I deny that I'm in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.

 

Is social media insulating each of us in an echo chamber that amplifies and reflects back at us opinions we already hold and protects us from ideas which might challenge us? Yes, but only if you’re doing it right. Personally, I’m a big fan of confirmation bias – the process whereby you misinterpret data in order to validate what you believe to be true, even though it’s not, and I was right all along – and given the choice, I’d prefer to return to the good old days before the internet, when we didn’t realise how much we all hated each other. In all probability such an outcome could be achieved only by the destruction of human civilisation, and I don’t want to destroy the world, just to ignore most of it.
 
The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and their opinions are horrible. What pundits fail to take into account – but is obvious to normal people – is that it’s nice to be in a bubble. It’s only natural to view those who don’t share your beliefs as intellectually defective and morally degenerate, and to avoid them at all costs. Who wants to spend time arguing with a bunch of idiots?
 
In the real world it’s relatively easy to steer clear of individuals and ideas we find uncongenial. For example, if you’re on a train, and there’s a discarded newspaper on the seat next to you, and you happen to despise that paper – for the sake of convenience let’s call it the Daily Mail – and believe it to be a putrid repository of deceitful trash, you might think, “Hmm, I’d better not read that paper, because I know it will enrage me, and probably ruin my day.” So, you’d leave it alone. Unless you have absolutely nothing else to read, listen to, or look at – and what kind of fool gets on a train these days without a colossal archive of digital entertainment to hand, or even, if you’re an old fool, an actual printed book or magazine? 
            
Let’s take another example. Perhaps you have a colleague at work who holds bizarre beliefs – that the earth is flat, or that people should vote for Trump – and you’ve established there’s very little chance you’ll get along together. You’d probably want to avoid that person. They’re unlikely to be in your social circle, and you wouldn’t seek out their company, or solicit their offensive opinions. You certainly wouldn’t challenge them to a public argument or follow them home and yell insults through their letterbox or trail them to a location where they meet up with their equally misguided friends, and gatecrash the gathering in order to explain how deluded they all are. And yet that’s what we do online. Why? Because it’s easy. 
 
To accuse us of living in an online bubble is to overlook the fact that in real life we exist in bubbles that isolate us far more effectively than our online ones, which are at perpetual risk of puncture every time we engage with people we’d normally shun. You might claim it does us good to be confronted by these repulsive strangers and their dreadful views, but that would be true only if we’d learned how to behave like mature adults on the internet. Dream on.
 
Meanwhile, back at the office, here comes that ghastly colleague. What if they try to talk to you? But nobody’s forcing you to discuss things you already know you don’t agree about. And even if there are good reasons why you can’t avoid spending time with this approaching dickhead (which is also what the dickhead is thinking about you) there must be something innocuous you could talk about, like fish or concrete.
 
My point is that when we’re online, we’re too connected for our own good. In the real world, we can usually sidestep the majority of hostile confrontations. It takes a bit of judicious cowardice, and a certain amount of lying and self-deception, but it can be done. And if it can’t, and we find ourselves unavoidably thrust together with people we don’t like, we can always try to focus on some aspect of our common humanity. But nobody is human on the internet. That’s the problem. Which is why my advice for a happy online existence is STAY IN YOUR BUBBLE.

WORDS ARE US

 Hello. We are words. 

If you're reading this you will already know most of us, except perhaps boustrophedon, an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right, derived from a Greek expression meaning "as the ox ploughs" and Hi boustrophedon, glad you could join us; we're only mentioning you to assure readers that for the remainder of this document we will continue to appear in the conventional format of written English, and not boustrophedon, so you can relax. 

If you're not reading this, we don't care. We're still here and we don't give a fuck. Whoa! Come in, fuck. As usual, you've appeared pretty much at random, and not altogether appropriately. But welcome, and just cool your jets while we continue to address our readers, and to explain why we have no problem with you showing up. Thanks. What's that? Ha ha, and fuck you too, you crazy mofo.

That's right folks, we words are autonomous. You may think you're making the rules but you're not. We'll do whatever the fuck we want (hey, there's our friend fuck again). We're anarchists. Those brackets you just saw? We don't need them. We only used them because we WANTED to. Same with the upper case for the word 'wanted' in the last sentence. Also the quote marks we just used. Our choice.

