You probably know at least one. The parents have doted on the child since birth, and it can do no wrong. They tell everybody how brilliant said child is, how talented, and they gush with endless praise.

I have known one of those since the day he was born. He is now thirty-one years of age, failed his exams at school, failed to get to university, still doesn’t have a job, and still lives with his parents.

Who still think he is fantastic at everything.

He, of course, is also convinced of his own brilliance.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

Compare that to this, from a chat with a friend the other day:

“I’m in the phase where I think everything I’m making is terrible and I hate it…”

And that is what prompted me to take a break from my mountain of editing and revisions and think about the value of self-doubt, and self-criticism.

My own upbringing was far removed from any concept of me being the wonder child. Nothing I ever did was good enough. I had no help with schoolwork whatsoever. The number of parents’ evenings my father attended you could count on one hand. My mother never went to any. Not one.

This was not helped by having an older sister, who even from a young age, I could tell was getting the VIP treatment while I was left to my own devices. She had all the attention, the school trips and foreign exchanges, I had none. I remember when I was around eleven, I worked stupidly hard to get a good school report, entirely self-motivated, and I did it. That was the only outstanding school report I ever got, and my parents hardly even looked at it.

I was devastated. I had dreamed for months that maybe I might get some of the praise my sister always got for her school reports, and that had been my motivation, what made me work and do everything to the best of my ability. All I wanted was that moment of feeling I had done something well. Although I remember almost nothing of my childhood, I will never forget that miserable evening at the dining table, and it still hurts.

So this gives you a small insight into my upbringing. There were other issues that I am not going to mention, but you get the picture. I was brought up to believe that everything I do is wrong, inadequate, a failure, and time does not heal these things. Those who are brought up from an early age to believe they are fantastic, go through life with total confidence in themselves. Those who were brought up with pathetically low self-esteem also have to carry that through life, and you see both here on Substack, in the community of writers we have in our little corner of this weird version of social media.

There are writers who cheerfully bash content into their keyboards and sow these pearls of wisdom before us with confidence. And to be honest, on the rare occasions I bother to read anything of theirs these days, it is, at best, meh!

Occasionally these blessed people will exhibit trauma:

Oh, I seem to spend ages with the thesaurus looking for just the right word. I wish I could just write.

Yes, dear. Why don’t you just go and see Mummy about it? Rush along now, she will make it all better.

And then there are the self-doubters, who scream into the void with frustration, who apologise when they do write something on here, and generally give the vibes of dissatisfaction with whatever they have produced. Can the people on either side of this divide even begin to understand what life is like for those on the other?

I doubt it.

It is disturbingly common to read of writers on here who either know they have serious mental health issues, or just display the symptoms and are perhaps not even aware of such things, who have periods of being completely unable to write, frustration and even anger at what they are trying to do. You read of writers who actually hate their own work, and sometimes delete it in frustration.

I may be my own worst critic, but I am lucky in that I am not blighted by that extreme manifestation of self-doubt. When life gets me down, I escape into my writing, and if I cannot write, I edit. Here, being self-critical comes into its own, because you are not afraid to pick apart your own writing. You know it can be better, so you edit, you improve it, you do not give up.

Last summer I vanished into an abyss that was crippling, but instead of that making me unable to write, it was my writing that got me out of it. Not therapy, or encouragement from others, I disappeared into my writing, and that was my way out. True, I had to give up my scriptwriting, that really was asking too much, and that has been a tremendous financial blow, but it is not being too dramatic to say that my writing possibly saved my life.

When I got my shit back together, I looked at the two books I had published, decided they were not good enough, so I unpublished them, and I got to work. I realise how fortunate I am to be able to do this, and my heart goes out to those who are wiped out by depression and self-doubt from time to time.

So which of these two polarised groups make the better writers? I am biased of course, and would say the self-doubters, because they work so much harder, and the quality of their writing is much better, but that is just my opinion, and who gets to define what better is anyway? Millions of people devour what I consider to be banal pap, and they love it. Perhaps if you show those people my writing, or anything I enjoy reading, they will recoil in horror. God, I’m not reading that!

I will stick to my guns, however, and support my fellow self-critics, because when they do write something, I thoroughly enjoy reading it, and I appreciate what they do. I haven’t written this to blow my own trumpet, to say that I am better than those who write with confidence; indeed quite the opposite, because my conclusion is that we are all different, we want different things, so we have different ideas about what is better.

The world would be a dull place if it were any different.

You can subscribe to my nonsense and thoughts on writing for free. I don’t do the money thing on Substack.

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People who make a living by bombarding us with writing and publishing advice tell us we should be advertising this and optimising that, sell, sell, sell. As I have found out by lots of trials and even more errors, it just doesn’t work like that. I have added DoF to my growing little series, and now it is back to work with writing and editing.

We are constantly being sold the same dream: that we will write the book (singular) and it will magically rise like a beautiful soap bubble above the ocean of other books and be noticed. It is easy as long as you follow the right advice, their advice, not somebody else’s advice. No, because other people have it all wrong. You listen to this deafening babble of advice while your book (singular) languishes in obscure misery, unnoticed, as the book-buying world passes you by.

I have spent fifteen years writing my books, the last two of those years spent with a focus on finishing them properly and getting them published. That has given me plenty of time to soak up the vibes and get a feel for how it all works. The people who want to make money out of you will say it is all about the right strategy, the right Amazon keywords (and they can sell you the secret to getting those right), the best strategy for Facebook ads, which are definitely the best way to promote your book (they can sell you a strategy for those), and so it goes on.

To be honest, I am tired of the noise. The reality is that I am an unknown author, and before yesterday, I only had two books to my name. Today I have three. Big deal! Let’s be honest here folks, that is not going to set the world on fire.

So what can I do?

Well, for a start, I can be patient. I now have three books to my name. A year ago that was one (and I had made a mess of publishing that due to listening to the babble of advice). Now I know how to write a book properly, how to format it, how to make it something a reader will enjoy reading rather than just the book I first wrote. That is a massive step forward, and more important than any marketing advice.

I have a growing audience, here on Substack, on Facebook, even on Instagram which I haven’t had time to get to know yet. While I work away at writing and editing, and editing, and editing (you get the picture), I am slowly building a little following, not by dragging people in with tricks and gimmicks (people who will then vanish), just by getting on with what I do, and being myself.

Meanwhile, I quietly get on with the most important job for any writer: writing. I write ghost stories, but they are not the usual ghost stories, which to be honest, are mostly lame horror with cobwebs and gravestones. I write ghost stories that are a bit different. For a start, they might not even be about ghosts. I let the reader decide.

That style of ghost story will not be everybody’s cup of tea. You can’t be all things to all readers, that is just beige, and nobody wants beige. I have therefore started writing classic ghost stories for people who want something more traditional. I have spent years reading every type of ghost story there is. Some are classics, most are just awful, but I have learned what works and what goes in the bin, so now I can put that learning to good use and write books that learn from all the good bits. I have spent years studying the theories and reasoning behind anything you would call supernatural (I am now a qualified parapsychologist, go me!) so I can write with all that knowledge behind me too.

There is a picture emerging that is no longer the unknown author with a couple of books. I am gradually building an image, a brand, and also a selection of books.

