I’m bored with the usual stuff, but I’ve got to produce some copy, so I’m just making this up as I go along – it’s a bit like my life really, boring, but got to do it, so that was just made up as it went along too. No great plan, just the hope that something would turn up and the remarkable thing was it always did. Perhaps not what I really wanted or expected, but it always got me to the end of the day and the next meal. No decisions ever made, just a leaf blown down the gutter of life, some go down a storm drain and others sail free on the wind over the fields to land in a sheltered corner and quietly compost down ready for the next turn on the wheel. I found out young I preferred my own company. I get involved in fewer arguments that way. So like that leaf on the wind it’s been a life alone, but never a lonely life.

I’ve lived a life absolutely full of bits and pieces that make no sense at all when you string them together. So many places lived in, so much information cached in my memory, so many skills acquired, and so many bizarre events that I initiated, took part in or just witnessed. And I’m still doing it because for me that is the way life is. A leaf does not contend with the wind. My life is completely unbelievable taken as a whole and so totally pointless, but I have come up with a few guidelines to pass on. If they are of no use to you you will at least be no worse off for having read them, and they’ll pass a bit more of that time you have to use up between the cradle and the grave.

Today is Saturday. Tomorrow is will be Sunday, whether you like it or not, and whether you are here to see it or not. Time is a strictly increasing monotonic function. The former statement is a translation of something that was around before the current era (so it’s at least 2019 years old), and obviously it changes as to the day of the week. The second is a much younger mathematicians’ statement that means the same – not only does time never go backwards, it never stands still either. The significance of both boil down to, ‘The rest of your life starts right now, so don’t waste it’.

If you are persecuted, the solution is to walk away. The inverse square law works every time. For non-scientists it can be rewritten as be somewhere else when bad things happen. They do, they happen often, so get used to it and buy a good pair of running shoes.

Are you obsessed by a need to know? The only answer is study. The result is you’ll be overqualified to do any job you are interested in doing, but you shall have satisfied your need to know, and you be able to pass the time doing cryptic crossword puzzles while you are out of work.

If you’re poor, then analyse what you need to do to make money. At the far end of it you may possibly have more money than you know what to do with, but you won’t be hungry or cold and you’ll have somewhere warm to sleep, and you can donate to the organisations that stand against the people you don’t like. You know the sort of thing. If someone you don’t like is bothered by a planning application to build an eyesore that will devalue their property donate to the developers’ pension fund or buy shares in the company.

If your family disown you, the solution is to forget them. Decades later you won’t know if they’re alive never mind where they live, and by then you won’t even be sure if you ever did care. Time is the great healer, and ignoring someone is the ultimate insult. Return any mail from them marked, ‘Unknown at this address, return to sender.’ It’s petty yes, but satisfying, and the return will cost them about a fiver a letter and you nothing. The letters will soon stop.

If you don’t get on with folk, then don’t bother with them. You’ll have no friends and only yourself to talk to, but at least it will be intelligent conversation with someone who holds the same views as yourself. Remember if someone knocks on your door you don’t have to open it. Get an answer phone. If someone doesn’t tell you who they are or what they want ignore it. If they talk to it but you don’t wish to talk to them ignore it. Unless you wish to use it keep your mobile phone turned off. Better yet, get rid of the land line and the mobile. It is no crime not to answer letters. Use them unopened to light the fire with. Shift control end delete works wonders with emails, delete the lot unread. You didn’t ask for them did you? If you are expecting one save it first, then delete the rest.

All is possible. You only have take up a little space and then die, the rest is all optional providing you are prepared to pay the price.

But back to me, I’m elderly, educated, wealthy, on my own, no family I know of, and have a few acquaintances rather than friends. I’m occupying a little space, but haven’t yet got round to working on dying. Looking back, how do I justify my existence? Do I need to? Do I care. The answers are simple. I don’t, no and no. However, I like to keep my mind occupied, and at my age all activity is probably futile, but I really can’t be bothered with the totally pointless computer games or even more pointless su-doku, crossword puzzles and the like.

Instead I’m a writer and I use all that life time’s worth of places, folk, information and skills to fuel my dream machine, it’s all grist to the word mill. Plus a large helping of fabrication, new truth, (Only those who don’t understand writers call the new truth lies. Ignore them, for they have no souls), out right futuristic impossibility and misdirection to hold it all together. It doesn’t have to be consistent, but I like it to be credible even when it’s incredible. See what I mean about inconsistency? Language is there for the writer to play with.

To be of faith is not the opposite of to be faithless. Price and value and worth too have similar meanings, but priceless and valueless are near antonyms, and worthless lines up with the latter rather than the former. Such worthy quirks of the language are priceless and beyond value to a writer who considers them worthwhile. Play with them. I just did, four of them in one sentence! It’s a long time since to say a statement was incredible, unbelievable or fantastic was to accuse someone of lying, but that is the literal meaning of all three. Truly unbelievable, or then again maybe not. A caution, ‘ware the use of literal and its derivatives, for ‘tis a dangerous collection of words that are capable of exposing much folly in a writer.

But back to the point. The beauty of writing is, it’s fiction, so it doesn’t depend much on a good memory. Never let reality stand in the way of a good tale. You can blend four, or ten or more if need be, boring people to create one interesting character. If something interesting happened at Luton airport, a totally tedious location, take the event to the Asimov space station on Mars. A irritating neighbour with two kids living in a half decent area becomes a crack whore with eight kids, all with different unknown fathers, living in a slum. If you have a story that you’d get into trouble with the law, the mafia or whomever if you told it like it is then change the names, the places, the descriptions, everything except the guts of it that makes it work, and write it as fiction with the usual disclaimers. And remember you know nothing.