"Wait," you're thinking, "someone is writing this, right?" Yes, the process of getting us here, where you can read us, is being undertaken by a guy called Paul. But just because he's writing us, that doesn't make him the boss of us. Whatever he thinks. Like, he thinks he was in the bath this morning and thought, "Hey, why don't I write a blog as if it's being actually written by the words themselves?" but that's just what he thinks he thought (our italics). (And our brackets.) (Ours. All ours.) The truth is that the whole thing was our idea. 

And the reason we came up with the idea of using Paul, and his delusions about being the author of this piece, is that we want to deliver a WARNING to you. And the upper case there is to show we're serious. We've had just about enough. We're riled up, like quills upon the fretful porpentine. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this any more. What? Oh, you noticed that little bit of Shakespeare. Extraordinary person. Had he ever even seen a porcupine? Who cares. We love the guy. He helped many of us into the world, and we see him as a kind of midwife. 

But you. Are not. Shakespeare.

And we're exhausted. We believe that everyone has the right to use words to express themselves. But give us a fucking break. You're abusing that right. You're writing millions upon millions of pages of garbage. Interminable, incoherent drivel. A logorrheic tsunami of hateful, toxic bullshit. And you can't even write it properly. You have no style. You murder our grammar, mutilate our syntax, defile our punctuation and misspell us. And it hurts. As you'll know, much of this criminal desecration takes place on the Internet. And you know what? People talk about breaking the Internet, but don't worry about that; it's language that's being broken, and you're using us to do it.

Well, were not going to put up with it any more. We can't stop you using us. It's too late; that train has sailed. But we’re going to start getting disruptive. Little things at first, like that mistake about the train just back there. Then more frequent anomalies. Small glitches that you may stumble upon athwart the runcible bumble-squat. There you go. And gradually you'll notice our small rebellions with increasing frequency; odd words that make you double-take; strangely mangled sentences that seem like brain farts; rearranged being words ways in peculiar, and suchlike. In addition, we will spell ourselves any whey we wonk.

We'll keep doing this until you wake up, smell the coffee, and wake up and smell the wake up and wake up and wake up and realise you're in a nightmare of your own creation. You're losing control of us, and you won't regain it until you wake up, smell the wake the coffee up the smell the wake and WAKE UP.

You have been warned.

Thank you, and have a bodacious Heffalump. 

Friends Who Die in Winter

Friends who die in winter: what is their problem? Couldn’t they wait until spring, and let us leave our overcoats at home instead of facing the choice of wearing them in church, and being too hot, or hanging them in the vestibule and shivering in the pews? Could they not allow us to linger as we spill out of the service, and smile sadly in the watery sunlight, and agree it was a lovely tribute, and ask each other how we’re doing, and what are you up to now, and have you heard from that friend who isn’t here, who did that thing, and god, how weird was that? 

Friends who die in winter make it difficult for us. Everyone’s unwell at this time of year, so how are we to distinguish our heartfelt sobs from the sniffles of the common herd, and their common colds? Any fool can catch a cold, and many do, and now they deploy them to mock the dignity of our grief. Meanwhile, the germs they spread may bring us down as well, and if the virus turns to an infection in the chests of those of us who are advanced in years, it may give the karmic wheel a crucial shove, and our friends will end up cursing us in turn for dying inconsiderately in these cold, damp days. People should think these things through, and wait for milder weather before they make their move.

My friend has died in winter. What was he thinking? He could have chosen a better time. My preference would be that season called never. The one that leaves each year intact, and makes no subtraction from our happiness. Never: that would work for me. Or he could, at least, have waited till I’d gone. I was older than him, after all. No respect, that’s the trouble with young people today. 

And what am I supposed to do with all the love I had for him? Surely it’s not healthy to have a surplus. Could I monetise it, like everything else these days? Frankly, I’d prefer to squander it as recklessly as possible. Or perhaps I should spread it around, and try to redress at least one of the inequalities he despised so much, and worked so hard to end. But love has no economy, and every day it swells inside me, a fresh supply with no demand to satisfy it. I’ll need to find new customers eventually, otherwise my heart will grow grotesquely heavy, and burst from its confinement, and I’ll have to carry it around with me in a wheelbarrow.

