1. Antibiotics affect my mood. I’m always on a bit of a down for a couple of weeks after taking them.
2. I am also in that dangerous middle section of a novel when the going gets really tough.
3. Consequently I am feeling like I am the worst writer, like… evaaaar!
4. As a result, I’m just writing and worrying about whether scenes work or not once I feel a bit brighter.
5. I have passed 50k on book 2.
6. Interviewers can make a note to ask me about the mess at 35k that needed unravelling and resulted in a load of re-writing.
7. I strongly believe there is an upper limit to pain.
8. I believe there are two types of pain – a low throb and a sharp spike.
9. I believe I have an incredibly high tolerance for throbbing pain and virtually none for the spikey pain.
10. If I knock my bad leg in purely adult company (i.e. no kids), I really don’t give a shit about your opinions on swearing.
11. I have the cholesterol level of an athelete.
12. According to the various apps I’m using to track my rehabilitation, if I ‘restrict’ myself to 2600 calories a day I will lose 2lb a week. I could eat a massive family size chocolate bar each day (possibly two) and still not hit that much. I.e. my metabolism is fucked (as tests are starting to prove).
13. I believe this country’s obsession with demonising obesity is stopping people with serious metabolic issues from being diagnosed (i.e Thyroid, circulation, etc).
14. I have missed walking more than you could believe.
15. Hobbling around the block currently wipes me out.
16. Walking currently feels like a gremlin is clinging to my leg stabbing me with a knife with every step. This is better than it was.
17. Being housebound these last few weeks has made me very, very cranky.
18. When I am treated like an idiot or ignored by someone I usually let it just wash over me.
19. My tolerance of aforementioned people is at an all-time low.
20. However, I will not let aforementioned people change me from being a nice, fun, open person at heart.
21. Being grumpy is not a character flaw, it is a privilege of age.
22. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you’re fucked.
23. I can judge how well / focused I am by the number of full stops I omit from the end of paragraphs.

A lesson, if you like, in how one shouldn’t try and predict their writing career

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I have to go and get the nurse to change the dressing twice a week. There’s a few things under the plaster to aid the wound and draw out the infection but it’s a 10 minute pit stop. Things have been going well and the hole has shrunk right down as the swelling and infection reduced.

The Doctor’s surgery has been fantastic and I cannot praise them enough. But one things has become clear is that my old Doctor’s surgery missed many easy to do tests. Maybe it’s a question of equipment, time or training but here I find that the nurses want to fuss (in a good way) over me and check a few things out to pass back to my doctor. Perhaps I’m a willing guinea pig but after spending years trying to get people to take my health issues seriously, this feels refreshing.

One such test was to look at my circulation and involved taking the blood pressure of my leg. I’m sure, even if you’ve never had your blood pressure taken, you’ll have seen the cuff that gets wrapped round someone’s arm and then pumped up. Think how painful that is on a leg with a massive open wound.

I think that’s where the latest problems started. It hurt for a couple of days after that and as we got into the weekend, started to weep. Typically, the wound had been healing so well that they decided I only needed to come in once a week now, and I was trying to see whether I could hold on until Thursday.

I’m doing a lot of working from home on the day job recently… mainly because if I go into the customer office, I can’t put my foot up, but also because the discharge can be quite potent. I was chatting to a work colleague over the phone about some issue and then went to move my foot. I couldn’t move my toes. I looked and my foot and leg had swollen to twice the normal size. I felt like Dr Kananga from the James Bond movie, Live and Let Die. Thinking of the fountain that would result if this one burst, I hastily arranged an appointment with the doctor for that afternoon. In the meantime, my leg began to ‘sweat’, liquid pouring out of my leg. By the time of my Doctor’s appointment it had gone down a lot, but was still ‘sweating’ so I’m not going mad as the nurse confirmed that was what it was doing.

She bandaged me from toe to knee this time. I again got commended for doing the right thing at the right time (yay me) and am back on the antibiotics.

It sucks, my leg hurts like buggery and there are other complications, but it looks like they’re taking my health issues seriously where for years I’ve felt I was saying there was a problem and I was just told I was overweight and ignored. Plus I get to gross out some people talking about some of the decaying flesh form the initial explosion (yes, I am officially a zombie!).

I’m in relatively good spirits (although I do sometimes get angry that some things didn’t get discovered years ago) and just hope that we can get things diagnosed and sorted.

