The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  Socialising on the second floor takes place on the “chillaxminster” carpet, where Joe plays peacenik songs on a ukulele, including “When the Sun Goes Down in Your Heart” and “Sunset Over Lake Positive,” while Julia and Doreen sew daisies into legwarmers and Rick improvises free-verse poems to warm ooooohs (no matter how terrible!). The children play with dolls and dump trucks in a sand-pit, or attend English lessons given by the ladies (who sometimes stay over). I ended up crocheting “lucky” duck feathers into tights or playing the bongos, munching from a bowl of stone-ground sea-salted corn chips and sucking back pints of sparkling Highland water. At my book launch, a vegan buffet had been prepared and a small stage erected for the performance of two colourful tableaux. The Somalian kids were inserted into papier-mâché costumes—a sunflower, petal, and daisy—and moved around the stage like uncoordinated waltzers to trippy lullaby music played on a xylophone, flatly singing non sequiturs like “love of hope in land of freedom” and “we are hope and loving love” in a way that was more disturbing than cute. Doreen and Julia formed a human light show by manipulating the fairy lights wrapped around their long silvery dresses, beginning with a secret strip tangled in Julia’s high-quiffed hair: blue winks below the dirty blonde, moving down her shoulders in yellow-green flickers until a psychedelic disco blinked along the two women’s bodies, bunched tightly together as though caught in a flamboyant Venus flytrap. Joe explained how the sunflower revolving around the pansy symbolised the four cycles of growth as outlined in the Arnold Vernon Hope Through Ecology manual. The daisy is at the centre of the sphere on the index of the sun. Sometimes when the weather permits it the petunia is in the ascendance. I understood very little, but it was tremendous fun. The evening concluded with a reading from my novel. Here’s a sneaky peak:

  The sun set on the final sheddings of his mis-said heart. Walking into the waning moon as it waxed on the dying embers of the city, he entered a new beginning away from the shattered emblems of his old heart. He was putting his old life behind him, like a used-up bacon slicer being taken back to the repair shop a day ahead of the warranty expiring. He gazed into the middle distance, his eyes magnetised to the hopeful sunset, and with a generous lashing of hope in his hope-filled heart, he went forth into the new world, his heart aquiver with expectation, poised and ready to lead a meaningful, socially conscious, revitalising life, and not the one of degradation and sin he refused to abandon earlier.

  —Cal McIntyre, Hope Hurts at First (p.459)

  A Word from the Team

  JOE: Hey dudes and pomegranates! Take a load off and let me slip you the info. We four fab ficcers write what “they” like to call Middlebrow Literary Fiction, what we prefer to call Morally Replenishing Moral Fiction: this leans less on the negative. We bite into difficult cookies here, like third-world poverty, homelessness, life in slums, childhood trauma, and substance abuse, always with a hopeful, redeeming outlook. It’s easy to fall into despair when thinking about these doozy downers, so we give our readers a positive message and a way to chew on these issues that will make them strong and feel hopeful. Hope is the most commonly said word round here. Have you hope? So, my groovy team, what advice have you got for anyone looking to hang with us moral ficcers?

  DOREEN: Be up, don’t beat up.

  JULIA: Ooh, that’s nice.

  RICK: Get ready to bite into some difficult crackers.

  JULIA: Or a cranberry bagel with tropical sheaves and parsley prawns.

  DOREEN: Yum, how voogey!

  JOE: Never let the sun set in sorrow.

  DOREEN: Voogeylicious!

  RICK: Miss friends, don’t ’dis friends.

  JULIA: Bite into hope, not the Pope.

  RICK: Board the bus to the terminal of possibility.

  JOE: Hug the love, love the hugs!

  DOREEN: Voogeywoogie!

  JULIA: Put wishes into the cannon of disappointment.

  RICK: Praise be to he, she, they and everyone!

  JOE: Love is the best, why settle for less?

  DOREEN: Voogeywoowoo!

  JULIA: Be prepared to be kind.

  RICK: Let the stars light the night on your way to what’s right.

  JOE: Sail the seven seas for one big smile.