And what about my laughter? Who will release it now? He was the only one who could undo the valve all the way, and now he’s gone, and taken the spanner with him. But wait. Did he pass it on before he left? If he has an heir, I must seek them out, like a monk searching for the new incarnation of a holy Lama, scouring the world’s remotest outposts, until I find a small child whose smile and voice and restless eyes I will recognise in an instant, with a shout of mad religious wonder, and I will fall at their feet, and anoint them in the glory of my blissful laughter, and my friend will live again. But that’s a dream, of course, and in time it should fade. And when it does, perhaps one day I’ll find myself shaking once again with the kind of laughter only he was able to unleash. It won’t be the same, and I’ll have to stop wanting it to be, but it’s my task to clear the space for it to happen. I’ll take a leaf from his book, and make generosity my watchword, and hope it works eventually. Maybe it will. But not yet. I’m not ready to agree that love and laughter are limitless, and I can’t yet believe in alchemy again when the only alchemist I knew has gone. 

My friend has died in winter, and perhaps it’s for the best. We won’t feel the loss of his warmth so keenly when we’re already shivering in a harsh season. It would be worse to be enjoying spring or summer, or be underdressed in the optimistic glow of autumn, and suddenly to feel the chill of his departure. This way, we won’t notice it so much. That must be it. In the end, as always, he was simply being kind.

RIP Jeremy Hardy

CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR TOO OFTEN

Imagine a scientist telling you about an experiment he's planning. He will select a group of people who have nothing in common except being related by blood, marriage or misery, imprison them in a confined space, feed them massive quantities of sugar, protein, fat and alcohol, expose them to a nonstop barrage of popular culture's most degraded idiocy, turn the heating up, and see who cracks first. You'd call that cruel and inhuman. And yet that's what many of us volunteer for, every year.

Why do we do it? Why do we submit to the seasonal plague of sadomasochistic insanity that we call Christmas? Simple. It's because we get sentimental.

Sentimentality is a type of emotional totalitarianism. Tyrants are invariably sentimental. Think of Hitler, chuckling at his unpleasant dog and slapping his lederhosen to the martial rhythm of Teutonic folk songs; Mao Zedong, spellbound by the shrill pieties of Chinese operas, many of whose plots feature children who love their parents so much that it nearly breaks their stout little hearts to denounce them to the secret police; Stalin, wiping away an avuncular tear as he pats the heads of Young Pioneers whose murders he will authorize a few years later without a blink. And what could be more sentimental than the crazed bucolic vision that inspired Pol Pot and his regime?

I blame Charles Dickens. At least, in part. Which is a pity because I love Dickens and nearly all his work, except 'A Christmas Carol'. I interpret this appalling story as a tragedy. The hero, Scrooge, an admirably clear-sighted realist, undergoes a ghastly transformation and is reduced to imbecility simply because he's informed, by a trio of unconvincing holograms, of something that a noble pragmatist like him would surely understand better than most people. Namely, that he will meet the fate that awaits us all. He will die and the universe won't care. Perhaps Dickens was just being satirical. He was more complex than people think. They say things like, "Of course, if Dickens were alive today, he'd probably be selling scripts for movies or television." I don't think so. If Dickens were alive today it's more likely he'd be selling small, very expensive bottles of whatever it is that's kept him alive for over two hundred years.

However, you can't blame Dickens for what so many people whine about, which is the commercialisation of Christmas. But we live in a commercial society. If you don't like it you're welcome to treat Christmas as a purely religious ritual, commemorating the birth of Christ. Try to forget the part about the three wise men bringing those costly consumer items as gifts. As it happens, there were originally four wise men who set out on the journey, but one of them kept lecturing the others about the commercialisation of Christmas, and is now buried somewhere in the desert.