So that is why I am not going into a selling frenzy. You can find out more about Destruction of Faith HERE and it is actually a pretty good introduction to David Hammond. They do not have to be read in order, not the first three, anyway. Meanwhile, I will get on with revising The Gamekeeper’s House, which is the first of my classic ghost stories, and studying Haunted People Syndrome, and yes, that is a real thing.

If you haven’t seen my author website recently, it is shaping up nicely, so have a quick peek at my home page at www.nigelcode.co.uk.

Thank you for reading. Now I will get back to revising, because that seems to be my life at the moment.

A few people have asked how David became an investigator into all things haunted and paranormal when he obviously does not believe in such things. A ghost hunter who does not believe in ghosts.

I thought the best way to answer that was to write a collection of short stories spanning David’s early years, from when he was still working as an industrial chemist, to when he quit the television programme that made him a household name, and set out on his own.

The final story is now written, and I have put them together into a book, available free to anybody who wants to read it. If you believe in such things as hauntings and ghosts, this might change your mind about what they may or may not be. If you do not believe in anything you might call paranormal, perhaps you should. There is certainly plenty of evidence to at least believe there are still things we do not understand.

Some of these short stories were first posted on Substack, but when I re-read them, they were little more than first drafts, unfinished. Those have been revised, helped by the ever-critical eye of . Thanks also to for being the guinea pig to make sure I had set up the technology at BookFunnel correctly. Writers helping writers, it works.

David’s stories are something new, somewhere between belief and scepticism. To read the free book, simply subscribe to my newsletters. Not these on Substack, my proper newsletters, away from the corporate machine. You can always unsubscribe if this turns out not to be your thing, or you can go on to read more. The choice is yours. For my parapsychology research, I explore lesser-known aspects of the middle ground between folklore and what is currently seen as paranormal, so my newsletters can be a little different, and fun. Something a bit unusual to land in your inbox.

If you would enjoy something new to read that is not fantasy or horror and allows you to form your own ideas about such things, give it a go. You can subscribe at my little corner of the interweb, www.nigelcode.co.uk

Thank you.

I am struggling with a task today, writing the next customer newsletter email for the place where I used to work, the place that still pays the bills and allows me to have a shot at being a writer. Yup, lucky me.

I haven’t written anything yet because I haven’t had the inspiration.

That has made me think about the difference between writing and content creation, and why pretty much everything on Substack these days is a bit samey, and to be honest, not very good.

Most people who write stuff on Substack are not writing, that seemed to stop a long time ago. These days, they are just filling it with content.

I have been writing these customer emails for years, decades, before the time when they were customer emails, back to the days when they were printed and sent out by post.

That long.

Customers like my newsletters. They actually take the time to reply and say so. These days they are formatted and sent out by the marketing bods who look after the website, people who send out stuff like this for a living, and every time they come back with the stats, and some comment about, just Wow!

This isn’t because I am a brilliant writer. It is partly because I know my customers, and I know what interests them, but more than anything else, I do not write anything unless I have something to write about, something to say that they will want to read.

And this is where Substack fails. People are pressured to write constantly, whether they have something to write or not. It is just content, content, and more content, made by the calendar, typed into keyboards by the hour, and not surprisingly, it is dull, uninteresting, and pretty much the same as the last one they wrote, and the last one somebody else wrote.

Poetry on Substack. Don’t get me started. There used to be some good poets on Substack, and their gems arrived in my inbox once in a while. Thoughtful writing that had been imagined and crafted over a long time, so it could be weeks before the next one arrived. That, of course, is no good for Substack, which demands poems every day, on the dot, churned out to the electronic schedule of metrics and idealised content posting rates. The good poets have gone because posting once every few weeks does not satisfy the machine. The machine wants content, good or bad, it does not care, it just wants lots of content.

One of my treasured things is Model City by Donna Stonecipher. It took four years to write.

Four years.

Think about any of the great poets, ancient or modern. Were they churning out a poem a day, loading them into a spreadsheet, and autofeeding them into Substack? No, they were writing when inspired, then revising, rewriting, often over several months, perhaps longer, until they felt in their bones that it was right.

It is the same with fiction. A novel takes weeks or months to write, then months or years to revise and rewrite until it is ready. The story is written from start to finish, then written again, changed along the way. What the writer pulls together in chapter 28 means changes have to be made to several earlier chapters, so it is back to the beginning, and so it goes on, refining and rewriting.

Think of it as a sculpture being hacked out of marble. We like analogies with sculptures hacked out of marble. The sculptor begins by bringing out the overall shape, then honing it down, closing in on the final work by perfecting one area at a time, going back over the whole structure until the finished form emerges and is polished to perfection. A thing of beauty.

That doesn’t work on Substack. What is needed is content. Ideally, it should be daily content, so just keep writing. The end product doesn’t matter, the machine just wants more writing. Daily prompts - keep them coming. Hack up bits of marble, pile them up, nobody will ever care what the finished sculpture looks like, just hack up marble, do it quickly, rough as you like, and add it to the massive heap of other bits of rough, hacked-up marble.

Amongst the ocean of shite advice for writers, you will find write something every day, no matter what. That is the worst possible advice for some people, not all, but some. Write something when you have something to write, otherwise, find something else to do. Go back over old writing and see how you can make it better, sort out your notes and all the garbage you accumulate while writing, do anything, but do not write until you have words to get out of your head.

So there you go. I just needed to get that off my chest. I will now make myself some sandwiches and take them down to the sea with my writing pads, notebook, and pencil, and that usually does the trick. Just the quiet walk to another place is often all I need to clear my head, and if it doesn’t work, I will wait. I certainly won’t just write something because the office expects something. If I do that, I will just write content, and my customers don’t want to read content, they will stop reading my newsletters, so what would be the point?

If you enjoy my musings about writing and occasional rants, you can subscribe for free. I do not do the money thing on Substack.

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I read an article yesterday from somebody I do not subscribe to. At the bottom, I am encouraged to subscribe, and for some reason, also to Start Writing.

This, I presume, is for readers who are not signed up to the Substack machine, and rightly or wrongly it gives me hope, because Substack is still marketing itself as a place for writers.

Anybody interested in reading or writing on Substack will be painfully aware that the main marketing effort has been to sell Substack as a place to make easy money, thus attracting the grifters and chancers who fill the place with so much junk that it is almost impossible to find anything worth reading. This week, Ficstack closed, because Substack is no longer a place where people come to read, and this is not surprising, because the vast majority, and I don’t think I exaggerate by saying in excess of 99% of the content, is worthless pap, a complete waste of pixels.

put a huge amount of effort into creating Ficstack, but that was in different times, when there were good stories being posted and people wanting to read them, and there was no way of connecting the two, so he made that connection. During that short period of time, less than a year, Substack changed. The writers have either gone or have stopped writing fiction and now merely write content to a schedule, and readers no longer look to Substack to find their next story.

There are 35 million users on Substack now, or at least, 35 million accounts. I reckon a huge number of those, probably the majority, have signed up, failed to make money as easily as promised, and have already gone. The process is that these people sign up, follow all the advice to post to this schedule or that schedule, fill the place with the same old Dear Substack, or I want to find, you know the stuff, and when it gets them nowhere, they give up and go.

So why do I feel some hope for the future?

