Category: Art

Two Weeks

“Fuck what you know. Fuck what you believe. I am the architect of my destiny.”
-James “Buddy” Neilsen.

With language like that in the epigraph, I think that it’s fair to say that this post won’t ever be making an appearance on the freshly pressed page. But then, my language is abrasive at the best of times, so I guess I’ll have to live without the vindication of being a pressed writer for a little while yet. Nevertheless, let’s kick this off and get down to why I’ve chosen to feature the lyrics of a post-hardcore band in my epigraph, and what it has to do with a page dedicated to the trials and tribulations of my writing career.

Well, the simple answer as to why I chose Neilsen’s lyrics is this: I like them. And I like hardcore music, so I thought that I would feature them just as I have before with artists like Adrian Fitiplades and Max Bemis. But the more in depth answer, the one that actually makes this whole post worthwhile is that right now those three little phrases resonate with me more than anyone could ever truly understand. In fact, the lyrics of the entire album the epigraph was chosen from resonate with me to such an extent that I spent the better part of two hours today deciding between the lines I chose to use and the following:

When you look in the mirror
Are you proud of what you see?
When you look in the mirror
Are you the person you thought you’d be?

The truth is that I’m not quite the person that I thought I’d be right now. I thought that a few things in my personal life would have panned out a little differently than how they have. I’ve been a little emotionally fragile lately, and thankfully I’ve had something constructive to focus my time on…But on a writing front, I’m more than I ever thought possible. That’s right; with less than two weeks to go until I head to New York, I’m so fucking confident in myself and what I have created that I can’t wait to pitch my heart out. Right now when I look in the mirror, I’m damned proud of what I see. I’m a writer with passion and a goal. And regardless of whether I secure a contract in the USA, I know that I’m taking positive steps in the right direction for my career.

Just as Neilsen growls in the song Canine, I am the architect of my destiny. Every single time I sit down and put pen to page I am constructing the blueprints of not just a tale of fiction, but of my life and how I want it to be. When I submit those blueprints to an editor for revision they are given the opportunity to improve and come one step closer to being completed. And when I pitch my story to agents in a foreign city I’ll have the opportunity to see those blueprints come to life. All I need is for one person to say yes and the foundation of my story and my vision will come to life.

But if I’m feeling so confident, and so enthused, why did I chose lyrics that are so explicit? Well, because that’s just who I am. When I’m confident I feel indestructible. And in true Chris Nicholas fashion I have constructed a novel and a pitch that defies what is considered the norm within the publishing industry. When I start my pitch I don’t want to be perceived as just another aspiring author; I want to be seen as a force to be reckoned with. I want to be seen as a man capable of rising above the slush pile with a story to tell and the fire in his stomach to do it. So fuck what you know about publishing. And fuck what you believe is acceptable within the industry. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

Two weeks. That’s how long I have to wait until I can pitch myself against the best in the industry and see how I compare. And for all of my bravado I am fully aware that I could walk away from the whole experience with nothing. But even if I do, just by making it this far I have achieved something incredible.

An unconventional mission statement

“All I want is to dethrone God so that I can be crucified.”
-Max Bemis.

With just over three weeks remaining until I head to New York and pitch my heart out to dozens of publishers and agents, I haven’t really had a great deal of time to blog. I’ve been so busy brushing up on my pitch and tweaking my manuscript that this poor page has sat dormant, its daily hit count slowly withering away until all that I have worked so hard to create seems forgotten. I’m not sorry though. The past couple of weeks have been integral to my preparation and I’ve grown so much as a writer in such a short time that it feels refreshing to be able to step back into the world of weblogs once more.

In addition to the hours spent labouring over my manuscript and pitch, I have also devoted a fair amount of time to gaining a better understanding of myself as a writer. I mean, I know that I started doing this to cope with the demons inside my head, but I started to realise that what was once my motivation to create wasn’t necessarily the reason I put pen to page anymore. That’s not to say I don’t still have a few issues; I can assure you that my head is just as fucked up now as it has ever been, I’ve just learned to accept my fractured perception of normality for what it is.