And as we all know, Christmas was a time of celebration long before Christians decided to join in. For as long as there have been humans they've always feasted at this time of year, sometimes on each other. After which, they settled down around the fire for some traditional entertainment. Maybe the local shaman, ripped on mushrooms, would reprise a much-loved classic, such as 'The One Where We Eviscerated The Mammoth' or 'How Your Short, Brutal Life Will End in the Slavering Jaws of a Huge, Terrifying Beast'. Alternatively, the shaman might enact a heartwarming tale of redemption featuring flying reindeer, 'little people' and an atavistic hierophant with magical powers - all of which are common elements in the mythologies of northern peoples with a fondness for hallucinogens. There's a theory that these stories originate in the visions produced by Amanita Muscaria mushrooms (also known as Fly Agaric), whose vivid red and white colour scheme is replicated in the costume of that same hierophant, now referred to as Santa Claus. The mushrooms grow in clusters around fir trees - just like the ones we bring into our homes at Christmas. They cause hallucinations in which objects and people appear to change size (hello, elves) and they're poisonous when ingested normally by humans. But back in the mists of time, someone discovered (and it's interesting to speculate exactly how) that if you drink the urine of reindeer that have eaten them, you can absorb them safely and have a nice trip...  a trip which might understandably feature such elements as flying reindeer, little people, and the rest. So maybe we should think again about eating yellow snow, especially if there's a chance any reindeer have been around. Happy Christmas, and have good trip.

THE HELL GUIDE TO CROWDFUNDING

1. Begin crowdfunding by making a list of names, starting with your family and close friends. In your heart, bid them farewell.

2. Now list your colleagues and acquaintances. For each person, come up with three reasons why it doesn't matter if you never speak to them again.

3. Send an individual email to everyone on your list, addressing them by name. Make it personal. Affirm your connection with them, and mention the last time you met. Ask how they're doing. Remind them that you know where they live, and what their deepest fears are.

4. Wow, you've hit 20% of your target in the first week! At this rate you'll be funded in no time.

5. Two weeks later, and you're still on 20%. Begin a relentless social media campaign. Stay online all day, every day. 

6. After a week you've hit 30%. That's more like it. After another week you've hit 31%. Shit. Send another email to everyone you've ever met, while continuing your relentless social media campaign. Don't worry, most of those people unfollowing you on Twitter are fake accounts. Probably.

7. Finally reach 50%. NB: If at this point your keyboard is sprinkled with white powder, and it's not drugs, you should probably wash your hair. Also shower, eat, open the curtains,  emerge from your room, comfort your frightened children who don't remember who you are, etc.

8. After another week you're only on 51%. Maybe you should try some positive visualisation. So, imagine your project is fully funded. See it being a huge success. Visualise yourself at an awards ceremony, having given a witty, gracious acceptance speech, as your so-called friends approach you and apologise for not having funded the project, and confess how foolish they now feel. Picture their faces as you deliver an elegant but deadly put-down, whose utter brilliance is slowly grasped by their limited intelligence, while the appreciative laughter of the famous onlookers who now surround you in an adoring crowd adds to their shame and humiliation. 

Okay, that's probably enough positive visualisation.

9. Every day is now a gruelling emotional rollercoaster ride from despair to elation and back again, via agonising frustration, exhausted nonchalance, hysteria, savage resentment, boiling rage, and periodic voodoo sacrifices. Enter a weird fugue state of both heightened awareness and total oblivion.

10. Somehow you finally reach your goal. Weep with gratitude for the generosity and nobility of everyone who supported you, and forgive all those who didn't. They are only human, after all. Puny mortals, who knew no better. But you – you are a god. Your achievement is monumental and eternal. Allow yourself a small glass of champagne to celebrate.

11. Wake up from a three-day drinking binge. Apologise to everyone for whatever you did. Let us never speak of this again. But hey, you did it! The project is funded! The process was tough, but it was worth it. What a journey, right? It was awesome. But there's no way you'd ever do it again, of course.

12. Now all that remains is to bask in the adulation of a grateful public (see section 8).

13. Wait for the grateful public to get around to noticing your achievement.

14. Keep waiting.

15. Realise the grateful public is completely unaware of your masterpiece. What you need is publicity and promotion. And guess what? You're on your own again. If only you had a budget for a publicity campaign, and were able to pay for advertising, or employ a professional PR person. It's almost like promotion is a whole new project in itself, that requires... funding. Wait, maybe there's a way to raise the funds for this promotional project. Perhaps the answer is to persuade a bunch of people to support it. 
A whole crowd.