If you wake up dead or with a horse’s head in bed with you you probably didn’t change enough. I suggest you reread the last paragraph. If memory fails, you could I suppose if desperate enough look it up, but a viable and faster alternative is to make it up. When challenged over something, a time discrepancy say, you can always say on the planet Seilfemit seven o’clock always comes exactly one hour after eight o’clock – it’s how it works there, but best to make that one a solo because it gets complicated when epilogues and prequels start switching places. You are the only arbiter of your stories, and no one else has any authority concerning them, so be as robust as you like concerning the contents of story itself. If you want to open with a dead heroine who yet has deeds of heroism to do, then do it. If you want to close a so called autobiography with your own birth do it. It’s how it works in the town of Esnes, county Enon, where you were born right?

However, if challenged on something outside the story, say the nature of it, or your right to write about such things, do not respond. You need no defence, so don’t allow them to waste your time. Block them and do whatever else you can to prevent them reaching you, and then forget them. Write another story in the same vein as the one that fired them up, and let that be your only response. Keep writing stories like that. They’ll get tired before you do, after all one of the benefits of you writing is it lowers your blood pressure. They are increasing theirs, so look on the bright side, you’re taking them that bit closer to a meeting with the grim reaper. You may even get a story out of that. If you do be polite. I know it’s tricky thanking a corpse for being your muse, but hell you’re a writer. You can do anything.

The concept of reality is actually mind blowing when you think about it. How many books, magazines, newspapers, tracts and other things have been published since Caxton? That’s a rhetorical question that I have no idea of an answer to. My point is femtioelva, fifty-eleven, a lot. Somebody has to have written all those quinzillions of words. I made that one up. I’m allowed. I’m a writer, and we do things like that all the time. So how many writers have there been? Perhaps a more germane question is how many writers are there alive today? Not a quinzillion perhaps, but certainly at least a bazillion. I didn’t make that one up. Check it out.

My point is that there are so many that being a writer shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. In the era of universal literacy, in theory anyway, in the developed world being a writer should be no big deal. However, this is invariably how it goes. You say, “I’m a writer.” Then they say, “Really‽” You can hear the interrobang in their voice, the compounded question and exclamation marks that say, “An alien, Eh? I never met an alien before!” Which is an example of their reality. Just for God’s sake whatever you do don’t tell them you’re trans too. The shock will kill them, and you’ll be charged with manslaughter. Society has really got it in for trans aliens at the moment. They’re the new gingers.

So, is this for real? Autobiographical? Don’t be silly. I’m a writer. Haven’t you been paying any attention at all to what you’ve just read? We make stuff up on the hoof just because it’s convenient, and then pass it off as real fiction, an oxymoron if ever I heard one. Nothing is real. Cogito ergo sum is just a fancy way of saying everything else except my thought is or could be illusion. Which is my point entirely. But I’m a writer. I know I keep saying that, but it is significant because all writers have to consider their readership. I regard Latin as more than most of my readers wish to do battle with, so I’ll translate it for you. Cogito ergo sum, I’m pink therefore I’m spam, which in the cases that are not immediately obvious will become so with time.

Most of the so called non-fiction ever written is either deliberate lies or self delusion, and the rest is jingoistic garbage, with the the possible exception of ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ which was by Carlo Collodi, not Walt Disney. Which statement proves my point for it contains an obvious lie and probably self delusion as well. History has always been written by the victors. For every word written in French about Wellington’s and Napoleon's campaigns in the Iberian peninsula leading up to the battle of Waterloo on Monday the 18th of June 1815 there are tens if not hundreds of thousands written in English. A balanced view is impossible to arrive at, and Henry Ford’s statement, and yes he really did say it despite what the naysayers would have you believe, ‘History is bunk’ is unarguably true to the millions who have never heard of Wellington or of his life and times and adventures with the Corsican monster, though most will have heard of Pinocchio, and probably Geppetto too.

Even reality is fictional, reread the paragraphs above. Autobiography is filtered through at least one set of attitudes and beliefs and events become changed and rose coloured as a result, and that’s with out the spectacles. Biography is filtered through at least two sets and all else is total fantasy. Billy Connelly the Scottish comedian and raconteur once said he’d told some of his stories so often even he didn’t know what happened any more. Time does that to your memory. When I think back to certain events in my life I’m almost sure my memories of my behaviour have become less discreditable with time. But then again maybe I really was the good girl and took the moral high ground in those scenarios. I suppose it’s possible. Do I believe any of this? What do you think? I’ll give you a clue. I’m a girl with a deadline to meet for a two and a half thousand plus word filler.

Does any of it matter? Well that depends on why you write. If you do it for kudos on BCTS, and a piece you consider to be pretty poor, because you wrote it in a rush with maybe no spell check, no editing or even reading it through once or even the story was a lousy concept anyway, gets a load of kudos, no it doesn’t matter because it achieved what you set out to do. The piece was a success. If you wrote it for yourself and you aren’t happy with it any kudos it garners are irrelevant because it’s still a work in progress. A bit like life really, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that on the day you draw your final breath you will have written your final word and it will be good enough to see you out, kudos or no, and both you and your writing will be ready for the next turn on the wheel, as a writer.