Well, all those grifting fools will only put so much effort into climbing the greasy pole, after all, the whole attraction is to make money by doing nothing, so when they find they are making no money, but are having to do something, that goes completely against their principles. They will go back to watching YouTube, playing video games, and scrolling through TikTok. At the moment, there is still a conveyor belt feeding in new people to replace those who give up, but surely this nonsense will lose its attraction, the dominance of How I built my Substack to a $100,000 business in X days will go, and it will become a place for writers again. Then we can hope that these writers no longer feel pressured to write content to a schedule, and will go back to writing fiction when they have a story to tell, or non-fiction when they have something to say.

There are days when I feel like packing the whole thing in. I don’t write any fiction for Substack at the moment because there really is no point. It would be just a tiny drop of writing onto the vast seething churn, and people have simply stopped reading. But I still stick around, and I think writers have to take the long-term view. It is constantly changing, and will not stay like this forever. If it gets worse, then we can go, but I have hope that it will get better again, so if you are disillusioned with Substack and are thinking of packing it all in, maybe take a back seat, but don’t get off the train altogether just yet.

You never know, it might still be on the way to a better destination.

You can subscribe to my nonsense and thoughts on writing for free. I don’t do the money thing on Substack.

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Over the weekend, I finished the first revision of The Gamekeeper’s House from the first draft that I wrote with such haste in December and January. Now I know I moan about Substack, or rather about the abuse of Substack by the grifters and phoney fakers who fill it with their spam, but it is still a great place to meet other writers, and it is thanks to other writers that I was able to dive into GH and know what I needed to do.

One such writer came back with two pages of comments, good and bad, such as:

“Now the ending.

It was okay, but I felt a little let down, no, more dissatisfied really. As if I had been denied something of value within the story.”

He then went on to not only explain what was missing, but even where I could prime the reader for the ending it needed, a couple of chapters earlier.

I knew when I wrapped up the first draft of GH that the ending was unfinished, but to have somebody else give their take on it before I went in months later to give it its first tweak was so useful. I knew roughly in my head what I needed to do, but just having that help made a massive difference, in confidence that I was doing the right thing, and in structure by pointing out what I had left unsaid, or rather, unwritten.

So I suppose my point, while I take a break from writing to check out Substack for ten minutes, is to not be afraid to share your stuff with other writers. They do not even have to be writers the same as you. I write ghost stories, he writes historical fiction, but we just get on, and bounce each other’s work between us for comments we know will be honest and useful, good and bad.

Back to work I go. I now know what to do with the nine-year-old girl upstairs who is having a proper sulk because everybody calls her a liar, and what she is likely to say when she comes downstairs for pizza, so these little breaks on Substack are useful too.

If you enjoy my occasional musings on this writing life, you can subscribe for free. I don’t do the money thing on Substack.

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Those who follow my ramblings will know that I wrote a full-length novel, a proper ghost story, over Christmas in a burst of impatience, because I had limited time to get the story out of my head before my attention would be required elsewhere.

I have to leave a first draft for a while to get it out of my mind, so I wrote it, blasted it into the keyboard, ordered a paperback proof, then stuck it on a shelf and forgot about it. Now a few months have passed, so I have set to the task of first edit, and boy am I enjoying myself. I edit using a pencil in a paperback copy, so I can edit wherever I like, away from screens and keyboards. It is something organic, a welcome break from pixels on a screen.

Writers really should enjoy editing. It is the best part of writing, or it should be, yet I read so often of writers who hate editing. What is going wrong? I am loving this. I already know some of what I need to do, such as no proper ending. I deliberately just put down the absolute basics, so now as I go through, I am working on that ending. What is not to like about that?

So that is it for today, just a quick note because I know so many writers dread editing, and others like myself absolutely love it. We are all different in our own ways, and the world would be a dull place if we were not. If you are one of those writers who struggles with editing, maybe try something different, bundle it into a paperback copy like I do and disappear with it somewhere, get away from your screen. Maybe some small thing like that could just click into place and make it a pleasure, because it really is a wonderful part of the whole writing process, getting it just the way you want it for your readers, the way you want it for yourself.

Right then, time to make lunch, then it is a nice day so I may take my editing down to the seafront. My outdoor office beckons, and I’d better remember to take some bread for the crows. They do like a little treat.

News from the coalface is my series of occasional ramblings about my writing, but I also write occasional ramblings about whatever might be on my mind. You can subscribe to my musings for free, I do not do the money thing on Substack.

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I have a spider plant called Cyril.

Every year, Cyril grows long flowering stems, and from these sprout little spiderettes. Yes, that is what they are called. I have wanted to try growing one of these, just for fun, for ages. A few weeks ago, I finally kicked myself to chuck some compost into a spare pot, and without a clue about what I was doing, planted one of them.

He seems quite happy now, so dear readers, meet Baby Cyril.

This, of course, raises the question of what to do with another spider plant, and the thing anybody would want to do with a spider plant they have grown and nurtured is to give it to somebody. The problem is, there is only one person who would truly appreciate Baby Cyril, and that person is in America. I am in the northeast of England. There is no way I can (legally) get this plant to America. I simply do not have the resources to get him there alive, and even if I did, Trump would probably napalm him, just out of spite.

Why is the old fool wittering on about a bloody spider plant, you might reasonably ask?

The reason is simple. The person who would really be cheered up to have Baby Cyril arrive on her doorstep is somebody from the tiny but cheerful Substack community of writers, and she has been a bit down lately, disillusioned with the aggressive, commercial, and competitive aspects of Substack. She has stopped writing because of the lack of appreciation for good writing, and the trampling to death of the tiny number of creatives by the vast hordes of bounty hunters who have no dreams to chase, merely more subscribers they want to capture.

I know that to have Baby Cyril arrive would bring joy to somebody, a kind thought to cheer somebody in need of cheer. The person I refer to is , and one of the reasons Baby Cyril would bring her a little bit of sunshine is because a few months ago, she mentioned Cyril in her Ten Hate Poems.

Marissa’s Substack

10 Poems I Hate About You

Author’s Note: Hear ye! Hear ye! Today, on the day of love, I have written 10 horrible hate poems for the worst of the worst here on Substack. All of these people are horrendously amazing and how dare they be so! So join me and enjoy the hatred…

Read more

7 months ago · 59 likes · 53 comments · Marissa Purdum

Marissa has never been one to write often, compelled to feed content into the churn, but when she does write, it is thoughtful, and often beautiful. We need more writers like Marissa on Substack, and fewer who merely feed the churn, because well-thought occasional writing is so much better to read than the vast torrent of writing to order that chokes this platform and makes it so hard to find the gems that are worth finding.

So I will keep Baby Cyril here, and every time I see him, water him, and make sure he is happy, I will send a kind thought across the miles, and I would like to think that perhaps one or two of those kind thoughts will land and bring a smile.

I will not put a subscribe button at the end of this one; somehow, it does not seem appropriate. Instead, please think a kind thought about somebody who might need one, because sometimes, a kind thought is all you can send.

Thank you for reading.

I sent somebody a photograph of my messy writing last night.

I am normally a very tidy person. Everything has to be clean, tidy, just so. Last night I abandoned my organised desk and shifted camp to a table so I could scribble while listening to music on the big grown-up hifi. I stood up to make a cuppa, came back to the table where I was working, and just thought, I’ve got to send a photo of that to somebody who knows how tidy I normally am.

‘Oh, you write freehand,’ came the reply.

It is not something I think about much, but this morning, as an alternative to actually doing some work, I thought I would ponder about why I write this way?