So while I was trying to rediscover who I am as a writer I stopped and started to catalogue what defines me an aspiring author, and I came up with a rather obscure little list.
• I’ve fought depression a few times. Writing helps clear my head.
• I’m arrogant and over opinionated. But I’m OK with that.
• I want to be published. Not because I want to make millions of dollars (although it would be nice). But because I want to reach inside the mind of my reader and alter their perceptions on art and the world at large.
• I tend to write about characters that I aspire to be like. But they are often incredibly flawed narcissists and megalomaniacs.

It’s a bit of a strange list. But nevertheless those four points define me as an author. I’m egotistical, yet my own toughest critic. I’m a narcissist but only because I believe that I can open the reader’s eyes to new concepts and ideas. And just like Max Bemis above, I’ve recently decided that I want to dethrone God so that I can be crucified.

Obviously I’m not talking about this in a literal sense. If anyone shows up at my house with a bucket of nails and a cross I’d be less than impressed. And I’m not even talking about God as the omnipresent being mankind believes to be above us. I’m no Aleister Crowley, and there will be no bathing in blood. But I’m talking about the gods of literature. The big name authors who have transcended the medium and become ingrained into the fabric of our society. I want to be one of them. I want to be better than them. But only because I want to know what it feels like to be crucified for my work. I want feel the elation of success, so that I can also feel the crippling sensation of failure.

It sounds counter intuitive doesn’t it? My mission statement as a writer is to become immensely successful so that I can fail. And I want to do this so that I can peel back the layers of my soul and examine where I went wrong so that I can rebuild myself as a more formidable writer once again. I actually don’t expect anyone to understand this. How could they? I, Chris Nicholas, the narcissistic writer, want to succeed so that I can fail. But that’s not to say I will ever intentionally produce a piece of work of substandard quality in order to taste failure. Rather I want produce something so fantastic that whatever comes next fails in comparison. Only then will I ever be able to truly test myself as a writer as I try to do the impossible and out do myself.

So there it is: my unconventional mission statement. I want to become so good at what I do that I spend my entire life competing with myself; constantly striving to outperform the person that I was yesterday. I want to dethrone god, and I want to be crucified so that I can rise again and continue to grow.

Take Two

A little while ago I posted a snippet from a scene that I had been working on. What I posted was fairly rough, including all of the spelling and grammatical errors one would expect from a rough draft. Despite its flaws I wanted to post the scene to show the dismal number of followers I had at the time what I was working on. So, after many months and a little bit of polishing I thought that I would provide a ‘take two’ entry of the same scene. Please excuse the formatting, it’s gone a little crazy during the conversion across to WordPress. Nevertheless, I hope that you like it…

The spring sun had set over Marseille, France’s second-largest city and its largest commercial port. Though the daytime temperature had been a mild eighteen degrees Celsius, the trade wind known as the Mistral blew through the valleys of the Rhone as the day diminished, unleashing its bitter assault on the city as night had fallen. The harsh, cold wind was an unwelcome change from the warm early spring days the city had experienced over the past week, and many residents had locked themselves indoors for the night. High above the city sat the Notre-Dame de la Garde, a huge basilica positioned on the city’s highest natural point, a limestone outcropping on the south side of the old port. The de la Garde looked grand against the moonlight, the cold winds lashing over its stone surface, leaving a faint smell of limestone in the air. The basilica was a tourist mecca and a local place of worship for Marseille’s religious population, but right now the holy building had been closed down for the night, abandoned save for the four men standing on its limestone balcony, gazing out over the city below. Lights glistened in the windows of houses, and streets cut an intricate maze through the buildings as far as the eye could see. To the south, the moon’s light reflected off the deep blue surface of the Mediterranean Sea, its usual calm broken by small whitecaps rolling silently towards the shoreline.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were brothers by blood, but their appearances were startling different, even when concealed by the heavy robes they now wore, just as their namesakes would have worn. Pestilence, the eldest brother was tall, his features dark and handsome, his hazel eyes endless and deadly. His body was lean, yet surprisingly muscular; his age was indeterminable beneath his priest’s robes and hood. Concealed beneath his robes were two pearl-white handguns, held in pancake holsters against his ribs.

