"Bits of the Mind's String"

Looking for myself in my notebooks

DALL-E thinks that only old-timey people use notebooks

Paris, 27 October 2016

On the page of a small pocket notebook, dated 27 October 2016, a few lines in black ink:

"A pulp detective. Ex-US Army. In Paris after WW1, on an investigation that will lead him to discover an Eldritch entity that has been awoken by the industrialisation of warfare and has started the clock ticking on the end of the human race." 

And at the bottom of the page, a name: 

"Emerson Hyde."

I remember where I was when I wrote this, in a room at the top of the Bourg Tibourg hotel, in Paris. The room was a weird shape; the eaves intruding into headspace on one side and a corridor leading from the other, along the edge of the building, to end in an alcove where it would be easy to imagine Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec patiently waiting to sketch whoever came around the corner. The alcove housed a recessed bed, built into the wall by the door. My daughter was asleep right then on that bed. In the main room, my wife was trying to read a book by the soft glow of a bedside lamp that seemed more designed for atmosphere than practical illumination.

I was sitting by the window, looking out across the rooftops of Le Marais. It was coming up on midnight. The bars at the end of the street were still going strong. Four floors below me, people, either heading home or heading out, were striding by in loud groups. 

Something about Paris at night. The sights, the sound, the atmosphere. My mind wandered back to the point in history that most fascinates me about this city. 1922: The birth of Modernism. Joyce, Gertrude Stein, The Waste Land; more and more layers and textures piling on as I surrendered to a fog of half-remembered snippets of art and history and literature. 

And then a man stepped out through that fog and stood, looking around. He was a big guy, a brute. He scowled and then sniffed. He was wearing a grubby suit and a loose tie and his knuckles were perpetually cracked and bruised. He hadn't spoken, but I knew that when he did, the accent would be American. Chicago. Or maybe Providence. An American in 1920s Paris. I had the sense that he didn't really belong, in a more profound sense than that of just being a foreigner. I reached to the table and picked up my notebook...

“A pulp detective. Ex-US Army. In Paris after WW1, on an investigation that will lead him to discover an Eldritch entity that has been awoken by the industrialisation of warfare and has started the clock ticking on the end of the human race... Emerson Hyde.”

These lines barely filled half a page of thin Tomoe River paper, in a Travelers Company passport-sized notebook. Did they constitute an idea or just a half-baked notion? A fisherman, feeling a tug on the line, has an instinct for what just took the bait, even though he hasn't seen it yet. Something was there, down in the depths, something worth playing out and trying to reel in. Maybe it would snap the line and get away, maybe it would turn out just to be an old boot. 

At that point in time, looking out at the Paris rain with a pen in my hand, I didn’t know that this thin scattering of words would evolve into a script that would take me to New York and California, or that the project would prompt a bidding war. I didn’t know that one of the biggest directors in Hollywood would want to make it, nor did I suspect that I would wind up on the phone to a movie star who was keen to play Emerson Hyde. And in the long list of unknowables there also lurked, unseen, the global pandemic that would fatefully scupper the entire enterprise in four years time...

---

I know where I was when I wrote that note because the time and place is scrawled at the top of the page. But the note itself evokes context. I remember writing it, and what else was happening at the time, in a way that I rarely do when I type something. Physical media drops anchors in time. The act of writing with pen on paper snapshots the moment itself.

In her essay "On Keeping A Notebook", Joan Didion refers to "bits of the mind's string". These are pieces of who we are set down on a page and back-linked, to borrow terminology from the notebook's digital cousin, to a vivid snatch of life experience.

I have been actively keeping notebooks for many years now. As with every other aspect of my work, I continually switch up the what, when and how, but I always try to have some form of pen and paper with me. Something other than my phone. The phone is fine, and there are many times when it is more useful or immediate than a notebook, but I know that the act of dropping a note into my phone is likely to occur in a contextual vacuum. A reminder, but not a memory. The metadata in a digital note gives me the where and when but it doesn't give me the who. The person who wrote that note in Paris in 2016 is not me now, but from the note itself, from the handwriting, from the surrounding pages, I can form a picture of who I was at that time. 

