I wrote here a while ago that I have significantly reduced my consumption of what I grew up regarding as ‘News’ – typically TV and newspapers (I haven’t listened to the radio for a long time.) That doesn’t mean that I don’t follow news, just that I focus on hyper-local stories and niche things and let other stuff wash in on the tide. What I’m picking up anecdotally is that other people are doing the same. That is something touched upon in an interesting discussion with Jim Waterson of London Centric:
I’m managing just fine without the endless stream of stories and opinions coming from what, for the sake of a name, I’ll call the legacy press. I don’t think I’m any less informed about the big stories but I do think that I get more signal than noise. The same is true with cutting back on the noisier end of social media.
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Since my last post I have turned 66 and have started on my prostate cancer treatment. In the end I selected hormones plus radiotherapy and have begun taking the hormones. The radiotherapy runs from the end of January through February 2026. I’d say so far so good but I’ve also had a heavy cold that has masked any reaction.
The hormones have been 3 weeks of pills (Bicalutamide) and the first of four implants (Leuprorelin) under the skin of my stomach. The latter stung because the needle was thicker than normal; the nurse suggested the doctor should prescribe a numbing cream before the next one (January) which made me wonder why they didn’t for this one.
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Although I have had other things on my mind, I have kept on with the writing, even if only a sentence or paragraph or two per day (sometimes more of course). In many ways, at 40,000 or so words into it, it is still taking shape. I’m keeping an open mind about how long it will end up being. It’s the second draft that makes it coalesce, this first draft just gets it down.
More importantly, I’ve removed the Amazon exclusivity on the ebook versions of all four of my books. That cuts of a trickle of Kindle Unlimited income, but it is only a trickle. I’m making the eBooks and, shortly, paperbacks available from a variety of platforms, though most of the variety is in North America. In purely commercial terms it probably won’t make any significant difference, but I did not want to stay locked into the Amazon exclusivity. I’ll put links to the other vendors here and elsewhere in a week or so.
I’m conscious that I haven’t written anything here for a while. A lot of the time has felt like being in limbo, mainly focused on reaching a decision on cancer treatment. I have also been reading a lot (that will likely be a later post) and Kirstin and I spent a few days pottering around York last week. For today I’ll go with the cancer news.
Medical opinion is that, all things being equal, either hormones + radiotherapy or surgery will work and my choice was therefore between the differing sets of side effects in the short, medium and long terms. My decision is to pursue hormone treatment plus radiotherapy.
In terms of side effects, I can expect something very like menopause as a consequence of the hormones, tiredness towards the end of the radiotherapy and perhaps mood changes. Other side effects have been observed but they are less common and can’t be predicted beforehand.
The NHS is impressive when it swings into action: I informed the clinical nurse specialists at the Edinburgh Cancer Hub yesterday (Monday) afternoon and by this afternoon my GP had prescribed the hormones (tablets first then 3-monthly injections) and practicalities were set in motion. The plan is to have the hormone treatment for between six and twelve months with the radiotherapy happening for 20 days in the fourth month. At some point I’ll have gold markers inserted into my prostate to act as a focus for the radiotherapy.
I will keep blogging here as the treatment progresses but the posts may be sporadic since, by its nature, the treatment is taken at a steady pace rather than rushed.
Meantime work on the novel-in-progress continues although it has been derailed somewhat by the cancer stuff; creativity is resistance but sometimes it’s better to sit down with a pot of tea and a book. Also, I’m at the stage where I realise that in order for *x* to happen, *y* has to happen first, so I need to go back to add it in. This is all to the good, but it takes time and focus that has been lacking.
The experiment with writing a poem per day continues, though I use ‘poem’ as a generic noun here as I am under no illusions about the quality of my output thus far. I also continue to read poetry in the early morning; current favourites are Alice Oswald, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Seamus Heaney and George Mackay Brown,
I commented to a couple of friends on WhatsApp that I would call the majority of what I have written ‘verse’ rather than poetry, which rather begs the question of the difference between the two. I was pointed towards this useful article that I’ve been thinking about.
The question of the difference between verse and poetry is an old one; it goes back to at least 1873 when Gerard Manley Hopkins made notes about it (and no doubt earlier but I didn’t look too hard.) There is an aspect of the difference that is semantic but there is a deeper difference: we would all recognise, I think, that Pam Ayres and Seamus Heaney were engaged in different enterprises.
If we put aside snobbery, as we must, one of the differences is ‘literary’ intent and approach and the pursuit of inner truths rather than external, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. For some, poetry is not an activity but the expression of something that lives within them, in the essence of their being; it isn’t simply casting words into a particular form, it comes from how the poet perceives the world. When you encounter the real deal you encounter a changeling, swapped into their cradle at birth with continuing links to somewhere else. It is like learning to play an instrument then encountering someone for whom there is no barrier between themselves and music. It is not about craft, it is existential. No matter how hard you try, you cannot teach yourself to be George Mackay Brown.
