Thank You, Virginia Shank
Getting that letter was a moment that made exactly no impact on the universe but felt like it changed my world entirely.
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I love the Stephen King story about how he hammered a nail into the wall of his writing room, and used it to keep all the rejection slips from publishers. He said he wrote, and submitted, and wrote, and got rejected until the nail fell off the wall.
My nail in the wall is a writer’s website called Submittable that I use to send my stories to different publishers who are looking for the kind of thing I write, and here’s my track record.
I will get Gold In The Abraham accepted one day! I’ll sneak that angry little story into a pile of others and maybe it will have its moment. These are just a few of my rejections over the years, and I kept submitting and writing and submitting until I got a little break through.
In 2022, a literary journal in California called The Ear picked up my short story All The Colours Of Death and published it in their May print edition. Getting that letter was a moment that made exactly no impact on the universe but felt like it changed my world entirely. There’s something that hits different about validation that comes from somewhere so disconnected to you - no friend of a friend recommendations or family members, just a little email as I was checking my phone before bed.
It was so exciting to read, and then to learn what ‘First American Serial Rights’ meant, and just to feel a part of that world. What followed was just as exciting, including an invite to the launch party of the new issue. I did look up flights to L.A. but I decided that maybe I was getting overexcited. I also learned a lot about communicating with the publisher. I read the proofs, and some very key italics had been removed. It changed the narrative voice so I decided to ask if they could be put back - it turns out it was a mistake so I’m glad I said something.
The whole thing was so exciting, and then seeing my little story for real in the book when I received it was even better. The bio, the contents page, then the story itself just gave me a feeling of, I guess acceptance in that world. More than that though, I adore the story. Everything I write comes from a deeply personal place, every one of the characters is part of me. The girl in All The Colours Of Death is an outpouring of pain that comes from my journey with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and the breadknife moment is a very real desperate thought I’ve been to many times. It was the most cathartic experience to follow the thought through. To take it to its limits and try and experience it as fully as I could.
My novel is one thing - I’ll finish it on these early mornings I’m currently enjoying, and then get in contact with an agent or agents, or a million agents until I can convince someone to read it - and short stories are another thing entirely. An agent won’t be interested until you have at least nine stories on a similar theme. I’m on seven, all on the theme of love and death, and I’ll name the collection after the last line of my favourite story, my first published story, and hopefully one day I can say it was the story that started it all.
Now I Can’t Breathe, Finally I Can Breathe.
RJ
All The Colours Of Death
I am in pain.
All the time.
All the time, I am in pain.
Somehow saying it under my breath under my duvet under my ceiling stars brought me relief. Somehow, admitting it felt like a comfort.
I saw a late night commercial once where an old man with long hair and a badly-fitting sweater looked straight into the camera and talked about ‘the power of the mantra’. It caught my attention the first time it came on because of how slowly he was talking compared to everything else on TV. His room was lit by warm orange spotlights that made lines in smoke and a yellow phone number flashed up at the bottom of the screen. The man explained that by repeating certain lines over and over again we could find relief from anxiety. A twenty-first century pandemic, he asserted in his deep, Texan accent.
“Now’s about time for you to start your journey to inner peace,” he said. “Turns out I’ve done the hard work for you. Say the words, make your surroundings a little simpler. All you have to do is repeat after me, and then just maybe you’ll dial the number and join me on a little year-long adventure.”
I’d seen the advert so many times I knew every beat. He’d shuffle to the centre of the screen, close his eyes and then I’d repeat the mantra along with him from under my cosy sheets.
“Life is made from many colours,
But see - only green in the trees.
Get a whole year of mantras straight to your door,
For only ten easy payments of $8.99 a month plus shipping fees.”
I even knew the number by heart. That old mantra-selling Texan was the only reason I left the shopping channel on all night, on that old TV that I found behind the post office the week after I moved in. It flickered and buzzed and had a broken yellow tint that matched the stars on the ceiling.