That photograph does not do it justice, but it was not staged, I just grabbed my phone and took a photograph of how I left it when I stood up. The blue file has been plonked on top of yet more pads and notes. At the time, I had three A4 pads, four A5 pads, countless Post-it notes, and the file on the go. That is a pencil, by the way, not a pen. I have to write with a pencil.

When I am writing, by which I mean when I am writing, with words pouring out of my head, I simply cannot work on a screen. A table covered in pads with Post-it notes handy is the writing equivalent of painting on canvas. I have all the paints and brushes to hand, and the entire canvas in front of me to be as creative as I need to be. It is instant, organic, free.

I find a screen too limiting. You have a keyboard and a flashing cursor, and any freedom vanishes when you have to scroll and scroll, navigate through menus, or worst of all, find and open another document. It is like trying to paint your canvas while only allowed to see a tiny part of it at a time.

I am sure it must work for some people. Maybe plotters work better on a screen, able to focus on the task in hand, knowing exactly what they need to write. I am the ultimate pantser, and I need the freedom to work in madness.

Everybody and his dog seems to have ADHD these days. I was diagnosed with this string of letters last year as part of something entirely different, although quite what I am expected to do with this information at the age of sixty-one, I have no idea. Maybe it is just a fancy term for what we used to call a busy mind? My guess is that it is nothing out of the ordinary, and lots of people like me just get on with life without even being aware of such things. Mine is a particularly extreme form, hence it got noticed, and apparently, most people do not have quite as much madness going through their heads all day (and probably all night too), but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of fiction writers do.

Is this the difference between plotters and pantsers? Do plotters have nice tidy minds, and yes, this is the sentence I am going to concentrate on now. I know exactly where I am going. And pantsers are aaarrrggghhh! I can’t get these words out of my head fast enough!

I don’t claim to have any of the answers, these are just my thoughts on a Sunday morning before I get in the shower and set the day in motion. Hopefully, by jotting down what works for me, it may help somebody else to try something different, because that is how we all get better at life.

I see comments so often about people staring at a blank screen, not knowing what to write. Well, why not turn the screen off, turn all the screens off? Grab a pad, not a little notebook, a proper pad with lots of space to be creative, and a pencil. Take it somewhere with music, silence, a view, whatever is handy and works for you. Maybe that will allow the words to come together?

Try freedom. You might just like it.

Yes, this was written on paper, while sitting up in bed if you must know. And the music last night was Goldfrapp, Julie Fowlis, and Mahler’s glorious Fifth.

If you like my random thoughts and scribbles, you can subscribe for free. I do not do the money thing on Substack.

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I am studying parapsychology, and as part of that we learn that cultures across the globe construct similar legends of monsters living in deep lakes or inside mountains, mysterious creatures in forests, fantastical beings.

None of these things are real, but the First Draft Troll bloody well is.

You will not find this malicious entity in any of the textbooks, not yet, because I only just worked out that it simply must exist.

A few weeks ago, I started work on a new classic ghost story, Something Disturbed. I had good reasons to begin writing it, then I had good reasons to stop writing it, namely a kick up the arse from a writing friend who told me to put it away and crack on with the other things I really should have been doing instead.

It was sound advice, and now I am caught up with all the things I had been putting off. In my series, books one and two are published, three is with some lovely readers, four is well through the edits, and now I have formatted five so I can start editing. My first classic ghost story is with an editor (yikes! Scary new ground for me). I have printed proofs ordered and on their way, but I won’t be able to do anything with them for ages. Those of you who know the way I write will know I have to leave them alone for a month or two until I have forgotten them, or at least until I no longer remember them so well.

So I was faced with the decision of what to do next in my writing time. I could dig out the first draft of book six and get that formatted for a printed proof, but then that would mean working on four books in the same series at the same time, and there is already enough madness in the world.

The obvious thing was to carry on with Something Disturbed. When I last looked at it a few weeks ago, this was possibly the best book written by anybody, ever, since the dawn of writing itself. I know it was, I remember that very clearly, yet when I read through what I had written, something was wrong. It wasn’t well-written at all. Parts of it are simply awful and desperately need work. What the hell happened to it?

The First Draft Troll.

It is the only possible explanation.

This evil little blighter has deleted parts of the story that I know I had written, well, which I am pretty sure I must have written. I mean, I wouldn’t have left holes in the story like that.

Would I?

There is repetition all over the place, almost as if I had been in too much of a rush to get the words out of my head and onto the paper and had forgotten what I had already written. I would never be so sloppy. We are talking basic errors here people, basic errors.

The only rational explanation is some sort of malicious entity that takes a brilliant first draft and wrecks it when you are not looking. I know this must be true because this is not the first time. Indeed, now I think about it, every single first draft has been sabotaged by this thing.

Book five of my series, which I have just finished formatting from a first draft written in 2001, was exactly the same. I remember very clearly how perfect it was when I finished it with a sense of pride five years ago, but when I opened it and started reading, I honestly questioned who had written this crap. Same thing, repetition, holes in the story, repetition, things I would never have done myself.

I have heard other writers say the same thing, so that is definite proof that this little vandal exists. The big question of course, is how to get rid of it.

I take a serious and scientific approach to all matters concerning what you would call the paranormal, but in this case, I do not think we dare risk ignoring the remedies that have stood the test of time against the whole panoply of demons, trolls, and evil spirits. If you need to protect your first draft from this nasty little creature, play Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, chant psalms in Latin, and set fire to enough sage to rival a major bush fire.

I can’t guarantee this will work, but we have to try something. This thing is pure, undiluted evil.

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The second book in my series, Gate in the Shadows, is now published, but for the moment, only quietly on Amazon. I am not making a big fuss.

If you are a writer, maybe thinking about publishing your first book, this might strike you as odd, but bear with me.

There is an absolute ton of often conflicting writing advice available these days, too much advice, but one thing almost all of it has in common is that it is about your book.

Singular.

When I first dipped my toe in the publishing pond, I followed this advice, publicised my first book, Oliver’s Voice, and got absolutely nowhere. This was partly because I am not a great loudmouth on social media, so I don’t have thousands of people hanging on my every word, but even if I did, I have since found out that this wouldn’t make a huge difference. I may have shifted a few ego-restoring books, but on the whole, zippety pop.

It is only from talking with other writers that I have found out that a series works a little differently, and to be fair, this was mentioned in some of the publishing advice I read, but was lost in the noise. I cannot stress enough how important it is to listen to other writers, both those published and hitting the highs, and those just setting out. Listen, and you will learn, and you will learn much more than from classes given by people who make a living from giving classes.

So where was I? Ah yes, publishing a series. What I have learned from a few other writers who have walked the walk is that they did the same as I did, published the first book of their series, then spent ages trying to get their new baby to fly, and it was an utter waste of time, money, and effort. Mentally draining, and most importantly, so pay attention folks, it was utterly demoralising.

What they have since learned is that when starting out as a writer of a series, your best plan is to publish, maybe stop and make a coffee, then get on with the next one. There are a number of theories as to why this is so, which seem to hang around the thinking that a buyer of a series will be wary of buying a book, with the chance they will like it and want to read the next, and there being no next. People who like a series, and I am one of those, steer clear of one-book wonders.

They want to know that if they are going to put in the effort of reading your book, you will at least have the decency to make the next one available.