The second brother was huge. Taller and broader than his siblings, he physically dominated the foursome. His shoulders were wide and his chest shaped as though Da Vinci himself has chiselled it from the finest of stone. His hair was dark brown and his eyes a fiery emerald green. He wore a beard, thick and woolly, poking out from within the hood of his robe. In his right hand he held a small flick knife, the blade three inches long and cast from blood-red metal. He spun the knife effortlessly between his fingers as he watched the skyline. Although he was known to his brothers as War, he had once been known in intelligence communities as The Surgeon, such was his abilities to flay open the flesh of his prey. To his left stood the third born son of Chaos—the quiet one, his gaze cast down at the floor.

The quiet one was also the smallest of the foursome, standing at an embarrassing five feet nine inches with thin, sinewy shoulders. Many myths surrounded him; a bastard child with origins unknown. Famine had spent an entire lifetime concealing himself from the world, his face hidden behind a facemask complete with breathing apparatus that could be seen hanging from beneath the hood pulled over his head. Even his brothers had never seen his true face. Some said that he was a prominent military figure who shielded his identity from his kin. Others said that he had no face at all, that he was a ghost capable of moving through walls. His movements had the precision and fluency of a dancer, and he wore full military Special Forces combat attire, all black.

The youngest of the brothers stood apart from his siblings, his face tipped upwards towards the moon. The hood of his robe had been pushed back and draped across his shoulders and neck, revealing a beautifully hideous face to the world. His head was shaved smooth, his features made sharper by the pale green tattoos that covered his face. His entire skeletal system had been tattooed onto his skin. Cheekbones, ribs, phalanges and metatarsals were replicated in soft green ink. He was tall, six feet three inches, and his eyes were a translucent grey. Death incarnate.

The Four Horsemen were the sons of the infamous assassin Chaos; the former United States of America’s “confidential enemy number one”, a man who had been executed eight months ago in Berlin by a unit of MARSOC operatives. Named after their biblical namesakes Pestilence, War, Famine and Death were a closely guarded secret within intelligence circles. There were just a few hundred people across the globe who could accurately say that they had direct knowledge of their movements, only those with the highest security clearances were ever made aware of the vicious reputations the brothers held. Governments had fought tirelessly to keep the atrocities that the brothers had committed out of the public’s eye, just as they had done with Chaos. But the brothers thrived in the secrecy of their actions. Pestilence and War cold move freely. Famine could live another life without his mask, and Death often used makeup to cover his skeleton and move unnoticed throughout the world.

“My brothers; tonight is a momentous night,” Pestilence said, dropping down the hood of his robe. “Tonight marks the eight month anniversary of our father’s death and the last time we will meet.”

“Such sentiment,” War mocked, thrusting the blade in his hand towards Pestilence to mark his point. “I have no time for petty bullshit brother. Tell me why you bought us here. Tell us why you killed the arms manufacturer.”

“I had no use for him. Gerard was a turncoat who was planning on ratting us out.”

“We needed him,” War said, trying to keep his voice to a whisper, belying its true thunderous volume. “Gerard had worked for us for years. He worked for our father. He was invaluable to our cause.”

“And yet he was going to betray us,” Pestilence snapped. “He had seen what I was planning and he was weak. He was going to rat me out so I put him down like a dog.”

War fell silent, offering no response. The four brothers were not close on any physical or emotional level, rarely seeing eye to eye. Their only mutual affiliation had been their now-deceased father. Each man would have been perfectly content to operate independently of his siblings, and for a long time they had done so. But right now they needed one another if they were to fulfil their father’s plans and bring the world to its knees. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were inseparable for the moment, no matter how badly they wished otherwise.

“Tomorrow marks phase one of the Rapture,” Pestilence said, taking a moment to scan the faces of his three brothers, lingering a fraction of a second longer on Famine, the brother without a face. “Our father was slain eight months ago today, and the governments of this God-forsaken world are still yet to feel our wrath for their actions. The soldiers responsible for the attack were neutralised, as were their families; but now we must set forth and fulfil our destiny. We must bring about the Rapture, and bring our enemies to their knees just as our father would have wanted. We will tear down every corner of the earth and reduce it to rubble and we will rebuild the world in his image. Chaos and anarchy will reign.”

