Christmas - Feast, Famine and Fiction

I'd say I've always hated Christmas, but that's not really the whole truth. I've been in love with the abstraction of Christmas ever since the ghost of Jacob Marley scared the bejesus out of me by staring out at an oblivious Scrooge in the form of a doorknocker. It's the December/January shut down I hate. I usually find myself in one of two situations during this period - either paid to do nothing, or not. In the one instance idleness drives me to find new and creative ways to ruin my life and prospects, and in the other, I starve. This year is different. This year, I find myself with quite a lot of work to do and, somewhat unusually, receiving moneys to do it.

While I've always looked on the enforced good will of this season with a somewhat jaded eye, someone who loved Christmas with a fanaticism worthy of a better cause was Charles Dickens. A prolific author at the best of times, he seems to have extended himself when it came to seasonal fiction, his productions ranging from the unmemorable (and practically unreadable) Cricket on the Hearth, to his iconic Christmas Carol. It's in this second work where we see Dickens at his effulgent, heavy-handed best. This is really the man's true mêtier - a morality tale, simple to the point of crudity, hammered home with a variety of blunt instruments ranging from the pathetic (Tiny Tim) to the grotesque (Marley).

It's curious to note just how utterly childlike Dickens seems to have been. His adults, never particularly convincing, are even less so here. What anchors and redeems the novella is his disconcertingly keen insight into the inner lives of children. His description of the lone child at boarding school, Scrooge's grand nephews and nieces, are poignantly verisimilitudinous. And on another level, his conception of Christianity and ideal human relationships has more than a touch of the Mediaeval about it, an adolescent era if ever there was one. The whole book is, in fact, pre-modern, and not just because of its didactic insistence on the evils of modern commercialism. That heady mixture of fear, awe, pure love and open-handed patronage is classic, extravagant Mediaevalism writ large. This is what gives the book its most enduring quality - a keen, bittersweet sense of nostalgia. A yearning for simpler times, larger souls and purer hearts.

Compare this cockeyed idealism with the author I've always thought of as Dickens' modern-day counterpart, Terry Pratchett. The late great Pratchett had the same prolific imagination and focus on domestic detail. Both Dickens and Pratchett wrote quite a lot, hammered out quick and rough for money, but their works are saved from being trash by a core of keen humanity, intelligence and observation. But whereas Dickens pursues a childish fantasy of a decent world filled with decent people, Pratchett likes to look at deep origins - his fantasy is one of unbroken continuity. His Christmas book, Hogfather, inverts the feast in much the same way as the Carol, using Death as a flaneur to examine its traditions, but his focus is on paganism. Blood, ritual murder and snow. One gets the sense of a horde of blinkered, ignorant human cattle going through ritual motions they know not why. But it's vitally important they go through these motions because, if they don't, the conceptual world as we know it would end. Humanity is made of ideas, and it doesn't matter, according to Pratchett, whether we really understand them at all.

We see that where Dickens looks back with the eye of love, Pratchett looks beneath with a kindly, but sneering assumption of intellectual superiority. If Dickens is a mediaevalist, Pratchett is very much a benevolent Tory. Where both of them meet, however, is in pointing an accusatory finger at the essential hypocrisy of the season. Of a time when we all spout generosity and goodwill and lock ourselves in suburban fastnesses to gorge on plenty and ignore everything beyond our own little circles. Both of them point to the uncomfortable truth that care for the poor and downtrodden probably isn't supposed to be confined to a few weeks at the end of the year, and nor should it be limited to unobjectionable and photogenic little match-selling girls dying in the snow.

It's a bit dichotomous, this whole Christmas thing, and I think that's what I find most distasteful about it. That simultaneity of generosity and mendacity, the idea of households eating their fill in simulated joy while, just a couple of streets away, December is despair, empty pockets and a deep sense of failure. A season where you're significantly more likely to both get smiled at in the street and murdered by your partner. It's this dichotomy which generally flings me into such a slough of despond over the season. So it's a good thing, really, that I've got a bunch of work to do and will be far too busy to dwell on that sort of thing this year.

'Beowulf', Myth, and the 'Tears of Things'

Listen!
We have heard of the thriving of the Danish kings,
How they flourished in days long past,
How those royal athelings earned their glory!

With this adjuration to 'Listen!' begins one of the most important stories in English letters. Any serious student of literature will have spent a great deal of time living and breathing this poem, as will a whole range of other bookish types - historians, archaeologists, philologists and so on, but it's not this experience of Beowulf I'm really talking about. Sure, it's important as the genesis of storytelling in English, for its verifiable glimpses of the material culture and mentality of Dark Age Saxons, and for the understanding of the language we all speak and write, but to my mind, these are really its least important aspects.

