I feel a bit normal today

October and the third or fourth summer of this weird year brings two debut stories in two publications, both of which I’m very happy about indeed. I’m starting to feel a bit prolific, a weird feeling for someone who wouldn’t write every day if he could.

In Nicholas Royle’s guest edited issue of Cōnfingō, a boy named Dylan digs a hole on a beach.

The initial prompt for the story came from the sight of a similar child digging a similar hole on Margate beach last year, in another odd summer, made weird by climate heating, my own chronic illness, and the psychopolitical aftermath of lockdown. My girlfriend and I had gone to Margate for a short break and had stayed in a flat in Arligton House.

My ME/CFS, which had at times that year appeared to be in remission, such that I was jogging up to eight miles again, was back, contributing its own peculiar effects to a strange period in our lives. It was one of those stories that came quickly. I had it all with that initial image — I just had to write it. Thanks to Nicholas for accepting it for Cōnfingō. It’s the second story of mine he’s now passed on for his lovely, excellent Nightjar Press chapbooks and instead published somewhere else; the first was ‘New to it All’, in Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2022. It also came after two previous rejections from Cōnfingō, my spreadsheet of rejections informs me. So I sort of got in there round through the back door. By hook or by crook. I haven’t received my issue yet, but the line-up looks great, and it can be ordered here.

(Talking of Margate, I’ve just remembered the wonderful ‘On Margate Sands’ by the late Uschi Gatward, from her debut English Magic, a book I read earlier this year and highly, highly recommend. I’ve just added the epub to my kindle, because, upon remembering it, realised I have to reread it again at once. The paperback, from Galley Beggar Press, is a very nice volume. Lara Pawson reviewed it in The Guardian. You should buy it.)

The second story this month comes from the excellent Fictionable, edited by Richard Lea, whose edits to my own story significantly improved it. (I love working with editors.) Very pleased to join sone excellent company here, including M John Harrison, one of my favourite writers, and Joyce Carol Oates, Etgar Keret, and others. Harrison’s story is typically brilliant. All can be read for an inexpensive annual subscription of £20.

‘The Medical Room’ came out of a period of severe depression prompted in part by a relapse in my CFS/ME and the encroaching bullshit of neoliberal UK HE in which I work, and my own cratered ability to deal with both. David Graeber’s concept of ‘bullshit jobs’ will be familiar to anyone who has ever, well, had a job in this low, dishonest era of the world. I don’t think my own job is a bullshit job, as such. But the professional-managerial cadres that run the sector are certainly given to bullshit, all large organisations have weird bullshit-culty tendencies, and every day there seems to be a little more. That said, I think it’s a funny story. At least it made me laugh, briefly.

The First Aid Room/Medical Room in my place of work is suitably grim: it’s cold, it isn’t really private, and every now and then security rescinds my card access. Last week I learned it has been ‘decommissioned’. I’m hoping to reverse that. I go there for short periods of ‘therapeutic rest’. This isn’t the first time I’ve been annoyed into writing a story; grumpiness is often overlooked as a factor in creative inspiration.

(I have another story, called ‘Golf’, which is a sort of partner or sibling piece to ‘The Medical Room’, that I’m yet to place, and which is about how much I hate golf.)

Richard interviewed me for the Fictionable podcast, which isn’t live yet but will be soon. I also read the first 700 words of the story, which I made sound seamless in Adobe Audition.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, if you’ve got this far. I promise this will never become one of those newsletters that troubles your inbox every day. Here are some more phone snaps from Margate. I need to get a proper little camera; the iPhone oversharpens everything and I hate it.