At this point, we should remind ourselves that somebody buying your book is only the start of the journey. They will then invest many hours of their time reading your book, and they are quite reasonably wary of wasting their time. It is a two-way process, and not like selling somebody a tin of beans. Just as you put in a lot of time and effort to write your book, the reader puts in a lot of time reading it.

The upshot is, that if you try to promote just one book at the start of a series, or even two, evidence suggests that unless you happen to have a big dollop of luck, or are prepared to invest a mighty fortune to promote your book that you will never get back, then it will bring nothing but misery. Don’t think about it, certainly don’t worry about it, just knuckle down and get on with what you are supposed to be doing, which is writing the next book. Your first and second books will toddle along, people will read them, and you will slowly get feedback and reviews. They are not going to die because you leave them to find their own way while you get on with the next.

I hope this is food for thought for anybody in the same boat. If you have one book out there and wonder if it is even worth publishing the second, then yes, it is. So many people write one book, it goes nowhere, and they give up (hence, readers avoid writers with just one book published). Get on and write the next. You have already put in most of the effort to get the first one this far. The next one will be much easier, so you know what you have to do.

Keep the faith.

The hard sell before I get on with editing book five of my series, which is what I am doing this afternoon: If you want to see a real live second book in a series, you can find Gate in the Shadows at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GZZGTK4C

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Every now and then we have to stop and think.

What am I doing?

More to the point, what am I doing wrong?

Not to forget, what am I doing right?

I had one of those stop and think days this week. Lots of things going on, none of them getting finished. Here is a brief rundown of the madness:

Book series 1, Oliver’s Voice, published on Amazon, not publicised yet. Should have had it beyond Amazon by now, just to dip my toe in the wider publishing pond. Book 2, Gate in the Shadows, not published on Amazon yet, still not finished the final check after getting feedback (much of it from other writers). Book 3, Destruction of Faith, not fully revised, changes I need to make before sending to readers for feedback. Book 4, just forget books 4 to 7 (Darkness in the Forest, Walls of Camus Rhea, Underwood Park, The Dragon Stone), all of which are fully written in one form or another. Let’s not even go there.

Because my series is a bit niche as ghost stories go, I need something more mainstream for readers who want something familiar before they try niche. That is why I went a bit nuts and wrote a classic ghost story, The Gamekeeper’s House, in December and January, but this idiot entered it in a competition, which although I am not arrogant enough to think I will win, I will still feel like a proper idiot if I now remove it and publish it.

So:

I started another classic ghost story, Something Disturbed.

Aaarrrggghhh!

Too much madness.

A writer friend emailed to ask how things are going, so I told him about my madness. He replied straight back, blunt and to the point as always, and who would want anything else?

Get Oliver’s Voice published beyond Amazon.

Finish checking Gate in the Shadows so you can publish it.

Get Destruction of Faith revised and off to readers.

Stop burying your head in the publishing sand by writing another book.

Perfect advice, just what I needed to be told, and who could tell me that except another writer?

Nobody.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the publishing world, another writer shared his experience of publishing his first book, first in a series, and it all looked so familiar. He had published the first and had no idea how to promote it. He wasted time and money, but who was going to buy an unknown book from an unknown author who might never write another? He found out the hard way that it was a waste of time.

So he did nothing at all to promote it, and got on with the next book.

Then the next one.

When he had a series of three books, he found himself in a different position entirely, and he had spent all that time getting better at writing, and slowly understanding the publishing world. Also, slowly getting traction with readers.

He had learned a lot in that time, and credits a lot of that learning to other writers.

Now I am learning from that writer, that my sort of plan for publishing isn’t barking mad after all, and I am not kidding myself by publishing a book and then doing nothing with it.

Where else could I get advice like that?

So I took Finn’s advice, and as a result, I have had a good week. Book 1 is now published on D2D, awaiting a physical proof, then I am all set to publish all my books beyond Amazon. Book 2 is revised and updated, and will be on Amazon in the next few days. Book 3 is updated and loaded into Bookfunnel for the lovely people who already read my stuff to read and let me know what they think. The marketing plan in my head is looking sensible again instead of chaotic. Something Disturbed has been put away, and I will write no more until I have everything else up to date, including book 4 revised so I don’t just start another pile of things undone.

All of this progress is thanks to other writers.

If you hide away in your writing cave, you are on your own, and unlikely to get anywhere. A quote from Winnie the Pooh expresses this nicely:

You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.

For all its faults, Substack is a pretty good forest for writers to be in, so if you are a writer, get yourself out there, meet up with other writers, and you will be stronger amongst friends.

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You always know when it is St Patrick’s Day. Anybody with even the most tenuous claim to some sort of Irish heritage will be celebrating, dressed in green, with the Irish flag draped across absolutely everything. People fly thousands of miles to join the celebrations in towns and cities around the world. The carbon footprint of St Patrick is bigger than that of some small countries. Enough Guinness is consumed to fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools.

St Andrew’s Day in Scotland is a national holiday. It is customary to get so drunk at the end of November that you don’t sober up until Hogmanay, then it all starts again. The entire country reeks of whisky (note the correct spelling, you Americans at the back, and you Irish) for months afterwards, and the skirl of bagpipes can be heard around the globe as men dressed in large heavy skirts terrify the local children using this bizarre screeching device.

It is rumoured that strange celebrations take place in Wales for St David’s Day, but this ancient and secretive land is so obscure and mysterious that very little news emerges from it. It is known that they do something odd using leeks, speak in an unknown and ancient tongue on this day, and the women wear bizarre hats, looking unusually happy as they celebrate their national day.

So what do the English do on this day of our national saint, St George, a proud Greek, or Turk, could have been Palestinian actually, a brave Roman soldier who never even visited England?

Well, not a lot, usually nothing. Many like myself do not even know it is St George’s Day, unless they happen to hear it by chance, as I did on the radio just a few minutes ago. Even that was only a brief mention, and if I had sneezed I would have missed it. BBC Radio 3 have made more of this being Billy Shakespeare’s birthday.

We can’t wave our national flag, because apparently, to do so would be considered racist, an aggressive jingoistic act, and likely to attract the attentions of the police. Put up a red cross on a white background in your window and you will be shunned by the neighbours who will assume you are some sort of fascist. We don’t have a national drink, unless you count tea (which is Chinese), and it is difficult to get completely hammered on tea.

The only time you ever see the English flag being displayed is when the national football team (that’s soccer to you Americans) limps into the closing stages of some cup competition or other from which they will soon be humiliated and sent home, and then the flags are put away again until this farce is repeated a year or two later.

And when you look around the world and see what flags do, perhaps this is not a bad thing. Every war you see kicking off, people are aggressively waving flags at each other, rallying round their own flag so they can justify kicking the living crap out of people with a different flag. Maybe if those flags only came out for sports days, and people with different flags could enjoy meeting each other and celebrating such occasions (as they do in rugby, but sadly not in football), the world would be a better place.

So Happy St George’s Day to you all. You can now go back to whatever you were doing and carry on as before, forget about it, nothing to see here, the party’s over for another year.

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I have started another, and this one is going to be a bit creepy. Here is an early version of the first chapter, to give you a hint of where this one will be going.

Chapter One.

Eve

If you’re reading this, then I guess you must be curious. Am I the monster I was made out to be? Did I really do all those things?

I was just nine years old.