The central thing about Beowulf is that it tells the oldest and most fundamental story of humanity. It is a tale of civilisation's light against the dark of the ancient wild, of the hero, the cost of that heroism, and of the 'lacrimae rerum' - the tears of things: the tragedy inherent in inevitable death and decay. For a storyteller, an author of fiction, there are few stories it is more important to understand. For what story worth reading is not about heroes, order against chaos, the search for meaning as we hurtle toward oblivion?

The poem can be a little daunting to those uninitiated in the study of literature, and who therefore see reading as an enjoyable activity rather than a kind of intellectual self-flagellation. It begins with a genealogy, and the story of a magical child found without clothes, taken in by a kind family, who rises to become king. This may seem irrelevant, but it is important for establishing the relationships later in the story. More than this, however, it lays down the essence and core of what the whole tale is about. Of Scyld Shefing the poet declares, 'Þæt wæs god cyning!' He was a good king! It is in the exploration of what makes a 'good king' that we find inquiries into what it is to be a good man, of what consist the good things in life, and of our absolute duty to fight the darkness that lives beyond the light of the hearth - the evil which dwells at the edges of our minds.

This evil takes the form of Grendel, descendant of Cain and hater of human works - of light and conversation, of built things and of the songs in which history and memory are preserved. Grendel is the 'feond en helle', the fiend of hell, and he stalks the marshes, the fell and fen - the wild places unsettled by man. But it's not his otherworldliness which is Grendel's most horrific feature - it is his familiarity. He is a liminal creature, the personification of our own beast nature, and of the edges of civilisation within our own selves. The war between Beowulf and Grendel is emblematic on every level of the core struggle of humanity over its entire time here on Earth.

After Grendel comes Grendel's mother, an inverse portrait of a fundamental human instinct. Feminine imagery abounds in this section, and we can see that old warrior-cult dread of the female 'other', with our hero diving into deep caves and piercing the monster with a magical sword. But beyond this archaic misogyny is a progression of responsibility. The defeat of Grendel is a fine, pure beserk frenzy - power over power - as Beowulf rips off the creature's arm. But here, at the cave of Grendel's mother, the hero is required to plunge, cold-minded, into the pool of his probable death. This is our middle age, where we become aware of the costs and risks of what we do and, if we are worth anything at all, go on to do it anyway. Beowulf teaches us with what grace and good cheer we may face our fears, and our doom.

And then finally, with a strange skip in time, the poem takes us to old age, where Beowulf himself has risen to be a 'god cyning', a good king, his kingdom menaced by a dragon. As he eases his creaking body into his armour we feel the deep sadness of his predicament. He knows he rides to his death, but he is determined to do so with courage. And, immolated in the dragon's fury as he is, he meets his end not with vainglory, but with a grim determination to protect that which is good - his works, kingdom and people. And if the dragon represent death, what more powerful image than that of old Beowulf, clutched in its jaws, stabbing his knife deep into its heart even as it kills him?

It's classic stuff. In fact, it is the classic tale. Anyone can string pretty words or a complex plot into a more or less unified whole. Any idiot can place a thrilling sequence of events into line, and many do. But the most valuable stories are those which resonate with our deepest selves - which feel real at the most important level: the one which has nothing to do with objective detail, and everything to do with a recognition of our deepest nature and inmost struggles. Which is why I think it's compulsory for every author or would-be author to study old myths like Beowulf, and thereby understand the root and branch of storytelling: what it is, what it's about and, most importantly, what it's for.

Rush to Death, and Awaken From Your Dreams

I should probably start by saying that the title of this post is not meant to be taken literally, so all four of you who read this can stop worrying. The saying itself comes from a Samurai manual of sorts, and is typical of the absolutist interpretations arising from that particular warrior cult. These have always appealed to me, and not just because of the cool armour and beautiful swords that come with them.

The fact is that life and reality have always struck me as rather dreamlike. My earliest recollections are consistent with my current experience in being essentially surreal in nature. As I walk down a footpath, I have to remind myself that I will not sink down through the concrete, that I cannot jump to the roofs of nearby buildings and that if I walk off the edge of a precipice I will die. It is said that the mark of immaturity is the belief in the uniqueness of one's own experience, but I don't think it's juvenile of me to believe that, in this case, I am at least atypical.