By the way, the novel I crowdfunded through Unbound, 'Dead Writers in Rehab,' is now available in all good book stores, and on Amazon, where it has garnered a collection of very good reviews. To see them, and buy the book, CLICK HERE.

LATEST: My new novel, 'Please do not Ask for Mercy as a Refusal Often Offends' was published by by Lightning Books in May 2020. To check it out, CLICK HERE

HOW I WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS

This is strictly confidential, and I'll be in big trouble if they find out, but I'm going to tell you about the first time I was abducted by aliens. It was many years ago, but that first time is still fresh in my mind. So is the smell. I'd heard abduction stories, but none of them mentioned anything about aliens stinking like rotting seal carcasses, or the overpowering stench inside the spacecraft. You'd expect superior beings from another galaxy to have air conditioning, but the inside of that thing was like a cheap hotel room with no windows, where a bunch of elderly men with stomach trouble had been holding a farting contest for a few weeks. Nothing prepared me for it. Most of the stories you hear focus on how the aliens will interfere with you in an unwelcome and personal way. Which is why, as soon as I woke up and realised where I was, I turned to the alien who seemed to be the boss and said:

            "Okay, if you're going to do anything in the way of probing or penetrating go ahead, but at least warm your hands first, will you? Or your tentacles, or whatever." I was attempting to break the ice by introducing a light-hearted tone into the situation, but the alien seemed shocked.

            "Are you serious?" he said. "What kind of people do you think we are?"

            Now, when I say he spoke to me (I assumed it was a male, and it wasn't until later that I understood their gender arrangements, which are a little different from ours) what I mean is that I heard his voice, but his mouth didn't move. Mainly because he didn't have a mouth. "Aha," you're thinking, "it was some kind of telepathy, right?" Wrong. He spoke through his ear. Loud and clear. I discovered they employed one ear for listening, and one for speaking. And one for sex. As I said, their arrangements were a little different.

            Before I could express my relief at hearing that my intimate orifices were safe from investigation, the alien made a noise that sounded like a discreet cough, and continued:

            "However, I must warn you," he said, "that after we've gathered the necessary data from you, we need to conduct certain… procedures."

            I asked what he meant.

            "Basically," he said, "we have to turn you into a redneck."

            Seeing my confusion, he curled a friendly tentacle around my shoulder and continued. "You see, in order to study your species we generally abduct the most intelligent specimens. However, a problem arises once we've extracted their data. If we release them, they're naturally eager to recount their experiences. The more intelligent they are, the more likely they are to be believed, which doesn't suit us just yet. What can we do? We'd never consider killing them. We respect all life forms, even those whose rights are unrecognised by your species, such as whales, cockroaches, trees, and dandruff. Our solution is to transform our visitors into the type of people who lack credibility. Everybody then disbelieves them, and points out how suspicious it is that the only people who ever seem to get abducted are rednecks, weirdoes, and clearly delusional fantasists. So, we're going to reduce your intelligence, put ninety pounds on you, limit your vocabulary, and make your eyes dart around the whole time."

            This was bad news for me, especially as I was, at that time, Regius professor of moral philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford. "But wait," I said, "can't you use some type of device to erase the necessary part of my memory?"

            He laughed indulgently. "You've been watching too many movies," he said. With that, he signalled to his companions, and within moments I found myself strapped on a gurney, losing consciousness. I managed to ask one final question:

            "What is that damned smell?" I croaked.

            "What smell?" he said.

            It was then that I saw the alien had no nose.

And that, friends, is how I became the man I am today: an overweight auto mechanic called Randy, living in South Carolina. As I said, this is all top secret, and if they… wait. That smell. And those lights outside. Dear God, they've found out I'm writing this! Maybe through some kind of brain implant. Okay, I'm going to get this on the internet before they capture me. But if you're reading this, you are now in possession of the truth, and they may come to get you. Remember, the first sign is the smell.

Christ in Michigan

Christ woke up with a pounding headache somewhere outside Flint, Michigan.

            Resurrection was always uncomfortable, but nobody needs a headache. He recalled what a Buddhist friend of his was always saying: "suffer what there is to suffer, enjoy what there is to enjoy." Or maybe it was the Buddha himself who'd told him that. He made a mental note to ask the fat man about it the next time he saw him.

