J. Grey's Blog

I’m quite bad at blogging, at Twittering, even at updating Facebook. I’m a man with too little time on my hands and when I do have some, I work.
My new novel is currently untitled but my best guess is that it will be called ‘Hawk-Eye.’ I’m lucky enough to have a partner in crime, a close friend who beta tests everything for me and he assures me it’s coming on well.
This was a novel I didn’t think I’d ever write. It’s a silly, terrible, stupid idea for a book. It could so easily be an utter disaster, like trying to tell the news through a series of funny cartoons or making people laugh with puppets made from dead kittens. It’s just a horrible, horrible idea and one that should have been strangled at birth.
Many people have said the same about me, of course so I figured I’d give it a go.
I was lucky enough to grow up in the 80s, before the world was a complete and utter disaster. It was certainly getting there but there was still room to breath, optimism in the future and the naive belief that we still had one. Like all kids my age, I watched TV, probably too much of it. Some things stuck with me.
I loved the super-vehicle TV shows. The king of them all was Knight Rider, the story of a talking car that could drive itself but that wasn’t my favourite. I liked Airwolf, the tale of a heavily armed helicopter but that show was ultimately very flawed. The first series worked quite well, using the helicopter as the centre of the show but it increasingly drifted into a weird episodic formula where nothing had anything to do with the helicopter until 5 minutes before the end where a stock villain would just for no reason happen to have a flying machine of his own that just happened to need shooting down by the super-vehicle that completely outclassed it. It just didn’t work and became laughably bad by the end.
My favourite was Streethawk. Streethawk was a brilliant idea from a budgetary standpoint. One of the biggest problems the other shows had was the sheer expense of running a large and costly piece of equipment. A motorcycle is a cheap, small machine so the stunt-work was affordable. Also, and best of all, it was about a motorcycle!
Motorcycles are cool.
Sadly the show wasn’t actually that good. It only lasted for 12 episodes for some reason. The stories were terrible, they were stock scripts which usually didn’t have anything to do with the bike, it was just tacked on. Ultimately it just made the whole thing seem a bit silly, but then the 80s were a bit silly, they just were and they were just meant to be.
As a keen (obsessive) motorcycle nut, the idea of the super-motorcycle always stayed with me. Some elements of the show seemed utterly ridiculous. The bike was capable of hyper-thrust which meant that it could ride at 300mph, too fast for the rider to control it so the computer controlled it instead. But that just made no sense. It made no less sense than the fact that it was armed with a particle beam, a machine gun and a set of rockets, however.
I wondered if a story could have been written that actually made sense of all that and an idea took hold. It would also need to shake up the format, making the whole thing more interesting, more nuanced, more modern but without sacrificing what was good about it.
I wouldn’t write a book that didn’t have a point. I like to write stories that have a purpose of some kind, that have themes, layers and metaphors.
I like complex stories, things that keep you guessing, my goal is to write books that you want to read twice, that you can read again and see how everything fits together, that’s more than just an obvious narrative, that has things you never spotted the first time around.
But could this work? Could I really tell a subtle, nuanced and layered story about a very fast motorcycle that solved crimes? It sounds like a challenge to me.
As I finished up my last book, the idea took form. There was no escaping it, it was in my head and it was writing itself. I had several other books in mind but for some reason, this was the one that wanted to get out first.
I spoke to my friend and discussed the idea with him. He told me that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. I had a theme, one that surpassed a crime-solving super-bike. I had a new way to shuffle characters around, ways I could tell the story in a new and interesting way so that fans of the original show would understand it but anyone not familiar with it would still keep up.
I wanted the story to have a tongue in cheek 80s feel to it as well as being a modern sci-fi. It somehow had to walk the path between the two and I thought I had a way to do it.
The ideas became characters, they wrote their own dialogue, they started coming to life on the page. I found a way to make the whole thing interesting, peeling back layers of mystery as the story progressed and built a complex narrative, a twisted story that took the audience on a ride of their own.