“Not all of the soldiers were killed,” War spat, casting a glance at the youngest brother, Death.

“Did I ask for you to open your mouth?” Pestilence hissed silencing the brothers before Death had a chance to respond. “We will do as our father has asked of us and we will divide the world into quarters and conquer them. Europe will fall underneath a cloud of disease that will cripple its people and leave its governments powerless to help. The rich will protect themselves and the great unwashed will rise and destroy what remains of them. Then my brothers, your time to rise will come.”

Pride

“This is real pride in my eyes; it’s not a cocky act.”
-Shadrach Kabango.

As a writer I follow a lot of other writers through various blogging platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr and so on. I follow writers with readership bases that range from thirty to hundreds of thousands, and I sift through their posts in a never ending search for inspiration and enlightenment. In the grand scheme of things my own blog has a readership base closer to the thirty mark then the hundreds of thousands. But I’m comfortable with that, because I’ve never really been one who has felt the need to seek out approval from anyone other than myself. If I write a post and believe that it’s good, I’m happy. If someone else enjoys it too then I’m ecstatic.

Until recently I have enjoyed the regular updates from many of the sites that I follow. I’ve found humour in their words, inspiration in their stories, and for a select few I’ve even felt outrage for their plights or one-sided bigotry. But lately I’m feeling disillusioned with many of the writer blogs that I follow. I have my reasons as to why I feel so cynical towards my fellow writer, and I’ll try to say this as diplomatically as possible. It’s going to sound harsh when I say it, so here goes….

….When did being a writer mean that you have to be a whiny bitch?

Seriously, it’s as though we writers are so desperate to post anything in order to grow our readership base that we have resorted to posting pathetic, poorly written articles about sweet nothing. I’ve read the “steps to growing your readership base” articles, and I know that rule number one is blog often, but in my humble experience blogging well trumps blogging often every single time. Real art takes time to produce, and if you’re churning out post after post at lightning speed, chances are what you’re posting is shit.

I don’t give care about your failed relationships or if you’re struggling to make ends meet. Grow some balls and understand that everyone has relationship issues, and get a fucking job. If you’re like me and you haven’t yet reached that point where you can survive solely on the income generated through your writing endeavours, then get a job, bust your arse, and pray that one day you become successful enough to give up the nine-till-five life. The amount of posts I sift through from struggling authors trying to mooch from their readership base or moaning about a lack of funds is disgraceful. No one is going to pay for your dreams, and no one wants to hear about your desire for them to do so.

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

If you’re broke, work. If you’re struggling with your situation, change it. And if you want to be a successful author you need to realise that it isn’t going to happen overnight. You need to put your head down and start producing some incredible manuscripts and you need to want success so bad that it’s your only option.

I used to think that my greatest weakness as a writer was my pride. I’ve always been a man who wants to defy the status quo, and I will forever choose the path of most resistance. The idea of networking with other authors makes me want to head butt a brick wall, and the thought of censoring myself to anyone sends a shiver down my spine. I used to think that this pride in myself would prevent me from ever succeeding, but now I believe that it will be the very thing that sees my work make it into print.

I want to become an author so badly that the thought of failing causes my heart to ache and my breathing to become laboured. I don’t want to be a whiny bitch posting about nonsensical shit. I want to be an author who tries to outdo himself every single time he writes. I want to push myself beyond my own comfort zones and I want to experience the fringes of my own mind. And I want to take the reader with me.

From now on the tone of this blog will change. I’ve had posts in the past that have hinted at my own inner school-girl, but from this moment I aim to bring you a better standard of writing. No more whining. No support me because I’m a broke, lazy as fuck writer styled entries. No shitty half-arsed posts. I don’t blog often, so I plan to blog well. And for those of you do regularly follow my entries, let’s see how far we can take this thing. It’s time to create a blog that I can be proud of. I don’t want to be just another cocky act.

Bone collections & Sonder moments

As writers we often choose to move through the world unnoticed, toiling away at our craft in solitude until we feel that we have created something worthy of sharing with the masses. We are deeply emotional people who moving along the fringes of society, our ever watchful eyes shifting between souls as we try to understand their stories and use them to fuel our own.