The evidence for this is in the behaviour of other people. Almost everyone I've ever met has been hellbent on convincing me, sometimes by force, that stuff is real and that the things we do actually matter. Concerned observers - parents, teachers, friends - have made it clear to me that my behaviour and decisions are bizarre. I have been at great pains to explain, unsuccessfully, that they make perfect sense to me. I eventually came to the conclusion that the essential disconnect lay in the fact that they live in a world which is substantial and tangible, and I do not.

Huxley had an idea that the true role of any art was to 'transport' the viewer to another realm of the mind. I think that inherent in this is the implication that the artist is already in that other realm. As tempting as it is, however, the idea that the vagueness of my experience is down to an 'artistic nature' smacks of vanity, and I am therefore unwilling to accept it. A thing in myself which I do not recognise in others must, by my logic, be a flaw, and one which needs to be eliminated.

Which brings us to the idea of 'rushing to death'. I've always taken this to mean that a real and vibrant world is accessible through absolute immersion and absorption. That absolute dedication to some pursuit, lethal danger, service to a cause or deep connection with another, would provide a hard link to the universe and coalesce it into a coherent and 'real-feeling' reality. The theory is that by pushing oneself to liminal realms of thought and experience, one might gain an understanding of the boundaries of reality and thus define and understand it. And, ultimately, experience it fully, in a way which no longer feels like the faint imitation of a vivid dream. I believe I've tested this proposition fairly thoroughly and found it to be false.

Extreme situations feel, if anything, even less real than ordinary daily life, dedication and commitment to skills or causes increase rather then reduce the distance between the self and the other. And on the few occasions I have connected with others, they report that, far from their reality transferring to me, their time with me feels as surreal for them as every day has for me. So now I pause and reflect. I'm running out of things to try, and I'm beginning to suspect that my focus on external means has been profoundly stupid.

What's worrying me most, though, is the idea that I might simply be wrong about this. It's looking increasingly probable that this process of anchoring oneself in the real world is a task which every single human must undertake. That this is a challenge which everyone faces and that, far from being different, I might merely be one who has failed to overcome it.

The Practical Navigation of Hardship

I can make a total of seven different dishes based on these.
None of them are nice, but that's not the point.

There's quite a bit of advice out there on how to 'make it' as a writer, but a lot of it seems to exist in a fantasy world of aphorism and affirmation. This strikes me as profoundly unhelpful. Sure, a few encouraging words can serve the purpose of making one feel briefly better about things, but once that's taken care of, what does one actually do?

I've been plugging away at this writing nonsense for a while now, and years of effort are beginning to manifest themselves in incremental gains. This being the case, I thought I might just jot down a few of the (sometimes very hard) lessons learned in this time, for the general betterment of humankind. And also because the vague hippie crap I've encountered along the way really annoys me.

DOLLAR DOLLAR BILLS

This looks bad, sure, but I can't actually afford a wallet.

If you're going to drop everything and 'chase your dreams', you're going to need a plan. And your head examined. Of the two, though, the plan's probably the most important, and by 'plan' I mean one that exists in the real world. The kind of aspirational maths used by small time drug dealers and Amway Ambassadors isn't going to work here. The inescapable consequence of exchanging security for creative endeavour is going to be financial hardship. Any plan needs to account for this and it's a far, far better thing to choose what you give up than to have it wrenched unexpectedly from you.

In my case I dropped eating out, buying clothing, buying technology of any kind, any and every kind of monthly subscription, drinking in any kind of bar with appealing decor or patrons, and practically any and every occasion involving going outside with other people and frittering away money (otherwise known as socialising). What I kept was food, tobacco and some of the cheaper ways of getting drunk, seeing these as bare minimum for the maintenance of physical and mental health. Of course, these lists are going to be different for each person, but I think their relative proportions are about right for this kind of thing. If you think this all looks a bit bleak, you're right, but it's really just a question of attitude. It's worse than useless to give way to anger or frustration, and the benefit of adapting to a lifestyle like this is the discovery of untapped reserves of discipline, which is always handy.

Apart from sacrifice and various other hair shirts, there's also a positive side to extreme penury if you're able to stay open to it. It's important to inculcate a willingness to do just about anything for work, and with the right attitude this can be a treasure trove of experience and material. I've worked construction sites as a labourer, done highly uncovenanted shifts in various kitchens, taught English and music (just like my Victorian spiritual ancestors), private investigated and written godawful hack pieces for everything from technical manuals to genre mags to international tabloids. If writing's about exploring new worlds, it's not possible to ask for better than this, and it's mainly accessible through developing a tendency to say 'yes' a lot, and some skill at pretending to know what you're doing.