I wanted the book to feel like a ride on a motorcycle, it’s dangerous, it’s exciting, it’s fun. I wanted the book to take you on that kind of wild ride, to know it’s silly but want to do it anyway.
It’s now hit the 50k word mark and I’ve made the first big reveal. I would think it will run to about 70k words but I hope to finish it to first draft this week.
I’ve been passing chapters back to my friend for feedback and opinions. I keep pestering him with questions such as, ‘is this really working,’ and ‘is this just a stupid idea?’ So far, he assures me it is working and the stupidity of it actually works in its favour. In fact, he’s enjoying it and won’t let me discuss future plot points, he’s keen to see how the story develops himself.
That’s a good sign, and frankly, I’m keen to see what happens as well.
I know how it ends, that’s all planned but I wasn’t sure how to reveal it to the audience. I had a dream that separated the ending into two big reveals, one final one that wraps everything up and will leave the audience (hopefully) satisfied.
The biggest surprise to me is just how dark this has become. Considering it’s based on a kids TV show from the 80s, this has quite an ugly edge to it. I wanted the audience to appreciate just what was at stake so the villainy behind the story is very grim indeed.
So far, it’s incredibly gratifying to write. I’m enjoying it immensely. It’s like going back to this other world to play with these characters I’ve created, that are alive and existing in a perfectly formed universe of their own that just happens to exist inside my head. It feels like watching it all happen and then just writing down what I’ve seen.
Obviously it needs finishing and testing but I think I’d enjoy writing sequels to this. I love the characters, I enjoy the word they live in. We’ll see what the future holds, I guess.

I finished my new book. Of course, the whole idea of finishing things makes very little sense to an artist. Creative people are not organised people which is why accountants offices are so dull and why filing cabinets are rarely given as gifts.
Finishing things is a subjective concept. We don’t really finish things, a book is never actually complete, it’s just abandoned at some point. That point is where we feel that we can’t make it any better, even if there’s room for improvement, and that’s measured against the insanity it causes by trying.
So when I sat ‘The Human Race’ is finished, I mean that it’s as good as I can get it without driving myself even more crazy.
Like most of my work, this new one is different. Of course, nothing is really new or completely original but I do try my best to make it as novel as possible.
My passion is science-fiction which is, sadly, a bloated genre that’s very difficult to be heard in as a new, single voice crying out amidst a huge crowd.
My other interest is motorcycles. They don’t judge how crazy I am and they tend to be heard from a long way off, especially if driven hard and with ‘proper’ exhausts fitted. ‘Motorcycle’ is a genre that doesn’t yet exist. That seems unusually cruel.
I decided to write a fictional book about motorcycles. In fact it’s really just a drama, mixed with comedy elements and a mystery thrown in for good measure. It has a weird, unusual premise and is told in an unusual, weird way.
The story revolves around a competition and it’s open to motorcyclists in London. If they complete their challenge then they could win a share of one million pounds. They have no way to know what their challenge will be, they don’t know who they’ll be partnered up with, they don’t know how many other players there are and certainly have no idea how many people are going to make it through to the end.
The story begins in a church hall where the various competitors have to work out what to do next. Each chapter follows them on their day as they struggle against increasingly ridiculous and dangerous tasks that push them to the limits of their endurance, ability, morality and stupidity. The stories intersect, adding various pieces to the puzzle until eventually the mysterious challenge and the dark forces behind it are eventually revealed.
As well as (hopefully) telling an entertaining story, the work is a character study of various motorcycle archetypes. It’s set in London and the characters are firmly based on those you might find in the city.
Some of my original ideas didn’t make the cut. In my early plotting, I had a city courier and a motorcycle gang member. Ultimately they were just too obvious and too exclusive. I wanted to make the book accessible to everyone so, for the most part, they’re just people who happen to ride bikes.
There are no heroes and no villains, although there are people that I really don’t like. They’re all just people, sometimes they get along and sometimes they don’t. They have different viewpoints, they come from different places. Some are running away from their past, others are trying to save it.
