This life, version 2.0

THE WRITER'S LIFE

There are a lot of amazing feelings which come from publishing a book, just as there are in writing one. Obviously the writer has complete freedom if they are like me: Working mainly for myself and only in my own styles when I'm hired for freelance work. But I've written plenty about the writing part. What's occupying me the most now is the post-publishing stage of a book.

The publication date was coincidentally poignant for more than the reason I'd already realised. It was three years to the day since part one of my life had ended. It was the day of Trump's inauguration, and there's a fairly barbed Trump reference in one of the stories. And it was the day my friend from Catford was laid to rest. It was a fitting date and it all happened by accident.

I like to play with numbers, to keep my mind always busy. It struck me that my last post was on what would have been day 1126 of me writing this blog. If you add all of the digits of that number, you get 10. If you add the 11 to the 26, you get 37: A prime number. Reversed, it's 73: Another prime, and Doctor Sheldon Cooper's favourite number for that reason and more: 7 and 3 are also both prime numbers. If you add those together, you again get 10. 10 is 2 in binary (well, 10 is 10 in binary, but you get my drift) and 2 is a prime number. It's a lot of overthinking things on my part, but it demonstrates a point: Strange coincidences are there in real life. Some just take more effort to find. 42 is, of course, the answer to life, the universe and everything. When mankind couldn't understand that answer, the point was made that in order to understand the answer to something, one must first understand the question. The question in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was extracted from Arthur Dent's brain was, what do you get if you multiply six by nine? And it is 42. If you use mathematical base 13. We're just not thinking radically enough.

Weird coincidences do happen in real life, as they do in fiction. Often, life's happenstances are stranger than those told of in fiction. The fiction writer has to be wary of accusations of stretching chance too much. Such an accusation might be made of some writers (not mentioning names, but one which rhymes with “ban drown”) but most will make things believable without too much stretching of the imagination. But it is true that stranger things happen in real life. Paul Auster commented on this in a recent interview with The Guardian:

“People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.”

As if to prove it, between 1999 and 2001 he took part in the National Story Project on American public radio, in which he read out yarns submitted by “ordinary people” across the country – “true stories that sounded like fiction”. His original call was for tales “that defied our expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives”. It was a success; thousands of stories were submitted and a selection published as True Tales of American Life. Auster found confirmation that “reality is truly as strange and incomprehensible as I thought it was”, and that others too felt the pull of improbability: “I’m happy to report that I’m not alone,” he told the Paris Review. “It’s a madhouse out there.”

“I borrowed some things from my own life, but what novelist doesn’t?”

None of the stories in The Perpetuity of Memory rely on unbelievable devices. Even the more fanciful and fantastical ones have a grounding in science and some of my background research is explained within the contexts of the individual stories. There are elements of me in most of them but probably only recognisable to those closest to me. As fiction, they are good stories.

The truth is, so much has happened in my life that there are many stories to adapt and tell as fiction. “Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them”, after all. This entire blog is the story of most of my life – non-fiction - or at least what I'm now calling part two of my life.

At the end of part two, I've published two books: The Paradoxicon and The Perpetuity of Memory. The Paradoxicon is a partly semi-autobiographical story, written in a hurry, in an effort to commit things to history. As a flash fiction novella, it's a good little book (I'm told). The Perpetuity of Memory though, is the book I'd like to be judged on as a writer. It represents the three years during which my life was first in transit, then settled and contemplating. It's a story in itself: 25 collected tales, one book, wrapped up in another story: that of my life, version 2.0. I'm contemplating and writing many more stories, for the webzine, magazine and anthology markets, then there'll be a second volume, probably in about a year, and with the working title of Recollections of the Future (not final). I'll also be re-writing The Paradoxicon as an expanded, full-length novel, incorporating a fictional account of the real autobiography I've found too difficult to write.

My book is out there. I'm earning royalties in various currencies as it's bought around the world. The royalties are almost irrelevant to me. I have a modest, comfortable (if not luxurious) life and I have all that I need around me. So as not to complicate my benefit payments (writing is recognised by tribunal judges as being therapeutic for my depression and anxiety), most payments from my books will go to my usual charity benefactors. That, and just the knowledge that my books are out there, is why I do it. People are buying The Perpetuity of Memory and reading it. Friends are sending me photos of my book in situ in their houses.

It's a good feeling; This life, part three, or version 2.0.