Back then I’d sit, hidden and exhausted in the yellow-edged darkness after a day stripping mattresses at the Trucker’s Motel, a tired old bundle of walls on Route 80 between Lexington and Elm Creek. It was like a beacon of safety, that bright buzzing screen. Eight hours of ricocheting elastic cornered bedsheets, flicking up skin flakes and rubbing against wet spots. Eight hours of avoiding leering guests with X-ray eyes and a thirty minute break in the office listening to Dina Morello complain about the noise from the vending machine complain about the smell of the radiators complain about the sticky telephone buttons complain about the cold.
But when I got home and locked the door, behind the glow of that broken yellow TV screen, I could try and breathe a little easier. I could make my world simpler like the old man said. I saw those late night commercials like the flickering lights I’ve seen in big corporate kitchens, the ones that attract flies and then burn them up. I imagined anything nasty in the world becoming attracted to that screen and not getting any closer.
Yellow for stars, yellow for comfort. Yellow for vaporising the day in a raging furnace.
I’d whisper it aloud to help me make sense of the world. I figured I could start with the colours and everything else would fall into place.
The power of the mantra.
I remember those nights so clearly now, through the haze. I remember thinking a breadknife would be the right way to do it. I remember the thoughts inside my mind like a bee sting I couldn’t comfort. I remember it all now. I remember that man standing in reception. I remember when the mantras failed. I remember when the yellow light didn’t work its magic anymore.
• • •
The carpets in the Trucker’s motel were dark red. At least, at the edges. The middle section all the way from the front door to the vending machine to the lift to the staircase up the stairs to the bedrooms was threadbare and grey like scar tissue over an old wound.
Red for warmth, red for class. Red for easy to clean after a violent crime.
I’d describe the rooms but first I need to tell you a bit more about Dina Morello. Dina was the owner of the Interstate Motel on I-20, 80km from Dallas. On Mondays through Thursdays she wore war-torn jeans and t-shirts with large slogans like ‘can’t a bitch catch a break’ and ‘bad-assitude’. On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays she switched to formal mode, power-dressing in black suits with open collars. She also wore heavy eyeliner, district red lipstick and switched to a British accent. Dina Morello hired me on a Tuesday afternoon, so I had plenty of time to get used to her regular steakhouse attitude before the cultural whiplash of her weekend persona hit me like a London bus.
Dina never left reception. That was her driving seat and she had everything she needed. Room keys, security monitors, a telephone, and an ashtray so compacted with a quarter century’s worth of sediment layers that you could spend weeks with a rock hammer and fossil brush making all kinds of discoveries. But of all the objects scattered around her desk, there was one she barely put down. The Motel intercom.
She was a brash, humourless old motor with a 24/7 coughing-up-lung-tissue-rattle but I loved Dina Morello from the moment I met her. The one part of her character that never changed from jeans to trousers, Van Halen t-shirts to padded shoulders, was her unrelenting lack of bullshit.
I still remember walking into the reception that day. She was standing behind her chair with her intercom in hand. She took one look at my summer dress and sandals and had me all figured out. She barked into the microphone:
“Crystal, Crystal my darling. Leave the first floor for this new girl who just walked in. Let Jesse know you will be there after all.”
She tossed the joystick-shaped microphone and speaker onto the desk and took a long drag of her cigarette. She needn’t have aimed her pursed lips; just being in the smoke-filled room was enough to start a lifelong habit. A grateful noise mumbled through the intercom and then Dina gave me her full attention.
“Start at 7, leave at 7, three bucks an hour and free coffee from the machine but only on your break ok hun.”
And since that was the most successful job interview I’d ever had, that was how I ended up cleaning rooms at the Interstate Motel in the summer of ’96.
Red for lipstick, red for buses. Red spilled on the carpet under the yellow light of my old TV.
• • •
Despite Dina’s odd little efforts to make it classy, the Trucker’s Motel was exactly how you’d imagine. Nobody’s paying premium rates for a mattress as thin as the Bible in the drawer. Those long-haul drivers expected nothing more than a hassle free arrangement - a hot shower, eggs and coffee in the morning. The rooms were decorated to match the price. Bed, bedside table, trash can, single plug socket. There was also a framed picture of a different US president in each room. Every room, except room 39 which had Robin Williams dressed as Mork with a big smile on his face. When I asked Dina about this, she said, “It’s for the Canadians.”