There are some dark moments too. The story includes my first sex-scene. It’s not needlessly graphic and it’s an essential part of the plot. It was about time I wrote one so I made it as different as possible. It’s far from romantic or sensual, it’s a moment that just happens in a world we often have little control over.
There’s a particularly grim scene in it too. Even though it lacks the sweeping drama of a huge story, this down to earth little moment in a person’s life should strike a chord, this person could be us and if it was, would we do anything differently?
But there’s some light moments too. There’s comedy drawn from the antagonism between some of the characters, there are situations that are patently ridiculous.
My favourite chapter involves a sacrifice, someone doing something for another person in the most human way possible.
That’s why I chose the title. This book is about a competition, often a race to complete their tasks before midnight, always running against one another or the clock. But it’s real, the people are inspired by the things around me and the people I’ve met along the way. The comedy comes from real situations that could happen. They shouldn’t but they could, and if we were desperate enough, they just might.
What would you do if the odds were against you, how far would you go to take control of your life?
Hopefully not too far, but just far enough. That’s how finished this book is… I hope.

I had a difficult and challenging weekend. I was busy writing my sequel to ‘Those Two Idiots’. Well, technically it’s a prequel since the events happened before the ones I wrote about earlier.
Still, time is an illusion, Friday afternoons especially so, when the evening promises beer, a suitable amount to remove the unsuitable amount of coffee I had leading up to the beer.
My life teeters on the balance between two extremes, life and death, awake and asleep and night and day. But none are more important than maintaining the delicate balance between coffee and alcohol. I’m sure there are many people will understand, even if they’ll only come to appreciate that another delicate, and far more precarious balance I maintain is that of my mental equalibrium.
Well, with that in mind, I had something of a slight issue. The book I’m working on is provisionally titled, ‘Travelling-lite’. It concerns a trip around Europe by motorcycle. The most challenging aspect of it was taking my then girlfriend whose name cannot be mentioned because I’ve actually forgotten what it was.
She was not a very good travel companion. I could have got more use from a tree-stump with a face painted on it, and probably would have had more fun besides. She provided no useful function and moaned the entire time about being on the motorcycle, which took some of the shine off it. Now while conflict makes for good drama, it just brings back the painful drudgery and consequently the book is frequently not fun to write.
The name itself is a bit of a pun, I was travelling but the experience was an easy one, a light and simple exercise. Consequently the book frequently veers off at wild tangents so that it’s at least vaguely amusing.
All this means that writing it can come hard. No matter, I’m a professional. I’m taking two weeks off to write this one. I have recently finished up the draft for a fun piece of fiction and needed a palette cleanser before going back to edit it.
On Friday I poured my heart and soul into my work, pushing myself into a 5000 word chapter. It was coming together, it was funny, it made me smile at the stupid things that had happened. Then, as luck woulnd’t have it, my computer gave up. It just died, completely and absolutely, turning over, rolling on its back with its legs in the air saying, ‘no more, I’ve had enough of this stupid stuff you write, go and get another job, you idiot.’
There was much frowning, some gnashing of teeth and some swearing might have been involved (some swearing was involved). None of this helped, of course.
I managed to get the thing running in safe-mode where it seemed that some of my files were intact. I was lucky enough recover almost everything but my days work was gone, vanished into the ether like a fart on the wind.
I’d had enough now, this was the 4th computer I’ve owned in only 4 years. This one was nearly new, only around 5 months old and in perfect condition. I’d had enough, I decided to make it bullet-proof so this never happens again.
It stalled my work but I spent the weekend building a tough, no nonsence computer from the ashes of the old. I found out that HD crashes on my computer were pretty common. I replaced it with a Kingston SSD HD and installed a fresh version of Linux Mint. Never again will Windows turn up its toes in the middle of a chapter. No more will Bill Gates take a casual nose at what I’m doing or try to upgrade my system with something that completely refuses to work.