We writers are amongst an incredibly small number of souls with the pleasure and pain of understanding the true nature of experiencing a sonder moment; a moment of pure clarity where we stop and realise that there are others out there whose hopes, dreams, and realities differ exponentially from our own. It’s a moment of mixed emotion, filled with pleasure and pain when our own lives are revealed to be just frivolities in space and time which can oftentimes bruise the ego of the selfish man. However there is something truly beautiful in understanding how singularities of flesh and bone that we encounter each and every day differ from ourselves.

So we watch the world and we learn. We learn how to remain on the periphery whilst unravelling exactly what makes others tick. We learn their stories and their dreams and we use them as inspiration to create our own tales of triumph and woe. We writers are the bone collectors of the world. We hunt out the darker impulses of man or the stains those impulses leave behind and we gather up the bones, take them home with us and we study them. We reconstruct and manipulate them, and we create our own stories out of the gristle and marrow.

As despicable as it sounds, we writers seek these moments of sonder not because we care about the lives of others. Instead we long for these moments of intimacy with complete strangers so that we can better understand how to make them feel when we put pen to paper. It sounds unnerving, but I want to know what makes my fellow man feel love, so that I can show him romance. I want to know how he feels hardship, so that I can show him compassion. But most of all I want to understand his fears, so that I can extort them, exposing his bones to the bitter chill of uncertainty and terror.

I don’t expect all of you to understand this. How could you? What kind of man actively chooses to stand on the periphery of society and pick at the remains of egos and shattered dreams like some kind of tormented vulture? The entire concept is reminiscent of sociopath-like behaviour, and yet there are hundreds and thousands of writers just like me all over the world that watch the lives of others through a kaleidoscope of hope, fear, love and anticipation. We don’t actively wish for someone to fail, that in itself would be sociopathic behaviour. We simply wait until the inevitability of failure arrives so that we can scoop up the bones of a dying world and turn it into something beautiful once again.

Perhaps a better title for this post would have been scrimshaw. Since we are on the subject of creating the beautiful out of the bones of the dead why not name the post after the art of doing exactly that? But somehow it just didn’t seem fitting. Why? Because sometimes as writers the bones that we collect don’t always become beautiful pieces of art in the end. Sometimes those bones are too brittle, or too hard, or sometimes the story within is just too wild or convoluted to be told. Sometimes when we collect the bones of our society we end up doing nothing more than examining their intricate curves and faults before discarding them onto a pile of stories that will remain untold. Sometimes, we collect simply to add to our ever burgeoning bone collections.

We are collectors and story tellers, and sometimes a difficult choice must be made between a story that needs to be told, and a story that doesn’t. We must connect with the remains of tales and dreams and feel that moment of sonder so that we know others will feel it to. For if we can make our readers feel something from a pile of broken bone, then we have delivered to them a story worth telling.

A weakness of flesh (Reach for the stars)

‘The weakness of flesh is to settle for less than we have the potential to be.’
-Jesse Leach.

When you read something filled with such profundity and insightfulness as the quote above you can’t help but stop and think about your own shortcomings. How many times have you settled for less than you had the potential to be simply because you didn’t have the courage to push that little bit further, or reach that little bit higher and grasp everything that you have ever wanted? If you’re like ninety nine percent of the world’s population then you can probably think of a handful of times when you’ve sold yourself short for whatever reason. Maybe you were tired of trying; maybe you were afraid of the success you were striving for, or feared looking foolish if you did fail. Whatever the reason is, at some point in your life you have settled for less than you were meant to be. We all have.

If this is true then one must ask why mankind has evolved with such a fundamental flaw in our design. Or maybe even ask how the fuck we ever managed to evolve in the first place. I mean surely if it is in our nature to fall short of our dreams then shouldn’t we have stopped evolving somewhere between a half-formed zygote and a fucking chimp? Whatever, the evolution of the human mind and body is a conversation for another day. All I want to know is if our weakness as a species is to accept complacency, then how the hell am I ever meant to achieve everything I dream about? How am I supposed to become a published author? How am I supposed to see the world? How am I supposed to form meaningful relationships? Or even be happy?

