It is easy to overthink a Substack. I was in a meeting with two successful people last year, (a ghoulish time for me, obviously: I sit there in an unironed t-shirt and think about the text I just got about my overdraft and wonder whether it’s time to bite the bullet and actually get a job) and they were saying a lot of successful people mantras and phrases, things like “growth”, and I think one of them has since poisoned my brain: “You only get to launch once.” Black tar. This is good advice for normal people, but I am not that, and so instead that word – once – tickers around my brain causing immense decision fatigue. I have to launch my Substack the right way!, I think, in the shower or on one of those psychotic walks I go on without headphones. It needs to be something! It needs to have form, and reason! It cannot begin until it is perfect!
Yes, yes. All of that, good. But sometimes you just need to do something. Last week, on a combination of erection medicine, GLP-1, and hair loss pills, I spent nine days in Margate writing the next portion of my book. I wrote seven-and-a-half thousand words, barely spoke to anyone for the full stretch, went through a profound quantity of snus and Diet Coke, and think I broke something mentally inside of me in a way that means I am forever changed. Anyway, I also kept notes. Here are some of them. ‘It’s A Start’.
MONDAY (0 WORDS)
To briefly catch you up: I’m writing a novel. I’m writing it in five distinct sections, each taking about four to six weeks of work to get over the line, the kind of work I want to do in concentrated bursts – I never want to be opening a document two months after I started it, with dust between the paragraphs, wondering where I was going with that half-thought – and my friend Felix was going away on holiday so his flat was free, so I figured going to the sea (and crucially, going to a town where I hardly know anyone, and so won’t be distracted by socialising or fun) was a good way to get started ahead of another six-week tranche of writing. A thousand words a day as a goal. If I hit it by 2pm I’m allowed to have a big sandwich and take the afternoon as holiday. You know the deal.
Margate is an interesting place, because it is like they airlifted the 2021 bits of Hackney – a coffee shop with records in it! Quite good pasta! – and then just dropped them on top of a corner shop where a guy who refuses to wear a t-shirt ever is buying a sugar-free Monster with coins. That’s it. The two cultures do not interact with one another at all, and that’s the weird bit: it is old-school, ‘90s, show-your-teeth seaside-a-cana, but also ‘women who dye their hair pink and only wear pink clothes’, punk sobriety, berets. I believe it must be built on leylines, or plague pits, or something sinister pulsing beneath the brown sand of the beach. Still: some good pubs.
I have left some actual work over from the Friday before so I tell myself I’ll do it on the train down, but on a random sleepy Monday for some reason the thing is full-to-bursting, so I stand at a weird angle in the corner by the door and poison my psyche with 90 straight minutes of Reels instead before emerging, creaking and sour with my own sweat, into a dopey seaside breeze. The grass is scorched the colour of straw. The streets skitter with flattened plastic pint cups. The cheerful coin-dropping ding-ding-ding of the seaside. Men crossing roads at very erratic angles. They don’t always pick up their dog shit here. I am not going to leave the same man.
My evening is sleepy: I go to the pub and read 30 pages of my book (Hard Rain Falling), which I think is about the perfect number of pages of book to read of an evening. It lasts three pints and one packet of Nobby’s sweet chilli-coated peanuts. The sun sets from the bleached sear of the day to an inky, lazy nightfall, and the air temperature falls about one degree, and as I’m leaving I get hooked into a conversation with what I think is an enjoyably pretentious old British lush – he is wearing a loosely button tuxedo shirt with a straw hat and two cross-body bags, and sounds like the voice they invented the radio around – but it actually turns out he’s phenomenally tedious because his brain is so pickled by years of alcohol and he has a lot of thoughts he wants to express about writing and the fact that I am a writer and art and my book but he also has fucking no idea what he’s on about and can barely string a sentence from one concept to the next (a ghoulish vision from my future? Dad?). I drink a half-pint while watching him summon about 90 seconds’ worth of thought over the course of 25 endless minutes then make my excuses and leave. Dinner is a third of a weed edible, homemade fajitas which I make while slightly stoned and so seemingly just appear on my plate in front of me as if I did a spell, and Bad Boys on ITVX, which much as we pretend it is is not really very good. Martin Lawrence and Will Smith need to be in the same scene together or it doesn’t work. I hope this is amended with Bad Boys 2. Also: how preposterous, now, the idea of Will Smith as a cool, rail-thin, Miami-based megashagger? It’s underestimated how profound his aura drop-off has been from The Fresh Prince to the cucked-in-public Chris Rock slap.
I sleep for ten hours without moving.