Anyway the rooms were so sparse that it was always immediately obvious when a guest left something behind. Usually a razor, or a dirty pair of socks kicked under the bed. Once there was a little hand-drawn map of Disneyland on the back of a pile of signed divorce papers. Someone had scribbled and scratched it in navy ink using one of the plastic biros from reception. I probably should have let someone know but like most other things I found, I took it home.
The one day that sticks in my mind, and became a turning point for everything that happened afterwards, was the day someone left behind a little A5 booklet. Right there by the door. A dog-eared instruction manual on sky blue paper with the title Prosthetics And You: You’re Still In One Piece.
It was 6:45 on a Friday and the last room before I was done for the night. Dina had been quiet on the intercom so was probably busy elsewhere, so I sat on the newly made bed and flicked the thin pages, a little out of curiosity, mostly to waste time.
It was full of first-hand stories from people who had, for a while, struggled with a life-changing event, but who were now apparently getting on just fine. The next few pages were step-by-step fitting and removal instructions, and then some FAQ’s on the last page. The thing that always stayed with me, from those few minutes of quiet, was a story about phantom limb syndrome. It explained how patients who had experienced an amputation might still feel the presence of what was taken for years afterwards. In really bad cases it said, it could be horribly painful. The idea that you have an itch you can’t scratch seemed unbearable enough, but to be in agony in a place that doesn’t even exist - that hit me, and it caught me off guard. I sat on the bed looking at the words in that thin blue booklet and I started to cry.
I think the reason that story hit me so powerfully was because it just struck me as hopeless and lonely. Nobody can see it, some people won’t even believe it in the same way they don’t believe in ghosts, and you can’t take a pain killer for a torture that’s hanging in thin air.
Blue for biro scratched maps, blue for cheap paper. Blue for depression and blue for my tired, end of the day tears.
• • •
I am in pain,
All the time.
All the time, I am in pain.
I don’t know much about the mind. I was hardly a girl with a bright future - cleaning motel rooms for a living and stealing lost property - so it wasn’t likely I’d know anything at all about the human body. But I’ve always wondered what’s happening when you have a pain in your thoughts. Just like those stories from the blue manual, suffering somewhere you can’t hold, somewhere you can’t bandage, somewhere you can’t cool with ice or heat with water.
It seems so far away, somehow so unreachable.
At least that was the pain I felt when six months after becoming good friends with Dina Morello I walked into the reception to see her standing on the wrong side of the desk. She was standing in front of a tall man in a black t-shirt, blocking him from walking towards the rooms.
“This ain't about you,” he said. Or something like it. And then he shouted Crystal’s name over and over again and stamped his feet and punched the desk.
I remember Dina’s face, in fact I remember her whole body. She was in her weekend black suit with smart shoes and her eyes were wide as a wheel. She managed half a sentence.
“Jesse, listen she isn’t-“
And then there was an awful sound as he hit her.
I made a horrified noise and the man, Jesse, he turned around to look at me. He had a small pocket knife in his hand and his black t-shirt was shiny with grease.
I’ll never know how Dina stood up, but she did. As he turned back around and walked towards the stairs, she grabbed his arm and yelled for him to stop, but he was much bigger than her and he barged her up against the wall. In the same movement, he hit her again and again, and I realised, that was the hand that was holding the knife. He wasn’t hitting her. I was watching my friend being murdered.
Two minutes, it can’t have been more. He had panicked, and he had gone. Two minutes and the only sound was a ringing telephone and the hum of traffic from the road.
I don’t remember calling anybody, I don’t remember acting at all. From that moment, I felt like there was a black rotten patch in my mind that could never be cured. It was swollen and bruised and pressed against every other thought at every minute of the day.
And this would be selfish. Talking about my pain. Talking about how much I was hurt by seeing Dina’s death. Talking about how I was never the same again. But this isn’t the story about how Dina Morello died, this is my story. This is the story of death, this is the story of mine.
Black for a dirty t-shirt, black for Saturday’s formal dress. Black for my irreparable damage and black for my broken heart.