Well thankfully, this crippling weakness that has been bestowed upon us doesn’t afflict every decision or action we make. I can make friends, and I can be happy. I can even see the world if I bust my arse and rustle up enough cash to do so. No, this debilitating mindset of settling only rears its hideous face in the midst of moments or thought patterns that have the power to define our lives. Self-doubt as it is commonly known serves no other purpose than to derail our dreams and see us fall agonisingly short of where we really should be.

For those of you who have been following my web-log for some time now you are probably well aware that there have been times in my life when I’ve settled. There have been moments when publishers or agents have asked me to make minor tweaks to my works in order to make them more marketable or palatable, and in my infinite stupidity I’ve refused. I’ve told myself that I am a singularity (and I still believe that I am a highly unique individual), and that as such I shouldn’t have to change my works to suit the needs of others, no matter how subtle those changes actually are. But what if these poor decisions weren’t me refusing to change who I am? What if in actual fact they were moments of me settling for less than I had the potential to be simply because I was ultimately afraid of what would happen next if I did follow through with something?

It’s an interesting question. And the truth is that there is no real way of knowing what would have happened if I’d been smart enough to follow through with the advice that was offered to me. I could have had a book published by now, or I could have done heeded the advice of others and still failed to secure that elusive contract that I so desperately strive for. But no matter what could have happened, it now never will because I settled instead of reaching for the fucking stars. Because I was weak and I lacked the courage to push just that little bit further in order to achieve I now have to forge a new path forward in this world of manuscripts, agents and publishers.

-I realise that up until this point this post probably sounds a little negative. But I promise you that it’s not. See the thing is that I know I’ve messed up a few potential opportunities in the past. I’ve failed to follow up on rewrites; I’ve abandoned scripts, or burned bridges with publishers and agents. Shit, I even threw away writing altogether for a space in time. But without those mistakes or missed opportunities I wouldn’t be the writer that I am right now. I wouldn’t have the confidence to sit here and acknowledge my weaknesses and faults and I wouldn’t be able to make a conscious effort to learn from them.

Every decision that I make nowadays in regards to my writing I do so with a calculated mindset designed to constantly bring out the very best in me. Take my last post for example: I wrote about my desire to travel half way around the globe to hunt down an opportunity. And I did so because if I didn’t go public with my intentions then I would never have followed through. I would have settled for less than I truly deserved and come July would have still been sitting at home cursing my poor decision making skills for not having the balls to follow through with something again. But instead, I took to the screen and I made my intentions known so that if I pulled out I would have looked like a fool. Two days later my ticket was secured and trip confirmed.

I believe that the quote used to open this post is indeed highly profound and incredibly accurate. The weakness of flesh is indeed it’s acceptance of settling for less than it deserves to be. But you can overcome it. Once you identify a weakness you can turn it into a strength. You can train for it, adapt to accommodate it, and ultimately overcome anything as long as you have the fortitude to keep pushing forward even when you’re no longer sure that you can.

New York, New York

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‘The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.’
-Jordan Belfort.

So there’s this opportunity that has presented itself. It’s a chance for me to actually grow a pair of balls and take my roadshow of misguided tales and prose across the world in the hopes of securing a contract with a publisher or agent. Imagine that: no longer would I be that disgruntled writer sitting at his kitchen table penning his inner most thoughts onto scraps of paper or punching them into a word processor. I’d have made it. I’d be a star…

…Well maybe not a star. But at least I’d finally be taking some serious steps towards my dreams.

This opportunity is the kind that comes along once in a lifetime. An opportunity that would see me sitting face to face with the men and women that could make my dreams come true. I would be afforded the chance to pitch my scripts to them in person; I would be able to field their questions, capture their interests and (hopefully) inspire them to believe in my visions as much as I do. It sounds fantastic. And believe me when I say that I’d do anything for an opportunity like this. There’s just one little problem: that opportunity is in New York City in July of this year. As of right now I’m over 9,600 miles away from where I need to be in roughly five months’ time.

