Michael Walters

Welcome!

This is my little word garden on the internet—Michael Walters, author (it’s true!). I have a speculative fiction novel, THE COMPLEX, out with Salt Publishing, and I’m deep in the writing of a follow-up. I would love it if you gave it a try.

I use Bluesky to connect with people, Letterboxd to track films, and StoryGraph to track books. Follow me and say hello in all those places.

And if you want more of my thoughts on writing in particular, you can subscribe to my posts on PATREON. There’s a Weird and Wonderful tier if you want to support me with a donation, and that now includes notes on the novels I’m reading, but I post regularly to all patrons.

My son and daughter are both YouTube watchers, but until this year I’d never felt the need to try it. The whole influencers and cult of personality thing put me off. Then last week I decided to look on YouTube for tips on meditation and I found a Matt D’Avella video, I Meditated for 1 Hour Every Day for 30 Days.

D’Avella is a classic self-help vlogger who specialises in minimalist living and is a documentary filmmaker by trade, which makes his videos impeccably shot and edited. He’s personable, good-looking, self-aware, talks about his feelings, has a lovely apartment, and is funny. I watched the video, then watched all the others. He made me feel good. It was comforting.

I remember Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog from the late noughties (check out his archives, which go right back to January 2006), and in tech circles in particular, there was an endless debate about the best ways to live as simply and effectively as possible in an increasingly overwhelming online world. People were beginning to burn out — and this was way before social media became all-consuming. I was trying to start a business at the time, and I too bought Getting Things Done and The 4-Hour Workweek. I suppose I’m saying I have a mixed history with this stuff.

Minimalism, which is living simply and within your means, seems to be a hotter topic than ever. My wife and I have both worked four days a week for most of the last decade so that we can be around more for the children. In a way, minimalism is our natural philosophy, partly from financial necessity, but also because we both like order and neatness.

I develop software for a living, and I write stories in my spare time. Now that I’ve completed my Masters in Creative Writing, and The Complex has been published, I feel like I’ve levelled up to being a professional writer. I have two professions and I need to give them both their due. Fresh thinking is required.

So, to solve this complex problem, I did what I always do: I cleaned my desk.

I now have the piles of short story collections that were on either side of my monitor (and supporting my laptop speakers) on the shelves behind me. Novels live on the downstairs shelves, split between the living room and the kitchen-dining room. I can now do whatever I need to do on a sparsely populated desk without always thinking, I should really read one of those short story collections, or, I should roll those story dice for once and see what comes up, or, that tennis ball shouldn’t be there, but I don’t know where else to put it. (I put the tennis ball on the pile of useful things in the corner of the room that would usually be on my desk.)

So. I cleaned my desk. I feel like a minimalist. I have two professions. Got it. Onwards.

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I’m sitting in my kitchen listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, and I have some thoughts about how it’s making me feel. Christine McVie is singing Songbird, a song she wrote, and while the lyrics are hopeful and full of love, her voice is delicate and sad.

This reminds me of a long-running debate I have with myself about whether it’s a good idea for me to write reviews. As a writer, I know how fragile the life of books can be, because they have to fight for attention, against all the stories and media and entertainment in the world, relying on scant marketing, rare good will and, if it’s lucky, word-of-mouth. A bad review can kill a book. Reviewers opinions are subjective. Some reviewers may hold more sway in the cultural landscape than others and some are more skilled readers than others. Tastes are different. We all have an opinion.

When I start making notes about what I like and don’t like about a book or film, since stories are what I care most about in that way, it’s not too many steps to a review that I could publish on my blog. Perhaps I could develop the skill enough to get a gig as a reviewer for a magazine or local newspaper. I have a book published now, that might count for something in the review marketplace.

This is where I catch myself thinking about what it would be like to get a bad review. I want books to find readers. Just because I hate a book, someone else might absolutely adore it. If I were a professional critic I don’t think this would bother me, because it’s self-evident that one person’s opinion is just that, and there’s an ocean of opinions out there. But being a writer myself, meeting other writers, willing them to do well, wishing success on their books, I feel caught between being a critic and a well-wisher.

This reminds me of Colson Whitehead writing a negative review of Richard Ford’s short story collection, A Multitude of Sins, and how Ford later spat on Whitehead at a party. It’s an extreme example of the rancour that can come from a bad review, but it bothers me that as a writer I might have a negative impact on another writer’s work and life. I might be on the edges of it, but I can already see there is a community and camaraderie amongst published writers.

It’s good to write critically about a piece of art, but as a writer who meets other writers, who supports other writers, who acknowledges that there are different strokes for different folks, how can I write negatively about a book that I want to do well? Am I being cowardly? But also, how can I write positively about a book when I am perhaps good friends with the author? Can people trust my review?

