I haven’t always been a writer. There must’ve been a time, before I learned how to handle a pen, when I couldn’t write but, if so, I don’t remember.
My mum said I taught myself to read. I was reading before I went to school. She said when I was a toddler she saw me sitting in a chair with a copy of the Daily Mirror open on my lap. She thought I was emulating my dad. He often spent time reading the paper. But then I pointed at a word on the page and asked what it meant. She thought then, “he’s teaching himself to read.” I don’t know how true that is, but it might account for something. My writing is pure 1950s Daily Mirror house style: designed to be read by a working-class readership.
I never published anything until I was 39. I thought, “I’ve got to do something with this obsession or I’ll die a bitter man.” I’d tried all sorts of things by now: novels, poems, short stories, plays, all unfinished. But I wasn’t doing journalism at that point. It occurred to me to try writing smaller non-fiction pieces for magazines.
A friend came to my house. We got stoned on amphetamine sulphate and, in our excited state, decided to start a magazine. It was going to be called The Id. That’s a great title. Unfortunately there was a successful British magazine available at the time called i-D (it’s still going) but we didn’t know that when we were making our plans. We were both going to write material for it, as well as get other friends to contribute. The magazine never happened. My friend never came up with anything, and neither did our friends.
But I did. I wrote an investigative story about a couple who lived on my housing estate who were practicing witches. I went to one of their ceremonies and kept my eyes open throughout the proceedings for anything of interest. Later I wrote it down. And that was it. My first story.
My friend was persistent drug user. I’ve written about him before. At the time he was keen on poppy tea: that is, he’d collect poppy heads when they were in season and boil them to make this greenish-yellowy sickly slop. One night I tried it. I was violently sick. After that my body wouldn’t do as it was told. I kept falling over and bumping into things. I couldn’t go to bed. I couldn’t sleep. Instead I sat down and started to write. Again it was about my housing estate, about a couple of people I’d become friends with since I’d moved there, an older woman and her teenage boyfriend. I called the estate “Housing Benefit Hill,” a reference to the Bob Dylan song “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”: “Up on Housing Project Hill it’s either fortune or fame.” And that was it: a second, linked story in what would soon become a series.
Even as I was writing I knew I was on to something. I knew it had the potential to go somewhere. The following day (Saturday) I bought a copy of The Guardian. It came with a weekend color supplement. It occurred to me that my stories might fit in well with this format. I sent them off with a covering letter.
Someone should’ve warned me. It was an absurd move. I’ve since found out that the Guardian never accepts proposals from unknown freelancers. Most Guardian writers come from the same basic stock, the London literati, people already in the media business. But there was one exception: Deborah Orr, who was from a working-class background in Motherwell, Scotland. She was the editor of the Weekend magazine. She must’ve seen something she recognized in my stories about working-class life on an obscure housing estate in the south of England.
A few weeks later there was a large brown envelope on my mat when I came down in the morning. It took me a second before I recognized the handwriting. It was mine. It was the stamped addressed envelope I’d included with the stories I had sent to the Guardian. I picked it up, expecting to feel the weight of paper inside, but it was almost empty. All it contained was a note from Orr. My stories had been accepted. That was the beginning of my writing career.
That was in 1993. It didn’t last. I had a few good years, from 1993-1998. There was one year when I had four columns on the go: in the Guardian, the Big Issue, Mixmag and the Independent, plus a book out. I was recognized on the train once and asked for my autograph. People would come up to me in pubs and want to talk about my column but, bit by bit, my work slipped out of fashion. I moved to London, then Birmingham, after which I was homeless and living in a van. It was more difficult to keep my media contacts up to date. Finally I moved back to Whitstable and took a job as a car park attendant. You can read about that here. The media’s fickle. I remember the review of my second book in the Guardian. It described, not just my book, but me, as “boring.”
Some people spend years struggling to get published, after which they become successful. My path was the opposite. I had no trouble getting published but, successful for a while, I’ve struggled ever since. I’ve had a variety of columns in lesser known magazines, like Prediction and Kindred Spirit, and in my local papers, the Whitstable Times and the Whitstable Gazette, plus a few books, but mostly my life since 2004 has been spent online. As such I’ve watched the changes as they have occurred.