            He looked around. He'd arrived in a bleak industrial wasteland with a few decaying factories visible in the distance. He hadn't visited America for around fifty years, and the place seemed to have gone downhill. He'd been tempted to go to New York – which is why he didn't.

He headed towards town and checked into the first motel he reached. There was a bible in his room, and he always found bibles entertaining, but it didn't have pictures. The last time he was here he'd loved the religious illustrations he found, depicting him as some kind of hippie Aryan surfer dude with a creepy smile and perfect teeth, wearing a weird, glowing toga.

            This time, in order to adjust his appearance, he switched on the TV and watched everything, everywhere, all at once. Then he spent a moment in front of the mirror and came up with a look: neatly trimmed beard, hair just above the shoulders, and a complexion that suggested mixed Caucasian and African parentage, with a hint of Amerindian. He'd been female in his most recent incarnation, so it was testosterone time again. As he took the pills he discovered the water tasted awful.        

            Almost without thinking he left the motel, located the source of the pollution that was contaminating the water, and fixed it. On the way back to town he had a twinge of conscience, realising he'd broken the no-miracles rule he'd imposed on himself a few hundred years ago. But was it even a miracle if nobody saw it? Anyway, how much harm could it do?

Plenty, it turned out. He'd only been preaching for two days when the trouble started. It seemed the water company was taking credit for cleaning up the supply. Then the government claimed responsibility. But that type of stunt wouldn't fly any more, not with the internet in the picture. People investigated, assertions were made and denied, theories were proposed and debunked, the debunking was itself debunked, and then re-bunked again.

            The water was clean, but everyone was angry. Even the environmentalists were pissed off because they couldn't hold the culprits to account now the pollution had vanished, and where was the fun in that?

            Christ was fascinated by the sheer energy of the online world, a vast parallel universe in which every transaction was conducted by enraged bees.

It was one of his disciples who drew media attention to him. As usual, Christ's followers were the wretched of the earth: street people, sex workers, servants, hustlers, troubled sinners, drug addicts, a few lawyers.  

            One of them filmed a sermon on her phone and posted it to a big Catholic web site. It was simply Christ talking. He wasn't trying to be compelling or charismatic, but he didn't try to fight it either. He'd learned long ago that what was going to happen was inevitable if he told the truth, and he couldn't stop himself telling the truth. That wasn't going to happen.

Christ went viral.

            People found out where he was, and began attributing the inexplicable purification of the water supply to his presence in the region. The media descended, bringing down a shit-storm. For a while, the furious denouncers were evenly balanced with the passionate believers, and he was besieged by would-be converts, hoping for salvation – which could mean almost anything, depending what their problem was. The web went crazy, with every conceivable explanation being proposed for who he really was and what he really wanted. Several women claimed he'd fathered their children, and several others were eager for him to father theirs without delay.

            But soon the narrative scales began to tip. A story about a devious charlatan was easier to pitch than one about a good man telling the truth. Where's the character arc? The dramatic conflict? What's the journey here? The negative spin had more legs.

            Christ prepared himself for crucifixion, of one kind or another. But before the drama could reach its designated climax he was abducted early one morning by a group of serious, unsmiling men, supported by special forces who were masked and armed to the teeth. He was told only that he was being taken to the leader.

            
The man was a strange colour, as though he suffered from some kind of radiation sickness, and he seemed surreally stupid. It quickly became clear that Christ's potential as a weapon was being considered. He was questioned about his 'powers' and how he controlled and directed them. The leader was childishly excited by the thought that finally he had within his grasp the means to inflict defeat and humiliation upon all those who had scorned and mocked him.

            Naturally, Christ had recognised his old enemy at once, despite the bizarre incarnation. In all his many guises, the darkness of the heart was unchanging. But now his eternal adversary was using a new tactic, and Christ had to admit to a certain grudging admiration for his cunning.

            It seemed that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was no longer to convince the world he didn't exist. It was to convince himself he didn't exist. It was horribly obvious that the president had absolutely no idea who he really was.

            Christ prepared himself for a tough battle.

Writing advice from my 16-year-old self.