But most importantly, it's time to brace. There's a reason there's a picture of Mi Goreng at the top of this piece. In a country as rich as ours, poverty can easily be bearable but it's rarely ever fun.

ALONE, ALONE, ALL ALL ALONE

Awwww... Nobody cares.

Nobody is going to understand what the hell it is you're doing. 

Okay, that's not a hundred percent true - it's pretty likely that other creatives will, but it's best to assume you're not going to meet any. While the world is full of people who claim to be writers, very few actually are. I've been unreasonably fortunate in this regard, having met a bunch, but fortune isn't something to be relied upon overly much.

So, back to nobody understanding. There's a few key disadvantages to writing as a profession. A big one is that nobody can tell the difference between a person who is writing and a person who is sitting around doing nothing. This can cause serious problems. I remember a long series of friends and relatives who more or less immediately lost faith in the idea that I was doing anything at all. The result of this is resentment and gratuitous advice. The solution is to strike out alone. I'm not, of course, talking about some libertarian bootstrap mission, but rather a willingness to be morally and spiritually lonely. Of all the things that have got me through, the support of friends and family have been important, certainly, but the primary thing has been mental independence. 

Like everything else worth doing, writing requires a lot of time alone and in silence, working very hard indeed without the slightest prospect of reward. This is difficult at the best of times, and it's next to impossible if you care about what other people think of you. 

THE GENERAL CUSSEDNESS OF LIFE

Insert Affirmation Here

When Anthony Burgess was incorrectly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, he was given twelve months to live. Being married and penniless at the time, he set to work on publishing enough material to provide a financial basis for his widow. It's difficult to imagine a greater sense of urgency, but even he found the occasional roadblock he couldn't immediately surmount.

He set himself a target of two thousand words of 'fair copy' per day, and then went on to attack this target in an admirably realistic way. By his own account some of the things which got in his way were rather petty. Hangovers. Arguments with his wife. Brief periods of despair. What this shows is that regardless of how driven and single-minded a person is, there are still going to be occasions where they fail and that this just isn't important. What is important is to just keep going.

I realise as I write this that it's very similar to the kind of nonsense you get on writing websites, usually broken down into a faux-aphorism and set against a nature photograph. This doesn't stop it from being true. It's vitally important to just keep going. Bloody-minded doggedness has achieved a great deal more than sensitive inspiration in just about every possible field of endeavour.

What's worked for me is to make a clinical assessment, at the end of each day, of what I've actually achieved and how I'm currently feeling (yes, gasp in shock). Then I plan the next day according to these factors. Do I need to push some stuff back? Recalibrate my short term goals? Spend a day in the gym or at the bottom of a bottle? Fine. Disappointing, sure, but fine. Just so long as I maintain an absolute faith that I'll stand back up tomorrow or the next day, it's absolutely fine to burn the day just gone. A lot of people will tell you not to beat yourself up, but I disagree. A minor, and above all brief, assault is both necessary and beneficial. And then you just carry on.

I've had a lot of advice from a lot of people over the years, ranging from, "Be willing to set your enemies on fire in a public square,"  to, "The only way to peace is to place a flower on their head in your mind." It all boils down to the same thing, though, as far as I can tell. Our greatest weakness is also our greatest strength - the appalling loneliness of our inner selves can be turned from a wasteland into a fortress, so long as we're willing to pursue a purpose we set for ourselves. I know this because I once wrote something like it for a fortune cookie.

Writing Out the False Value of Self

One thing I'm very sick of hearing is how 'personal' and 'unique' the writing experience is. Apparently, the whole art of writing is a simple matter of aligning your chakras, embracing the woo, and communing with the universe until literary brilliance pours out onto the page as a direct result of personal inspiration and divine intervention. I would humbly suggest that this is utter bullshit.

In Donna Tartt's excellent book, The Secret History, one of her characters says something along the lines of, "The greater the amiability, the greater the coldness." The contention here is that being amiable is a process which involves manipulating and managing the feelings of others, and that those who are best at it are necessarily those who possess the objectivity of indifference.What is writing, if it is not the manipulation and management of the reader's feelings and experience? It follows, then, that writing must, on some level at least, be a somewhat cold-blooded experience.