  JULIA: If I grant you a wish, will you tell me a secret?

  RICK: Close your eyes, dream big, and never give up.

  DOREEN: Voogeyseeyou!

  Puff: The Unloved Son

  I

  THE adorable ink-cheeked creation of C.J. Watson was inserting his fingers into a pipe that in nineteen days’ time would flood the entire seventh floor and drown a hectare of single-sided laser-printed manuscripts, two hundred Macintoshes containing over two billion words of unprinted work near completion, and three people. He unzipped his flies to make a urological investigation between two corporeal and industrial waste outlets (to see if his winkie might fit into the pipe), only to have his research interrupted by a roar of “What ARE you doing! Get AWAY from there!” He responded to the chide by running up and down the office, figure-of-eighting the writer-locked desks while recreating the exact sonic pitch of an Allied bomber as it unloaded on a village of civilians, collapsing on the cream carpet in a harrowing mass of screams and howls as he scooped his insides up and cried “WHY!?”

  The writers turned their murderous eyes on C.J. Watson who was too preoccupied with p.108 of the fourth book in her Firewood series to notice her son’s powerful screams that arrested one’s senses and, like all successful war recreations, bludgeoned the viewer into contemplating the horror of mass sacrifice for the propagation of ideological evil. Upon the cease of his howlings, the child (whose adorable name was Puff) leapt up and took on the part of a grieving widow wailing over her husband’s corpse, letting rip a long tirade against the sickness of the world and the beastliness of man until F.V. Young lost his cool and hurled his mousepad towards the adorable ink-fingered Puff and chased him around the office with his stapler, shouting his regular threat to “seal that little blighter’s lips shut.” At which point C.J. rounded off her final clause and took F.V. by the collar, warning him: “If you ever threaten my son with a stapler ever again, I will have you scrubbing the stairs in solders.” She used that threat each time as she loved the triple-S alliteration. F.V. didn’t.

  Claire J. Watson had plotted her nine-book-and-increasing Firewood series (ex-Firepile, Fireworld, Fireplace, Firehole, and Fire-ice) during her stint as a phone operative for ScotCall. She spent her free time adding complexities to her fantastical world in order to prevent having to start the writing. When more characters, incidents, metaphors, universes, enchanted lands, and themes had been planned than she could conceivably insert into one book she would expand the scope and dream up another handful of plotlines and opportunities for long indulgent description. To distract herself from the looming prospect of writing she signed up to ScotCall dating and fell in pretend love with an operative whose interests included nailing 5K targets, dodgeball, the music of Santana, and sitting on beaches basking in the wonderful sun of the wonderful world created for wonderful us. Being in a relationship with a target-hitting worker meant she had too much free time to sit and compose her novel, so she allowed her pretend love to impregnate her, hoping this responsibility might provide ample distraction from the business of having to write; only her man doted on her so much she had less preparation to do, so she decided to sever ties with the man and raise the child alone. The arguments ate up a certain amount of time. Once the child was born she realised she didn’t love it (him) and so came to her senses and signed up to The House to realise her dreams and knuckle down to complete the nine-books-and-increasing before she went mad.

  This

  2

  THE House of Writers is the first “proper” novel I have attempted since moving to The House. In my twenties, my writing method involved a form of permanent self-distraction using the internet (a portal to view cats). I would write a sentence (or half a sentence) and click back onto the t
hree or four regular windows I had open and stare at the same content I had seen that morning observing minute variations as the feeds expanded. I became so habituated to writing one sentence (or half a sentence) and clicking onto the web pages I had seen before, looking for distraction opportunities, that writing became an incremental and unabsorbing process and the only solution I had was to develop a form of composition that allowed for aimless digression. I also had to account for the general sloth and sleepiness that overcame me when faced with the prospect of starting anew, worrying that the present day’s writing would pale in comparison to yesterday’s (with yesterday’s paling in comparison to the previous day’s, etc.) I had to permit myself to churn out semi-conscious sentences and hope later I might have the concentration to whip them into line as passable constructions.

