For me, and many others, 2021 is ending as it started, under house arrest. I have just tested positive for COVID for the first time. I’m 37 and fully caught up with vaccines so should be fine but will take things slowly in the coming days. December has been another busy month.
Activities
To increase and diversify business, I have joined a new tutoring platform, Music Tutors. It is a sleek and highly reputable organization that I can’t wait to start teaching over.
This month’s main piece of writing is an essay about why I am abandoning a major writing project, for the time being. It contains a bit of literary commentary and mostly memoir. It was cathartic to write.
Output
If I write half as many songs in 2022 as I did in 2021, then it will have been a good year. The final song I wrote this year is another long, experimental one. It is titled ‘Music to Make Love to’
Wider World
This month’s China Book Club was Philip Pan’s ‘Out of Mao’s Shadow’, which was published in 2008. It begins by pointing out that at the time of writing, China was going through the freest and most prosperous period in its long history. But the book covers the battle for the soul of the People’s Republic and the various characters involved:
On one side is the venal party-state, an entrenched elite fighting to preserve the country’s authoritarian political system and its privileged place within it. On the other is a ragtag collection of lawyers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, hustlers, and dreamers striving to build a more tolerant, open, and democratic China.
The year after the book was published, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were all blocked in China. Now the entire non-Chinese internet is effectively closed. This month, the behaviour of the authoritarian government has reached new lows.
Police arrested six members of Stand, an independent news organisation, which has also been closed down. This took place in Hong Kong, where the world’s most trusted news outlets had been stationing themselves for many decades, due to the relative lack of corruption or despotism.
Then there is of course the bizarre case of tennis player Peng Shuai, who accused former member of China’s highest ruling council Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Her re-emergence has somehow managed to be even more disturbing than her initial appearance.
This all supports the conclusion reached in ‘Out of Mao’s Shadow’, that the government of one of the world’s two superpowers is both to be reckoned with and ‘irredeemably corrupt’.
Year-End Roundup
This year has been creatively excellent, professionally passable, and romantically mediocre. Business as usual really.
The first few months of the year, when restrictions were at their tightest, I lived in a rental while trying to push a purchase through. At that time, I:
With businesses being closed, options for romantic gestures were thin on the ground, so I wrote what I think are my two best non-offensive love songs, ‘Far Away’ and ‘Open Gates’.
Finally got a mortgage.
Overall, I have:
Built and consolidated several professional relationships and made some money along the way.
Published my first short story collection, ‘The Naked Wedding’, which was the product of years of agonizing toil. Here is a Q&A about the book.
Recorded in a studio with an actual producer, plus drummer and bass player for the first time. The result is by some distance the best production quality any of my songs have ever had.
The year was bookended by gigs that I consider highlights of my creative life. One was in February, an online showcase of my Chinese-language songwriting
The other was in November, the long-delayed triple album launch
Anyone who has written something enviable will have gone through some unenviable experiences to have done so. The most acclaimed generation of American novelists were those who were of an age to fight in the Second World War. These included Kurt Vonnegut, who was a prisoner of war in Dresden, and JD Salinger, who was at Utah beach on D-Day.
Most good writers have not fought in a world war and, contrary to stereotypes, did not necessarily have miserable childhoods. But good writers are resilient.
In some walks of life, newcomers are subjected to all kinds of brutal initiations. As recorded in the song ‘The Apprentice’ by bawdy balladeer Kevin Bloody Wilson:
Singed me eyebrows off with an oxy torch stuck an air hose up me arse,
Pinched the wheels off me f***in’ push bike peirced me ear with a rivet gun,
He’s only the apprentice and we’re only havin’ fun.
The literary world does no such thing to its young. It doesn’t need to. Aspiring writers do enough violence to themselves. Another thing writers tend to have in common is being oddballs. My new year’s resolution as an aspiring writer is an odd one. It is to NOT work on my novel in the coming year, having started it over three years ago.
In most professions, to abandon a years-long project is seen as an unequivocal defeat. But two writers I have studied under – Sean O’Reilly and Ashley Stokes – have written about doing just that and feeling fine about it.
Why I Write Fiction
Most writers have an inspiring story behind why they write. I don’t.
It was late November 2013, on Lamma Island, Hong Kong. I woke up feeling comprehensively terrible about myself, despite not having drunk enough to be hungover. I was weeks away from turning 30, and a few seconds after waking up, I began to recollect why I felt this way.
I was staying with an academic friend Chester (not real name). The previous night he had gone on the offensive about how I was wasting my life writing ‘ridiculous’ songs, when I had a master’s degree and should be using it to hold down a high-status career.
By most conventional metrics, he was more successful than me. He was fully employed when I wasn’t. He was married while I was single. And he was making his own way in one of the world’s most competitive and expensive cities, whereas I had never had a high salary or been associated with a prestigious institution.
That day he doubled down on his claims about my songs and my master’s. One monologue, in which he wore a self-satisfied grin, displaying the confidence of a professional who worked with governments and NGOs, ended with the clear statement that if I continued on the creative path I was on “you’re a loser”.
When I asked what he suggested I do instead, he said “I think you should market yourself as a short story writer”. My Master’s degree was in Creative Writing, kind of. I completed it in 2006, three years before I met Chester, and I have never held an opinion in my entire life with as much conviction as Chester held his opinion about my master’s degree.
Subsequently, becoming a published short story writer became on obsession.
I did partly ignore Chester’s advice. I’m nuts but not that nuts. I got a job in a multi-national company that he described as ‘selling out’, I did fine in the job but was never fully engaged because of my fixation on short stories.