The notebook isn't just a collection of ideas, or a record of events, it's an account of me as a person. These are notes to future-me from a version of me back then. The notebooks document a changing world and an evolving personality at the same time. Nothing is fixed, everything is in flux. You can't step into the same river twice, but the notes are a reminder of what the water felt like at a particular moment.

On the shelf behind my desk, there are small archival binders full of my notebooks. I have been compiling these books for a few years now, but I rarely look back at them, save to find something or check some half-remembered fact. Now, I have decided to take some of them down from the shelf and read back over them. This is dangerous stuff: reading messages from the past, finding out who I was then and how much or how little I have changed. But I have become curious. I have recently started therapy for the first time in my life, not out of some urgent need to have something fixed or examined, but more because I have become interested in who I am, my patterns of thought, why some things slide off me while other, more trivial things, can form roadblocks in my life. My therapist is at the getting-to-know-you stage of proceedings, and it strikes me that I might contribute to the conversation better if I make an effort to know myself. Who I am, or at least who I have been, is partly captured in these books. I might look back on an event and ascribe a feeling onto the past from the present, but how was I actually feeling about it at the time? 

These notebooks may hold the key to who I was and who I am now, and if there is any substantial difference between the two. As storytellers, it is drummed into us that characters must change. Must they? Have I changed? As the star of my own movie, surely I must have some kind of an arc?

A pile of notebooks on a desk. A record of a section of my life. messages from a previous version of me, messages that, until now, I have left largely unopened...

---

New York Public Library, 3 April 2018

April 3, 2018. The New York Public Library. I hadn't been to New York for at least a decade, and this was my first time here with my family. The trip was paid for with the proceeds of selling the TV script that the note in Paris had turned into. We were staying at the Algonquin, for the Dorothy Parker vibes. The hotel cat was sitting on the reception desk when we checked in and my daughter played with it. The cat was called Hamlet. The Algonquin has had a cat since it opened. The male cats are almost always called Hamlet, the females Matilda. The elevators were being refurbished and only one was working, which meant that you often had to wait an age to get to and from the lobby.

We visited the New York Public Library because Ghostbusters. The Rose Main Reading Room is not open to casual visitors; there are people working in there and they don't need gaggles of tourists chatting and taking pictures. But it turns out that if you brandish a notebook, the gatekeepers will let you in to work.

I find it difficult to describe the feeling this space gives me. I've been back a few times since, and it's the same every time. It's not the size (it's huge) or the sound (it's library-silent, which means you can hear hushed whispers, pages turning, nibs scratching paper), but there's an atmosphere to the place that I haven't experienced anywhere else. I imagine religious people might have this with certain places of worship. It's as if the air is thick with ideas. It's an imaginarium. One only needs to sit still for a few moments and thoughts become clear, connect, form bigger thoughts. It's inspiring, but it's more than that. It's like you're tapping into something. A source. The pure stuff.

My daughter was ten years old at that time and had a fascination with old books that was more to do with look and feel than content. She loved this space. We went back to New York just a few weeks ago and the library was top of her list of places to visit. This time around, I got to sit and watch her write an A-level essay in there on a rainy April morning. This place has claimed her now.

Back in 2018, I sat and looked around the room. Like all good libraries, this one had its share of students working away, and more casual visitors reading whatever was to hand. And then there were the people, as there always are, who don't LOOK like they would visit a library but are here anyway; the people who set you wondering as to what brought them here and who they are outside of this place. Do their friends and family know that this is a thing for them, or is the library their secret?

And that's when Marla Givens strolled into my head. Marla wasn't really a library person. She had had a difficult life. Her husband had run off at some point, leaving her with no money and a brood of kids to raise and she was doing menial jobs, trying to make ends meet. But something had happened to Marla. She had encountered something in the New York that was out of the ordinary, supernatural, threatening. Something was hunting her. And she had come to the library for answers.

Creative ideas aren't born in a vacuum. That's why notes like this one, which seem procedural - a writer making notes on a story idea - are actually a key to what is going on with me at that time. I am experiencing New York in a new way. I have come to this library for the first time and I am experiencing a rush of creativity from the space. But I channel that feeling through my own experience. I conjure someone, like me, who is not from here. Someone for who life has taken some odd turns, someone (like me then, like me now) who has questions about how they got here and what it means.

