Michael Walters

Welcome!

This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.

I use Bluesky to connect with people, Letterboxd to track films, and StoryGraph to track books. Follow me and say hello in all those places.

And if you want more of my thoughts on writing in particular, you can subscribe to my posts on PATREON. There’s a Weird and Wonderful tier if you want to support me with a donation, and that now includes notes on the novels I’m reading, but I post regularly to all patrons.

I hit an emotional wall a couple of weeks ago. Looking back, it’s been coming for months, but when you’re in a storm for long enough it begins to feel normal. This is mainly a day job thing, and I don’t talk about that here, but emotionally everything is connected, so of course there are knock-on effects. Anxiety got into every nook and cranny of my life, including family, walks around the block, meal times, evenings, weekends, and dreams.

Some part of me pulled the panic cord. For days afterwards I woke at night with memories of real conversations blended with imagined responses, alternative choices I might have made, alliances I could have struck, things I could have done differently. As a partially-reformed people pleaser, I’m wary of my tendency to always wonder what I could have done better. Asking for what I need doesn’t come easily. Boundaries are hard-won. Part of me was wise enough to jump out of this hot pot before I was boiled alive. I’m grateful for that.

It’s been ten days and I still feel shaky. Before this, I would have said I was an above-averagely anxious person who managed it well enough through tools learned in several years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I think that is still true. I suspect those tools, along with strong support at home, have prevented me from having a more seriously damaging experience. When I am not thinking about my job, I’m okay—more lethargic than usual, a bit down—but when I find my thoughts drifting to work conversations, and the fast-paced interactions, the big personalities, adrenaline floods into my body, my heart rate accelerates, my stomach churns, and I’m overwhelmed again.

Dad went into hospital just before I started this project. (My last project went so well!) His vulnerability, three hundred miles away, and his reasonable requests for help at random times, have taken a serious toll on me. So much driving. So much sleeping in a ghost house, away from my family. I feel blasted, roasted, blank and exhausted.

What’s the route forward from here? Keep letting the anxiety go, listen to intuition, ask for help, be patient, be kind to myself. Go gently.

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The year barrels on and tomorrow we hit July. It’s the halfway point. The summer solstice has passed and the hottest months are ahead. Time doesn’t take a break, even when I ask politely.

Dad gave me some of his old golf clubs. He took me to the Steelworks golf club when I was twelve and taught me to play, but then when I was fourteen I chose tennis over golf, and I haven’t played since. I still play golf video games though, because I’ve always loved the curve of a ball through a landscape. Tennis gave me a similar thrill. Angles, curves, spin, and the laws of physics.

I booked a beginners course at my local golf club. The club has always been there, but I’ve never wanted to visit. Five Saturdays, nine am, one hour, all equipment provided. I know I’m going to be sucked back in. That’s why I’m doing it. Perhaps it’s part of the process of letting my father go.

Got a nice little string of blog posts going here. Here are the May headlines:

• my father is out of hospital (eight weeks!)
• the cinema finally opened

Dad’s bounced back well. He looks his eight-eight years, and he’s anxious about his heart, but he’s happy to be home, able to make meals and potter around the house, and he’s back to sending me the occasional wry message. I’m starting to relax and let in some joy and relief. I just want him to enjoy whatever time he has left.

The new cinema was announced in 2019, and I’ve been boring everyone around me about it ever since. A monthly membership lets me-plus-one watch unlimited films, but in the opening week I was faced with Fast X (shit), The Little Mermaid (not for me), Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (possibly fun, but IP-driven nonsense) and Super Mario Bros (um). This was not how it was supposed to go.

There are throwback showings on Sunday evenings. Last week it was Heat. During the final chase, I could feel the rumble of planes in my stomach, and my wife now has the hots for nineties Pacino. He’s a very sloppy kisser on a big screen. It was all unexpectedly intimate. I’ve become used to television-sized screens for films. Last night it was Fight Club, and they gave out free wine and popcorn. What a film, but, you know, we all know the first rule.

I have a Bluesky account. A fellow writer on Twitter sent me an invite — it’s still in a pretty combustible beta — and I immediately feel much more at home there than on Mastodon, which has an awkward user interface and an established culture I don’t chime with. Mastodon is very… conversational. I don’t want to talk with strangers particularly, but I do want smart voices saying interesting things in as few words as possible. Bluesky is like Twitter used to be in that way. It also allows me to control who I read and, with a 300 word limit, encourages me to edit before I post and take pride in what I write.