It feels like there should be a separation of concerns. I know authors need to take criticism, but do they need to give it out? Perhaps they do. I’m still very conflicted on this.

I’ve updated this website, hopefully in ways that aren’t obvious to the reader, but that let me have more control (and fun) in the months ahead. It’s been through several iterations over the years. The last one was built with PHP, used a .htaccess file and a PHP script to create clean URLs, and was statically generated from markdown files, so there was no connection to a database. I wrote it all myself, which wasn’t a great use of my time, and at a conference I heard about a tool that would do the same thing, plus so much more. That tool was Jekyll and now this site is generated by it.

I suppose the fact that I could do this illustrates the other side of my working life. I’m not recommending it over Wordpress, especially if you aren’t comfortable with installing software on your computer using the command line. But it was fun to play with, and it gave me a chance to play on a rare writing/software crossover project.

The first shoots of the ideas that would combine to become The Complex appeared way back in November 2012, when I was fascinated by Lars von Trier’s film, Antichrist. I hadn’t watched it, I was too scared of it, but I was reading interviews with Charlotte Gainsbourg about what it was like to work on the film, and I became fascinated with the idea of going into the woods, with actors, as a director, and getting them to do whatever I wanted. I was suffering with writer’s block at the time. To be able to write freely, without censure, in a cabin in the woods on my own internal film set, was an exciting idea. I was crushing the life out of myself with old feelings of shame and inadequacy. Gainsbourg in the interviews made film-making with extreme material feel playful. I wanted some of that.

I didn’t write the first words of the first draft of The Complex for another three years. By this point, in December 2015, I was in the middle of the second year of an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I had been flailing around creatively, with two aborted attempts at a novel on my desktop, but now things were getting serious. For the first time, I had workshops in which I had to present work from my final dissertation, a novel, to a group of my peers and my tutor. I remember reading back through years of notebooks, pulling together strands of thoughts and little sketches, about a cabin in the woods. I also found notes I had made about the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, taken after my mother died in 2014. In working through my grief, I had written about his concept of a complex, in which a person is taken over by patterns of thoughts and feelings so that they act irrationally, with great energy.

I had even written in my notebook that The Complex was a perfect title for a novel. I had forgotten all this, even when starting to write two other novels, but now, when I needed it, the title reappeared. I think I fell into a complex to write the first half of the first draft of the book — after years of not being able to write a longer story, under the pressure of a workshop, with a tutor who I wanted to impress, the words started to come. Three voices — Stefan, Gabrielle and Leo.

It became clear that I needed to find a narrative mechanism that would let me write more fantastical, dream-like sequences, but staying grounded in the emerging location of the story. They appeared organically, as I wrote the draft. Stefan has the Virtual Reality headset. Gabrielle has Art’s drugs. And Leo has whatever is in the place itself.

And I wanted to explore relationships. These characters were parts of myself, and I could bounce them off each other, let them rip. A lot of the fun of writing The Complex came from imagining the scenes as if I were shooting a film. My father introduced me to genre stories very young. He loved mysteries, thrillers, fantasy, science-fiction and horror, in books, television and films. Growing up, our house was totally liberal in what I could read, mostly liberal in what I could watch on TV, but totalitarian in terms of having and expressing feelings. No wonder I had writer’s block. But that’s an entirely different blog post.

When the writing was going well, it felt like I was making a film for myself, perhaps for my father too. Dreams, fantasies and the imagination are all real in their affects. Through Gabrielle I could write about my grief at my mother dying, Stefan about optimism and hope, and Leo about desperation, longing and despair. It felt like important work to be doing — even if it might never be published.

Because the book took almost four years to write, by the end of it I was a different person, and I could look more clearly at the themes. There was grief, yes, but also the problems of intimacy, technology, sanity and reality, family, falling in love, betrayal, addiction, competitiveness, manipulative relationships, affairs, and memory. I’d covered a lot of ground, but organically, without a conscious agenda. The story is driven by the characters. In writing, the themes seemed to follow the characters interests, but if I am the characters, and they are aspects of myself, then I guess these were all my concerns and obsessions.

Anyway, my tutor on the MA was Nicholas Royle, who was also a commissioning editor at Salt. I feel lucky and grateful that it will be published and read. Now I have to write some new characters, in new locations, and find out how my obsessions have changed. It’s like writing myself into existence.

Since I’ve put it like that, I’d better crack on.

This blog post first appeared on the Salt website.

Everyone looks the same to Michael Stone. He is in Cincinnati to give a talk at a conference and is staying at the Hotel Fregoli. After failing to make a connection with an ex-lover, he becomes fascinated by an antique Japanese sex toy. He seems unable to make a connection with anyone.