In the library, Marla would encounter some other people; an academic, a cab driver and a self-proclaimed psychic (a cursory glance around any Manhattan street will yield little hand-made signs proclaiming "Psychic, 3rd Floor" every few doorways). Marla would meet these people and discover that they are members of something called The Albany Group. They investigate what happens between the cracks of the city; the supernatural flotsam and jetsam that has disconnected from early folklore and mythology, and evolved as the city grew around it.

I write all this down in my notebook. A stream of consciousness idea. I don't know what it is, a TV show, an audio series, a book (it doesn't matter at the moment, the idea exists and it just wants to escape onto paper)... But I know that The Albany Group is controlled by a woman called Alice Swiftwater, and she works out of a closed floor at the top of the Algonquin Hotel. I suspect that Alice is not entirely human.

The idea, whatever it is, has a title. I squeeze it in at the top of the first page of the notes: "Shadows of New York".

A notebook crackles with potential energy. Between the covers, myriad scribbles hold ideas, observations, quotes, anxieties… This is pure thought, suspended in time. Only when an idea is extracted from the book and exposed to daylight does it start to decay. Nothing lives up to the original idea, or at least nothing lives up to the feeling you had writing down that original idea. Structures are imposed on stories, third-party requirements; "Can it be more like..." The original note is the spark of life. As soon as it leaves the womb, it starts to die.

Even the act of writing itself is a process of decay; the translation from thought to word dilutes and distracts. And when you make up stories for a living, they only ever really get worse. Sure, there are good bits, upticks on the graph, but generally the feeling of a new idea is as good as it gets. Everything after that is a compromise. 

In a certain corner of the internet, you cannot move for articles and posts about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Apps such as Obsidian, Tana, Heptabase, Capacities and (for the longest time) Evernote, have enabled us to collect information from sources both online and in the real world and annotate it, collate it, link it and extract it. A particular type of person (yes, I am that type) obsesses over the best way to collect and categorise knowledge and research. On the surface, this would seem to be a modern phenomenon, hastened by ever-advancing technology and, latterly, by the ubiquity of AI. But, while the technology might be new, the urge to collect and collate information is certainly not. 

In the late-medieval and Renaissance city states of Italy, the zibaldoni became fashionable. The word zibaldone originally (Italian scholars may wish to correct) meant "miscellaneous", and thus the plural zibaldoni becomes a miscellany. Facts, quotes, research notes, journal entries - everything was fair game for the zibaldoni. The idea was to collect knowledge, connect it, form a "second brain" on paper. Notable exponents of the form include Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, who began his book at the age of 15, and went on to record over 4,500 pages of notes, reflections, and excerpts from his reading. Leopardi's notebook covers a wide range of subjects, from philosophy and literature, to history, and science.

Perhaps the best-known example of the form from that time is the notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci's notebook, which he carried with him at all times, contained a wealth of information on subjects ranging from anatomy to engineering, as well as personal reflections and numerous sketches. This was how you managed your personal knowledge in the medieval period.

While the advent of the printing press and the arrival of mass media in the 18th and 19th centuries prompted a decline in the use of notebooks, as modern technology provided an easier way to collate and disseminate information, writers and artists continued to use what had by then become known as "commonplace books". In 1706, in a curious nod to where the future of the form would go, John Locke wrote "A New Method of Making Commonplace Books," providing advice on arranging material by subject and category - he was hinting, if not at the database form of modern Personal Knowledge Management, then at least at the advent of the bullet journal. 

Notable users of commonplace books include Thomas Jefferson, John D. Rockefeller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Ronald Reagan, who apparently collected jokes, aphorisms and trivia on a set of index cards that were always in his pocket. 

Another famous keeper of commonplace books was H.P. Lovecraft. Excerpts from his notes have been published in a single small volume, and that is a book I find myself referring to a lot in 2018. This is the year of the single-use notebook. Alongside my regular notebook, I crack the spine on a new book which will be devoted to a single project - an audio series based on Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward".