And so, describing my writing so far as pedestrian verse rather than poetry is not simply a defence mechanism – though I suppose it is that too – it is also a recognition that I am not a changeling. And that’s OK. Sometimes it is enough to do your best and work at craft while taking inspiration from those in whom the muse lives, hoping to absorb something by osmosis, to find your own voice.
I have decided to vary my experiment, though. With the best will in the world, although I write something every day the efforts cannot be described as completed every day, they need to be edited, revised and polished to something closer to a finished state, and even that will be provisional. So my plan now is to write for all of July then choose what is worth revising and polishing in August before restarting the cycle.
All that said, I am aware that even after nine days I now spend a lot of time paying attention and watching out for lines or thoughts that are worth isolating, noting and playing with, and more often than not casting the net for unforced rhymes and echoes.
Each day now I find myself
Scavenging for my wordhoard,
Turning syllables in my mouth
As a lapiderist washes stones.
I am no poet
Striving in fields of rhyme and metre
To harvest truth from fresh-mown words.
And yet, and yet
Perhaps with careful sowing in well-tilled earth
Pampered into ridges and furrows,
Or seed rough tossed on soil in fractal scatterings,
A crop might be gathered in
To fill my barn with grains of beauty
And meaning, its syllables and caesurae soon
Kneaded and baked into doggerel bread
For the autumn feast.
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I set a course to read and write a poem per day,
To distil an image into words that sing and dance,
Blown in on squalls of metaphor carrying meaning in their sway,
And thereby move my readers’ hearts with any luck – or chance.
And so transcend the scrape of nib on page
And open windows wide onto the world and time,
Or shine a light on beauty in the soul, and age
Gracefully, though writer founders on the shoals of rhyme.
Until recently, I was looking forward to collecting my State Pension later this year as a great way to gain more disposable income and make the lifestyle a bit more comfortable. As the markets now stand, I’m watching my private pension fund diminish at a disturbing rate; we’re not yet in Truss/Kwarteng territory, but turmoil in the markets mean squeaky-bum time until the markets finally stabilise, whenever that might be. I also have a Civil Service pension and find that this year’s index-linked increase is *less* than our annual Council Tax rise. Anyway, six months to State Pension day and it suddenly looks a lot more like a safety net than a comfort blanket.
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The Butcher Bird has been out for a month now. I am delighted to say that I have sold some copies, but not many copies. So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim said, poo-tee-weet. I don’t write for sales, but it is always nice when I see that a book has sold or someone says something kind on social media. And as I write this I see that someone, somewhere in the UK, has bought a hardback copy; I got quite the endorphin rush.
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One of my TV memories from the early 1970s was watching Clochemerle on BBC2, a satire that revolves around a proposal to erect a public urinal near the church in a small wine-growing town in Beaujolais. I have it on a DVD and should watch it again, not least because the luminous Cyd Hayman is in it, an early crush of mine. A lot later I read the book by Gabriel Chevallier and at least one of its sequels (I have all three of them but I have no memory of reading the third, Clochemerle les Bains.) I also have one of his other novels in an old paperback, TheAffairs of Flavie, but didn’t get along with it. They’re quite old translations and could do with an update. What I didn’t know until recently was that he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, La Peur, based on his experiences in the trenches in WW1, a novel that was effectively suppressed when WW2 came along. It was eventually released in English as Fear in 2011. I’m reading it at present and enjoying it: the modern translation helps.
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A trailer is out for Star trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 is out and I’ve embedded it below. It drove me to watch my three favourite episodes of season two – Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Those Old Scientists and Subspace Rhapsody. Easily the best Star Trek show since Deep Space 9.
The Atlantic has just published an investigation by Alex Reisner into the scale of copyright theft in feeding the AI fad. (nb, the link may be paywalled). According to the article, Meta employees realised that it would be very expensive to acquire legit copies of the vast number of books they wanted to use and so they had the wizard wheeze of torrenting the contents of a piracy site, Library Genesis. Library Genesis does not disguise the fact that it is a giant repository of ‘free’ books, and I see that its users, or those on Reddit at least, are enthusiastic pirates.
If Reisner is correct, and (a) he is working from legal filings by Meta and (b) I’m guessing that The Atlantic had its fact checkers and lawyers go over it in very fine detail, then Mark Zuckerberg himself gave the go ahead. I find it difficult to believe that Meta was not aware of exactly what it was doing.
Why do I mention this? Because The Atlantic provided a searchable database of the pirated works and I find that my novel The Raven and the Hart is on it. A novel that has, since it was published, earned me the untold riches of just over £200 ($260 at today’s mid-market exchange rate.)
So if anyone finds themselves here through a search for the headline items mentioned in this post and feels like helping a brother out, my books are all available on Amazon and, later in the year, on other platforms. Meantime, it beggars belief that the UK government seems able to condone the behaviour of these thieving bastards.
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