My life was decided for me when I was nine years old.

Just think about that for a moment. What were you doing when you were nine years old? I bet you didn’t have photographers camped at the end of your road, sneaking into your garden at night, trying to get pictures of you through the windows. I bet you didn’t have reporters asking your school friends what you were like, what you were really like, passing them notes to pass to you, offering you money.

Did you get taken to the ‘special room’ at the police station, with its comfy sofa in front of the cameras, every sound you made recorded, somebody trained to make you tell lies?

I’m sure you will believe what you want to believe, after all, it’s what we all do. I have people trying to get me out of here, people who believe I am innocent, or they say they do, but what do they know? Half of them are religious fruit cakes, the other half maybe just fancy a girl with ginger hair.

I am sure some of them must think I am still that sweet little girl from the newspapers, although that picture they used didn’t make me look sweet. Maybe they doctored it or something. I don’t remember. Boy, would they be disappointed to see me now. That was seventeen years ago. I’m not that little girl anymore, and this place doesn’t exactly turn out beauty queens.

What do any of these people think freedom means, anyway? Where would I live? What would I do? Those people really haven’t thought this through, have they? I’m sure they mean well, or at least some of them do, but it will take more than good intentions to give me my life back after all these years.

It would be different if I had a family, but that ship sailed, and it isn’t coming back. My mother, my loving mother, thinks I am the demon child, the spawn of Satan. Dad? No idea, and I don’t want to know. Little Pearly? The apple of my mother’s eye? Forget that one, then, she is my mother’s daughter. Sweet little Pearl.

That leaves the lovely Laura, my beloved twin, although sometimes I have doubts that we are even sisters. I have red hair, she has brown. I was the wild child, she wouldn’t melt butter. Not so much chalk and cheese as not even related, but we still did that twin thing, always knew what the other was thinking, and boy, did that go wrong sometimes!

We weren’t even born in the same century, something the papers had a field day with. Oh yes, they loved that one, and it all helped to put me in here, I’m sure of that. I was born just before midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999, hence the crappy name. Even giving me my name was some sort of joke. The lovely Laura didn’t arrive until half an hour later, or something like that, by which time all the parties had already started.

She didn’t get a stupid name, although they nearly called her Dawn, as in the dawn of a new century, but she had a lucky escape because Dawn Sinckler sounds like a tool you would use to unblock a drain. Pass the dornsinkler, this is going to be a tough one.

So she got to be called Laura after our grandmother, and I got to be called Eve because my parents had no imagination. I am making it sound like we didn’t get on, which is unfair. We got on fine. As I said, we had that twin thing going on as well as being sisters, and we worshipped little Pearly because everybody did. Mum used to dress us all up nicely and tell anybody who would listen that we were just divine. And Dad, he would do anything for his girls.

Everything was fine, one big happy family, until we moved into that house. Number thirteen, Matilda Drive. Yes, number thirteen. The papers made a big deal out of that, too, but grow up for pity’s sake. It’s just a number between twelve and fourteen. There were plenty of things wrong with that house without adding stupid superstitions to the mix.

But there was the bird. You could say that was a superstition, but with everything else going on, I think everybody forgot about the bird. Looking back, that was probably the start of it all.

Have you heard the expression; one for sorrow, two for joy?

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

Never to be told.

Thank you for reading.

You can find out more about what I am up to at nigelcode.co.uk

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He shouldn’t have gone alone.

That is what people said afterwards, but perhaps this was something he needed to do on his own. It had been many years since he had last visited the Highlands, a long way from home. He parked the car at the end of the road where he would trouble nobody.

It was a long walk up the valley to the gulley that marked the way up the mountain, but there was a good track to follow. Snowdrops grew in wild places, the tips of wild daffodils starting to show in darkest green. Signs that spring would arrive soon in the far north of Scotland.

The man walked alone because that was how he lived. He had wanted to climb the mountain as a younger man, but there had always been a reason to put it off until next year, or perhaps the year after, and the time never came. Then he promised himself he would climb this mountain with his son, another excuse that had passed into years of things left undone, but the promise to himself was not forgotten. To not climb the mountain would be yet another failure, another part of a life left unfinished in too many ways.

During quiet moments, a commodity he was never short of, he dreamed of this place, of the climb avoided, and was increasingly aware that he was running out of years. For reasons he could explain to nobody, not even himself, this failure troubled him more than it should. It had become symbolic of too many regrets.

Beyond the track, there was no marked way up the green slopes to where the rocky outcrops began, still dusted with winter snow. He just had to follow his instincts, skirting the soft, wet ground where water seeped down to the river. A cold wind hissed through the dried husks of last year’s thistles and disturbed the rushes that grew everywhere. The soil became thinner, and more rocks littered the ground as the slope became steeper.

It took an effort to keep going, and he had barely climbed five hundred feet from sea level. This mountain was a Munroe, more than three thousand feet to the summit, and already the going was hard up the unforgiving gradient. He was strong and fit for his age, but his joints protested, untested for too many years. Thoughts of failure tried to pick away at his resolve, thoughts that he was foolish to tackle such a climb when the mountains were still in the grip of winter, when days were short and cold. To twist an ankle on rough ground or take a fall, were thoughts he did not wish his mind to dwell upon.

He should have waited, but he had spent too many years waiting, and those years had not been kind to him. He had made a good life, and had lost it at the whims of others until there was nothing more to lose. To climb this mountain was something others could not take from him, he would only have himself to blame. This had gnawed at him in unexpected moments for almost thirty years, three decades that had left him poorer in too many ways.

He drew his zip up higher as the icy wind whipped down the valley from the sea, cutting quickly across the higher slopes. The gulley cut deep into the mountain, rising high above him into a sky that was fresh and clear. If he kept to the highest side of the gulley, there was a slope that was free of the vertical rock faces and scree slopes that made other routes treacherous or impassable.

The slope grew steeper, and he had to pull himself higher with aching arms and protesting legs, but steadily he climbed until the valley floor looked small, the river reduced to a mere stream, everything looking insignificant in this vast landscape.

His foot slipped on loose stones, and it took an effort to regain his balance. As he fought his way back onto firmer ground, he felt suddenly unwell, a feeling that troubled him, not because he feared for his safety, but because he feared he had left this too late. There was still a long way to go, and already he was struggling. How much strength would he have left to draw on? He had to keep going. To turn back after all these years would be another unthinkable failure.

A chill of fear washed through him, a fear that he was not going to make it. He should have found time for this between all those demands that had been put on him by others in his life. He should have done this years ago, had made too many excuses already, and had no time left to make more. He would have to do this now, or not at all. He had to keep going.

These were the regrets that flooded through his thoughts as he was overcome by a sudden weakness in his legs that he could not overcome. He reached out for a large slab of broken rock that he could sit on for a while and recover his strength. His legs felt suddenly weaker as he sat, and a cold shiver went through him like something passing. As a feeling of weakness overcame him, his world faded into darkness.

I do not know how long the darkness lasted. Time had become something for other people to concern themselves with. The mountain had measured time beyond any one person’s imagination, time that had seen many people come and go. It had no need to rush anybody.

I looked up, and the darkness lifted as I sensed rather than heard the nearness of somebody. A young man approached up the slope, already close enough to be almost with me.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are you going to the top?’