  Often I would bring up Google images of people I hoped one day might respect and admire me. I would drift into fantasies of the novels I would never write and the success I would never have and this fantasising was more appealing than the business of placing words on the page for an unseen audience that might never top more than a handful of people. So the words took longer to emerge from brain to hand to screen due to this trance-like immersion in fantasies of being the most talented and hilarious writer and comedian and musician and actor in the world (with a tormented romantic life and brilliant eccentricities), and the novels became collages of dreams, resentments, hopes, failed ambitions, digressions, fantasies, and comedic vignettes, which seemed an acceptable form as far as representing life and individual consciousness went (being as good a purpose of the novel as any).

  Despite these barriers, the novels appeared in quick succession—Then (2015), Now (2016), When (2017), and Earlier (2018) — until this technique was exhausted and passé among my small cabal of readers. I progressed to writing “technogeddon” potboilers composed of emails and instant messages, eschewing narrators and obscuring characters/speakers to create a sense of informational overload (presaging the meltdown two decades later). These works were in vogue and I found a wider audience with (No Subject) (2020) and Anonymous Would Like to Chat (2022), the latter composed from anonymous messages on a chatroom and ending with a series of murders and suicides. I became complaisant turning a profit as a doom-monger and tried to write a more positive novel about two lovers who find each other after fending off various stalkers encountered on dating sites. The Blacklist (2024) appeared to lukewarm reviews so I returned to writing bleak visions of tomorrow. Bleak Visions of Tomorrow (2027) was well-received as one of the ur-texts of the post-meltdown gen.

  After the meltdown and the ScotCall rebranding of the country, I worked in their publicity department until The House opened. I fled immediately, and spent an unsuccessful few months in the experimentalists’ basement trapping rodents and using their tails as a makeshift pen (and their blood as makeshift ink) and set to work hacking out novels on various floors. All I had to do was knock together semi-readable plots and find unambitious readers to purchase a few copies to survive, although the dispiriting workload wore me down. I decided it was a miracle to be working at something I love, despite The House having long since killed the pleasure I take in putting words on the page (this novel an exception—it feels so nice to be writing this sort of thing and not a pornographic western set in a Turkish rodeo). I hope if civilisation rises from its illiterate bog and my oeuvre is reappraised, this novel will be included among my early, visionary works as a late masterpiece.

  The Trauma Rooms

  2

  THE doctor took three short paces to the second of the trauma rooms, located with convenience across from the first, and cautioned Erin about its contents.

  “As in the first trauma room to which I took you—”

  “Ten seconds ago,” Erin said.

  “—yes, ten or thereabouts seconds ago, as you correctly evinced, this patient is suffering a mania as a result of critical hyperbole. In this case, he was a ghost-blurber, that is to say, professional writers paid him to write their blurbs and critical comments in praise of various authors. One day, for amusement, he read one of the books he was blurbing and suffered a violent physical and mental breakdown. He is fairly calm these days, so I can let him tell you the remainder of the story. Terence, this is Erin.”

  “Hello Terence.”

  A man with the expression of lugubrious schnauzer kicked once too often by its sadistic master offered a limp hand. “

  Terry,” he said.

  “Care to tell Erin what happened when you read that book one evening?”

  “I suppose,” he said with the voice of a teenager told by his parents that all colleges and businesses had closed forever and there was no money left to support him. “I had been making mega-bucks writing blurbs and critical comments on the back pages of novels. The publishers sent me outlines of the plots, and I salt-and-peppered their words, adding superlatives to increase market value and reader frenzy. Established writers paid to read the books and provide praise contracted their duties to me, and I wrote their lines for a cut of their fees. In those days, for a writer to be published, certain initiation rights were required—the CEO of Penguin liked to sodomise first novelists with a bronze replica of Julius Caesar’s penis, while other established writers took turns to urinate in their nostrils—and once in the ‘established’ club, writers provided a collective backslapping service on their respective books, contracting their duties to people like me: I doubt one of these writers read a book by their contemporaries. I never had any artistic ambitions myself, in fact, I rarely read books published after 1900, I was mad into the Victorians. I had written newspaper copy for several years, but the rise of vicious youths fresh from their BAs and diplomas shunted me from the profession. Anywho, to circumambulate back to the point. Yes, I made a nice living. I could afford to take a lover at last, after years struggling to scrape enough pfennigs together for a pint of milk, and I had the damp in my flat treated. One night, having written the 500th blurb, I opened a can of fizz and settled down to read one of the books—the latest novel by John Green, entitled Fractured Lovelines. I need a moment to compose myself before I describe what happened next. Please excuse me.”

