The Golden Whale

I used to think that my wildest, most audacious ideas came to me when I was drunk. I have since learnt that this thought was very much misguided.

You see, I stopped drinking years ago and yet those God-damn, inspiration-howling brain-fireworks just keep lighting up my inner sky.

Take May.

I was relaxing with some drawing and intoxicated only by the early summer sun and the fragrance of honeysuckle on the warm evening air. Mildly bewitched by the freedom of a quiet two weeks ahead, my mind wondered over possibilities of what I could do with such a juicy container of freedom.

1. Gentle, meandering sorjourns with friends?

2. Alfresco painting on wildflower moors?

3. Lilting swims in wild, romantic oceans?

   
   

OR ….

4. A two week, lung-blasting fitness smash-up bringing in all of the tools and twists I've learnt over the last 45 years of life.

And because Idea 4 was such a mischievous, audacious beast ... it then dragged in Idea No.5 and teamed up with it.

Idea No.5 was:

5: Stay accountable with Idea 4 by documenting the entire process on camera and tell my coach, Iain, an ex-military PT that I'm going to do it and that I'll be sharing all the videos with him.

Ideas 4 & 5 took over my brain and they won, hands down.

The fitness madness happened. It was superbly torturous. My biggest take away was not better fitness or a peachier derrière, but the realisation that I REALLY believe in storytelling as a means to change the world.

Then I tried to get on with my life. But the realisation about telling stories, did not go away. And what made it worse was this:

I have stories to tell.

Many stories.

I have 3 novels bottled up in jars on my shelf.

I have 100s more just waiting on the back burner.

I even have one book that I left school to write (age 16), that I wrote about writing in the hundreds of journals I’ve written each day through this life.

And that’s when the new idea began to make itself known to me.

This wasn’t a glitzy, lace-ruffled, Moulin Rouge, can-can kicking sort of idea … It was an idea that emerged from the wild ocean like the back of a golden whale, displacing water and ships and old sunken cities, lifting further and further, revealing a monolithic body of a mythic creature never before seen by the eyes of a human.

This was an ancient idea from my origin days.

It was a Deamon idea from my Platonic Soul.

It was an idea that landed in the mind of my radiant 5 year old Self and refused to ever leave me.

To be a writer.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Finally. I’m going to do and be, just that.

This summer I’ve saved hard, I planned deep, I’ve budgeted with the self discipline of an Olympian monk. I’ve worked out that if I stick by my maths, I should be able to spend the Autumn and Winter writing 2 of the novels in the jars on the shelf.

What will happen then, I don’t know.

I mean, it is possibly the worst time in history to be writing books, right? The world is collapsing, the woods are on fire, communities are divided, everyone’s addicted to scrolling shit and AI is about the devour humanity as well as all the creativity we possess.

But you know this woman.

I like a challenge.

And I want to tell these stories.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. X