An Update
There were times when I would hear them.
It would be three in the morning, or some other hour. There were plenty of hours to choose from. It would be dark, whether I was in my office and lying on the couch, or in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, or in the empty and silent living room sitting on the floor. Sometimes even in bed. It would always be dark, and sometimes I would hear them.
More often than not, it would be her.
As for a great many people, the pandemic was brutal on my mental health. Not because I previously went out a lot, or needed to see people in person; not at all. But because of the ambient anxiety and uncertainty, about the future and about how the virus might affect me and my loved ones. And because my wife was pregnant. Our twelve-week scan was right around when lockdown started.
Lots of hospital appointments where I had to wait outside in the car, and she had to go in by herself wearing a mask, before we had any vaccines. The trauma of the birth. Then the really bad part began.
I have an… well, an incompatibility with happiness. My normal state is a sort of introspective pessimism, and my common state is a pervasive sort of sadness; sometimes numbing, and sometimes infuriating. It’s a defect. I’m a damaged vessel at the best of times. And the last three years have been pretty damned awful.
I’ve been involved with mental health services, and I’ve had therapy, and I’ve struggled. I’ve struggled a lot. It’s been the worst time I can remember. Let me tell you, without exaggeration, I have suffered. There were times when I was seriously considering the possibility that the whole thing was designed to torment me; that the religious people were right, and I’d already gone down to the bad place.
Parenthood of an infant did not agree with me, at all. It was agonising. I will never do it again. Parenthood of a toddler, though, is a different story; it’s actually pretty wonderful. Yes, it’s annoying at times, and stressful at times, and there’s a lot of stupid busywork, but there are real rewards too. My son has known nothing but love and safety and encouragement since the day and hour he was born, and at age three he’s become — really — the most endlessly fascinating, most amazing, coolest person I have ever known. And I know that’s my DNA talking, and that’s just how fathers feel. But I can’t tell you how glad I am that I do feel that way. It’s the biggest relief of my life, because for a while I thought I might be broken in a way that would lead to me inevitably failing him.
It was a very long road to get to this point, and I know there are decades more ahead. In the deepest, darkest parts of it all, in the intermittent, exhausted silences, I would sometimes hear them. It wasn’t the same one each time, but whoever it happened to be, I felt I’d let them down too.
My most recent novel came out last year, but that fact masks the underlying truth that it’s been almost five years now since the previous instalment in the KESTREL series. That wasn’t what I wanted. Every day, it wasn’t what I wanted.
Being entirely honest, Middleshade Road and its dark themes was a book that burst out of the middle of my attempt to write the third KESTREL book, demanding that it come out first, like a suppressed scream that couldn’t stay inside any longer. It’s an open secret that there’s more truth within Middleshade’s protagonist’s background than you’d probably be comfortable knowing explicitly. I think every author has some books like that. And they suffer for it, but there’s nothing else to do. Some things have to be written.
KESTREL fell by the wayside, and when it came time to take that series back up again, there was a mountain to climb in terms of getting myself to the place where I could write a pacey, technical thriller with an established ensemble cast, fitting into a larger series framework. So this last year, while easier personally, has been less than kind at times.
I don’t believe that an author necessarily owes their readers anything beyond the books themselves, but I also know that one of the core tensions of art is feeling that you’re letting people down. And I’ve spent so many hours feeling that I’ve let people down.
It’s little wonder, then, that sometimes I’d hear them talking to me about it.
The main thing you learn with parenting, and with mental health struggles, and with life in general I suppose, is coping strategies. Triage. Hyper-focus on the present moment, and what you can do to advance the scenario. The pursuit of ideal circumstances becomes a lost luxury, and a remnant of the past. All you can do is whatever you can manage to do within the window of opportunity you’re allowed. Babies need to be clean, fed, rested, and to feel comfortable. The rest of us aren’t so different.
After a certain point, you get tired of resentment, and you get tired of woe, and you get tired of what-ifs. Not because of the energy required, and not even because of the negative emotions themselves, but actually because those things are static. You come back to them hour after hour, day after week, month after year, like Groundhog Day. Eventually, however long it takes, you wake up one morning and you decide to just make some progress, even if it’s not according to the old plan.
The funny thing was that I stopped hearing them for a while, and I worried about that too.
I worried that it meant I’d surrendered in some way. But when I decided to stop waiting and blaming external factors, I started hearing them again, like turning on a light.
Major life changes tend to involve sudden losses (or substitutions), and then a long, slow, gradual climb back up — and often not to the same place you used to be. When you add a sense of shame, or failure, or some other nasty feelings into the mix, an already challenging process can feel insurmountable. The big picture, previously a source of inspiration, becomes too big, and impossibly far away. The only real way forward is to reassess, acknowledge the truth, and come up with a new plan.
It’s strange how often you come to realise that you were going about things the wrong way from the beginning.
Lately, I’ve been snatching at things more. I was always terrible at it, instead needing a place and a time, and notional readiness. The opposite of the good advice, about anything at all. But if you struggle for long enough, and come out the other end to talk about it, you’re forced to realise that there’s only really now. Nothing else truly exists, and that’s definitely the case for doing the thing you really want to be doing. If not now, when?
When their voices started coming back, so too did awareness of how long I’d been waiting, too. I don’t want to be a writer; I want to be a novelist. And there’s only one requirement for that role. I don’t want to relive the past few years, either, but I do wish I had them to do over.
The third instalment in the KESTREL series, JINX, isn’t quite ready for you yet, but I’ve broken the back of it and it’s come a long way. For quite some time, I didn’t think I’d see this point at all.
I feel very, very good about it, and I think that fans of the series are going to really enjoy it. Those aren’t words that authors tend to use, by the way. They’re more like marketing words, but in this case they’re actually true. As I read it while I work on it, I very much like what I have. I like it in the way that I like TOLL, and how — I think — it really found its form, and was a book that can be read as a fun romp, but can also be read as something with a message, and also as something that has levels beyond the bare tale.
I’m sorry you’ve been waiting so long. Some parts of ourselves aren’t our fault, and some parts of our lives aren’t our fault, but ultimately I’m responsible for my work. More people than I would have hoped or believed have read those two books, and I like to think that a decent percentage of them were at least at some time waiting for another one. There is another one coming.
KESTREL will return, says the afterword in both of those titles, and dear reader, that is absolutely true.
Addendum: Two months after this article was published, JINX was released.