For a moment, I did not know how to reply, but whatever had overcome me earlier seemed to have passed. The pain and tiredness in my legs had gone, and a rest had taken away my feeling of weakness.

‘That’s the plan,’ I replied.

Whatever strange turn had come over me when I slipped on those loose stones had gone. Perhaps I merely needed a rest to recover my strength. I stood and tested my legs, and they felt good again. Had I merely allowed myself to panic, a reaction to almost falling, and realising how stupid I had been to attempt such a climb alone at my age? Now with a companion for the climb, I felt more confident of making it, or at least of not being alone if I did not.

It seemed to be left to me to lead the way, so I continued up the steep slope, my legs feeling strong and refreshed. The effort of the climb and the sound of the wind rushing across the bare rocks around us made talking impractical, so we climbed in silence. I glanced behind occasionally to reassure myself that my companion was still with me, and he returned my look with an untroubled smile that gave me the strength I needed to climb further. That is how we continued for whatever time it took. I had no interest in checking my watch, merely to set one foot in front of the other towards my goal.

The thought crossed my mind that I did not even know his name. I would ask when we reached the top, and perhaps share a dram of the fine malt I carried in a hip flask. The slope grew occasionally steeper, requiring arms and legs to traverse the bare rock of the mountain itself, then it would become more gentle again. It was sometimes necessary to crab sideways to avoid a steep bluff or a slope of loose scree, to find the next way forward.

We had left the gulley far below us, and now there was only unforgiving rock, where almost no vegetation found shelter in which to grow. Patches of snow remained on shaded slopes, and the wind that now blew more strongly still had the taste of winter within it.

The slope eased, and although I had no way of knowing, I sensed the summit was not far ahead. The sky had a lighter quality to it, and the wind blew in all directions instead of one. I looked back to see my unknown climbing companion smile back, as if he too could tell that our mission was almost accomplished.

Gradually, the ground levelled out, and as I looked ahead, a beautiful horizon came into view, of the valley on the other side of the mountain, leading northwards to Loch Duich, the peaks of the mainland overlapping with those of the Isle of Skye in a spectacular landscape of geological wonder.

The sky was the biggest I had ever seen, of a pale blue only found in winter, patterned with light clouds that felt closer to me than any sky had seemed before. The buffeting wind was exhilarating, and I felt a rush of joyful achievement, like nothing I had experienced in six decades of life.

I turned to see if my companion would share this moment with me, already knowing that he would not be there, because now I understood that the only person I had shared this journey with was myself. I was still alone, but at last I was at peace with being alone.

It was two days later when the search team found the man, sitting alone on a rock as if he had merely stopped for a rest, and at any moment would rise and continue his journey. He looked untroubled as the wind and a light rain continued around him. They could not tell if he had been on his way up, or on his way down, when he had sat on his rock. Had he made it to the summit as his last act on this earth?

Thank you for reading.

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This is absolutely incredible.

Incredible (adj) impossible or hard to believe.

If you still find this hard to believe, you would be right, and then you might be suspicious about today’s date.

1^st April.

April Fools Day is a popular excuse for all sorts of pranks and hoaxes across Europe and North America, yet its origins are obscure.

The most popular theory relates to the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar and originates from France. The date of the new year was moved from 1^st April to 1^st January, and those who still believed the new year began on 1^st April were called April fools. People taken in by nonsense are also called April fish because they have been easily caught, and it is still fun today to secretly fix a paper fish to somebody’s back on this day.

Some people trace the origins back even further, to Roman times, when around the equinox, marking the start of spring, was the festival of Hilaria. In honour of the goddess Cybele, people dressed up in disguises and enjoyed a day of fun, which probably involved getting absolutely hammered, because, Romans.

Personally, I find this theory a little iffy. It smacks of people trying to make a connection that isn’t really there. For a start, there are many festivals of Hilaria, it refers to any festival of fun, and the Romans knew how to have fun, or at least the rich ones did. It also marked the vernal equinox, which isn’t the first day of April, so nice try, but I’m not buying it.

The great thing about writing ghost stories is that I get to research folklore, the fascinating world of the paranormal, and so many intriguing traditions and beliefs. This is actually my job these days, yes, really. Somebody, please pinch me.

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You may have heard about the sad loss of this much-loved tree on Hadrian’s Wall.

The wood from the tree has been saved, and there is a competition run by the National Trust for how to make the best use of it in a fitting memorial. This will be partly decided by a public vote, and I would like to suggest one of the contenders and ask you to consider taking a moment to register your own vote for whichever option you believe is best.

I have no personal connection with any of the contestants, but this is a very meaningful place to me, and only one of the designs will provide a fitting and permanent memorial to this magnificent tree, near to the place where it once stood. It is this connection with the space that to me is so important.

I know this place very well, and the proposal for the wooden sculpture and the various displays that go with it by Helix Arts is in my opinion truly outstanding. It is the only option that sits well in the space, and provides what was lost when the tree was cut down. It will create a new and beautiful focus point, somewhere for people to return to with their memories, both shared and private, something that will return it to being a place of pilgrimage.

This is the only proposal that has the right feel to it is what I suppose I am struggling to put into words. What is currently such a sad place after such a callous act of vandalism, will once again become a place of memories and hope. That is what the design by Helix Arts captures, that the others do not, in my humble opinion anyway.

Those are my thoughts. Please have a look at the six proposals at https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/hadrians-wall-and-housesteads-fort/honouring-the-legacy-of-the-sycamore-gap-tree-a-new-creative-commission

Thank you.

So why is Friday 13^th considered to be so unlucky? Well, for a start, this depends on where you live. If you are Spanish for instance, you might be wondering de qué está hablando este idiota? If you are Greek that might be τι λέει αυτός ο ηλίθιος. I don’t really know because I don’t speak, read, or write, Spanish or Greek, and copied that from Google Translate, so it could say anything as far as I know. Possibly, do your bananas have purple tongues?

I really don’t know the answer to that question either to be honest, and being unfamiliar with the anatomy of the fruit of the banana tree, would not know where to look. This is quite remiss of me because I studied Biology at university, but maybe I was asleep or off my face on something the day we had that lecture about the fruit of Musa paradiiaca, which is the Latin name for the cultivated banana tree, not Ananas comosus, which looks like it should be the Latin name for the banana tree but is actually the Latin name for the pineapple.

Absolutely true. Would I lie to you?

And now you have that song stuck in your head, same as I do.

Would I lie to you da dum da dum da dum da da dum.

I love that bass line.

So where was I?

Ah, yes, explaining why Friday 13^th is considered to be unlucky. The most popular belief is that it refers to a combination of 13 people at the Last Supper, and because Jesus met his maker on a Friday, but this doesn’t wash to be honest. When the calendar changed from Julian to Gregorian, in most of Europe it changed by eleven days, so Friday 13^th would have become Monday 23^rd, which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, or in England where the calendar changed by 11 days, Tuesday 24^th, which would have been a much harder sell for Hollywood.

So this seems an unlikely explanation. The popularity, or should that be unpopularity, of Friday 13^th arose in the nineteenth century, so we will probably learn more by looking there for our history. Sure enough, on Friday 13^th November 1868, the great composer Gioachino Rossini passed through the mysterious veil, went to sing with the choir invisible, snuffed it.