Two important books I read early in the journey were by authors of about my own age. ‘The Incarnations’ by Susan Barker is set in China and is the kind of book that aspiring writers should probably avoid because it will make them feel inferior. The other was short story collection ‘Spoiled Brats’ by Simon Rich. It had a mixture of technical accomplishment (which I was a long way from acquiring) and unpretentious joie de vivre (which friendship with Chester had knocked out of me).
Eventually, after countless drafts, bleeding onto the page every working day for three-and-a-half years, and spending thousands of pounds on tutors and mentors, the acceptance letters started to arrive.
Most short story writers are used to being annoyingly asked when they will finally write a novel. Learning to ignore overbearing people has never been my strong suit, so I set about beginning one in late 2018.
Literature is one of the few fields in which megalomania is a good thing, so it was time to write my magnum opus.
The Novel Itself
My novel (working title ‘Fallen Souls’) is a psychological thriller in which a woman is relentlessly stalked by an anonymous internet user who knows intimate details about her everyday life and claims to have known her through four previous incarnations.
It has had multiple beta-readings, including from Darling Axe, Fish Publishing, and The Literary Consultancy. Each rewrite has been more polished and fleshed out than the last.
Aside from bringing it up to standard, there are other reasons why it will be very difficult to ever get published. The viewpoint character is a woman of colour from another culture. She is also a sex worker who does not unequivocally hate her job. The more I rewrote it, the more I side-stepped these problems. The different culture that Lotus is from is a fictional one, so no need for a sensitivity reader from a nationality that doesn’t exist. The portrayal of the sex industry is even-handed, neither relentlessly bleak nor breezily positive.
Also, the more I rewrote it, the more prominence the male antagonist received. If I ever complete it, the novel might spend as much time in his shoes as the heroine’s. This would help either embrace or evade accusations of the male gaze.
Even so, nobody ever wrote anything good by pandering to trends in the publishing industry. And issues with marketability are not a good enough reason to abandon a creative project. When a subject is taboo, there is all the more reason for writers to write about it. So why am I abandoning it?
To work, a piece of writing needs to be unpretentious, it needs to flow out. It also has to be necessary. At this point, I cannot think of a reason why continuing with ‘Fallen Souls’ in the near future is in any way necessary.
Why does anyone write anything?
There are many bad reasons to write a book. These include fame, fortune, and a place in history. There are far more sensible, less laborious ways of achieving those things.
The only good reason to write is that creative people are wired to create, as cats are wired to hunt. Few people understood this better than Gustav Holst, who wrote “Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you”. The most creatively fertile periods of my life happened when I didn’t force it.
In all good stories, the central character goes through big changes, and my journey as a writer is a more neatly-structured story than any fiction I have written.
Writing has caused me to pick up a lot of valuable habits, including to finally start setting standards for the company I keep. The first person I formally cut out of my life was Chester. In a good story, every character wants something. Chester wanted to be listened to and be thought of as wise and sagely. I listened to him very carefully and reached the only conclusion I possibly could – he is about as sage and as wise as that bloke on the Internet who fucked a horse and died.
The best advice I have ever received came from the literary translator Bruce Humes, who won’t mind me sharing this:
To say that the time spent on this novel was time wasted would be like saying that time spent on training for a marathon was wasted by every competitor who didn’t win.
I once had a summer job selling books door-to-door in Illinois. Our rather cultish Tennesseean employers gave us a special vocabulary to describe our situation. Getting the cops called on us was called “the blue light award”. “Executive exercises” were a ritual similar to the New Zealand Hakka that we carried out in the Denny’s car park every morning. A zero-sales day was known as a “character building day”.
Writing a novel is as character building as it gets.
After a delay of over eighteen months, I finally got to hold the album launch night. It was the longest set I’ve ever performed, and generally went well.
Activities
Getting more clients for tutoring is still a challenge, since lots of people will be broke this winter (see Wider World below), but people like to work with known entities, and performing music has been an unorthodox but effective way of building awareness.
When I returned to the UK in 2018, my only ambition was to land a nine-to-five. After a big professional blow at the end of that year, I started to get into the open mic scene to build up some confidence and, because, why not?
After my most prolific ever creative spell, culminated in some great on-stage moments, including this finale:
And this should be just the beginning.
Output
As well as spending serious time on the novel ‘Fallen Souls’, this month I uploaded two new classical guitar videos. These were ‘Reminiscence’ by the strangely obscure LH Drabble
And ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ by the very not obscure Maurice Ravel
Wider World
Inflation is likely to be a massive feature of the 2020s. The most recent Consumer Price Index inflation report has shown prices rising across the board. Overall, prices climbed 6.2% year-over-year, the largest increase since November 1990.
This year Deutsche Bank warned of a global ‘time bomb’, adding “the effects could be devastating, particularly for the most vulnerable in society.” This is one of several factors that will cause tough times ahead.
I recently saw the neglected 1989 classic ‘Scandal’, which is set during Harold McMillan’s premiership. McMillan famously said in 1957 “you’ve never had it so good”. He was probably right, and in the West things would get better over subsequent decades.
It is becoming evident to have lived at this time (1950s to 2010s) is by and large to have won history’s lottery. But then scribblers have always proclaimed that the world is going to hell. Our ancestors muddled through much worse things than us, and we still have their DNA.
My long-delayed album launch night finally went ahead on November 13th, 2021. The highlights are available as a YouTube playlist. Personal favourite moments include getting the chance to banter with audiences throughout the set, since there was no time limit:
Serenading an audience member on stage during the song ‘Cheap Hotel’
Performing Jon Lajoie’s ‘Mel Gibson Love Song’ for the first time in almost a decade
My favourite ever on-stage moment, starting at around 4:03 here
Kevin McGeary 