Prompted by my experience at the New York Public Library, I join the London Library and proceed to spend much of the latter part of the year buried in the stacks there, scrabbling through old books on folklore and the occult. The "CDW notebook", as it is labelled, consists of page after page of scrawled notes, quotes and page references; I'm laying the foundations for a mystery that will absorb two modern podcasters. I'm living with their voices in my head; asking questions, making connections. The research feeds the story and the story leads the research. This notebook charts the twists and turns.

The advantage of a single-use notebook is that it removes options. Sitting down with a journal or a commonplace book, anything is possible. The blank page invites thoughts and non-sequiturs and free association. A single-use book demands focus - this is all I have to work on, anything written here must pertain to the subject. I don't take my regular notebook to the library; I just have this one, and the work becomes deeper and more productive as a result. 

Once again, though, the act of making marks on paper provides a contextual anchor; I open a page and I can recall where on the shelves the book I was referencing was placed. I remember the desk I was sitting at, the sounds (or lack of sound) around me. As I read back, the break in a line prompts a memory of finishing one thought, then going outside to pace around St James's Square before coming back and scribbling down the next connected idea (and that break itself gives me the phone calls that Heawood makes to Kennedy while walking around that same square). A whole series of sensory memories, contained within the white space between two blocks of ink. 

A notebook is unique, like a fingerprint. It doesn't just contain thoughts and ideas. It isn't just ink on paper. There is something in the gaps, something lurking in negative space. 

These are messages from past me to future me, yes, but messages that are encrypted, using my own memories and associations as the key. I am creating an artefact of my own history, an entry in the fossil record, a trail of breadcrumbs stretching from then to now and from now into the future. This is a record of the course my life has taken, but it's also a record of where I THOUGHT I was going.

As I move out of the Lovecraft Investigations notebook and back into my regular journal from the time, the tone shifts. We move from practical work into everyday life. And as I look back on these entries, I realise that even in my most honest moments, I am lying to my future self...

Grindelwald, 19 April 2019

On the 19th April, 2019, I am in Grindelwald, Switzerland. I am sitting on the balcony of our hotel room, looking out at the immense face of the Eiger, which towers over the small town. Grindelwald was one of the main locations in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (the only truly cinematic Bond movie, but that is an argument for another time), a film I first watched with my Dad, when I was young. A Bond movie with a sad ending jarred me at the time. Now the memory of that first viewing also jars. I had booked this trip on a whim; for some reason, I had felt the need to make a pilgrimage back to my childhood. I meant to tell Dad about the plan but things got in the way, trivial events repeatedly diverting me from making a simple phone call. And then he dropped dead. So now, instead of taking pictures and writing notes to tell him about the trip when I get back, I am sitting on this balcony, notebook open on my lap, writing his eulogy.

I am entering a period of family difficulty and funeral admin, much of which I will go on to document in this notebook. But underneath all that, something else is happening... 

I am stoic, practical. Administrative tasks need to be attended to and I am working through them. Calm, collected, methodical. I am putting my mind to practical matters.... 

It's only now, looking back at these pages, that I realise my handwriting gives me away. The person writing this eulogy, these accounts of family feuds and burial arrangements, has a different hand to the person who was writing ideas down on paper a few weeks earlier. The analogue form betrays the secrets that are kept by digital media.

The next few weeks of notes are perfunctory. Practical. Task lists, plot points, story and character ideas. This is what my notebook is for. My notebook is not about my feelings. I am not journaling my inner thoughts, I'm writing down ideas, noting events, and musing on things that are supposed to be objective. I am deliberately skating over the surface of life, trying to avoid all the thin ice. And yet, reading now, I can sense my inner life bleeding through these pages. It's not a teenage diary, I know that because I don't find the version of me who wrote these entries to be a cringing embarrassment, but there is something coded within these pages that I didn't knowingly put there. The anodyne content of the notes merges with remembered context and transmits a message from the past into the present.

Making notes and writing a journal are acts of curation as well as creation: what we choose to include and what we choose to leave out. These decisions are made according to mood and circumstance, and the decisions themselves, content as well as style, inform the present-day reader of past idiosyncrasies and obsessions. 

---

From this point, death starts to make regular appearances in my notes; people around my age, people I know, or know online, or know of. And people getting sick; some recovering some not. All guest-starring in a story they didn't used to feature in at all. 