  “That’s fine. Take your time,” the doctor said. Erin stared on, rapt. In the ten-second pause, she scanned the area for her stapler. Aside from a plastic cup on a side table, there were no possessions in the room.

  “So I suppose I had come to believe in my own hyperbole. I never questioned that these books were anything other than works of stupefying wizardry ... I opened the John Green and read the first five pages. At first, I mistook my stomach pain for the aftermath of a chilli garlic chicken curry I had eaten that night, and powered on past page one, wincing at the knots, until I arrived at page five and vomited blood over the e-reader in the shape of a fractured heart. I doubled over, howling in pain. I could not believe a book could be that appalling. I screamed out: ‘I called this book a daring take on a controversial topic! I said this was a brave and beautiful novel to be cherished for decades to come!’ I clutched my stomach and screamed. I ran out onto the street, shouting nonsense, assaulting people who tried to help, eventually passing out in a motorway layby, covered in slime and scum, having leapt into a polluted pond to cleanse myself of the foulness that had overtaken me. Then I entered the most horrific dreams, the content of which I am not prepared to speak about and that I will take to the grave.”

  “We are still working through those,” the doctor said.

  “All because I read five pages of that John Green novel. If I ever meet John Green, I will hack off his cock and—”

  “All right, Terence, remember our lessons on controlling violence.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He can’t be released, you see,” the doctor whispered to Erin, “because he still vows murderous revenge on each of the authors he blurbed. This John Green novel has caused him ineradicable trauma.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Yes, his b
ooks are the most inexcusable waffle. Thank you, Terence, we will be moving along.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Erin said. He nodded with the thankful expression of Kaspar Hauser handed a lump of wax wrapped in cat hair for his dinner.

  “Shall we proceed to the third room?” he asked Erin, as if addressing a bemused child, and placed a guiding arm on her shoulder once more. She accepted his overfamiliar touch in the hope of locating her stapler.

  “Fingers crossed,” she said.

  “Yes! That’s right. Very good. Onward.”

  “Yes . . .”

  A Commission Gone Awry

  To: James L. Horton

  From: Derek Haffmann

  Dear James,

  I am the MSP for a town in West Region called Linlinger. We are a small locale with a proud foot in the manufacture of swan ornaments and raisin crackers. I half-read of one of your books (Pandora’s Bucks?) and I would like you to write a novel with me as the protagonist. I am not a vain man so I do not expect your depiction of me to be wholly flattering, although as a Member of ScotCall Parliament I expect you to exercise discretion when it comes to describing my role in the power structure and the facts of my personal life (however fictional). I will pay you a standard rate for this task.

  Regards,

  Derek Haffmann

  MSP for Linlinger

  To: Derek Haffmann

  From: James L. Horton

  Dear Derek

  Oh God! I canNOT believe you have chosen me for this task ... this duty ... this HONOUR, sir!! I am flabbergasted and proud to accept this invitation and I hope I can do your no doubt fascinating life justice! I CANnot quite believe that you have chosen ME, (ME!!!) the humble writer of the book you mentioned (actually called Pandora’s Locks, but what does that matter??) to perform this honour, this ... this privilege! You email at a perfect time as my ten-book series Fishes Make Wishes has not been successful with my reader and he has refused to pay me for my services ... I will spare you the sob story, sir, but I have had to drink water from the bathroom taps and steal leftover rinds from the canteen to survive the last few weeks. I also have a rash for which I am unable to source the medication ... however, that is not your concern! I am delighted delighted delighted to accept! Please write back to me outlining your vision for this novel and I can begin work on this project immediately.