For someone who has pretty much cleared their slate to finish writing the book, I seemed to be overwhelmed with things to do. The last book took 13 years to write. Trying to do the next one in a year is proving a real challenge, and hence the massive push. All part of learning and growing as a writer.

But that said, I’m having fun writing. I sit there, making things up, telling myself that I am probably the only person in the world who will like this book and that it doesn’t matter. I’m not even going to worry that this one feels more swords and sorcery than urban fantasy. It’s cross-genre, and this has always been the plan.

But still I worry whether the book is correctly paced. I did a lot of work on the last book to ensure that Darwin’s and Maureen’s stories’ highs and lows balanced each other out. This one has a natural break a little way in. I may divide it into sections, I’m not sure yet.

As you might expect, there are some new characters in this book, one of which was craftily name-dropped in the first book. What? You thought the first book wasn’t littered with clues? At least you get some answers in this book. You’ll get to find out what the elves are up to! Although sorry to those of you who want to know a lot more about Cassidy as you’ll need to wait until book 3. Watch carefully though, there are plenty of hidden things in book 2.

And of course, whilst I write this the book beard continues to grow. My friends joke that given the length of time it took to write the first book my book beard will look like this image before I’m finished. Thanks, Mark!

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The big trouble with anxiety attacks (at least for me. I can only speak for myself, I don’t claim to be an expert) is that unlike a full blown panic attack that stops you doing anything, anxiety attacks rumble away in the background. I can write with an attack, but I’m not as productive. The big problem is sleep. I can’t sleep when I’ve got an anxiety attack and as a result, last night I never got to bed until 3am.

They’re usually over something trivial. In fact, that’s how I differentiate between anxiety and genuine worry or stress. Money is always a good one although it was the fact that I used to get anxiety over money when I was doing OK that helped highlight them for me. But they can be over anything (somebody forgetting something, something going wrong, something that has the slimmest chance of happening) – worrying for worrying’s sake, so to speak.

I find antibiotics always leave me feeling a little flat and a friend once explained it as that “they kill the good bacteria as well as the bad”. I’m not sure how medically sound that is, but it kinda makes sense. I also have heightened anxiety. So when I went on a major dose for the leg, I suspected the anxiety would be acting up.

I’ve had a couple of attacks the last couple of days, but they’ve been expected. And as expected, they are over such stupid things that I cannot bare to admit them. I suspect they will quieten down over the days and weeks ahead. Trouble is, they always sneak up on you and catch you unaware, even when you are prepared for them.

I found, through no scientific basis other than my own experiments, that salt can heighten it. I’ve spoken to other anxiety sufferers and they’ve not had the same findings, but I have deliberately cut down on my salt intake as a result (especially crisps).

I think half the battle is knowing, is pointing the finger and saying “this is just stoopid anxiety”. Just as depression is (in very simplistic terms) feeling down for no reason, so anxiety is worrying for no reason. Being able to identify it weakens it a little, pushes it further back into the recesses of my mind but like depression it can creep up on you if you don’t know yourself really well. Even so there’s still that feeling of shame that you are being stupid over nothing, even though you know you are being stupid over nothing. You ask yourself “why am I worrying about this?” Nine times out of ten I can cure this worry by just asking someone to allay my fears but the anxiety holds it in place, makes you feel stupid asking stupid questions. And just as you can’t tell a depressed person to “cheer up”, you can’t tell an anxiety sufferer to “stop worrying”.

I think the other half the battle is knowing you are not alone. Hearing other people talk about it breaks the taboo, breaks that silence you put yourself in for fear that someone will say “why on earth are you worrying about that? What is wrong with you?”

My anxiety has actually been pretty good this past year (probably the best it’s ever been), so this flair up is difficult. But I suspect that once my body evens itself back out, the attacks will die down a lot. Other people are not so lucky and suffer in other ways. As I said, I am not an expert on these but if you are a sufferer as well, I hope the attacks pass soon too.

They liked it and rated it a “Buy It” as well. This, as you can imagine, makes me happy.

“Drop that stack of romantic books about reluctant vampires and grab this harsh story of a vampire who would love to kill you—and the lovely old lady who will find a way to stop him.”