Past-me starts to record mysterious aches and pains and lumps and bumps. Past-me imagines he has a broad spectrum of unconfirmed tumours and fatal conditions. 

But as past-me turns the pages and starts fresh notes, he seems to be unaware of the accumulation of imagined ailments, he seems not to be able to step back and see the bigger picture; the cause-and-effect of a dead parent and his own advancing age, a natural inclination to focus on mortality. Past-me is the protagonist, not the author. He’s Truman, stumbling around in a world that seems real but is actually, seen from the outside, seen across time, a construct formed from unprocessed grief.

A notebook is a form of time travel. As I write, I am aware that the intended audience is a me from the future. Perhaps an hour from now, as I transcribe an idea, or years from now, when I discover the book on a shelf and leaf through it, as I am now. The entries are anchored to a time and a place and a particular context. While the person writing the entries may not be aware of the entire context, the person reading, given sufficient chronological distance, sees that context much more clearly.

But is the reader immune from their own present context? I read these entries, and I believe I see the anxiety that my past self was living with. But has that anxiety passed? In five years' time, will today’s notebook entries paint a portrait of a person I don’t recognise right now? I can see, quite clearly, that I was not OK then. But can I tell if I am OK now?

London, 6 Novmber 2019

On the 6th of November 2019, I am sitting at my desk at home. Time has passed. The tide of mortal events has receded, and a thin pool of normality has washed back in. I believe that because I am not the student of the human mind that I pretend to be. It's a Wednesday. I have a bad cold. I document the symptoms and how I'm feeling (we are still a few months away from these symptoms being worrying). And then I pick up a red pen, and I write, in capital letters:

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE

This has always been an objective fact, but now it is rendered subjective because someone who has always been a constant has blinked out of existence. Death is not just one possibility in a theoretical future. Death is on the march.

Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens." This has always been my view on the subject, but now I have been left behind by death, and so my focus has switched from my own potential experience of it to the effect it might have on others. Still, with the red pen in hand, I write:

AND EVERYONE WILL BE OK

Because that is what I want to believe. Life moves on, the river flows, the world turns. Prompted by my father's complete lack of preparedness, I have made my own provision: lists of bank accounts, passwords, and instructions. My death will not be an administrative headache for anyone. Everyone will be OK. I seem to have decided that a correctly catalogued information system is the key to avoiding tears at my graveside. 

Reading that page back today, the absurdity of it screams off the page. That I felt the need to write "You are going to die" clearly speaks to my state of mind at the time, but it also speaks to past me being a melodramatic dickhead engaged in some form of state-the-obvious competition with his inner voices. I don't doubt the sincerity of the moment, but I am embarrassed by this page. I suspect I was then too, because the following pages show someone pulling themselves together and trying to write as much distance as possible away from that mawkish moment.

I am moving forward now, onward. The relentless march of life. Death happens; get over it. I am accelerating away, boldly, into the future. But, like Wile E. Coyote, I am yet to realise that there is no longer solid ground beneath my feet...

---

Paris, 6-8 March 2020

"But, Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people, and very few upon the 'Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up." Samuel Pepys, 16 August 1665

In March of 2020, we go on a trip to Paris to mark my 48th birthday. I record the jazz trio that plays every night in the hotel bar, the brilliant stationery shop we find on Paris's oldest street. But my notes at the time also reflect a growing concern about what seems to be happening with this coronavirus situation. We wash our hands a lot, we spend as much time as we can outdoors. Something is coming. It's in the air. It may literally be in the air...

I am scheduled to go to LA for a week. The idea I had in that Paris hotel room back in 2016 became a TV pilot script in the interim and got bought by a major producer. Now we have managed to attach a name actor to play the lead. I am going to LA to meet up with him and, together, we are going to tour the networks and streamers pitching our show. The expectation is that there will be enough interested parties to spark a bidding war. This is as good as it gets in TV land - an original idea becomes a tentpole streaming show...