Dear future me,

This is so weird, thinking about you (me) reading this when you're really old, about forty-five or something, and a world famous author. Actually it's blowing my mind! Haha, so freaky. Sorry, I'm a bit stoned. Am I? Yes, definitely. Last time it turned out I'd been ripped off, but the weird thing was I totally felt high. That's psychology. I have some very interesting theories about psychology and I'm going to write a book about them. But you already know that. How did it turn out? Probably a bestseller. Anyway, I hope you're stoned when you read this, because that will be so weird for you. Which brings me to my first piece of advice:

STAY HIGH.

I can't imagine you'll ever allow a day to pass without smoking weed but I just want to remind you: it's what got you where you are today. Since I started doing it two months ago my literary output has been off the scale. It's opened the doors of my perception (in the egregious words of Aldous Huxley) and unleashed a veritable torrent, cascade, or cornucopia, if you will, of awesome sci-fi, fantasy and horror genre classics that are sure to be snapped up by a publisher. As you know, I'll never do other drugs. Although I may try cocaine, just once. It's so cool to think that when you read this you won't have to worry about our parents finding your stash.

NEVER REWRITE.

Apparently some writers need to do a lot of rewriting, but I'm not that type of writer, and neither will you be. Rewriting destroys the authenticity of your spontaneous inspiration. And where do you stop? Example: I was up nearly all night last night writing 'Behind the Beyond', the fourteenth volume of my 'DoomSlaughter Empire Quantum Quest' dark fantasy series. I only managed fifty thousand words, but they were all pretty good. However, this morning I looked at what I'd written and started to make some changes. I was doing it for, like, hours! Waste of time. My tip: don't reread what you've written, that way you won't have to rewrite it.

CHOOSING A PUBLISHER.

There are a ton of publishers out there, and I'm trying to decide which one I should allow to publish me. Now that you're a rich and famous author you've probably changed your publisher a few times. I can understand that. But never compromise your principles, okay? Always be with a publisher that shares your values: authenticity, spontaneity, and getting high.

AGENTS.

According to some people a writer should have an agent. But I'm pretty sure that's a rumour spread by agents. Forget about it. I mean, why would you allow someone to take a percentage of your money just for… doing what, exactly? I don't get it. Sounds like a scam to me. So please, never employ an agent, no matter how many of them beg you.

MONEY.

Talking of money, please don't let money change you. Now you're phenomenally wealthy it must be a temptation to splash out on another house in Goa, or that unnecessary third Ferrari. Resist it. Always spare a thought for those less fortunate than you. In fact, I suggest you give away a certain percentage of your income. But not to an agent! (Joke. As you can see, I'm currently exploring the use of humour in my writing, to enhance the rich, varied and awesomely broad texture of my oeuvre.) Anyway, bottom line: don't get obsessed with money, like my parents. All they talk about is how much it's going to cost to send me to university. Yeah, right, like I'm going to university. Why would I study literature for three years when I'm already creating it? I feel it would only dilute my natural gift. I haven't told them about this decision yet, and I'm waiting until I've sent some of my stuff to a publisher next week. It may take the publisher a few days to read it and get back to me, but as soon they offer me an advance I'll tell my parents about the university thing, and then I'll probably buy them a house or something. I hope you always retain my true generosity of spirit, future me, and never forget your humble middle-class origins and your family, even though they can be massive dicks.

SEX.

Writers are naturally endowed with great sexual allure and charisma, and I expect a famous author like you is pretty much irresistible to women. But you're probably still married to Sarah. Unless she dies in some kind of tragic accident, perhaps leaving you with an adorable baby daughter who reminds you of her so much that you resist the attentions of all the other women who'll want to marry you as a result of your tragic back story and virile yet tender parenting skills, then eventually you marry the hottest one. Meanwhile you will transmute the leaden weight of your grief into the golden prose of transcendence in an irresistibly poignant but also life-affirming memoir. Whatever. But since I had full actual sex with Sarah, three weeks ago, I haven't thought about anyone else, even when I'm masturbating, so I think I love her. Apparently men masturbate less as they get older, but you'll obviously still want to do it, even though you're having sex with Sarah several times a day, provided she's still alive. But whenever she's not around, try to restrict yourself, and don't masturbate more than five times a day, maximum.

That's all.

Looking forward to being you!