Mint seems fine, with an SSD it loads up from nothing in literally seconds. It seems fairly stable but has a few odd teething problems. Scrolling is backwards, for instance.
Hopefully now, this will be the last computer I own for a few more years. Fingers crossed.

It’s with a heavy heart that I have decided to write about my dog. I’ve lived in Cambodia for about 4 years now and moved into a shop-house around 3 years ago, probably a bit less. This house was cheap but in a rough end of town. It’s where a lot of the locals live and standards are, consequently quite poor, at least as poor as the locals. Rubbish was routinely thrown over the wall into a swamp at the back of the house, children collect bottle-lids for crack-pipes and all hope gets washed away with every flush of the toilet. It isn’t as bad as it seems, most of the toilets don’t actually flush.
Consequently, because of all that we had rats around and mice in the house. I decided to get a cat to keep them away, ideally an older one since there are lots of unloved strays I could give a loving home to, or a home, at least. A cat became a dog, not through Cambodian magic as that only appears to have the power to turn otherwise normal people into sex-crazed alcoholics.
My partner brought home a puppy one afternoon, a tiny little female white ball of fluff that staggered around like a broken toy. One of our neighbours had given her to us but then, inexplicably, changed their minds and took it back two hours later. That was odd but not really odd for Cambodia where it really is like stepping into the Twilight Zone, but not on of the good episodes.
My partner was offered another dog, I said that would be ok, I like dogs. Her cousin had a male he couldn’t look after and gave him to us. It was all very casual but then the same thing often happens with their children. When we got him the poor thing was still too small to be away from its mother, it was infested with lice and malnourished. He wasn’t expected to live.
I sent her to the vet the next day so our new dog could be examined. The vet shouted at her, angry that she’d let her dog get in this state. She had to explain we’d just got him and wanted to get him out of this state. He wasn’t expected to make it but we did our best. The poor thing could barely move, he staggered to food and water and slept almost all the time.
He did survive, against all the odds. Around 9 months later there was still nothing wrong with him but he wasn’t quite right either. He was becoming Cambodian. He had issues with his balance and was slower than other dogs. Then all of a sudden, he turned the corner. He was just suddenly a dog, a great dog that quickly became the king of the neighbourhood.
He was a small blob of fur. A friend had his Cambodian dog tested and found it had traces of various kinds of Asian animals. He asked what mine was. My best estimate was that he was part mop and part potato. He looked vaguely like a Scottish Terrier, small and stocky with wiry white hair. He bit people. His eyes didn’t point in the same direction. He was a mutt and proud of it.
He was a fighter and he just didn’t know how to back down from a conflict. He was a fussy eater and would only eat a blend of fried meat and rice and ate tons of it. He was strong and attracted the interest of the neighbourhood females. He was too short to do much about it but he had a good go at it. Apparently trying is the first step towards failing and he failed often.
Then one day I got home from work and he was gone. We never saw him again, he just vanished from our lives. At first, I didn’t make too much of it. He had gone missing once before and turned up in the house of a local female on heat, where he moved in, took control and guarded her like a prize. I went over to feed him but he wouldn’t come away from her for an instant. He walked back a day later and collapsed on the floor in complete exhaustion.
Days stretched by. I put up a sizable reward and there was nothing, no word at all. My hope is that he was killed quickly, hit by a car on the road outside our house. More likely is that he was taken to be eaten.
It’s common practice here, almost everyone I know who has had a small dog has had it taken. I was told they don’t usually eat that kind of dog but they’re not too fussy either.
He was special to me. I laid on my back on the sofa with him on my chest when we first got him, I fed him milk and kept him warm. He was my dog, he rode on my bike, we travelled hundreds of miles together with him in a bag, strapped to my chest.
He was in a kennel once, with the female dog my friend owned. The kennel owner described him as a ‘spicy dog’ because she tried to bath him. She was warned, Jason liked things his own way and he didn’t take kindly to strangers bathing him. He protected his friend from all other dogs, it didn’t matter to him how big they were. In the she said he was ‘a real dog’, true to his nature but still a good pet. He loved his family, he would have done anything to protect us, dogs are like that.