Seeing as I am in the early stages of the next big block of writing on the new novel, and that I was overdue a shave anyway (the result of a lot of working from home on the day job due to the leg), I thought this could be a thing. However, given that the first book took me 13 years, and the real challenge of this book is me learning how to speed up my process without compromising quality, there are moments when I wonder if the beard will be long and grey before I finish.

I travelled up on Thursday (a little later than I had hoped due to an appointment to get the dressing changed on my leg) and was surprised to see that Bradford still had lots of snow. Down south, we’ve really escaped the snow of recent weeks, the most being a light dusting that had melted by 9am. I was in one of the satellite hotels but the con had arranged a bus service and given the amount of antibiotics I was on, I wasn’t going to be drinking and could drive.

Friday started out setting ourselves for disappointment as hanging out with friends Cara Murphy, Stephen Aryan and Ruth Booth we spent the afternoon coming up with a ever greater list of friends who were not coming. It started feeling a little lonely.

Friday also saw my first two panels. The first was Games in Fiction. I was a little worried about this, and did a lot of research but still didn’t feel comfortable about the subject. As a consequence, I stayed fairly quiet on this one, although moderator Lee Harris did a fantastic job of ensuring I was included.

I think if this had been my only panel I would have been annoyed with myself – no major fubars but I don’t think I had a lot to add to the discussion. However, I looked at it as the panel to get the nerves out my system and so when I went straight from there into the debut authors panel, I felt a lot more relaxed.

Debut Authors Panel. Photo by Stephen Aryan

The time seemed to fly here. Bella Pagan was another excellent moderator and with a large number of authors, managed to give everyone time to speak. I thought it went well, and I hope those of you in the crowd got something out of it. Those of you who came up to me afterwards seemed to think so.

Friday night, I went to support my friend’s Stephen Arayn’s comics panel. It was a great panel with each panellist giving some great choices.

Saturday saw me on another two panels. I’d done a lot of prep for the Twitter panel but knew that when you’re on a panel with Cory Doctorow and Farah Mendlesohn you’re going to defer to their expertise. I think I raised a few good points though and felt included by the other panellists.

Twitter Panel. Daisee talked about wanting to keep her identity off the internet so it feels only right to obscure her image. Picture by Ruth Booth

My final panel was the Reinventing Urban Fantasy panel and this was SO MUCH fun. I had a lot of people tell me it was one of the best panels of the weekend. There was a real positive buzz amongst the panellists (I think it was obvious we all love Urban Fantasy) and we got a real buzz from each other. I think if no-one had turned up we probably would have had the same conversation in the bar.

Urban Fantasy Panel. Photo by Stephen Aryan

Indeed the conversation did seem to extend to the evening where Steve, Ruth and I hung out with CE Murphy and her partner Ted, as well as Mike Shevdon, David Tallerman, Jobeda Ali, John Lenahan and his partner (whose name escapes me).

And this showcases the real trouble with writing a blog post on Eastercon. Because normally, you write a blog post and list a few names of people who really made your weekend. You might add the names of some people’s partners to be polite, and then apologise when you forget the name of someone you spent hours talking to.

This year it was different though. It just seemed everyone mixed whether they be a pro, an aspiring writer, a fan or someone who’d come along to support their partner. There were just so many people, so many new friends, so many great discussions. People have nicknamed it ‘Chilledcon’ not just because of Bradford’s snow but because of the relaxed atmosphere. I chatted with people who are working on novels, people who have novels coming out (Libby & David – look forward to seeing you on the debut authors panel next year). I discussed the difficulty of shopping in Tescos when you’re disabled, I talked about collectibles, I talked Warcraft and Warcraft novel tie-ins.

I also talked to (amongst others & in no particular order) Kev McVeigh, Colin Tate, Ian Whates, Terry Jackman, Emma Newman, Marcus Gipps, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Francis Knight, Gareth L Powell, David Towsey, Gillian Redfearn, Anne Lyle, Sarah Newton, Brian Turner (who always seemed to be outside smoking whenever I returned to the hotel like he was waiting up to make sure I returned back safe), Adam Osbourne and probably a few more that I will remember the moment I hit publish on WordPress (Sorry!).

I’m sure in the weeks and months to come there will be plenty of analysis as to why it was such a good con: holding it away from London? The panels? The wide range of panellists? The venue? Whatever it ultimately turns out to be, at the heart of it will be the simple fact that the conrunners put on an exceptional Eastercon that future ones will be compared to for years to come.