• • •
Phantom pain. Agony you can’t comfort. Pain in a place that doesn’t exist. I can’t help thinking that’s the whole problem with that idea - it does exist - it exists in your head, right? Grief, shock and memory. From that day on my body was surrounded in new limbs. A new set of aching arms above my head waving from the middle of a raging ocean. Exhausted legs, ghosts alongside my own. Frantic like trying to run in a dream. Two more hands trying to hide my face from a crowd while my own hung limp at my side. And a memory of my friend branded into the top right space in my mind. I knew it was there. Just a thought, just a moment in time, but that’s where it was. I could put my hand on it and press down and the memory moved.
I could almost feel it with my fingers. But I could never shift it. It just went deeper.
I stood, staring at my tired, tear-stained face in the mirror. Home in the darkness. Home in my yellow light. I wanted to focus on my face. I wanted to bring myself home, but my eyes kept drifting up. Up and right. To the unresolved pain. To the part of my mind that tortured me and intruded on my every thought.
One night I cut my hair to see it.
I took a fistful of my curls right above the thought and cut as close to my skin as I could manage. I put my fingers against the spiky square inch and felt closer to the pain. At the top. To the right. Like it was right under my fingertips. Dina. The reception. The ringing phone.
I took the scissors in my hand and pressed them into my skin until something was released. A line of blood and a small part of the memory, into thin air.
The man. The sound as he hit her.
Wherever. It could go anywhere.
Just out of me.
I burst into tears. Out of shock, maybe. Or because I was back in the motel. It was like I could see it more clearly than ever.
The knife in his hand. Yellow handle, small chipped blade. Keyring and keys rattling on the end.
His dirty black t-shirt with the outline of a red muscle car on the front.
His shoes. Blue trainers with black laces.
In the same way that I could feel the top of the memory in my mind, I could also feel where it ended. It was the size of a tennis ball, just under my skin. If I could get it out. All of it, then it would all be over. Feeling like this. It would be over.
I wiped the lines of blood from my eyes and stumbled to the kitchen. I was certain.
I couldn’t stab around and make a mess. It had to be quick.
I picked up an old breadknife from the kitchen counter and walked back to the mirror. I swung it at my sticky blood matted hair and chopped it away from my eyes. I held it in a closed and confident fist and tore it across the top of my head in a single swipe.
My eyes rattled like wheels on a cattle grid. I could see my reflection but it was like the mirror was smashed into pieces. I had six wide eyes, half a blood covered nose and three splintered mouths, showing teeth and determination. I felt pain, I remember feeling pain, but it was nothing compared to what was underneath.
I couldn’t hesitate. If I was too slow I’d lose my nerve, and I knew I could pass out. So I held the long jagged edge up against the hairless patch again and this time, I didn’t stop.
I kept a rhythm. Sawing up, catching on bone.
Sawing down. Taking a layer of curly hair.
Sawing up. Sawing. Sawing. Cutting. Tearing. Knees buckling. Balanced against the sink. Arms exhausted. Call on the ghosts to take over. Apparition, stop waving for help and hold the knife for me. Legs, stop trying to run and keep me here until this is done. Eyes keep seeing. Mouth keep breathing. Eyes keep seeing. Heart keep pumping.
The paramedics would tell you I got an inch deep before I collapsed.
They would tell you I held the knife so tightly that my nails pierced into my palm.
And they would tell you that I was dead long before they found me.
What they won’t tell you is that it worked. The girl they carried out of that tiny apartment in the middle of the night, she was free from grief, free from memories, free from pain. They don’t know that her mind reached out for comfort in the final moments and heard the voice of a late night Texan telling her to speak out the mantras. This girl, she started with the colours and built her world from there, this girl had one more. One that formed in the torn apart jumble of wires in her mind.
Colours of death, colours of me, colours in carpets and late night TV. Now I can’t breathe,
She thought,
Now I can’t breathe, finally, I think I can breathe.
15/100
HEY, ROBOT, I’m the beautiful tortured soul, not you.
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This morning I finished the first three weeks of my little hundred day schedule. Haven’t broken the streak yet!
And because I beat my 2000 word goal by nearly a thousand words this week, clearly we need to review the graph:
Still such a helpful way to track how much I’m showing up and dedicating my time, but the most important part of this journey is the quality of the work not the quantity, and I am so, so happy with how it’s going. Now that I’m truly back in the story again, and doing it every day means less time staring at the page trying to find my way again, I’m finding true confirmation that it’s the career I’m fighting for.