I don’t know what kind of monster would eat him but I open the door and there they are. One of them ate my dog.
Months later, I still miss my little-man.

The travel story is dragging so I’ve decided to change direction with it. The actual story isn’t particularly interesting so I’m using it as a springboard to bounce off into little anecdotes of things that happened in my many years of motorcycling, drinking, involving myself with insane women and trying to make sense with a world that just doesn’t have any interest in making any.
It is fun to write it, it’s like re-living it all over again. It comes back to mind easily, the story resonates and writes itself. I just don’t see that anyone else would find it entertaining or enlightening so I’m widening the scope to make it more of a reflection on my whole life. It’s the introduction to my need to travel and take the reader through my mindset and illustrate what it was that drove me away from England in the first place.
I still have the bike, Bella. She’s a BMW G650x. Sadly, about two years ago, I lent her to Marcin. He rode with me into Asia, and he’s a trusted friend and more like a brother, but the nice kind, not the sort that borrows money and tries to sleep with your wife. Read ‘Those Two Idiots’ to see our story for yourself. He borrowed her, asking if he could add a GPS power-point to the loom. As he was a qualified electrician and it was an easy job, I had no complains and invited him to do just that.
He phoned me from Thailand and in his blunt, inimitable way he calmly explained, “Jack, your bike is on fire.” By the time she made it home, she was a sorry state. He’d wrecked it, the engine was leaking, the bolts had rattled out, the whole motorcycle was shot to bits. I looked into repairing her but in Cambodia, it wasn’t going to happen. Luckily I sourced some parts from the UK, I stripped her down to the last nut and bolt and began rebuilding her. She’s up on her wheels now, just needing time and a little money spent on her to get her back to her former glory.
She’s retired from hard travelling, she’s given her all and deserves a break. She’s being re-invented into a scrambler, a fun bike to just play with, she’ll never be used hard again. Probably!
I spent an hour just staring at her, imagining the changes I’m going to make. My goal is to end up with something different, something radical that nobody would even recognise as the bike she once was.
That’s true of everything I do. I’m a changer, I re-invent everything, often including myself. It’s always been a passion of mine, to make things different, hopefully better.
My most recent release (escape) is ‘Serves. No Useful Purpose’. I tried to write things in a new, interesting way. Even the chapter titles were odd, each chapter introducing itself through the non-linear storyline with an interview with Dave and the Captain. Her final words always became the title of the story as Dave related the tale. Of course once the style was established, I changed it, varying it so it didn’t get stale.
My new book is also told in a different way. It tells the story of a challenge involving motorcycles. The story is set between 7am and midnight, each chapter following the tale of a different pair of competitors, the whole story growing with each new chapter, each revealing another small facet of the complete arc.
I like doing things differently, I like finding new ways to achieve things. It keeps it fun, and life isn’t always fun. Perhaps that’s why I write, I can recede into my own personal universe where things sort of make sense, but only sort of.
All my books are based in my own universe, all happen together. Each fictional work I write connects with each other, either with recurring characters or crossing over with events. Most of the crossing are subtle but one day, when I’m dead and gone, I’ll leave behind a tapestry of fictional nonsense that someone will work out and realise what I was going for.
Maybe…

Well, this week wasn’t the best! I finished writing my new novel last week, at least up to first draft and thought it was best to take a break. I like to give it at least two weeks between finishing something up and then going back to edit it. It feels like a fresh pair of eyes going over it. Coal has stepped forward to hammer the second draft into shape for me, he’s a sharp editor and his attention will get the book ready.
So my travel book, ‘Those Two Idiots’ is doing rather well so I thought I’d do a prequel. Before I went overland from London to Asia, I took a tour of Europe. It was largely uneventful beyond the minor inconveniences of daily life but it gave me time for an introspective look at what I was doing and why I was doing it. My personal opinion is that Europe is easy, it’s very accessible, mostly very safe and not really challenging. I wonder if there’s really a book in there to write but I’m going ahead with it anyway as I have the notes and it might still be an entertaining page-turner.