Then he hears a voice through his hotel door. Anonymous Lisa. Anomaly Lisa. Lisa’s voice and face are different, so Michael becomes enraptured by her. His interactions with Lisa in his hotel room are sweet, if a little manipulative. He is desperate for something real in his life, an authentic person who is not like everyone else, something that he hasn’t fucked up. The scene where they make love is beautiful. Animated intimacy surprised me, perhaps because it was more intimate and real than most sex scenes I’ve seen with real actors.

The nightmare he has that night reveals the horror of his situation. In the basement he meets the hotel manager who says he is in love with Michael, and that he can fuck anyone at the hotel but Lisa. Michael is falling in love with her and his unconscious is telling him he has to protect her, because he is going to ruin it, ruin her. He has brought her out of herself and her vulnerability terrifies him. The next morning her voice begins to change and she starts to become like all the others.

Michael has a breakdown on stage as he gives his talk — he is trapped in his own self-absorption, or perhaps a medical condition, we can’t know. He returns home and is faced with the same face wherever he goes. His family is no comfort. He doesn’t know how to connect with his wife or son. But Lisa is transformed by the experience and heads off into her life renewed. It’s a smart reversal in a film full of doubles. Multiples, in fact.

The hotel is a metaphor for Michael’s psyche, twisted and pulsing with his emotional experience. The story is told in three thirty-minute acts: arriving at the hotel, his night with Lisa, and the consequences. The dialogue is awkward and authentic, and it took me a while to realise all the faces and voices of periphery characters were the same. That was unnerving. It made me wonder if I had the same problem as Michael Stone. And the lines on the characters faces were freaky too. I didn’t know they were puppets, so it added to Michael’s paranoid, nightmarish view of the world. You only realise how ill he is at the very end.

It’s a terribly sad story for him, but an uplifting one for Anomalisa. Brilliant.

It’s tricky to find films that my fifteen-year-old son will want to watch with his forty-something parents, but this seemed to sit in the sweet spot — surfing, armed robbers, a cocky young hero, skydiving, a love interest and lots of banter. I wanted to see how the film stood up twenty-five years after the only time I saw it, on it’s release. I remembered Patrick Swayze’s charisma and the adrenaline rush of the action sequences, but beyond that it was pretty vague. Intriguingly, it also had the highest rating on iTunes I had ever seen, 4.9/5 with 74 reviews. That impressed me.

Johnny Utah wants to make his mark at the FBI and take down a crew of surfer armed robbers. He is attracted to the crew’s leader, Bhodi, who lets him in to his surfer gang and shows him the spiritual side of being a surfer. But Bhodi’s greed and Utah’s ambition put everyone in danger.

Utah becomes Bhodi, absorbing him, integrating his own shadow, in Jungian terms. We project what we unconsciously desire or fear and, if we do the work, we can claim those things in ourselves consciously, and take back our projections from the other person.

The film is fast-paced, the dialogue cheesily involving, and the main characters substantial enough. Bigelow’s camera loves the ocean, making the surf and surfers seem as mystical as the characters believe they are. It’s all very light. My son was impressed. Now I have to convince him to watch Robocop.

Point Break on Letterboxd

Siblings Sally and Franklin come to a remote part of Texas to make sure their relatives remains haven’t been dug up from a local cemetery in a bizarre, gruesome local crime. But Franklin’s curiosity takes them to the slaughterhouse their grandfather used to own. They are warned not to go there, but in time-honoured tradition, they go anyway. That transgression sets the film in motion.

This is a film about meat. The young people are slaughtered like cattle in a world where meat is life and livelihood. Bones are plentiful in the rural setting, made into art works, mashed together into new creatures. There is beauty and horror in the lives of these people, who are like bacteria, or maggots, stripping life to the bone because it’s all they have. It’s a type of hell.

The film makes meat-eating seem like a transgression, a breaking of natural laws, with the characters hung on hooks, frozen, and butchered like animals. The film seems to say that it is none of our business what people do in their own homes, and if we are too nosy, it’s at our own risk. And all sentient life should be treated with respect. It’s a pro-vegetarianism film.

So many horror tropes seem to constellate here. Young people are picked off one by one. A killer has a phallic, mechanical weapon. Rural communities are dangerous to outsiders who don’t respect the old ways. There is a final girl.

