failing to fake it till I make it. 

I'm at home. And I'm writing. And it makes no difference to anyone. Not even to me. 

And I'm still writing. I'm even writing this.