• • •
A small side note on this blog entry about my progress so far. Something I’ve been reflecting on in this era of writing either my novel or adding to my collection of short stories, is the frustrating amount of times I have to choose to reject the involvement of A.I. in my creative life. Everywhere you go to write now has prompts everywhere offering to do the work for you. It’s like being really hungry, and sitting down at an amazing roast dinner. Then, rather than enjoying the company of your friends, the wine, the amazing experience of the evening, deciding to take a little white pill that won’t make you feel hungry anymore.
It won’t give you any sustenance, or joy whatsoever, but you won’t need to eat.
I was an early adopter of chatting to GPT last year, being as blown away as anyone when it could hold a conversation and tell me facts about the moon while I was making dinner, but it’s as unwelcome in my creative world as a flat earther.
I’ve recently turned off autocorrect when I’m writing. I’m finding a new joy in making mistakes.
HEY, ROBOT, I’m the beautiful tortured soul, not you. Get out of here with your sentence suggestions.
It’s my book you can’t have it.
Mini rant over, back to the murderous and violent stories.
RJ
Never Give Up Ever I Love You
I still tracked every week, even the week where I wrote MINUS TWELVE WORDS.
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“I’ve always thought that two things that make for good records are deadlines and small budgets.”
- Brian Eno
I’ve always been someone that felt deep in their bones that they were capable of greatness.
Do I think my creative output is great? No not always. Sometimes it isn’t even bad. It’s the word before bad. It makes the world a slightly worse place.
And I’m truly an insecure person. I seek reassurance from those I love, I overthink things, I live under a little dark cloud of assumption that everyone hates me. But there is nothing you could ever do or say that would convince me I’m not capable of tiny moments of true magic.
And it’s those moments that I’m fighting for, and it’s a fire I’ll never let anyone put out.
I believe I’m capable of true greatness and that drives me to keep going. That doesn’t mean I jump out of bed every morning swinging my willy around yelling I’m great, let's DO THIS, I mean that might help too, but in this post I’d love to tell the story about some things I’ve put in place over the years to help me achieve my dream.
My dream of not just creating stories that people can hold in their hands, but dog eared books full of stories and characters that people relate to, take comfort in, and accidentally leave behind on the tube and on buses and park benches.
☕︎
When you have a job, there’s a structure, right? A skeleton to your week. When you’re choosing a goal in your creative life, it can feel like staring out over the ocean at the horizon and it feels impossible and unattainable. So the first thing I realised I needed was a structure and a deadline.
Nine days ago, I began a 100 day programme.
I was listening to a podcast about movie making and an actor said:
“It was a 100 day shoot.”
I sat up in my chair and realised, that’s it! I need to be in Active Production. Turning up to a movie set. A 100 day shoot.
So I made my own production schedule:
Along with the idea of a structure, like I’m making a movie - here’s my thinking.
Getting up at 5am when it’s cold and your coffee machine is broken (true story, first day), you’ll come up with as many excuses not to climb out of bed as possible. So you need a focused, killer thought in your mind.
☾
If I get up and don’t have a razor sharp idea of what I’m going to achieve, and where it will end up, it won’t get done. So I’ve designed it to remove as many options as possible. I’m already busy with music production, I’m writing and recording a couple of little EPs, I'm figuring out how to get myself back onto a stage and play live, I’m experimenting with sharing more music on instagram, I’m working on illustrations for my book, and I track all of this in a giant document called my ACP (Active Creative Projects) because I just can’t help myself.
So at 5am I don’t want to have to make decisions. Even about which story to write.
My production schedule involves the following rules, and they’re working:
• No strategising, chapter planning or notes. Writing only. Just write. Get in the flow.
• No decision making about which story to write. First three days of the work week are my novel, the last two are for my short stories.
• Don’t break the streak.
• At least 2000 words on Where Else Can Birds Go, and at least 1 word on my short stories (short stories are harder to set word count goals so it’s just about showing up. Creative momentum is everything).