Due to some very poor early life decisions, I often find myself reading the works of new authors and being asked to provide comments and advice. In the real world, this translates to telling them what's wrong with their stuff. In almost every case these works share a common flaw, and I strongly suspect it arises from the neo-Romantic hippie bullshit that gets circulated in schools, creative writing courses and smoke-filled coffee houses. Almost every single one of these works falls down badly in the area of "getting over oneself". One of the biggest tells which reveals the rookie author is a kind of adolescent insistence on their own 'unique' and 'personal' vision. Narrative, description and atmosphere get shoved aside so that the author can stand on a soapbox and descant on their pure and individual perceptions, their deeply held convictions or, in extreme cases, their delusional belief that they have some kind of unique facility with language.

No writing, from airport garbage to towering works of literary greatness, is about the author. Whether we're asking fundamental questions about the nature of truth, or assembling cracking tales of mystery and suspense, the prime and most important thing is to get out of our own damn way. One of my favourite (apocryphal) stories about Alexander the Great concerns his study of the Iliad under Aristotle. "Of all the characters in the Iliad," Aristotle is said to have asked the young Alexander and his companions, "who would you most like to be?" The cleverest answered, "Homer, because he's the only survivor." But Alexander disagreed. "If you were in the Olympic games," he said, "would you want to be the Pan-Hellenic athletics champion, or the little fat kid who calls out the scores?" As authors, whether we like it or not, we're the little fat kids calling out the scores. Just as the Iliad isn't about Homer, but Achilles, so too our writing has to be about something we're interested in which isn't ourselves.

There is a wealth of writing advice kicking around in the ether written by masters from various points of the literary spectrum, from the decidedly commercial but technically brilliant James Patterson, all the way through to the rarefied intellectual uplands of W Somerset Maugham. Form, construction, aesthetics and other vital aspects are patiently explained, but all of this advice boils down to one simple statement: remove, as far as is possible, any trace of yourself. Do I have a unique way of using adverbs? Delete. Do I write long passages tenderly painting the special unique specialness of the sights and sounds of my childhood? Delete. Am I relying on my own idiosyncratic manipulation of language to generate sympathetic resonances within the audience? Delete! Delete! Delete!

Like all arts, there is a strong requirement for competent craft. Until the basic technical skills are in place, nothing of any worth can be adequately depicted. The implication, then, is that a great deal of cold, mathematical exercise needs to be undertaken. It's a supreme irony of writing that prose which sounds natural and easy is necessarily the product of careful calculation and painstaking labour. I think most authors will agree with me when I say that building that nebulous thing we call 'voice' is always, in the beginning, an exercise in stripping and burning away every single thing we think of, initially, as unique to ourselves. Once this is done, we can then trust to the idea that our individuality - our uniqueness, if you like - will take care of itself. If it actually exists it will necessarily do so, leaving us free to focus on how to dissect, translate and then reassemble an experience which feels real and true to the reader.

This might sound a bit extreme, but it isn't. The fact is that we're always going to present in anything we write. Whether it's a short story, a novel, or a sales report, we can't help but leave our psychic fingerprints all over it. But as a story-teller or explorer of the human condition, it's our sacred duty to deliver the content, and this has to involve putting ourselves aside. As a writer, one has to work under the assumption that, for a while at least, we will be writing for people who don't know us. And a universal truth about strangers is that they do not give a crap whether we live or die. This means that in order to capture their attention and convince them to keep giving it, whatever we write really does have to be about something that isn't ourselves.

I don't care what anyone says - writing does not primarily exist as a form of therapy for the author. Writing exists to be read by people who are not the author. This means that no writer can ever really produce anything worth reading until they can climb over the detritus of individual identity and access that part of their existence which is universal.

A Fearsome Anthology

As a writer, one must make a conscious effort to avoid being stuck in a dark room swearing at the television in one's underpants. As a part of this effort, I joined a writers' group - the Northern Beaches Writers' Group, to be specific. I did this for several reasons, not least of which was the fact that spending my time exclusively with fictional people was sending me a bit strange. Okay, stranger.

What I expected was the usual mix of cheer squad and ersatz group therapy session, which I fully intended to ameliorate with decidedly irresponsible drinking. What I got was a serious, dedicated and talented group of authors with whom I was able to participate in multiple, rewarding and award-winning collaborative projects. All of which I ameliorated with decidedly irresponsible drinking.


The most recent of these projects has been the creation of an NBWG anthology of short stories for (hallelujah!) adults. The unifying theme was to be the interface between humanity and technology. Special focus was to be given to the question: To what extent do the machines that we make, actually make us?

What I was expecting was a mix of sci-fi and cyberpunk - cool, dark and gory and all decidedly genre. What I actually got was a delightful surprise.

