A[r]tism - A weird poem

+ Short story cover reveal + news about future projects

Feb 07, 2025

Hello, it’s been a while.

You may have noticed Free Fiction Friday hasn’t had any posts for a while either. That’s because with my new job I am often very tired at the end of the day, with little time to put into posting. I will go part time soon, but for now I am pretty much tired all the time. Unfortunately this hasn’t just removed me from the open mic comedy scene, it has also dampened my WHO KILLED THE HUMANS adverts… the book comes out in less than a month and I’ve not had the time to book and promo for it!

Anyway. I wanted to share this poem with you because it is about that very same limitation of timelines which I feel now, again, as I did in 2015 when I wrote this. Back then I felt deadlines were getting on top of me, unaware of how much free time I really had. It was a glorious time and I think, in this poem, I realised that.

I miss those times, and I hope brighter times are ahead.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

A[r]tism

I had to climb all the way to higher education before
realising poetry was a spectrum disorder
and my colours taste different to yours since
I’m a synaesthesioid and  
I was locked in the prism for four million years before
finally emerging as a string of code in paisley print so
madly in love with the universe yet
crippled by human relationships and
seen to be misbehaving when
actually plotting my plan for [something]

the notes in the margins
reveal more than the page
it’s all just Lego to me
[I’m agenda neutral]
language is just something to take apart

you know, it’s pronounced a[r]tism if you say it right

I stand only in the shadows of my future selves and
whatever forms they may take so
here I’m getting ready to submit my final rapport
though I don’t know if I have the class

here I’m tu[r]ning to a distant wavelength
splitting down the tributaries
of unrealised probability
it all goes [somewhere] from here

END

I have missed Substack…

I am hoping this becomes my day job at some point (in combination with the Minecraft, the comedy, and the comedy shirt store) so any and all friends you can invite would help a lot. My podcast will come back soon as well.

Preamble Postamble

Am I the first spoken word poet to put the sob story AFTER the poem?

So. I’ve paused my standup appearances, even after making new connections and getting invited to new, better gigs, because I simply cannot balance everything any more. I dropped my Minecraft streams as well, though my older videos are still viral, and I am confident that new venture will become my full-time job sometime. It’s a way of storytelling where I can blend the comedy and the scriptwriting and the worldbuilding I love so much, into one solid product, a video, or a stream.

I went off sick with stress for four weeks near the end of 2024. I know I got a lot of writing done, and my chest pain went away. I have that same pain now, but I know if I were to work less, I’d have a lot less money, and I need the money for the big Halfplanet projects. I’ve also had to cancel (reschedule) my audiobook recordings for two books. I can only afford these because of my job, but it’s the job which prevents me from having the time to do them. Funny how that works. Anyway, I prioritised my writing above these things because I’ve been doing the final edits to Who Killed The Humans? I get up, do the work, have a nap, wake up again, edit my book, go back to bed.

It’s a good book as well. I am proud of it. I think you’ll like it.

Who Killed The Humans?

Trying to get to 20 pre-orders this week. I’ve been at 19 for a while.

It’s busy times like these that I miss university. Back there in 2015 I was infinite, a mass of glowing white temporal strings that jutted every which way (possibly a new poem here). I refused to be compressed. When told I was a brilliant comedian by an audience member at a poetry reading, I said thank you, but privately freaked out that I might now never collapse like a false vacuum into another energy state; the author. I was multifaceted like Mr Benn, but like Mr Benn I had a new cosmos for each outfit.

My childhood rolemodels were Mr.Benn and David Bowie. Of course I turned out like this.

Bonus news

Writing workshops?

I wanted to thank Kyle Wilson and Charlie Lord for supporting me on Patreon as well. I just got $1.69 in the bank from Patreon, which is going into a new fund for future Halfplanet Press projects, including WrittenByHumans.

What’s WrittenByHumans, you ask?

Another post. Another time.

Patreon is where I offer paid content to my subscribers. Rather than doing it through substack and Stripe, which works fine but isn’t very dynamic, I moved to Patreon because it comes with automated discord integration.

Discord is an online chat room sort of thing. I run a server there, and it contains science fiction authors, poets, and comedians who all work together to create books. Books such as THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION and MACABRE MULTIVERSE only happened because of that server.

It also contains paid writing workshops. If anyone here has known me long enough, you’ll know that in 2015 I was not only an award-winning poet (£500 Excellence in Creative Arts prize) but a formidable academic force, compared with the other socials at my uni anyway. I set up the Writer’s and Poetic society, which briefly was the uni’s only academic society. We had visiting writers, field trips, and a curriculum I wrote myself whilst studying for my BA and later my Masters degree. I went on to be a judge at the Edinburgh Lit Festival, and drank a lot of wine on a chair shaped like a giant tooth.

People liked the society enough that it kept going when I left after my masters (in Creative Writing), so I gave ownership to someone who turned up on day one, Qachina, and she made a great job of it. I think she reads this newsletter. Hello Qachina!

Since then, people have wanted it to come back. But life happened.

Life has now calmed down, a bit, and I have brought it back.

I have about 80,000 words worth of notes, as well as my old presentations, from that society. Stuff about worldbuilding, the shape of stories, that sort of thing. I’ll also be using my creative writing workbooks, 52 weeks of horror, and 52 weeks of science fiction, to enhance the classes.

It’s going to be fun. Once I’ve upgraded the discord I will send an invite to anyone interested. There are free chatrooms where you can talk to authors and readers alike, but the workshops themselves will be in private channels, both at set times and as more temporally accessible things, so anyone can join them as and when it suits them. Different tiers on the patreon will contain other goodies too, such as getting your name mentioned in my Minecraft world, and in the credits to posts such as this. I am bringing all my creative stuff together this year, no longer playing along as multitudes of characters but as one solid entity. Because to me, the Minecraft videos contain jokes, the comedy contains poetry, the poetry is science fictional, and the science fiction is funny and poetic.

It is all part of the same journey.

And hopefully, with my experience, I can help some of you polish stories.

Sound fun?

The end.

That was a pretty big post for someone who really should be asleep.

I will return with stories soon.

This one will be in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? but released as a standalone as well, because I love it, and want it to have more chances to be seen.