At first this sounds like quite the hurdle. How the fuck does one travel almost ten thousand miles in order to chase his dreams? Well, all I can say is thank God for Orville and Wilbur Wright and their rag tag crew who made their own vivid dreams a reality. I don’t want to sound like a jukebox cranking out tired old clichés, but after taking a few words of inspiration from Mr Belfort above I’m telling myself that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

So rather than do what I would usually do and throw my hands in the air and curse at the world that such an opportunity should arise on the opposite side of the world, I’m trying to take proactive steps to reach out and grab my dreams by the coat tails. My theory is that if I can manage to make that momentous leap and grab the fringes of my dream’s cloak then then I should be able to claw my way forward from there until I’ve got the fucker pinned to the floor.

Right now my novel is undergoing another round of editing. This time I’ve enlisted the help of an editor located in (surprise, surprise) the USA. It seems to make sense to me that if I’m going to take a gamble and try and spruik my wares in the American market then I should get a little insider knowledge from someone already on the scene. While that happens I’m plugging away at my job; busting my arse to ensure that when the time comes I’ve got enough money that I don’t find myself sleeping rough in the streets of New York as I try and hunt down success.

And while all is that is happening I’m still trying to focus as much time and energy on the one thing that keeps me sane in times like these: my writing. I’m still putting pen to paper whenever I can, admittedly I’m currently doing so with a little more direction than usual; which is a small victory in itself. Whether or not I can make this small sliver of an opportunity work remains to be seen. But even if it does fail I’ll know that it wasn’t through lack of trying. For the first time in my writing career I’m prepared to cast aside that bullshit story that I tell myself is stopping me from achieving my goals and give this my all.

Respect

Here’s the thing: Respect isn’t given. It’s earned. It doesn’t grow on a tree and doesn’t come attached to a label or title; it’s received as a reward for your time spent in the trenches of life battling alongside your fellow man. Lately it seems as the whole concept of respect is a recurring issue in my life as I stare down the barrel of the monotonous daily trivialities that we all face. I’ve been called an arsehole and an arrogant prick because I refuse to pay homage to someone or something just because they believe that I should. I once wrote a post where I callously referred to myself as the mother fucking greatest, and I still wholeheartedly believe it, which means I struggle to bow down and respect my peers just because they want me to.

Does that make me an arsehole? Probably. But here’s the thing. I don’t care. If you’ve been following my most recent posts you have probably noticed that my confidence as a writer and as a man took a hit recently. I had an opportunity that I truly deserved snatched away from me at the last possible instant because others perceived my inability to follow the status quo as both threatening and offensive. But I’m not offensive. I’m merely different (or better, if I do say so myself), and often misunderstood.

See my catalysts and compulsions are different from yours, and different from many writers who flood the platforms of social media. How many times do you hear a writer say that they write because they have a story to tell? If you’re like me the answer is probably way to fucking much. We all have stories to tell, but that doesn’t mean that they are all worth hearing. In fact, many of them are a downright waste of time. I write not because I have a story to tell. I write because it quells the demons of my heart and keeps my mind from tearing itself in two. I write because I have a story that needs to be told. I write because somewhere, on some level this fucking world needs me just as much as I need it.

But what does this have to do with respect? Well, a lot. See even though I am different and unique I can still appreciate the artwork and lives of those who truly deserve it. We live in a world where the ignorant believe that they are the centre of the universe and that the rest of us should bow down to them. But that’s a half-truth; a mindset that has been blown drastically out of proportion and manipulated to suit the needs of our own egos. You are indeed a singularity. And you are indeed the centre of your own universe. But if you want to be the centre of mine you need to first earn my respect and my permission to do so because it will never simply be granted to you based on premise or title.

If you’re still managing to follow along with this rather erratic train of thought then you are probably nodding your head right now in agreement. We are all singularities. And we are all the centre of our own immediate worlds. But we are also just peripheral entities in the universes of others. That doesn’t necessarily make us any less important than someone else, it just means that we need to take a little reality check and realise that sometimes respect isn’t going to be granted just because we think it should.

