Michael Walters
Notes from the peninsula
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 remember when blogging was something people did to express themselves without worrying too much about quality. It was a daily thing, a quick thing, something informal and loose. It wasn’t a big deal to throw up a blog post. Everyone was doing it. This was before Twitter and before we had the Internet on our phones. Dare I say, before we had out attention spans blasted into smithereens.
Well, I’d like to claim some of that back. That feeling of freedom, that spoken quality of written voice. If I have to edit and rewrite and shape every blog post as if it is essay, it becomes a chore. That’s why the habit doesn’t stick. I have too much else I’d rather be doing. But I lose something in not blogging at all. There is energy in thinking something through as you type, like a first draft.
Perhaps I could go back to blog posts as first draft thoughts and creative nuggets. If it’s not fun, I won’t do it. I can edit the hell out of my stories, but I need somewhere to write freely that’s not Twitter, but is still public. The public part is important. There’s energy in public writing. At the same time, I need to let go of the critical voices in my head that hate having loose words and incomplete thoughts in the public domain.
I want to get better at accepting that I will get things wrong, that my opinions will be wrong, that I will make grammatical errors and that is okay. It’s good to be able to change my mind in public. So much of what we see and read in the news is people with fixed viewpoints not listening to each other. Fuck that. There is a better way.
I avoided watching It Follows because the idea was so unsettling. Like most unpleasant things avoided, the reality was nothing like as bad as I imagined. It’s actually genius — a really great film. Not flawless, but an impressive mix of original ideas embedded in an extended homage to John Carpenter’s Halloween.
The characters are all on the cusp of adulthood, with the adults barely a presence in the film at all. Jay, the lead character, has sex with her new boyfriend and finds out he has passed on to her a curse that she can only get rid of by having sex with someone else. Once you have it, a dead person that only you can see is always walking towards you, every hour of every day. The shape-shifting, visible only to the cursed, but physically very real zombie people are all frightening in different ways. They are all ages, shapes and sizes, but always clearly dead, and often gross in some way.
The cinematography is wonderful, with lots of slow tracking shots, wide-angle views of urban and suburban Detroit, and spaces left for the viewer to look into. You are always searching to see where the It is going to come lumbering from next. The soundtrack is inspired by John Carpenter’s synth scores and serves the mood perfectly, changing gear as the story moves from the brooding, despairing wait for It to turn up, to the horror of trying to escape It when it eventually does.
Who knew a single zombie walking very slowly could be so scary?
Winter
Winter is when I want to retreat to my burrow. The garden becomes inhospitable, but often beautiful to look at from indoors. Simple things please me when it is cold outside. A cup of hot tea is, in winter, sustaining in a way it isn’t at any other time of year. To be in the warm and look out at the cold and wet is a pleasure. So, I will make a burrow where and when I can.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a way of exercising your ability to pay attention: when you can focus on something, the critical thoughts quieten down.
– Ruby Wax, Frazzled
Getting a book published felt wonderful, but getting a book read was another challenge altogether. There are seemingly infinite books fighting for attention, and larger publishers have marketing budgets, so independent publishers struggle to get their books noticed in the mainstream media.
The chapbook you can see in the picture is a short story that came out with Nightjar Press. It had a limited print run of 200 copies and is now sadly/wonderfully sold out.
The Complex
The Complex is my debut novel, and you can buy it direct from Salt Publishing, or Amazon in the UK, and of course BOOKSHOPS.
Reviews
- Georgina Bruce, at Interzone (it made her best of 2019 list too!)
- Ian Critchley’s Books of the Year, 2020
- Mariah Feria, at Storgy
- Desmond Bullen, at Northern Soul
- Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone, at Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone
- Jo, at Jo’s Book Blog
- Giles, at Giles’s Book Blog
And of course, there are all the reviews at Goodreads and Amazon.
Quotes from the book cover
Luke Kennard, author of The Transition:
“The Complex is a lucid, menacing and utterly captivating novel, as elegantly designed as a labyrinth but as touching and human and chaotic as your own mind. Its hypnotic blend of technological horror and psychological accuracy, the intensity of its troubled characters and deeply eerie location worked its way into my dreams and I don’t think it’s going away. Like the very best speculative fiction it feels less like speculation than a present-day novel somehow transported back to us from the near future, not so much to warn us as to let us see more clearly where we are now.”
Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them:
“Captures the elusive nature of dreams and nightmares brilliantly. It’s original, cinematic, and very clever.”
Trevor Mark Thomas, author of The Bothy:
“Enigmatic and unsettling, with elements of Black Mirror and J.G. Ballard, The Complex is a gripping tale about the chilling, disorientating effect of technology on our lives.”
I’m originally from Port Talbot, South Wales. I studied astrophysics at the University of Kent, then spent a year training to be a journalist before becoming a computer programmer. I went on to study creative writing, first at the Open University, then completing an MA in Creative Writing with Manchester Metropolitan University.
My debut novel, The Complex, was published by Salt in 2019. My short story, Signal, was published as a limited edition chapbook by Nightjar Press in October 2020.
I am currently a software developer and live with my family in North Yorkshire. I am working on my next novel.