Let's talk about tracking those 2000 words. When I finished the first 55,000 word draft of my novel, Where Else Can Birds Go, back in 2015, I finished it by using similar rules - writing an hour a day before work, aiming for 2000 words a week and tracking my progress. Here’s what that looked like back then:
You can see from the graph, because of course everything needs a chart AND a graph, I might have stumbled in the early weeks but then I really took off. The green line is what I’d achieve if I stuck to my goal, the blue line was the reality.
Now, ten years later, I’m drawing on my success with this method and going again. Here’s the latest version of the same thing.
Ugly.
I still tracked every week, even the week where I wrote MINUS TWELVE WORDS.
But week 11, ah week 11 is when my new Production Schedule started. I turned up. I was on set at 5am ready to go and while I didn’t reach my goal, I made a pretty good stab at it.
Check out the graph.
You might have to zoom in to see it but, we have lift off!
A reminder, we’re not talking about starting the book. It’s been ‘finished’ a few times, but not up to my own standards, and I’ve learned more about my own voice over the years and learned more about how to tell the story I want to tell. So every time I finish, I tear it up and go again. This really feels like the one though, and this era kicks in while I’m re-writing Acts Two & Three of the book.
I’ve lived in this world for fifteen years. I can’t wait for you to go there.
• • •
I’ve thrown enough numbers and charts at you for one blog entry. I’ll leave you with this. No motivation is too silly, no motivation is too small. I’m saving a lot of little illustrations and coding notes and images for this website at the moment, and I was getting disheartened that I was spinning in circles. I named the folder for all this stuff Never Give Up Ever I Love You and it honestly gives me a little lift every time I see it.
That goes for you too. Find your rhythm and turn up to the movie set.
Never give up ever, I love you.
Russell James ✈︎
Project Bear Trap
Maybe some of those things helped one person feel less alone. Maybe someone somewhere felt that the world became a little less scary. I don’t know but I know in my bones that I’m not done trying.
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My name is Russell James and I’m about to fail in the most public way possible.
• • •
Where do I start? Well, how about my obsessive need to be able to explain why I’m here on planet earth, as if some inspector is about to bust down my door and demand an explanation.
But also, like a lot of people, I’ve experienced some pretty great highs and some deep, deep lows that have, at their worst, taken me right to the edge. Some of those darkest moments have driven me to truly focus on what I care about, and what I believe in.
I’ve always known this, ever since being a kid, but it’s only been in the last ten years or so that I’ve been brave/stupid enough to really claim it you know?
Here’s my little mantra - what I want to achieve in some small way with my life. My purpose:
“To make art that makes other people feel less alone, and less terrified of the world, even for a moment.”
Who knows if I’ve ever succeeded but I know I’ve had plenty of failures.
So now, I’m 43, I’ve released two albums over the years, a few singles out there, some art on people’s walls, a single story published…and now I’m getting even more serious about what I want to achieve.
Maybe some of those things helped one person feel less alone. Maybe someone somewhere felt that the world became a little less scary. I don’t know but I know in my bones that I’m not done trying.
• • •
So this is my story. At this new starting line. And I’d love to share it with you.
This blog, and this site is all about my journey to become a full-time author. Songwriting is my other big love but that (for now) won’t be the story I’m telling here.
I’m trying to finish two things.
A collection of nine stories about Love & Death (I’m at seven)
A novel (I finished the first manuscript ten years ago and I’m now half way through version 386 or something)
I’ve also spent the last six months building this website in a way that I felt inspired me to share more. Instagram’s great for little song clips but not for reading a whole story. I made a note on my phone called Project Bear Trap, named after a story I was trying to finish, but felt disheartened that I had no good place to share it.
So that’s why this place exists. To inspire me to finish, to do my best, to show up to work.
Thanks for joining me on this little journey, I’ll share everything to anybody who will care to listen. I’ll talk about the weeks I rack up zero words a week, I’ll share the progress I’m proud of and the moments I summon up the courage to make big moves. Maybe even show up to an author’s networking event and pretend I’m not a total fraud.
So here goes.
Come and have a drink with me when you can buy my novel in Waterstones.
Deal?
Russell James ☂︎