TUESDAY (1,077 WORDS)
You’re still thinking about the erection medicine. We’ll get there. It is Tuesday morning and I am genuinely excited to write. This is a rare feeling, I find, in the process: the blank endless document like an open road, the distant spark of an idea at the back of your brain and a shape of where it might go in the middle but, truly, no idea of what form it will come out in when you finally drag it through your fingers. A short story can squirm in a lot of directions over the course of a thousand words. Thrilling!
There is limescale in the toilet, though. Man must find distractions and hobbies to displace the urge to kill, and mine recently has been limescale in toilets. It just bothers me. The flat I just moved into had deposits of it, a beige-brown all-encompassing scum, that I blasted away over the course of a couple of weeks. I attacked it with those genuinely quite dangerous tablets you leave in the bowl overnight that scour away perfect circles of the stuff like the terraforming in Worms. It’s not shit, by the way. It’s not shit. It’s limescale. You need to finish it off with a special limescale bleach. I go to the toilet and notice the rind, there, and decide I have to do something about it. The document blinks blank. I have spent three hours trying to find the right ambient music. I am so excited to write. I walk to two corner shops (topless men: three) to get the right swan-necked Harpic. The toilet shimmers lurid and blue. It’s 2 p.m. and I’ve done nothing.
I am lucky, I suppose, that I am a frighteningly fast worker when I get going. Getting going is the hard part. The brain needs to be slowly turned like a safe-lock into the exact right coordinates – the right drinks in front of me, the right incense lit, the right amount of calm, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, and then, when I’m done listening to Green, maybe Surround. Maybe Green again. I bleach the toilet for a second time. I write 1,077 words in 20 minutes flat and go outside for an ice cream. The dog I am dogsitting comes with me but keeps dragging me into shops I don’t want to go in where she knows she’ll get fussed and cooed over by the baristas. I can’t find a bin for ages so carry a small green bag of dog shit for a mile-and-a-half. I run into a friend I have absolutely not prepared any smalltalk for. “Sorry,” I croak. “I— sorry. I haven’t actually spoken to anyone today. Sorry.” I have the nervous insane air of someone who woke up in a straitjacket before making an escape. “Sorry.” Pumpkin seed waffle cone from Angela’s.
That night I drink three pints of beer and go bowling on my own. I am aware: I am aware. I am: I am aware. I am aware, of this. The optics. The lanes are broadly empty but for some reason I am placed next to a dad with his three children doing much more normal bowling. I sprint through three games then go up for three more. I have another beer. I get three strikes in a row. I think I’ve refined my technique. You do not refine your technique, at Rowan’s, when it’s midnight and you’re blasted and you keep taking slurps of slushie in between throws. You refine your technique on your own, on a Tuesday, bowling only against yourself. The first pin you knock over is the one in your head. The children on the lane next to me all seem nervous. I know I’m not a sex offender, right? I know that about myself. But I do sort of feel, somehow, like a sex offender. I go up for five more games. The woman refuses to sell me five more games. “We close at 8,” she says. It is quarter to eight.
I could bowl three more games in fifteen minutes, I think. But does a man bowling on his own want to argue with a teenager in a polo shirt to play three more games of bowling? Does he want to plead his case? To bowl? He does not. He walks home. He orders a pizza. He looks at his phone so much that the sun sets and the room falls gloomy around him.
I am not a sex offender.
WEDNESDAY (1,037 WORDS)
My penis works in a normal way, by the way. Wake up and instantly put more bleach in the toilet. Getting there. It is searingly, dangerously scorching today – I keep looking out at the grass, dry like scrub, and thinking, is it normal that I’ve forgotten what rain smells like? – so I stay inside for ten straight hours until it cools. This is the time to get the work done. You put yourself in the cage.
Today’s snus is: a six-dot deeply lethal menthol-mint arrangement that I am slightly afraid of. A year ago I started experimenting with nicotine gum, because I half-skimmed a forum thread about ‘biohacking’ and decided that nicotine is good for your brain – it really perks you up! The crackle! – but cigarettes are obviously quite a doom-y way of delivering it into your system. The gum is good – I used to chew it on the way to the pub when I felt I needed a sort of ‘charisma bump’ – but then I graduated to snus, because once I got over the hump (I took a four-dot snus a friend had bought back from Scandinavia, got so pale and sweaty I thought I was going to die, then went and projectile vomited, twice, in the disabled toilet at the Army & Navy – the most embarrassing reason anyone has ever vomited in the Army & Navy? – but I was wearing pure-white trousers while I was doing it, so I sort of had to stand quite far away from the toilet and dip my head towards it like one of those desk toys of a bird sipping water, a remarkable vomiting technique that, inexplicably, got all the vomit into the toilet – which was devoid of limescale, before you ask – and none of it on my trousers, A Miracle From God) I have found it very effective as a work tool. A Diet Coke and a small pouch of nicotine and Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting and 25 minutes later you have a thousand words.