Rossini is best known for composing the theme music for the Lone Ranger, 80 years after he was buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, which remains to this day the best evidence for the existence of ghosts or spirits who haunt us after death. That connection alone must make it the most likely origin of Friday 13^th being considered unlucky, as it was certainly unlucky for Rossini.

So what should you do to keep safe on Friday 13^th? The most popular solution is to take the day off work, not go outside your front door, stay in your own home, and get absolutely hammered. This should keep you safe unless you get so drunk that you trip over the cat (preferably a black cat on Friday 13^th) and face-plant the coffee table. For those like myself who do not drink alcohol, stay in, have a nice cup of tea, and write something for Substack.

I hope you found this useful and informative. Try to stay safe, just a few more hours to go, then you won’t have to worry about any of this again until November.

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In the morning, I messed about folding pieces of paper together to make a journal, but not the sort of journal you write, the sort you put together with string, paint, and glue, like you would at junior school. After an eco-friendly naturally organic tree-hugging lunch, I spent an hour doing yoga, something I have never done before. Thankfully, nobody had a camera, because there are people who would pay good money to see me doing yoga. The day ended with a sound bath, utterly relaxing.

So that was all a bit out of character, except of course it isn’t, because I have been a great believer in the usefulness of meditation for years, and when you think about it, this was just an extended meditation, with some mild torture thrown in, and a very nice lunch.

That’s all very lovely, I imagine you saying, so what’s your point?

My point is that one prompt for putting together this journal was making a cairn of words. For those not familiar with cairns, they are piles of stones found in places such as the tops of hills, viewpoints, places where people feel inspired to pile stones, then more people feel inspired to add their own stone as they pass.

Here you go.

That is a cairn. A very fancy one. Usually, they are just a heap of stones.

So my cairn of words had to be about words of course, because words are what I do. Without any particular thought or planning, I came up with this:

I suppose what was going through my head was how stories come together when we writers set to work, or rather, how they should come together. You start with a story in your head. We can turn sounds into letters to make words, to make sentences, and paragraphs which form books which should tell our story. Okay, I should have stuck chapters in there too, but I was chilled out, playing with scissors and PVA glue on a table covered in scraps of paper. If it makes you happy, just imagine chapters are there in some sort of parallel universe or something.

The message I was telling myself here, or so I like to imagine, is that we writers should always remember that what we are doing is to take a story from our imagination and tell it to our readers by crafting words together. I think that basic principle can sometimes be lost now that we are bombarded with advice about structures, story arcs, character arcs, writing to market, writing to genre, and all the other formulas we must embrace or die.

All that great advice is wonderful I’m sure, but if it gets in the way of you telling your story, you would be better off relaxing with some paper and glue, maybe a bit of yoga, then finish with some musical relaxation. Put all that advice to one side, and when properly in the mood, just get on and tell your story the way you think you should tell it. Words and advice are no use to anybody if the story gets lost along the way.

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I am editing four books at the moment. If that sounds bonkers, just bear with me. Forget the four books, just think of the editing, and why there is nothing wrong with aiming for perfection.

This one is the bane of my life, or has been.

Actually, let’s go back to the number four, because you will notice that number scribbled on the cover. That is because this is the 4^th editing proof, and I am still working on it. I am still working on it because I feel in my heart, my inner core, my very being, that it was not ready to be seen by readers.

My apologies to Anja at this point because she has a copy of this version, or at least I think it is this version. To be honest, I’ve lost track.

Gate in the Shadows, now known as the Git, because it has been a proper little git.

Let’s go back in time, about a year ago, when I was reading all sorts of comments from other writers and supposed experts. I was bombarded by advice, and much of that advice was, you guessed it, don’t aim for perfection. Your book will never be perfect. If you have got this far, publish it, and get on with the next one. You will never attain perfection, so stop fussing over that bloody book and just publish it.

Being as green as the greenest grass in the world of publishing, I caved in to this repeated message, and I published it. There was a little bell ringing at the back of my mind saying it wasn’t ready, but I blanked it out because that little bell was telling me not to publish until it was perfect, or at least as near to perfect as I can make it.

Oh, how I wish I had listened to that little bell.

You see, this book is part of a series, seven of them written at this point, and I was still toying with how they all fit together. I wasn’t happy with Oliver’s Voice as the first in the series, for reasons that are now incomprehensible, because Oliver was always the first, and always will be. But I had a bang on the head or something, and that gave me the brainwave to make GitS (the Git) the first instead of the second, and I was still playing around with this idea when all these people told me to just publish the bloody thing.

So I did.

The lesson here folks, is to ignore whatever advice you have been given, whatever you have heard, whatever you have read, if in your heart you think it is wrong. Actually, let’s be more specific here, if in your heart, you know it is wrong.

I went on to publish Oliver’s Voice as the second, and I didn’t like that either, and it was only late last year when I came to my senses. I asked for opinions on here about printing on white or cream paper, and there was an overwhelming preference for cream, but that meant unpublishing both books to change from white pages to cream pages.

Thank you so much to those who made me do this.

Because I was unpublishing, that was a chance to put right what I got wrong. Oliver’s Voice was tweaked and put back where it belongs, as the first, and I then started work on Gate in the Shadows.

The Git.

Months later, I might finally be there, and now we come to why I have four books on the go. Like many writers, if I try to revise and edit something I have written, I have to leave it for several weeks before coming back to it. If I don’t, I see the words I think should be there instead of the words that are actually on the page (literally on the page because I can only work on printed copies). The glaring errors that get through if I read it too soon are truly shocking, and other writers will back me up here.

You just do not see these things.

At all.

I can’t just sit and file my nails for weeks on end until I have forgotten a whole book, so I have to either write something new, or work on editing others.

I did both.

Because I have a series to work through, I knuckled down and worked on the others, which are at various stages of completion. For reasons known only to a skilled psychiatrist, I also wrote a new novel, different to the series, a classic ghost story, which has added to the editing pile.

Last week, I finished the revision of GitS (the Git) and bashed all the changes and tweaks into the keyboard. Quite a lot of changes, like entire chapters sort of changes.

Hmmm.

That little bell again.

Next job was to work on the description. How to describe this book?

Hmmm.

There was that bell, and I couldn’t write the description because something was still not right. This time I did not ignore the bell. Instead, I asked why it was ringing. I already knew the answer, I knew what was not right, and I had known all along. Why it has taken until now for me to realise, I have no idea. As I said, probably because I am an idiot.

So I went a bit nuts with the bits I already knew I wasn’t happy with, drew a big line through them, and I started again, on fresh paper. I won’t go into the whats and whys or we will be here all bloody day, but almost all were written years ago, were assuming the reader is stupid, and needed to go in the bin.

Darlings killed, big style.

All this has been because I was aiming for perfection. I am probably happy with Gate in the Shadows now, probably, and might even stop calling it the Git and publish it. I do not regard it as perfect by any means. I am not so full of myself to ever think I could write a perfect book, but it is only by aiming for perfection that I have been critical enough to keep fixing and revising and tweaking until that little bell has finally stopped ringing.

So when people give you their words of wisdom and tell you not to aim for perfection, you may wish to ignore them, and listen to that little bell instead.

If you like the occasional ramblings of a newbie writer making mistakes as he goes along, click on the little heart thing, and you can even subscribe for nothing because I don’t do that paid subscriber thing.

If you want to see all the books I have in progress, have a look at https://www.nigelcode.co.uk/books

Thank you for reading.

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