The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  Puff: The Unloved Son

  3

  Apetition had been circulated calling for the expulsion of C.J. Watson and her troublemaking son Puff. His list of crimes included:

  —destroying forty photocopiers by bubblegumming the insides

  —destroying ninety staplers by flinging them at writers’ heads and walls

  —destroying eighty hole punches by ditto

  —destroying one hundred and three pairs of shoes by crawling under desks and gnawing on them

  —making lifts unsafe by wedging them open and placing tacks on the carpet

  —abusing, distracting, tormenting and bullying the writers

  —urinating from the windows while singing offensive ditties

  His mother Claire, author of the ten-books-and-increasing fantasy series Firelamp, was now in the undesirable position of having to take control of her unwanted son and defend her right to remain in The House. Several weeks after Puff’s birth, under the sway of painkillers and placebos, she’d had feelings of tenderness and affection until her mothering instinct expired with the realisation a son was a lifelong thing and she had a nine-book series to complete that she hadn’t even started. She went through the motions with Puff as if he were another domestic chore, changing his nappies alongside other time-zappers like washing up and hoovering—all done with that particular blank expression reserved for inanimate things that couldn’t care less how harassing they were. As a toddler, preschooler, and older preschooler (he was eight and hadn’t been to school yet), he was allowed more freedom until she let him run rampant around the building without even the occasional nondescript scolding from afar or threat of a willow switch across his behind. Every second she spent having to attend to him and lost not writing her manuscript made her hate his face all the more.

  Over 2,928 writers had signed the physical petition calling for her and Puff’s removal. She had an appointment with Marilyn Volt that afternoon. She sat down with Puff beforehand, staring at his mussed hair, lice-filled and overlong; the torn t-shirt and jeans from which arms and arse protruded at uncouth angles; the lips forming impertinence in song (“Mummy is a poohead / Puffy is a coolhead”), and for the first time, felt shame. She had made this rasping and foul entity, and now had to defend her actions, its (his) existence, and save her novels’ futures. As Puff wrote demented semi-rhymes on the walls in crayon (“I will eat your brains / and then your bairns”), Claire cried her corneas red and made general helpless noises as she shook her head in admission of despair. Then in a surge of decisiveness, she slapped her son hard on the face and held him down, administering hard thwacks to the behind as he writhed in screams and tears. “You will obey me,” she said, “or I will do this to you every hour on the hour until your whole world is a fear factory.”

  It was a line from her second book.

  The result of her punitive discipline, apart from the knowledge she had crossed the line into being an “abusive mother,” and that her son would later write misery memoirs on the 38th floor about her tyranny, thus undermining her fantasy novels for a whole generation of readers, was that Puff appeared to Marilyn as a neat and well-behaved child respectful to his mother. She had run 10K as usual (whatever time of the day, it was safe to assume she had ran 10K), and arrived with her usual sweat-gummed visage in perpetual rictus.

  “So I see a lot of people have signed this petition,” she said, taking her usual slurp on a sports drink between utterances.

  “Marilyn, I wanted you to see for yourself how calm and friendly my son is. These petitioners don’t have children. They have no patience for occasional outbursts of exuberance,” Claire said.

  “He looks very calm,” Marilyn said. She leaned into the stunned face of Puff. “You’re not a bad boy, are you?” He looked at his mother who signalled he should respond in the negative or else. “No, miss,” he said.

  “He’s my little Puff pastry,” Claire added.

  “More like Puff pasty. Ought to get him out in the sun,” she said and smiled at his adorable face masking terror. “Well, that’s settled. You both can stay. Sorry for the inconvenience. What are you working on?”

  “An eleven-book-and-increasing fantasy series, Firedoor. The heroine is—”

  “Great! I hope it does well for you,” Marilyn said, rising from her desk to run another 10K or do something not at her desk.

  Claire walked Puff to the front door and crouched down to meet his panicked eyes.

  “Now listen. I don’t want you growing up to hate me. I’m not a bad person. I just didn’t want you. It’s better you know this now than spend years trying to fight for my love. I don’t love you. But I don’t want to completely abandon you, either. So what I suggest is, you spend your days outside, playing around the fields. Be careful, there’s lots of shrapnel out there. Come back in at lunchtimes and dinnertimes for food. And back in at night to shower and sleep, of course. I think this is the best solution. See you later.”

  And so Claire left Puff at The House entrance, relinquishing her parenting duties to the vast creche of fragged motherboards and busted hard drives that littered the stock-dump fields, where he would spend his early youth, sifting through the trash and sitting on a volcanic hatred that would erupt in the nine-book-and-increasing series of misery memoirs entitled Dumped in the Fields: The Story of my Childhood.

  Mhairi

  5

  C.D. GRUNGE ate a fungus-tinted marshmallow and sprouted a second head. Unluckily, the second head hated reading and attempted to seize control of his body to do other things like sprinting or singing. The second head had a penchant for the lyrics of Freddie Mercury and the melodies of Gordon Lightfoot. Two weeks later a third head sprouted from his left buttock with a similar aversion to books and writing and a penchant for the lyrics of Mark E. Smith and the melodies of Tori Amos. This made writing an arduous and unpleasant task for C.D. and made sitting down impossible. When a fourth head sprouted from his big toe, he decided to take action and asked me to decapitate the heads. Due to a last-minute act of deception from the second head pretending to be the original C.D., the original C.D. head was decapitated instead and the second head took control of the body. The usurped C.D. left The House and went on the cruise circuit as a Queen tribute act with a less popular sideline in the songs of Gordon Lightfoot. This incident I considered a personal failure. These happen from time to time. I was able to construct a replacement body for the old C.D. from bits of old robot in the stock-dump fields, but as he wasn’t able to write, he pulled his own plug. Tragic.