Mm, or: you get hyperfixated on Brian Eno, and start Googling ‘brian eno interview’, and read all of Eno’s Wikipedia page, Eno Eno Eno. The excuse you can tell yourself when you are writing a novel is: everything is inspiration. Because, to an extent, it is. You find your brain shifts into this very plastic form, where half-ideas or forms from other things or sounds or smells or people in the street or pub anecdotes suddenly become profoundly inspiring, and everything is pushed into a big note on your phone, and then you have a bout of weed-edible-weird vivid sleep and all of that stuff gets tossed around in the washing machine and then you wake up and you’ve got more thread to weave your fabric with. I read this mad Chrissy Hynde interview with Eno in the ‘70s where he is really obsessed with niche pornography and I go: oh, that’s good. I watch an interview with a basketball player where he details his Chipotle order, and scribble it into my notes. Is that good? You never really know. The eternal question: is something inspiring or did you just see it today?
I can’t get comfortable all day. I lie on the floor and try and make up some back stretches. The sun still sears the sky. Yesterday was a thrill and today is a chore. But limping to a thousand words is just as good as sprinting it. I have genuinely forgotten what I did with my evening.
THURSDAY (950 WORDS)
More bleach. Get distracted by three real-world e-mails and lose a morning to them. I have been struggling to connect to the sound system that is hooked up via Bluetooth to the TV, but today I finally crack it, and the new E*VAX album sings like a hymn around me. This, obviously, activates the part of the male brain that goes: I really should have a complicated vinyl stereo system at home. I could wall-mount the speakers, I think. Get a little dongle and then I can connect with my laptop, too. It’s mainly about the amp. Look on eBay at Marantz PM4001s until I realise its well past noon. One of the e-mails has been really quickly replied to. Agonising.
I zip out 950 words in a perfect flurry then shut my laptop lid and go for a beer and a sandwich and a read. That’s daddy’s treat. Someone in Margate has written ‘JESUS SAVES’ a lot on the pavements and the walls and I see like five of them on the short walk there.. They are writing it in chalk, large, and without rain to blast it away it is everywhere. I sort of respect the compulsion, but it does get a bit tiresome to read. ‘JESUS SAVES’. We get it. ‘JESUS SAVES’. Yeah, I know. Someone, in a slightly off-colour chalk and in smaller script, has amended a singular ‘JESUS SAVES’ to read ‘JESUS SAVES NONCES’. I think about them doing it. They’ve got bored of the ‘JESUS SAVES’, as well all have. They’ve hit their damn limit. They’ve gone home to go and find some chalk. They only found a thin bar of the school stuff in off-pink, but it’ll do. They find a ‘JESUS SAVES’. What can they put on the end of that, to make it better? Nuanced, an attack. Think. ‘NONCES’. Walk home with chalk on their fingers. Was that worth it? Was it good?
The dog sits on my lap at the pub for about a second, maybe a second and a half, before pining for the attention of other people. A woman in a cowboy hat but no further cowboy accessories catches her eye. I have headphones in and my book open in front of her but she comes and talks to me about the dog anyway. She asks the dog’s age, and breed, and tells me that the dog is very sweet, and that the dog loves me. This is what happens when you go to the pub with a dog. Dog people come up to you and talk about and to the dog and you have to endure it. But then she says two very fascinating words: “my crows”.
“What? Your crows?”
“My crows. I feed crows.”
“You feed crows? What?”
“Leftover cat food.”
She moved to a new estate devoid of wildlife and found this reality chilling, so every morning she went outside and let cat food until she had ushered in a small clutch of crows. And now the crows come every morning and squawk until they get cat food. “The problem now is the gulls,” she says, gravely, as if she hasn’t completely engineered this situation entirely. “You have to feed the crows quickly before the gulls come.” I think about her neighbours. They moved to a quiet estate and now a woman in a cowboy hat is haunting them with crows. There is no reason for this. There is no reason for this.
I was really comfortably set up here but I make up a thin excuse and leave. My crows. This is the first person I have truly interacted with in two days. My crows.
