What was it like to write Pocket Notebook?
This is something I’m asked with increasing regularity, certainly by colleagues in my ‘real’ job as a serving police officer, colleagues who now look at me - the publication date fast approaching - with a curious mix of wonder, bemusement and no little amusement.
I’d love there to be a brief, snappy soundbite answer. In truth, it’s been a blur.
Try this: imagine working full-time shifts, a minimum fifty-six hour week of morning, afternoon (but they’re really evening) and night shifts. So even before you get to the physical act of writing, imagine feeling permanently jetlagged, like you’re flying to Goa and back ad nauseum, an interminable redeye flight across timelines, your body clock not tick-tocking but jumping around the hours until you’re so tired you could weep. Throw in a Masters degree in Creative Writing with a Critical Study on Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressive fiction and his accounts of marginalised individuals. Add attempting to renovate your decrepit cottage with little or no money, going to night school for Portuguese lessons (don’t ask), attending various writing groups and doing distance learning writing courses just so you can, y’know, get somewhere. Please. And then, just when it’s getting really interesting, ensure your wife gets pregnant. Twice, while you’re struggling with the first draft. I mean, why not? Idle hands and all that.
Against that backdrop you sit, and write, and type. You do it when you can. You do it because you must, because you’re twenty thousand words in now and it’s become a compulsion. This thing - this kernel of an idea you had back in the day, back in 1995 when you were a young man and the tools required to do the idea justice were missing so you put it to one side - it’s gripped you like nothing else. Imagine stumbling home after twelve hours in work, it’s one in the morning, your house is asleep so off you go, losing yourself in the travails of Jacob Smith, potty policeman, the prose pouring out of you, spewing onto the page because - see above - this is the first time in days you’ve had the chance to write and it’s been building inside you, you’ve just got to get it out. And before you know it the sun is bleeding into the room through the blinds, your heavily pregnant wife is at the door, bleary-eyed, holding your toddler daughter, shaking her head. You go to bed, feeling guilty again. You sleep, but wake intermittently to scribble notes. And so it goes…
Then there’s having a character like Jacob in your head. For months upon end. A character whose life is disintegrating, whose clipped, control-freak tones soon dissolve into stream of consciousness ramblings as everything unravels around him, a man who you would cross the street to avoid if you knew him. Imagine preparing to write, your laptop humming away, notes spread across the damp-riddled cloakroom you grandiosely refer to as your study, and to get into the groove you have to pace the kitchen, chain-smoking, working yourself into a frenzy just to match the mindset of the character you’ve created, to be able to write about the crazy things he’s doing with his life. Then picture your one-year-old daughter watching you do this.
So you write, and write, the word count rising, fifty-thousand, sixty, seventy, more. It consumes you, your character taking on a life of his own, his breakdown your breakdown, his experiences yours. It feels like it’s never going to stop. And then - suddenly - you do stop. Everything falls into place. Everything ends. Imagine it: it’s half three in the morning, you’re on paternity leave for your son, you’re supposed to be helping out your wife who gave birth not two weeks before. That guilt again. But that compulsion. The last year, gone. And you type the final line, almost crying with relief. Just as you do, your tired wife appears at the door again. She sees the look on your face and smiles.
It was good to get Jacob, this crazed police juggernaut, out of my head.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. Am I grumbling about all of this? Hell, no. Let’s put it into perspective: my wife, who was also enduring everything I’ve mentioned, quietly, with no fuss, carried and gave birth to two beautiful children while I was hunched over a desk making up a story in La La Land. But this novel, Pocket Notebook, is my own little baby. Now it’s published I feel a tiny bit of that guilt has been assuaged. It’s my thank you to her.
I imagine you reading it now, you who I’ve never met and probably never will. And I’m thrilled. I imagine you experiencing Jacob’s world, travelling with him, shaking your head in disbelief, smiling to yourself - maybe, hopefully, laughing out loud on occasion - as he stumbles onwards.
I imagine you finishing his story and feeling you’ve been on a hell of a ride. Because it is one, for him.
And it still is, for me.
Pocket Notebook by Mike Thomas is published today. To order a copy go to rbooks, Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, or find it at your local bookstore.
