Merry Christmas (and a Cautionary Tale)
[image error]I’d like to wish all of my readers a very Merry Christmas. Thank you for reading my work. Wherever you are in the world, I hope in your world there is only peace, safety and happiness. Twenty-seventeen has been the first year that “my readers” have numbered in the thousands, and I’m grateful to each of you. For me, Christmas is now indelibly associated with what happened to me two years ago, when I came to within hours of dying.
A couple of days before Christmas 2015, my appendix burst but I declined to seek medical assistance until it was almost too late. This wasn’t down to any misplaced male bravado: a few weeks earlier, I’d had the same pain which went away after I fasted for ten days. I assumed the pain would go away again, so fasted again. Two days later, I finally went to see a doctor, who said: “You need a surgeon within two hours.”
[image error]Christmas Day 2015 passed in haze of drug-smothered pain, drips going into my arm and a plastic tube carrying a vile-looking yellow liquid out from my stomach. The surgeon who operated on me conveyed his assessment to my wife that I might not survive the operation, and certainly would not have lasted another night without the operation. But thanks to dumb luck and the fantastic efficiency and professionalism of the Polish national health system, I did survive. So, dear reader, if you ever get a sharp pain in your stomach above your right hip, don’t delay in seeing a doctor.
But the reason I mention this is because of what it then led to: when this drama happened, I had just begun writing Repulse. It was going to be my last book, but I had lost the will to continue writing it. I’d been self-publishing my books for five years at that point, and had grown sick and tired of the whole three-ring circus. I’d stuck to the rules, writing fast-paced, character-driven science fiction. I’d tried everything and could not find readers; moreover, I loathed the fashion which demanded that, as an unknown author, I should pay other people to give my books away for free. So, I’d had enough. One more book and I was done, if I could finish writing it.
Repulse was not only the last book, it also broke all the rules, which was why I had lost interest in continuing to write it. It consisted only of exposition and had almost no dialogue, which is regarded as suicide for a work of fiction. It had no discernible characters who were in any way memorable. And the story was related by a historian 30 years after it had supposedly happened. I felt certain that, like all of my novels before it, Repulse would sink without a trace. Indeed, because it broke the rules, I believed failure was absolutely guaranteed.
When I came out of hospital two years ago, I realised that I owed it to myself to finish and publish Repulse—this one, last novel-that-broke-all-the-rules—before I died. I redoubled my efforts, finished the book, and published it in August 2016. And in quite the irony, 16 months later over 4,000 of you have read it.
Merry Christmas and thanks again (I’m the ugly one at the back, still smiling, still writing).
[image error]
[image error]