FRIDAY (536 WORDS)
Limescale all gone now and I feel enormous. The same biohacking forum that got me hooked on nicotine have got me on the erection pills, alright? You are meant to take a small erection pill a day and it is good for your entire vascular system, although there is not really much medical journal science to back this up. It’s for your heart health it’s not for your dick health. The dick is a side effect of the heart. Day 1 of erection pills I was slightly afraid I’d just get erections all day. But: normal amount. That’s the erection pill thing. Anyway five years ago I bought a pair of Birkenstocks and kept them holy inside the house – they had never touched the ground outside! – but in Margate I have somehow told myself rules don’t exist and they are all I shuffle around in. I sadly do fear this is a whole new epoch for me: Birkenstock Guy. They are so easy to slip on for little chores. They kind of look cool with everything. Is this giving up, or is this living? You must constantly ask yourself questions.
I find some holy peace in the middle of the day and carve out 536 words while the washing machine hums behind me. The number isn’t very good but I like all of them, so sometimes that’s the balance you hit. I tell myself I’ll nudge it up to a thousand after lunch but, you know what? I don’t. I just don’t. I go to a pub that sells big bags of Monster Munch and settle in there.
All I have to show for today is half a page of text and an ordinary number of erections.
WEEKEND
The weekend is my own business but I do accidentally take [redacted].
MONDAY (1,158 WORDS)
I find a clutch of Elvanse that I bought on Instagram a year ago so treat myself to half a capsule of that. I have a technique, don’t worry about it. I have a theory that Elvanse and other prescription drugs are more alluring if you’ve somehow obtained them from somebody else instead of being prescribed them officially by a doctor – just feels naughtier, illicit, more fun – but I do make a note to actually get a diagnosis from a doctor. I know everyone has it now because they look at phone too much but I did have a Zoom with an ADHD charity last year where they tried to diagnose me and I got slightly distracted by the sound of a motorbike going past mid-interview and she stopped the interview and wrote a note about that for ages and ages and ages. So. We fear we might be ill.
Floating Points Crush and look-at-the-document paralysis until 3 p.m., and obviously I start to think about the nature of writing. I do tend to write in a fairly ‘straight line’. The last three sections have come out very cleanly, little anecdotes and half-stories and thousand-word stretches I am as surprised to see coming out on the page as anyone, sort of auto-writing that does itself and figures itself out. But this section needs a structure and a shape and I worry I might have written myself into a corner with it. I am, still, being inspired by everything: every short story I read to warm up in the morning, every book (I have finished Hard Rain Falling – masterful, gorgeous! – and started All That Man Is, which is very good but in a different way), and, as deeply in ‘writing mode’ as I am, I find my brain whirring and offering solutions to the problems at odd hours when I am not at my desk. I go outside to pick up dog shit without my phone in and get dragged along the beach for a fairly endless 45 minutes and something kerplunks into place, and there it is: back at the desk, 25-minute timer, enough nicotine to enliven a horse and a pure, clean, 1,158 words in one go. I am always annoyed when those techniques work. I feel like I’ve done something a bit too ‘productivity YouTuber-coded’. But, come on. One one five eight. You can’t argue with that! You can’t argue with that, on a Monday!
As a treat I sit and tinker with Fantasy Football for a while but my team doesn’t save so I’ve just spent an hour thinking about 6.0m midfielders for no reason. 6 p.m. and I check my bank account and have Panic so I sit back at my desk and write a one-pager faster than I’ve ever written anything in my life. Two hours later I stare out of my window at the sea and fear I am in the exact middle of my life and not really done anything with it. Plain pasta for dinner with cheese.
TUESDAY (1,157 WORDS, WHICH YES, WEIRDLY IS ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME AS YESTERDAY)
Elvanse, banana-flavoured protein shake, a fairly distracting dog-led hour-long walk on the beach which mainly involves me bending over to try and catch her and her sprinting away, try and find an interesting rock as a memento of the week but all the rocks out here are chalky and wan and, I fear, quietly actually just petrified dog shit. I’m firing today. I read Thursday’s words and they are only OK. This is fine. Sometimes you have to just write a section to purge it. It’s ‘character work’ if you write something and don’t show anyone it. You know it’s there. On the beach the tendrils of the story weave themselves together away from the desk and when I sit down to type it I get 839 words in and my timer goes off and I just keep going and going and going. There are red beetles in the grass here in Margate, the kind I have never seen before. I have been wearing DS & Durga ‘Jazmin Yucatan’ all week and know I will come back here every time I smell it again. I think the hair pills are making my beard come in stronger. I’ve been told I “look good” four different times this week which is just code people use for “the Mounjaro is working”. I don’t want to bore my friends by texting them the true nature of my thinking.. The wind is cooler today. I try and broadly fail to roll a cigarette. I must, must, must get back to London.
It’s a start. It’s a start.
This is so good I stopped minding that your Substack is called ‘ME THANKY’
It is wonderful to read your words again! Long time fan, first time comment. Good stuff lovely man.