And then, on March 12th, the US suspends all travel from the EU Schengen area. I scrabble to work out if this is a problem; the UK isn't in Schengen, but France is, and I just got back from there. Am I tainted by association? It doesn't matter. Twelve days later, the UK goes into lockdown (later than most). The LA trip has already been cancelled. For a few weeks, we hold out the hope that this is not going to last long. And then that hope is abandoned. As the world shuts down, the project slowly fades away. Timing is everything in this business, and ours turns out to have been lousy.

I don't dwell on the loss, though, because these are the norm in TV and film - most of your time is spent failing to get stuff made. Somehow, the existence of that original note from 2016 buoys me up. It's like the mosquito with the dinosaur DNA, preserved in amber. Whatever happens, the show can be extracted again as long as that original note remains. And besides, the whole world has bigger problems right now...

For the rest of the year, my notebooks sing in harmony with pretty much anyone else who is keeping any kind of record of the time: empty, quiet streets; fear; a sense of the end coupled with a sense of disbelief - this can't be what the actual apocalypse looks like. Shops and restaurants, schools and offices are closed. If each of our lives are a movie, it seems as if someone has pressed pause. Except in those many instances where the end credits have unexpectedly started to roll.

As most of life slows to a crawl, some things start ramping up. On 13th March 2020, I write a note positing the idea of virtual writers rooms; would it be possible to use something like Zoom to keep writers working together during lockdown? Other people, it turns out, are having the same idea; within a couple of months I am running a virtual writers room for an Amazon show.

While my journal entries for this period talk of the coronavirus and the highs and lows of lockdown, my health anxiety appears to abate. I suppose this makes sense; at a time when everyone in the world is living in fear of what appears to be, absent a vaccine, a highly-contagious and deadly plague, what is the point of conjuring any other ailments to worry about? As a writer of fiction it irks me that reality trumps imagination in this way, but it seems to have happened nonetheless. 

As an observational diarist, I am sorely lacking. Future generations will learn almost nothing of this time from me. Thank God they'll have social media to look at. The pandemic months demonstrate this starkly. I’m not describing what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing, what is happening. This is a purely interior monologue; as I am confined to the flat, so my musings are confined to phone calls, zoom meetings and a fair amount of whining about work. We are forbidden from most interactions with the outside world and I seem to have shut it out of my thinking as well. I don’t record the idiotic government decisions, even though I clearly remember thinking most of them to be idiotic. Perhaps my journal at this time was a means of escape, a way to disappear into my head and ignore the world. 

Alongside my day job running development on a TV show for Amazon, I am re-writing a giant insect movie for one of the Hollywood studios, detailing a different kind of apocalypse to the one we suspect we may be living through. My first step is to get rid of the giant insects. I thought the insects being big was silly and scientifically unjustifiable. I may be simple. I do a draft and realise that the insects being enormous was really the only thing holding this idea up. I have written a story about a bunch of characters on an island getting relentlessly bitten by normal-sized insects. This is not a movie, it’s a weekend in the country. The studio praises the character work and, before they can even get there, I volunteer that scaling down the insects was probably not my finest hour. I do another pass with bigger insects. It’s far from a masterpiece, but at least it’s something. Another polish, and the studio people declare success. They are excited. They cannot wait to get this set up. The movie does not get made.

The Amazon show grinds on. Because of the pandemic, and the resulting inability to actually make anything, Amazon have set us up to write the entire first season of the show. Drafts of various episodes go back and forth between me and the other writers, and I chronicle this in the kind of exhaustive detail that might merit a Faber and Faber book, if the show ever sees the light of day.

I realise, reading the notebooks from that time back, that I am writing for posterity. Not future me, but future strangers. I have been through my “I am going to die” period and am now wary of stepping into the muddy puddle of self-revelation again. These entries are anodyne, sterile, procedural. I am guarding something, but I am not sure what it is until I stop and let myself be transported back through some of the entries. I am scared, I realise. Or I was scared. 

The pandemic, viewed from now, was a weird period; horrible for many, inconvenient for most. Now we might look back and see bad decisions and political incompetence. But these dull entries are contemporary to it. And I can tell I have armour on. I am scared, not of getting Covid (although that was certainly a worry in the early days), but of the world changing. I am clinging to work because I need to make it concrete; I need to know that it still exists, and I need to know that my life and career will continue when the doors are unlocked. I am scared for my work and for my industry. And I am scared that sitting alone in my study day after day, I will be forgotten.