Okay, the task of managing the editing of twenty plus stories ranging in length from two to six thousand words was neither delightful nor surprising. Nor was the cat-herding element of remote logistics as applied to a disparate rag-tag of self-directed, pre-occupied creatives. Being the person I am, I created what I thought to be a simple, centralised system for markups, corrections, version control and uniform product creation. What I discovered was that practically nobody knows how to use the internet, follow simple instructions or format a document. For quite a few weeks, there was a picture of me, tearing my hair out, next to the word 'frustration' in any dictionary you care to name.

As I said, though, this wasn't really a surprise. But the content and quality of the submissions really was. There were stories about bereavement and love, tales of ordinary people in far-flung universes, complex and subtle accounts of the minor but deeply impactful effect of our enhanced connectivity and, most surprisingly, a decent amount of sex.

What we've turned out here is a multi-layered, diverse exploration of an important theme. Which is nice, considering that all I was trying to put together was a more or less thin pretext for vanity publishing a bunch of our own stuff.

So, with the help of some absolute rockstars and award-winning authors too numerous to name here, we've finally got the anthology to the point where we can launch it onto an unsuspecting public. We'll be doing this at the Sunkissed Bar and Grill in Manly on Friday the 18th of November at 1830. I'd be very happy to see you there. In fact, I'd be overjoyed. Do come down - it's going to be absolutely epic.

Here is a list of people who have been a great help in making this anthology happen. They're in no particular order, but I mention them because you should do yourself a favour and check out their stuff.

Kylie Pfeiffer
Tony McFadden
Zena Shapter
Alex Cain
Harriet Cunningham
Amy Spurling
Zoya Nojin

The Caped Crusaders Win Again!

When Zena first asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a children's chapter book, my first reaction was to ask her if she was having a stroke. When she subsequently failed to collapse or speak in tongues, I spent some long moments staring at her while I waited for the delivery of the punch line. This also failed to happen.

Well, sort of. The punch line was there - it just wasn't funny. Have you ever heard the one about kids and how they get cancer? I hadn't, and the sheer outrageous injustice of it made me suppress my qualms and agree to be told more about what the hell anyone could possibly want from a combination of me and stories with morals, talking animals and other such garbage.

WABIAD Awards Ceremony 2016

As it turns out, it's all about stories. Once upon a time, a kind-hearted bus driver saw some bald children in the street and decided to give them a lift. Upon discovering that these children were literally deathly ill, he took it upon himself to become their personal taxi driver, ferrying them from place to place and, eventually, organising outings and activities for them. As with anything else, money was required, and he found himself also raising funds to sustain his frankly excellent initiatives.

Fast forward a few years, and this seemingly innocuous act of random kindness had evolved into a fundraising powerhouse, pumping vital quantities of cash into research programs dedicated to treating childhood cancers. And this is roughly where I come into the story.

Like most fundraising organisations, The Kid's Cancer Project has many strings to its bow, and one of them is the Write a Book in a Day challenge. You've probably heard me talk about this before, but for those who haven't, here are the basics. We get a team of people together and, in twelve hours, write, illustrate and bind a kid's book. Excellent people such as yourselves sponsor us to do this, either as the only way to escape our constant requests for money, or because they don't actually believe we're going to be able to do it. This money, every cent of it, goes to The Kid's Cancer Project.

I've been involved in this process for the past three years and it's taught me quite a bit. I've realised that collaborative writing is not only possible, but potentially very satisfying. This is surprising, as generally I'm incapable of collaborating even with myself. I've learnt that people have very definite ideas about what should go into a kid's book, and even more definite ideas about what shouldn't. I've learnt that you wonderful people out there in internetland can be astonishingly generous, that there's also a seven o'clock in the morning, and that being thanked for stuff is deeply embarrassing - none of which I was aware of before becoming involved.

But probably the most important thing I've learnt is that none of this stuff actually matters. What matters is the realisation of the existence of a war between human ingenuity and the insanity of pain. At any given time, there are people consuming their power, substance and mental and physical energy in the effort to create a world in which children no longer suffer from cancer. My writers' group, NBWG, has won the national best book award for four years running and I don't really care. As far as I'm concerned, every time we punt in another book and the cash we raise sponsoring and flogging it, it's another incremental win for those people in those labs. The researchers who are, when all's said and done, the real caped crusaders in this fight.

If you want to get involved or give money, click here to visit the Kid's Cancer Project, and here for Write a Book in a Day.