I’ve been writing software in various guises for over twenty years. I started posting to websites, blogs and social media as soon as I started learning how to code. Sharing thoughts online, as inconsequential, personal, and abstract as they may be, still thrills me, and must be connected to the still-simmering desire I have to see my fiction published.

“To see my fiction published” is a passive statement. I didn’t write ”publish my fiction”. It matters to me that I don’t self-publish. Part of me still wants validation, but I recognise the positives of having a book come out through a publisher, as well as the downsides.

I’m concentrating on my technology career, which pays the bills. I am not passive in that part of my life. I wasn’t passive when I finished The Complex and put it out into the world. This is the phase I am in. The next novel is still in my mind’s eye. It requires a degree of focussed attention that I just don’t have available yet. Anxiety doesn’t help. I am not independently wealthy. This is where I am. The writing phase will come around again. In the meantime I will keep posting here. And now possibly Bluesky.

I’m reading Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarentino’s non-fiction celebration of key American films of the seventies, from Bullitt and Dirty Harry, to Escape From Alcatraz and The Funhouse. I heard about it through the Pure Cinema podcast, which is connected to Tarentino’s Los Angeles cinema, the New Beverly. The prose voice is exactly how Tarentino sounds in interviews and podcasts. I’m sceptical of his writing ability, and I admit to being cynical about his novel, Once upon a Time in Hollywood, published after the film came out.

Obviously, I’m jealous. I don’t doubt his intelligence or capacity to speak fluently about the stories in his head. It’s easy to imagine him walking around his plush L.A. mansion, talking into his phone, then emailing the recordings to a ghost writer who edits them into shape. And why not? Writing clearly happens in many ways.

It feels like cheating because I have fixed ideas on how writers should write. There has to be suffering, each sentence sweated over, whole chapters thrown away, the entire thing rewritten multiple times. There has to be a crisis of confidence and real risk of the whole thing, perhaps even the writer’s life, collapsing into a meaningless void. That’s real writing.

Yes, that’s fucked up. I don’t know anything about Tarentino’s writing process. He’s an impressive artist and this is all in my head. I’m being a dick, and not to Quentin Tarentino, who couldn’t care less. I’m being a dick to myself. This is how I keep me in my place.

I’ve read three books in the last couple of weeks to do with creative writing: On Writers and Writing, Margaret Atwood; The Writing Life, Annie Dillard; About Writing, Gareth L. Powell. With everything going on in my life, the only way I’m going to write is if I have a clear purpose and a plan. This is always true I suppose, but I’ve seen several plans dissolve in the face of reality, and now I’m wondering if the problem is more in why I write than how I’ll write.

Almost all writers have to work in a job and write in their precious spare time. A few have enough money saved, inherited or earned by well-paid partners to allow them to give their writing full attention—hell a tiny proportion actually survive on income from their writing!—but this is rare. Margaret Atwood points out that as writers, our time is forever split between the imaginary worlds of our stories and the physical world of family, chores, jobs and our health.

On Writers and Writing is full of wisdom. For example, she says writing is a permanent record of our talent (or lack of it), so of course it can be hard to start. Like a musical score, it is brought to life by a reader, and we each have someone inside who we are writing for, whether we know it or not. That could be a memory of a parent figure, a lover, a course tutor, or some version of God.

I realised that for me writing is a spiritual act; it’s an act of nature and an expression of myself. Magazines have editors who accept or reject stories. Creative writing courses have tutors to provide feedback. The publishing game has agents. It’s easy to give these people too much power. Publishing needs gatekeepers, but writers need to own their shit and write for themselves. Writing is a spiritual act, a soulful activity, if done with the correct attention.

I walked slowly through the centre of Swansea this morning after listening to Marc Maron on his podcast talk about Sweaty Marc, the version of himself in New York from the eighties that he remembers as he walks there today. In the nineties, I was mostly lonely and lost, and Swansea was my stomping ground, but Lonely Mike doesn’t haunt me in the same way Sweaty Marc does Maron. It’s an apt image though, because I’m a little lost now, twenty-five years on. The novel isn’t coming on its own, and I’m not doing the right things to help it along.

