Little Light

"I'll hold your hand if you hold mine. The time that we kill keeps us alive."

What?

Not much I can say, I suppose. Let it simply be known that The Souljacker Diaries were not, in and of themselves, very inspiring to me. I just wasn't interested enough. All the time I was writing there, I was missing this place. It just wasn't the same.

So I'm gonna open a fresh, clean notebook, find myself a nice comfortable seat near what little light filters into this place, and get back to doing that thing I do best.

No, not that thing. You fucking perverts.

Well, maybe. But not just yet, eh?

So...what's been going on since last we talked? Well, I'm still gainfully employed by the Home Entertainment people, but I'm about to take a step down the corporate ladder. It's not really a demotion as such. I'm dropping from manager to assistant manager, but I'm transferring to the company's flagship store. So it'll be harder work, but less responsibility, essentially meaning that my work days will pass more quickly and I'll be able to go home and do something a little more productive (like, say, writing) without constant phonecalls from the store and worries about things that need doing to distract me. I'd like to get a few things done, creatively speaking, before the time comes for me to flee England for good, so this is happy news.

And so to visas. The lack of recent updates at Transatlanticism is due mostly to the fact that not much is going on. Under ordinary circumstances, I'm sure I would have shared some of the strange experiences of recent weeks with the readership, but I've had little time for the kind of lunatic prose that would undoubtedly have been spawned by such adventures as my recent jaunt to Birmingham, where a fat Asian doctor put his hands in my bathing suit area and then stabbed me with a completely unnecessary amount of needles. Fun though such tales might have been, exhaustion has left me without much of an inclination to get into that kind of action.

But we're almost there now. The paperwork is all wrapped up, I have ninety-nine percent of the relevant documentation, and the next communication I have with the US Embassy should be the one where I get an interview date. Fingers crossed, kids. That date is the holy grail of this journey, and once I have it, well, we'll be in fairytale territory, and I'll finally be able to look myself in the eye and say that all this was worth it.

But Christ, I wish they'd get a fucking move on.

Lastly but certainly not leastly, I'm maneouvering myself into a position where I can get some work done on a story for Jenn Jordan's Fuck Noir anthology. Not too much to say about it now, as all I have are the characters and a basic outline, but I think this one's going to be good, and I'll be sure to keep you updated. I've also broken my promise as regards doing any further writing for Clean Sheets, and a short piece of mine entitled Drafts will be going up there in January. The about-face happened when they decided (as a gesture of goodwill, I suppose) to pay me for the publishing of Aria. This marked the first time I'd been paid for anything that wasn't a favour for a friend as far as writing is concerned, and the fact that it was swiftly followed by the frankly bizarre sale of a seven-year-old screenplay to an indie director for £100 plus 4% of any (unlikely) future profits, made it an important milestone. The uncashed Clean Sheets cheque is now framed above my computer, and I like to think that the run of luck it inspired is ongoing. My plan for now is to get the story for Jenn J. done before getting straight back into the novel I'm working on while I'm still enjoying myself. It may not be the way things work out, but like I say, I'm on a roll, so who knows?

Anyway...I'm back where I belong, so keep it here and we'll see if we can't get some regular postage going. I've been drowning in bullshit and missing the outlet this page used to give me, so expect quite a few of the ol' Notes from here on in.

Or not. Shit, you know what I'm like.