I will market it carefully, making sure people realise it isn’t an adventure book and doesn’t involve any kind of lingering threat to life or limb. My working title is, ‘Travelling – lite’ as a pointed joke about the ease of taking a motorcycle there. It was easy, it was ‘lite.’
The problem I have is the notes aren’t very good. I found 40k words of them, plenty to turn into a proper book but as I went through them it became obvious that they’re not really ideal for a novel. Most of them are me, sitting around bored just chatting about bikes and travel and my plans for the future. Most of it will have to be trimmed which is taking rather longer than I planned. Ironically it’s taking longer to edit my notes into a workable travel tale than it did to write a whole new piece of creative fiction from scratch.
Cambodia has been getting to me this week. It’s a tough country to live in at the best of times. I work teaching but at summer school, we teach the lame ducks. These are the students that failed because they either can’t be bothered or just can’t. Most don’t turn up, they just pay their fee and sit upstairs drinking coke. It’s demoralising for me and it doesn’t sit well with the few students who might want to learn.
Of those that do turn up, most are pretty hopeless. Of the many failures, most just pay a bribe and are allowed to graduate. The system is incredibly corrupt, to the point of it being a joke. A certificate of education from here isn’t accepted anywhere else, nor should it be.
One year I had a girl with massive mental deficiencies. She handed in her final exam with only her name written on it, spelled incorrectly and put in the wrong place. The rest was blank. She wasn’t able to read or write and couldn’t converse with teachers or students. She was graduated, of course and they didn’t seem to understand that all they were doing was undermining the efforts of those who really did put in the effort and making their education system an international joke.
Every aspect of life here is permeated with the same issues. It gets to you, it grinds you down until you can’t help but wonder about the people. They won’t help themselves, they want you to do it for them. They all want to be rich, they tell you they’re going to be rich but when you ask them how, they just sit back lazily and shrug. Then they fail the mid-term quiz and shrug again.
I have a friend who’s a minister, his charitable ventures have now stopped. He said he just can’t justify it anymore. They invest in poverty programs but the money is stolen, they give free food and clothing but they sell it, they buy women out of slavery to the garment factories and the parents just sell them back into the sex trade.
I’ve started to question just exactly what it is that I’m doing here and I’ve started to consider moving on. Writing the fictional book last week made me pretty homesick, the memoirs of my European trip did the same thing. It’s made me question whether this is where I want to be, and made me think very seriously about my future.
I have several other stories on my mind. One is a huge, sprawling science fiction and the other is a mystery that I can’t really discuss as doing so would ruin the story. I’m looking forward now to getting back to fiction and creating the next book.
My colleague does the formatting for me, he’s away now for a month. I have that long to finish up the two books I’m working on which will mean 5 books published on Amazon this year so far. I’ll have at least one more by Christmas.
Of course I try with agents and publishers. I had interest from a publisher but they turned out to just be two guys working in a spare bedroom. Otherwise, I’ve had a couple of rejections on standard letters and nothing more. One hadn’t even taken the time to add my name, just ‘Dear Author.’ I received that in less than two days so you can tell the book hasn’t been read, they’re just scanning the synopsis or the cover letter for keywords.
It can be depressing, writing. It’s mostly rejection and that’s a fact of life.
At school we’re studying Siddhartha, by Herman Hess and The Duff, by Jodi Keplinger. Both are truly awful. Siddhartha is meant to be a literary classic but is just a jumbled mess of inconsistency and poor writing. Even the students are making valid jokes about it. At one point we lost around 15-20 years of his life with no explanation. The writing is vague and poetic but actually just lacks substance.