  Writer Portraits

  The New Writer

  IHAD been writing manuscripts and stories for over a decade when I had a story accepted in New Writing 49, an anthology for new writing (read: unpublished elsewhere but submitted within the last year). This story (written fourteen years ago) proved popular and I was included in the New Writers’ Showcase event, invited to read the piece before an audience including agents scouting for “new” writers to sell. I was amused at being branded a “new” writer when I had been around and had published in small presses for a long time, and that I was being announced as “new” with a tale I had written aged eighteen. I was asked to extend the short story (about a teenage breakup—the one piece I had written in a conventional manner, my usual MO being concrete prose arranged in acrostics)—into a novel, and a year later I was signed to an agent and had published The Time of Heartquakes. I received a favourable review in a national newspaper and was crowned an interesting “new” voice on the “scene.” A month later, I was unable to contact the agent and a month plus, I was politely dropped. At that point, though I wasn’t to know this at the time, I was to begin a “movement” known as The New Waves, The Bright New Things, The Newest Old Things, or The Sliced Breads.

  After the drop, I changed my name by deed poll and wrote another conventional tale in the same manner as the last. This too seemed to contain the formula the panel was after (among the panel’s titles: The Heart’s Gatekeeper, Shatt
ered Daylight, Learning to Love a Little Less), so I changed my appearance somewhat (a red perm, fake specs, and partial goatee) and entered the “new” machine once again, with invites to anthologies and readings (I faked a deeper voice), followed by another call from an agent. I penned a second novel mining similar teenage territory to my first, drawing on an unpleasant childhood, and received similar positive reviews, with invites to book readings and libraries. The agent triumphed me as an “energetic and vital voice quivering with wrenching emotion” up until the optimum number of copies had been sold to reap the maximum potential profit, and soon after, I was back into the wilderness of being a second-book author no one wanted.

  Several scenesters who had recognised me kept shtum and chose to copy my coup, many of these people former flavours of the month themselves with unwanted second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and in one case, eleventh novels in their cupboards desperate for publication and attention. This scheme worked well for publisher, agent, and writer alike, as second novelists had the writing chops and material ready—all that was required to sell books was a fresh identity, as readers tended to distrust second novels (the sophomore slump, the hatred of a writer succeeding in making a “career,” the usual lukewarm-to-meh response to most startling new voices), and publishers were unable to crank the hype machine or use phrases such as “amazing new voice” or “refreshingly honest new voice” or another combination using the words “new” and “voice” beside each other.

  The scene was populated with ex-“new” writers posing as new “new” writers, forcing out the real “new” writers, who forged their own sideline as “up-and-coming” writers (unsuccessful, as no one except smug musos wanted to “discover” writers before their “new” unveiling), and soon the agents and publishers were in cahoots with this mass hoodwinking—keeping various “new” writers away long enough from the scene before their rebranding. I made four debuts until a critic commented on the similarity in style between certain of my publisher’s output, and I became a toxic product and was forced to return to the real love of mine, concrete prose arranged in acrostics. This exit was to become fortuitous, as fame-struck writers, desperate to retain the mild ripple of interest “new” writers savour, sometimes had plastic surgery to alter their appearances so much that scenesters would be unable to recognise them (having exhausted the range of hairstyles, specs, and facial hair options available).

  The point of implosion arrived a decade into the “movement” when critics, at this point fed up of the repeated styles and themes in “new” writers’ books, pounced upon a five-time “new” novelist, reading from his child-abuse novel Shrieks from the Cellar. The critic Will Bentley recognised a familiar passage from an earlier “new” novel, searched the passage on his Kindle, and noticed a verbatim sentence from Mewlings in the Basement. He kept his ears open that night and discovered nine other repeats, standing up towards the end of the reading to shout: “This material has been plagiarised! This writer is a plagiarist!” The shock of this interruption caused the writer’s false moustache to fall, his false lenses to pop out their frames, and his badly applied wig to slide off, revealing Iain Strung, author of Sorry We Are Closed, about childhood beatings in his father’s shop. “That is Iain Strung! This man is an impostor!” the critic shouted. Iain ran off the stage to loud boos.

  Iain’s agent and publisher attempted to play dumb, feigning deception, but there was too much heat (another incident occurred a month later with Kitsy Bluepill, formerly Anne Winters), so the “new” writer “movement” was dropped. The writers had signed hush contracts, so no squealing happened for years, until a long article in The Guardian was run describing the entire operation (an intern at Faber & Faber had been bribed) and a long list of repeat “new” writers was outed (including me), and our book sales took a haemorrhaging and the publishers and agents received slaps on the wrist before returning to the old system of grooming “new” writers and spitting them out once they had served the balance sheet. None of this mattered much in the long run, as soon the audience for “new” writers became obsolete, and the “movement” of unpublished writers posing as established ones began.