But the thing that struck me most was the beautiful, dread-filled cinematography, the art design, and the overarching intelligence of the script and direction. Almost forty-five years after its release, when of course it was vilified and banned, it’s now clear it’s a masterpiece.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on Letterboxd

This one lingers in my mind. The married couple, D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) have created their own emotional ecosystem, balancing intimacy and distance, in a big modernist house somewhere in Central London. She is an artist, and he is an architect — both work at home, but in their own offices on different floors, talking to each other sporadically through an internal phone system. It’s an unusual setup that has worked for them for years, but comes under strain when they decide to move home.

Neither actor has acted before, which is remarkable to me, and makes sense given the naturalistic rendering of their relationship. They are completely believable as an averagely neurotic middle-aged couple. The house itself is the third character, representing the life they have created together. There are lots of beautifully framed shots of interiors and exteriors, the cinematographer making the most of the glass, concrete and minimalist shapes.

D hates going out and is afraid H will be hurt every time he steps outside. At the same time she lives a separate life in her office studio, performing for herself, using her reflection in the big glass windows, aware that she can also be partially seen through the carefully arranged blinds — if anyone was looking.

I read several Ballard books in the late nineties — my mid-twenties — starting with short stories, before being entranced by the original shiny silver paperback cover of Super-Cannes, and then going back to his earlier work. When I saw there was a film of High-Rise being made I believed I’d read it, but when I bought a copy, apart from the general sense in most of Ballard’s stories of things being on the edge of primal chaos, I didn’t recognise the story or characters at all. I’d read so many of his book shop blurbs they had all blurred together. In my twenties I didn’t read with much real attention either so it was quite possible I had read it and just forgotten everything about it.

Robert Laing is a newly divorced medical academic who moves onto the 25th floor of a high-rise block hoping for a life of comfortable anonymity. Richard Wilder lives on the 2nd floor and makes television documentaries. Anthony Royal is the building’s architect and lives in the penthouse. These three characters are rotated by Ballard to tell the story of the building, which is seen as a mixture of designed technology and living organism. It’s a social experiment designed by Royal and embraced by every resident at every level. Where Laing is a social chameleon who wants to make a safe place for himself in the building, Wilder wants to conquer it and confront its maker.

If the high-rise is a living thing, a psyche, and Ballard its ultimate creator, the three protagonists could be different aspects of Ballard’s creative personality. Each man tries to make the building serve them in their own ways but it’s the women who ultimately make the place theirs. The prose mixes an omniscient point-of-view with that of the character Ballard is following in each chapter. It is only at the end, in the final confrontation between Royal and Wilder, that he moves between both characters point-of-view in the same chapter. The author’s omniscience could easily be the building’s point-of-view, but at the same time I found it a little irritating how characters revealed chunks of backstory in their thoughts. Having said that, the descriptions are brilliant and unnerving. Ballard is very aware of the spaces his characters inhabit and finds endless ways to show the collapse and degradation of their initially modern and comfortable environment.

I was nervous about watching the film. The book was so particular and the opinions I had read were mixed, but more than that, I didn’t want to subject myself to two hours of disgust and misery. Perhaps from this starting place I was always going to enjoy the film more than I expected but that is to do the film an injustice. It is an excellent story in its own right.

Directed by Ben Wheatley and adapted by his long-term screenwriting and editing partner Amy Jump the protagonist of the film is definitely Laing. Wilder and Royal are still important characters but Laing is given far more agency and the narrative is quite different. It feels like the book is honoured though, and I suspect that is because while Jump makes the story more dramatic and brings different characters to the fore, in particular the female ones, Wheatley’s direction creates the equivalent of Ballard’s prose style in the visuals and soundtrack. It’s an impressive feat.

As stimulating as the last two weeks have been for me in the world of High-Rise whatever I read next needs to be a palate cleanser. A nice rom-com perhaps. No roasted dogs.

Woke up late. My son is in Sydney for three weeks and when I walk past his bedroom the quiet inside makes me sad. I’m trying to be more mindful as I go about my low-key morning. Last night I watched the first half of Let the Right One In before my wife and daughter got home from a New Year’s Eve party. This morning I read the first third of Written on the Body, mostly while sitting at the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee. I like being at home. It’s been a busy Christmas.

I took a break and listened to Wolf Alice on the expensive headphones I bought years ago and never used. Music sounds amazing through them, but they are heavy, make my ears hot and the cable has a squeak when I move my head. On a whim, and because the cable was long enough, I did some stretching while listening to the last track on Visions of a Life. My body felt tight and neglected. I wondered if I could do yoga while listening to Queens of the Stone Age. I felt stone-aged. I wanted visions for my life.

On the chopping board I have left a swede and yesterday’s leftover braised red cabbage. There is only frozen turkey to have with it, and that’s, well, frozen. It’s the intention I like. I am going to cook the swede and make it delicious. I have to work on my meal planning though. I wish I had a pork chop or a steak. C’est la vie.