Duff is extremely well written. The editing is top notch, there’s lots of hidden metaphors and examples of foreshadowing. There’s meaning in there, tucked away behind innocuous text. What’s terrible about it is that almost every character is absolutely unlikeable. It’s a fat-acceptance fairy-story with horrible teenage sexual promiscuity and a central character that bemoans everything about her life while causing most of the problems herself. This might go unnoticed in America, but in a third world country, even among the wealthier students, it’s comically cringeworthy and the class is pointing out the most obvious flaws in their characters and the problems with the way this entire fictional world is portrayed.
My employment, therefore is dragging. I also rent motorcycles and that is not much better. I have a customer who has lied and lied and has probably cost me a motorcycle. I can do without the stress of dealing with that, on top of everything else.
So this week has been a bit of a loss all round. The book is not really holding my attention and writing it feels like work, not pleasure. I’ll finish it but I’m looking forward to next Friday when I can close the last chapter, make sure my word count is high enough and dump the bloody thing on an editor.
After that I intend to do a quick re-write on the ‘Human Race’ book from last week. I need to get the writing up to a higher quality, at the moment it feels a little too much like young adult fiction. It’s meant to be accessible but I don’t want it to feel insultingly dumb.
Rob and Dave are calling me… They are having stupid adventures in my head and their story needs to be told. If only anyone would read it…

This week I finished the first draft of a new novel, ‘The Human Race’. I started it last Tuesday and finished it the following Friday. When inspiration hits, writing comes easily to me. I sit in front of the screen and the words flow, characters come to life in my imagination and I’m watching them live their stories as if I was reading about their lives for myself on the pages of a finished book.
This one is different from my normal fiction. All I’ve released so far is Science-fiction, one a proper, deep exploration of the human condition, one a comedy about a man who unblocks toilets. I wanted to do something in-between but make it a contemporary work that would appeal more to my friends.
I currently have three novels on Amazon, the last of them being the true story of a long-distance motorcycle ride. The sci-fi hasn’t really taken off yet but the motorcycle book is selling steadily and has even been the number 1 travel book on Amazon once over a weekend.
I thought it would be a good idea to write something that might bridge the gap. I had an idea a long time ago to wire an exploration of utterly ordinary people placed into a horribly challenging position. I wanted to create something accessible, not something that was going to be too challenging to read. I wanted to write a literal coffee-table novel, a piece of light entertainment that also had a few laughs and a few surprises.
I also had something to prove! I wrote ‘The Box’ around 16 years ago and did it in around 2 weeks. My travel story I wrote from notes so I didn’t really write the book in the traditional sense. As I travelled I wrote pages of notes and simply padded them out into a book. My most recent novel, ‘Serves. No Useful Purpose’ spent four long years in development hell. In the end I gave up and re-wrote the whole thing, turning it back into a new book from the original notes.
All this meant that I hadn’t written an original work in some time. Any good writer will admit, there are days (many days) where you really doubt that you’ve got any real talent whatsoever. Even worse you look at a book you’ve written and seriously begin to wonder if you could actually do that again.
I needed to prove to myself that I could write something new, like I used to. It didn’t come easy!
There were days locked in peaceful solitude where I pushed myself to 10000 words a day in painfully long hours after which my back ached and my eyes couldn’t focus on anything that didn’t have a backlit display.
As this is Cambodia, there were many other challenges to deal with that just popped up to derail the creative process. Most people know, it’s best for everyone to just leave me alone when I’m writing. Cambodia hasn’t managed to learn that yet.
I had rented a bike to a man who was teaching at my school. He had turned out to be a totally unreliable piece of crap. He lied and lied and lied and was over three weeks late getting in touch regarding the rent. He had slipped well behind already, of course. The ex-pat network is very strong and I quickly found out he’d left the country weeks before, cutting off all contact on Facebook. Worse, he had borrowed money from his current employer and vanished the next day so this was all clearly pre-meditated.
Sadly this isn’t unusual. Cambodia has a way of attracting a certain kind of person and a lot of the ones you meet here are immensely disappointing. At the school I work at, I had discussed this with some of my students. They were used to Western teachers vanishing, taking days off, not teaching them properly and simply not doing their jobs. It’s all quite depressing sometimes.
