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| - Recently I’ve been suffering from what I call ‘Talent gangrene.’, and now I’ve effectively got no limbs left that aren’t rotting slowly in their own juices. I’ve been told my writing is suffering from what critics call ‘Word syphilis’. The reviews say it’s boring but in a suffocating, disturbing sort of way, like marriage. My anniversary was last week. We went out to dinner, the highlight of our conversation was; ‘Pass the salt.’ It was downhill from there, and I know who to blame, cynics or as I call them, talent leeches. With every bad review I seem to get worse. Quite obviously it's their fault. They hated my last novel: ‘A Family of Broken Glass’. I can’t see why, it’s not like I’m asking for much. I just want people to read my work and think: ‘Tarquin Middleton, he’s the Shakespeare of tabloids.’ Is that so much to ask? The cynics seem to think so, with their zero stars out of ten and their snide comments. A lot of people just don’t realise how awful a bad review is. It’s like being stabbed, but with a knife made of letters. These cynics are everywhere these days, giving out their so called ‘opinions.’ Even my editor is now a critic. When I show him my writing, which is basically me saying: “Look, here’s my soul” He’s less than grateful. He even starts pointing out what he thinks is wrong with it. Who gave him the right to do that? It certainly wasn’t me. The only conclusion I can make, is that he probably thinks he’s God, and wants us all to build ego pyramids to his insane vanity. Like God, he doesn’t seem to appreciate my work any more. In fact he says he’s seen more vibrant prose in carpet samples, and coma patients who move faster than my latest novel's plot. Normally I'd outwardly agree, then silently fill with the sort of rage a spurned stalker feels. Later I'd send him an E-mail, to tell him how I felt, to explain as it were, just how wrong he is. It would have a polite, yet firm title like: 'Is cancer too good for your sort of bastard?' That might seem harsh, but if you remember, I trusted him with my soul, in the form of paper. He spat on it, then probably attacked it with scissors. Normally I wouldn't condone such actions. However this time, unfortunately. I had to agree with everything he did and said. I imagine only myself and the dead know how that feels. Last week I panicked as yet another deadline arrived, and submitted my six year old son’s English homework, a story called ‘Cannibals on Holiday.’ for immediate publication. Complete with chocolate stains, and a crude yet oddly disturbing drawing of stick people roasting in 'barbecue pits'. It looked like my editor couldn’t even tell the difference, he just gave the resigned sigh of an opium fiend and shredded it as usual. It was like losing a child, and I mentally promised to make him pay. Soon after he arranged to fill the huge blank space where my article should have been with a double page advert for a new brand of herpes cream. ‘It’s forty percent effective!’ the advert boasted, which is more than can be said for my writing. I gave my usual excuses for what had happened. I said I’d been under a lot of stress lately because of ‘Stuff… and things.’ And that I honestly was going to get a lot better soon. He said nothing as he stapled my tie to the desk and poured his coffee down my trousers, but somehow I knew what he was really thinking. The shock of scalding coffee on unprepared genitals, made me see things more clearly. I decided to tell him the truth. I had to, my constant vague references to unnamed personal ‘problems’ had obviously stopped working. There were no excuses left and no way to stall him any longer, although I did seriously think about faking a stroke, I doubted whether I could have pulled it off convincingly, and didn’t want to spend time spasming like a cretin for no good reason. He didn’t take the bad news very well. In fact he said people like me were the reason why cancer was invented. When I asked for more constructive criticism. Which is a writing euphemism for ‘Tell me how great I am.’ He just sighed like a disappointed parent, looked at my face, and said, 'fucktard', then he violently stapled the tie again, and boiled the kettle to make more coffee. While waving a condescending finger in my face, he asked if I really was the same man who wrote: ‘Do Midget Gems Cure Heart Disease? ’ and ‘National Pencil Crisis: They Just Keep on Breaking!’ He asked me why I’d didn’t just stop pretending to care and simply park a turd on his desk each week. Before announcing that, “Happy Mr. Shitstain.” had arrived to fill my deadlines. Then he decided to give me some advice. He recommended a holiday or cocaine or both, and then told me to go away and learn not to be useless, or that would be the end of my journalistic career. As I drove home, I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. I used a technique my therapist calls "Life Post Mortem." I started with the facts. I knew I was crap; I just couldn’t work out why, or how. There was obviously no shortage of journalistic talent, after all I single handedly covered the National otter shortage, with nothing but a pair of Wellingtons and a blunt pencil. It seemed like I’d never be able to work out just why things had turned quite so horrible. I admit I found it depressing, and that’s how I found the answer to all my problems, and more. It was during a particularly awful low point when I discovered, by chance what I needed to do. I was going to give it all up and train to be a gas fitter, but then, the other day I realised something, I realised you can’t tell a good story unless you’ve got a significant chemical imbalance. I thought about people like Van Gogh, Silvia Plath and Adam Ant. All talented, all miserable as hell. It was nothing to do or originality or any of that pretentious crap, I had to become enormously disturbed in order to get my talent back. In the next few weeks I’ll be chronicling my heartwarming/Comic and or tragic struggle to take a claw hammer to the face of happiness and become depressed, in the hope that it’ll give a life saving electric shock to the semi-comatose husk that was once my career.
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