My life is a cacophonous collision of activity, thoughts, relationships, hopes, dreams, fears, and movements that somehow meld into the physical and emotional form that is me. I am one of a kind and I deserve the successes, failures, elations, and disappointments that are afforded me. So if your life, your ideas, or status doesn’t garner my immediate respect then you can either work a little harder to prove your worth, or you can reside to the fact that you will forever remain on the periphery of my existence just as I shall remain on yours.

-AUTHORS NOTE. For the first time in almost a month a feel as though I’m returning to form as a writer and feel as though I am once again hunting down my dreams of becoming a published author with an intensity that has been lacking for some time. The arrogance that makes me who I am has returned and my mind is ablaze with possibilities and plot lines.
I would like to offer a sincere thank you to Cristian Mihai for recently featuring my post Monsters, as well as everyone who has re-blogged my works since then. It’s better late than never, but I sincerely wish all of you a happy new year. May your dreams and aspirations become realities during 2014.

Found Again

Morning Contemplation
It has recently been bought to my attention that I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life following the mantra of concentrating on myself in a fuck who you want me to be type manner that can rub people up the wrong way. I have focused so much energy on being different and being on the outer that I have effectively alienated myself from the very world that I live in, purely for the sake of being an individual. I’ve always actively sort out the path of most resistance and chosen to trek down its treacherous route armed with no survival skills but rather a potty mouth, a chip on my shoulder and a fuck-you attitude that has seen the somewhat difficult path towards success transform into an inhospitable trail of terror and doom.

I’ve undertaken battles with depression, kicking its arse to the curb more than once. I’ve squared off against my demons, my hopes, my fears and my failings more times than I could care to count. But every single time I have told myself that I was doing what I wanted to do, that I was acting in a manner that I was proud of. With willpower you can do anything I’d tell myself. With the stubbornness and intelligence I possess anything should theoretically be possible… But what happens when willpower just isn’t enough? What happens when suddenly all of the ground that you’ve won through those hellacious battles is ripped out from under you like a cheap rug? What happens when that same pride that spurs you towards greatness starts to become the very thing anchoring you to your own failings?

Well, you find yourself where I am right now: back at square one. For all my talk of personal development and growing over the past eighteen months I somehow seem to find myself in a startlingly similar position to where I was back then. I’m still pressed into a corner by all of my failings (which still stand between me and my dreams), and I’m still preparing myself to come out swinging. I honestly thought that I found myself for a while there. For a precious six months or so the world was a glorious place filled with so much potential, but now in the grip of another fucking frustrating bout of writers block I’m starting to think that the world can go fuck itself all over again.

I was lost and I was found through my writing. But recently I’ve shifted my focuses away from what is truly important in my life and I’ve lost sight of all that I could be once more. I’ve become disillusioned and disheartened by rejection and the mundane nuances of everyday life and now I need to be found again.

Right now I have five manuscripts sitting on my desktop in various states of completion that haven’t been touched in almost two months. Five. With the average novel sitting around the sixty thousand word mark I have a rather ambitious end goal of over three hundred thousand words that are currently stuck in my fucking head unable to make that transition from imagination to the page. With those kinds of numbers I should be spending every waking minute pouring my heart out onto my computer screen, but instead I’m walking around in a state of frustrated trance at my own inabilities to find myself within my own thoughts.

So what do I do? How do you find solace in yourself when you’re struggling to reign in the lives of five separate protagonists and their counterparts in addition to your own? What happens when your life as a writer suddenly becomes your life as a mentally exhausted man parading himself as a writer? How do you become found again?
For once, I don’t know…

…That’s right. For the first time in the history of this site I actually don’t know the answers to the very questions that I pose. The self-proclaimed all-knowing mind of Chris Nicholas is actually sitting here pondering over my current predicament without the faintest fucking clue as to how to overcome it. I don’t know how to find myself right now. But I do know this: I am and always will be an individual. I will never fall into line with what others expect of me, and I will never make excuses for myself. I am a writer, a man, a lover and an arsehole all rolled into one. I will always live my life with that chip on my shoulder that says I don’t give fuck about what others think of me. And I truly believe that while I am currently lost within a maze of three hundred thousand words, one day soon my talent and my drive will be found again.