Luckily, and again thanks to the ex-pat network where there are enough decent people to keep it just about tolerable, I did track down his address and find the bike. It cost me a lot of writing time but at least I didn’t lose a bike.
This week had another slight setback. A neighbour had been a close friend of my partner when we moved in to the block. She was on the downwards spiral. Her mum lied, cheated and stole to fund her gambling habit. That cost her friend dearly and her three children suffered. In the end, she went to work in the bar scene, in bars which are sexually charged and the money is good for extra services. She continued going downhill, losing her three children who ended up, mercifully, being sent out to the province and looked after by distant family.
She became a crystal meth addict and it took a considerable toll. She lost weight, money and any last lingering shred of self-respect that she might have been clinging onto. All this was bad enough, she was like a living corpse, an atrophied shadow of her former self. But of course, it got worse and she became pregnant.
She told everyone she was getting rid of it, which was merciful for the baby. She lied and kept it, finally giving birth this week. We had cut off all ties and she had moved out and was living in a hut somewhere with her drug-dealer who might, or equally might not, be the father.
She had to borrow money to give birth to the child since nothing is free in Cambodia. She called up and begged for clothes since she came home with literally nothing for the child. We gave her what we had but our own child is a large boy and hers was a very small and sickly girl. Nothing would have fitted but that was the least of the problems this child faced.
My partner dropped round with what we could spare and came back telling me they were feeding her cans of coffee-creamer since they have no money for anything else.
All this preyed on our minds, of course. Then yesterday, a family turned up to buy the baby and for some reason they turned up at our house. My partner is something of a centre of the community, people come from far and wide to beg for favours, knowing we normally do what we can to help.
As far as I can’t condone the practice of people buying babies, it happens and it was probably the only chance this little girl had. The family were decent enough, the woman had a sister who couldn’t have any of her own and with no government system or medical assistance, this is simply the way it’s done.
My partner went to mediate. The agreement had already been made, the woman was to simply hand over the child, the family would pay a small amount for her but at least she’d have a life, a chance to avoid death from coffee-creamer in the next few days.
Of course, rather predictably, she changed her mind and sent the heartbroken family away, her boyfriend fighting anyone who came close to take away the starving child. I offered to go myself, and just take her if that’s what it took. The family just drove off, clearly very upset with the whole situation.
This, of course, left us feeling rather helpless. We can’t give the woman money or even buy her formula. It’s a common scam here, the people who are given formula almost always sell it. We were sad, but trapped into a position of observers of this human tragedy as it unfolded around us.
This morning the family had come back. They’d been to the local hospital. It was common for babies to be sold there but there was nothing left.
I wasn’t able to go with my partner but she went alone with rice for the mother and formula for the baby to ask again if she would part with her latest unwanted daughter. She said she would in a few days but not yet as she was scared of her boyfriend. The child was piled in the corner, her head unsupported as she slept, even though we’d given her pillows and blankets.
My partner was mortified. We’d already seen her other three children emotionally battered. They were our close neighbours, we bought them Christmas presents, they came round to watch cartoons on our TV, we gave them money for sweets.
Without help, this child won’t survive and there’s no help on offer.
The real tragedy is the scope. There’s a story like this on every side-street, down every alley, in every square of shabby blocks of huts that aren’t fit for dogs to live in. This is simply how it is and I learned a long time ago that you can’t help someone that doesn’t want to be helped.
This resonated with me because it was partly the theme of my new novel. This is a contemporary work about desperation, about coping with the stresses of real life. Of course, bikes had to take centre-stage and the story revolves around a series of challenges. Each challenge requires the characters to push themselves to the very limit in order to win a share of an elusive prize.
Of course, it’s all a metaphor for life, plain and simple. Life is one long challenge and the people who win and succeed are the ones who drive themselves further. Nobody wins from the comfort of their armchair, and nobody succeeds without solving the problems along the way.
I have some talent as a writer but its hard work that gets the job done. The last two weeks have been work indeed.