I started this in November 2015 and raced to ten thousand
words. Then I hit a stumbling block and took a whole two years off it. Now I’m
back on it and up to fifteen thousand words. I intend it to be a length of only
twenty thousand words or so, so I’ve almost nearly finished. It’s nice to
settle into a nice long novel of eighty thousand words plus, but I’ve always
maintained that novels are too long. A novella has the potential to be better.
A novella is a novel distilled, with all the boring filler parts removed. A
novella is all the good segments and nothing else.
It’s about a man who is being harassed by a satellite. The
capabilities of satellites in the modern age are astounding, and I wanted to
touch upon this. This book may read like science-fiction, but it might also be
the realest most down-to-earth thing I’ve ever penned. It’s based entirely on
truth. It deals primarily with psychosis, a much misunderstood concept, but it
also delves into the second coming of Jesus Christ. My previous novel Escaping
Hazel had a significant religious dimension, so I don’t want to dwell on Jesus
too much in this, but he is involved to some extent. There is also a Muslim
element too, for balance.
It’s a conspiracy book, in effect. There’s a little bit of
science in it. I’m a bit grieved at keeping it short, because half of me wanted
to make it long and epic, but the main purpose is getting my point across, and
that I feel will not take too much more writing. Short and digestible is the
key. I’m proud to admit that this is a story that people will learn something
from. It’s ever-so-slightly educational because it emanates from years of my
own study and research. In a sense, it’s not even fiction. It’s cold hard facts
dressed up as fiction.
Experiencing psychosis has been a horrific experience for me
personally. The last four years have been riddled with it. It feels nice to
candy-wrap all my hardships in a booklet of literature and present it to the
world. Without writing, I’m not sure how I would cope. It would all be stuck up
inside my head with no offload outage to disseminate from. That might drive me
cuckoo and provoke me to release it via acts of bizarreness or dare I say it
even violence. Our emotions come to the fore in mysterious ways. Writing keeps
me grounded. It channels my subconscious in healthy positive pathways. I can
focus my life into a selection of prearranged words on paper. I can deal with
things. Even though I’m not famous, I can regard A Satellite For Me as my next
big release. It’s exciting, when you are your own biggest fan. You have to be,
when nobody else is. Writing is like downloading words from the ether; it’s
like conjuring an alternate lifespan from the cosmos. All you can do best is
live in it, for a short while, until it is finished. And thus, once done, one
moves onto something else.