I thought then that I was coping. I thought I was quite enjoying the silence and the solitude and the relative calm. I would joke that I was excited not to have to go to stupid meetings any more and that even when this was all over, I would continue to conduct my life via a webcam. But now, reading back, I recall the anxiety of finally being allowed out. I see records of me cancelling meetings because “it’s not worth the risk of catching something on the tube”. I was joking about being a hermit so as not to admit that I had become a hermit.

The work generated in that time; a giant insect movie, an urban-fantasy TV show, is just printed words on paper. The thousands of keystrokes that produced it are the unconscious product of muscle memory. The entries in my notebook, soporific though they may be, are a record of someone unaware that he is spiralling into fearful solitude. The entries do not mark the moment when the lockdown lifted, because I would not lift my personal lockdown for some time.

---

Thorpeness, 4 August 2020

About a mile north of Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, sits the village of Thorpeness. Originally a small fishing hamlet (and smuggling waypoint) called Thorpe, it was bought in 1910 by a railway tycoon called Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie. Ogilvie wanted to create an exclusive holiday village, a private fantasy world for his family and friends to enjoy during the summer months. He built holiday homes with Jacobean and Tudor styling, a country club and a golf course, and he turned a silted up Elizabethan shipping dock into a huge boating lake, which he got his friend J.M. Barrie to help design.

It's early August, 2020 and we have rented a house in the centre of the village. The house is a higgledy-piggedly combination of unusually large and unusually small rooms, like someone started adapting a Tudor cottage for modern living, but never quite finished the job. But this is Thorpeness. Like the spoon in The Matrix, there was no Tudor cottage; the house had been designed from scratch to be weird.

But weird is good, weird is where ideas germinate. We spend a few days exploring, taking boats out on the lake, snooping other strange houses, and walking along the the blustery North Sea beach. I like this place, at this time, because it allows me to be out in the world without feeling like I'm out in the world. Thorpeness is not the real world. However strange it is, it feel safe.

At a certain point, I duck out of a walk and head downstairs to the dining room with my notebook.

The dining room has exposed beams running along a ceiling that is barely high enough to allow an average person to stand up straight. You know, because Elizabethans were short.

Under the heading "IDEA", I write:

“In a manor house attached to a long-forgotten remote village in Suffolk, lives ALDRICH KEMP.”

My notebooks document my work and my life in roughly equal measure, and I have been mostly skimming the work stuff in order to find out who I am from the life stuff. And this Aldrich Kemp entry, the inception of that idea, gives me cause to re-think this approach.

Back in 2016, that note in a Paris hotel was about Emerson Hyde uncovering mysteries in the 1920s. He was lifting a veil. He knew there was something there, lurking beneath the surface, and he was determined to get a look at it, no matter how frightening. In Shadows of New York, the same story plays out; the Albany Group are battling forces that ordinary people are unaware of. And then along come Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher in the Lovecraft Investigations, and they are nothing if not lifters of the veil.

David Lynch once talked about the inspiration for Blue Velvet coming from a fascination with what might be going on behind those neat curtains and those white picket fences. The same impetus has always driven me when I'm coming up with stories. But that impetus also speaks of a certain level of fear and anxiety; I am sure there is something going on beneath the surface, and I am equally sure that it is nothing good. Human society, human well-being, are always balanced on a knife edge. People go about their lives unaware of how precarious their existence is. Terrible things can happen at any moment. I have spent my adult life certain that one of those terrible things is imminent.

But now I have experienced the death of a parent, and a global pandemic. D.W. Winnicott said “The catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened”. He was talking about childhood trauma being the root of present-day anxiety. I'm not equipped to delve too deeply into that, but I am aware from these entries, and from my work, that I have been scared of something awful happening. But now awful things had happened, and recently, and I was still standing. 

It has been argued convincingly that every character is an alter ego of the writer. Emerson Hyde, Marla Givens, Matthew Heawood, and Kennedy Fisher are all people who are trying to discover the source of the disaster they know to be imminent. But now, on the other side of the pandemic, a new alter ego emerges...