I made the decision to concentrate on my software career this year. I started a new job in September, and I’ve passed my probation, but there are redundancies happening all over the technology sector. I don’t feel particularly safe yet. At the end of March I started on a hectic, high profile account, so it’s been vital I get to grips with everything quickly. I’ve been waking up at five am thinking about work problems. I haven’t been in a job where I’ve felt so challenged in a long time. It’s taking all my energy.

But I had a dream the other night. An elegantly dressed woman is with me and a man on a balcony in a nightclub. The man is very drunk. She whispers to him that they should go on somewhere else. She’s sober and taking care of him. I want to go home, and I think the man’s had enough too, but if I don’t go with them they’ll be alone without me, and that feels wrong in some important way.

Perhaps I need to readdress the balance after a month that’s demanded everything I have. The man in the dream is a bit of a battered shell, and the woman is trying to look after him, but I need to step in and suggest… other options.

At the start of the day a deployment of code went awry and at the end I was a go-between over my still-hospitalised father’s boxer shorts. Life can be ridiculous.

On Monday I went to see John Wick 4 and ate a terrible hot dog. The person serving sprinkled it with dried (!), crunchy onions. Then yesterday I watched the first half of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte. The two films serve different parts of me. Michelangelo Antonioni — I am Michael, my uncle was an Anthony who is now with the angels. He was rich, although he might have denied it. Our last conversation was an argument over Brexit. I told him it would cost the country untold damage, and we’d be back in the EU eventually. He made some argument about the unfairness of laws on unpasteurised French cheeses. It’s a sad memory.

My new work account is the mobile app of a well-known supermarket. On the train home I read A Study in Scarlet, my first Sherlock Holmes novel. All I could see in my mind were Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson. I need some sleuthing skills to unpick some work puzzles, but first I need to discern the important ones. Not all puzzles are created equal. (Hm, that reminds me of other things. Sigh.)

Walked to Southside for a coffee. Why? I’m thinking of Gwen Bell, then Neo/Keanu. I deliberately left my notebook at home. I need some time without a pen in my hand. Re-balancing… something. Gwen, Neo and Keanu are seekers of different kinds.

I told myself yesterday to put the writing weight down. There is too much else going on to add the pressure of writing a novel. Life before art. Life is an art, yes, but you get my drift. I’m chaining myself to a rock when I need to be swimming.

Dad’s hoping to come out of hospital this week. He’s always on the back of my mind. And I started a new account in work, before I had completely finished the old one, so I’ve been doing both until today. A mind-stretching exercise and I’m glad it’s over. It’s a short week. I’m looking forward to the Easter break.

Maybe I can put some of this Neo coding energy into a character in the book. (I can’t help myself, but there’s a gap between thought and action.) If I’m stuck in a matrix, what sort is it? Writing? Capitalism? Our budget spreadsheet is a matrix. Reality? (There’s that word again.)

Keanu Reeves is in a relationship with Alexandra Grant, a visual artist, who on her website says her work asks the questions:

How do the languages we speak and the images we see form how we think and exchange ideas? How can artists and writers work to create and influence culture in an increasingly technology-driven world?

My father is in hospital again. Both his legs are swollen, which is fairly common with heart failure, which we’ve known about for a few years, but one of his arms has also swelled up, and he’s out of breath doing the slightest things. The practice GPs thought it was better to treat him at home, but the lymphoedema nurse was adamant it was something else. My moderately stressful trip shoehorning Dad into a VW Polo for an assessment in an inaccessible part of one hospital became an eight-hour wait with the triage team in a bigger hospital. As part of his admission he did a Covid test… which came back positive. The only people he sees are the district nurses who dress his legs, so it was probably them. He’s asymptomatic—I took him for his last vaccination in November—but after a whole day face-to-face lifting him in an out of chairs, I feel like I’m playing Covid roulette with a full chamber.

I’m letting off steam. He’s in good hands. I hope he’ll be home in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’m working from (childhood) home, I miss my family, I’m tired, and I feel vulnerable. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a full-time carer. At the same time, it’s a privilege to be able to look after him like this.

Hospitals are emotional places. There’s nothing like an admission ward to make you feel grateful for your health. Dad might be old and ill, but I’m still young and well. I have to remind myself because my boundaries in this are both hard-won and ever-fragile.