The Battlefield of The Mind
I got on a big podcast and said big, weird things about books.
(This one contains a bit of my comedy, which means it’s NSFW)
There’s also a free Horror writing prompt book at the bottom. I wrote it.
You know me: If I’m left alone for too long I vanish and start doing what my nerdier friends call ‘side quests’. I don’t have a solid job (though I am looking) and that gives me a lot more free time than my peers. You’re seeing the benefit of that here, primarily that I can write more stories faster.
In fact, I currently have 149 drafts on Substack… I reckon only about 10% will become published posts, but that’s just how I work. My formula is pretty simple.
Have idea
Write about it
Maybe go outside and share it (in comedy, radio, or with a friend)
Refine idea
Decide if it’s good enough to publish
Return to step 1
But not all my excursions are ‘side quests’. Some of them are big, lumbering hyperobjects in the worldline of my life. Some of them are game-changing. Some of them surprise me and make me realise something about myself as an artist, as a person.
Some of them get spicy.
This was one of them.
Rick Yee’s THE BATTLEFIELD OF THE MIND is a piercing, funny, and unforgiving look into the world of anyone he interviews. Doctors, writers, comedians, sentient bipedal mushrooms pretending to be people, we’ve all had weird journeys to where we are, and Rick helps people explore those journeys in a way which is both informative and entertaining.
He’s also a decent guy.
I talked with Rick for just over two hours about:
Beards
Winning a staring contest with a lunatic on the night bus
Comedians being cancelled
Poetry
Science Fiction, and how it shares some of its terrain with comedy
Purity culture
Gender identity, Bowie, and self expression
Where I’m going as a writer
Where I think writing is going, culturally
How we can coexist with each other, even if we disagree
Dogging
If you don’t know what that last one is, neither did Rick, and I had to explain it to him in a level of detail that was probably not appropriate.
The recording is due to go live this coming Wednesday, but if you’re reading it beforehand, congratulations! You just broke time.
You can listen to it early.
And what better way to celebrate a two-hour venture into the dark depths of the human mind than a writing prompt book all about horror? (It’s free today).
I wrote 52 Weeks of Horror back in 2021 to tackle several issues I had identified at writing festivals, workshops, and in writing prompt books. These were problems I first noticed way back in 2016, during my Creative Writing Masters Degree, but which hadn’t yet been resolved. Here’s a handful of them
Prompts were formulaic and uninspiring
Classes were not always accessible to the people who needed them
Prompts were single-use
The books were too short
Writing was turned into a chore
I solved these issues by creating what I call a handheld classroom. The 52WeeksOf series of books is not merely a collection of lists of ideas for stories (that’s never inspiring, is it?), it’s a collection of ideas and ideas about how to twist those ideas with your own ideas.
It’s a stimulant for the mind.
I’ve based the concept of the tasks inside the books off several ideas I had about writing whilst running my own Creative Writing seminars at Edge Hill Uni, where I founded and chaired the Writer’s and Poetics society. At the time, we were the uni’s only academic social.
This meant we didn’t go straight to the local cocktail bar every week, we sat in a classroom and wrote jokes.
Then we went to the cocktail bar.
It was great. I voluntarily did 9am to 9pm days just to squeeze in as much weirdness from my classes as possible, aligning the society with my busiest study day so I could push my brain way past what should be its limit.
Thank you Monster energy drinks (who do not sponsor me, but should).
Anyway, back to 52WOH
You don’t just get a concept for a story each week. You get a concept and a reflective task that is designed to trip you up and to rewire how you see storytelling. It reshapes fiction into a tangible shape in your mind, allowing you to better see the structure of each idea and how you created it.
And right now it should be 100% free on Amazon Kindle.
I want to thank my Patrons and Paid Substackerers here for keeping this thing going. I’m setting up some cool stuff lately, and you’ll see it soon.