Aldrich Kemp is not afraid of anything. He doesn't suspect that there are hidden nasties in the world because they are not hidden from him; Aldrich knows and sees all. He is immune to trauma. There is no problem that cannot be solved, no crisis that cannot be averted, and the key to survival is a sense of humour, a lightness of touch, and a reassuring certainty that everything will work out just fine in the end. 

This is new territory for me. Aldrich's organisation, the Themis Group, resides in a grand manor house in a hidden village that is not on any maps. Secret, protected, immune. Our way into this world is through Clara Page, an intelligence analyst who does think that bad things lurk in the shadows. But she goes looking for them and she discovers the bad things having tea on the lawn. The bad things are funny and jovial and they are on her side. 

This story world seems to represent me turning my influences on their head. There's a lot of James Bond in there, specifically On Her Majesty's Secret Service. And I am unconsciously turning the morbid associations that I have developed with that movie into something light and positive and actionable. I’m blending in Modesty Blaise, which has always been my safe-space comfort reading, and the Derek Flint movies which were my refuge in childhood. The journal entries that follow and intertwine with the creation of that first audio season "Who Is Aldrich Kemp?" suggest a more positive, active outlook on the world.

I have created Aldrich and Aldrich is creating a new version of me. I have made a world I want to live in, rather than reflecting one that I'm scared of. And at the same time, I am aware that Aldrich lives in the same world (I even put Kennedy Fisher into that first season. to highlight the crossover), but he just views it differently. Aldrich shapes the world in his image; nothing is a problem if you refuse to see problems. Aldrich has unimaginable means and resources, yes, but it is his attitude that wins the day. I can be this.

In my head, and in my notebook, I alternate between being Aldrich and being Clara. Clara is more me; she admires Aldrich's approach, but she struggles to adopt it. She doesn't think you can magic away the bad things by sheer force of will. In the world of the stories, she is cast as Aldrich's natural heir, but will she ever be able to take on the mantle? In real life, it doesn't matter; it's the awareness that there is more than one way to look at events that is important.

That moment of creation shifts the tone of the notebooks up to the present day. That's not to say there aren't still ups and downs; the Amazon show I was working on during the pandemic got cancelled, none of the films got made - the work, and the realisation of the work, will always have its difficulties. But through two (now nearly three) seasons of Aldrich Kemp, that fey, ridiculous rogue has taken up permanent residence in my head, tinkering with my thought processes, altering my vision of the world. This is the sea-change, this is the character arc I have been searching for.

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Taken as a whole, the period of time covered by these notebooks, from Paris in 2016 to the present moment, has unusually high peaks and unusually deep troughs. The entries chart someone finally breaking into Hollywood; getting an American agent, doing the rounds of the studios, meeting movie stars, being handed great writing assignments and selling shows in bidding wars. The highs are giddy, and most of the stories cannot be even referenced here, let alone detailed. And then we dip down through the death of my father and into a global pandemic. There are gaps in both periods of time, where I don’t write anything on paper for weeks. I don’t know why. The version of myself that emerges from those pages is one that I recognise, a mind that is still mine, even during those periods where I regret how it was working.

And I also see for the first time how much of me is in the stories I make up and how much those stories both reflect and influence my state of mind. It might be possible to trace that through just the work itself, but the work is always altered in the doing while the notebooks, even though they are far from the raw expression of purest thought, provide a clearer view. 

I’m not an anxious person, but I have had periods of anxiety. I don’t live fearfully, but I have been afraid. I try to be honest, but I have lied to myself in the pages of a book for which I am the only intended reader. I really don’t know what that is about.

What I do know, though, is that these notebooks serve a purpose that cannot be replaced by technology, or by any activity that I am aware of. I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation with myself, even if I haven’t always been listening.

Initially, that was a present-tense conversation; putting my thoughts on paper as they occur to me. After the fact, reading them back, the conversation develops a new context; messages passed across time, a record for myself of who I was and how much or how little I have changed. And it’s a warning from history too; you are prone to think this, you are susceptible to worrying about that. The warnings don’t always stop me from repeating the behaviour, but they at least remind me that what I’m worrying about today isn’t necessarily new. 

And whatever I was going through, or thought I was going through, back then, I am, in the final analysis, still here to read about it.