On December 22nd 2004 I started a blog called “Ten Thousand Days.” Here’s the first one. If you’d like to follow that, just go to the bottom and click on the link called Newer Post. That’ll take you on to the next. The title comes from a realization I had at this point, that I had about 10,000 days left to live. I was approaching 52. Ten thousand days is about 27 years and four months, meaning I was expecting to live till I was 79 or 80.
If you read it you’ll see that it starts off as a meditation on mortality, and has an obsession with numbers. I write the numbers out in long form, so, for example, when I say how long 10,000 days is in years I write it as “twenty seven point three nine seven two six years recurring,” rather than 27.39726. I don’t know why I did that. In the process of writing I remembered that at an early age I liked to count. I would count myself to sleep, often. I’d count to fill the time. My ambition was to count to a million, something that I never managed to do.
My plan was to write something in the blog every day for the next 10,000 days. I was counting out my time on this earth on a daily basis. That didn’t last. I’ve never been a disciplined writer. I write in bursts, sometimes as many as 3000 words in a day, with several days in between. I was writing for Prediction magazine and the Whitstable Times as well in this period. Eventually “Ten Thousand Days” became an online record of my writing regardless of the theme.
It was during this time that I had my first internet success. I’d written a piece for Prediction magazine called “How To Be Invisible.” That came about because the editor had written a memorandum to all contributors saying that, unless we had something extraordinary to say, such as a spell for invisibility, she didn’t want to be disturbed.
As it happened, I did have such a spell. I’d read it in an Idris Shah book many years previously, and from memory recreated it. It was rejected by Prediction as being too negative. You can read a copy of it here. (The original has since been removed.)
I put it up on my blog, and left it there. Sometime later I looked at it and it was garnering significant views. I had an internet hit on my hands. This was in the days when it was still possible for an independent writer to get high up the rankings in the search engines. The internet was still relatively new. It hadn’t turned into the festival of corporate propaganda it is today. It hadn’t yet been swamped with advertising, celebrity gossip and news from the mainstream. It was still mainly the preserve of enthusiastic amateurs and energetic outsiders such as myself.
The problem with a blog is that it appears upside down and back to front. The front page represents the most recent material and you have to dig deep into the archive to find the beginning. A friend of mine put me onto an internet site where you could share advertising revenue with the site owners. This was HubPages. The advantage of this format was that each article was a stand-alone piece, with its own IP address. I started writing for it in May 2008. You can read that story here. It was a travel piece about visiting my friend, Steve Andrews, in Tenerife, where he lived at the time. It was Steve who’d put me onto the site. Like me he was also trying to make a living as an online writer.
Despite my many years writing for HubPages, I earned just a total of $100. After this Google cut me off from the Google ads program, for the crime of ignorance. I was clicking on my own posts, not knowing that this wasn’t allowed. Since then I’ve been unable to earn Google revenue in any form.
Three stories stand out from this period: “We're Here Because We're Here,” published on June 10th 2008; ‘Beyond The Forest,” published June 14th 2008; and “Vlad the Impaler,” on October 25th 2008. The last two were extracts from an unfinished book about my travels in Romania. The first was given to me by one of my associates at work. All three began to get significant traction on HubPages and earned me a sizeable following.
But it was “Vlad the Impaler” that really took off. To this day it has received approaching 37,000 views, most of those within the first six months. That was because it had unexpectedly got to the top of the rankings on Google. It was number two after the Wikipedia entry. If you put “Vlad the Impaler” into your search engine, there it was, on the first page. I wasn’t responsible for this. It just happened. It’s an approachable, easy-to-read account of the life of the famous Romanian tyrant, and I guess people must’ve started sharing it.
The story stayed at the top of the rankings for about a year, after which it was taken down by the site owners. This was because there was a complaint from Google. I can’t remember what the basis of this was now, but the result was that it disappeared from the internet for long enough to see it lose its position, after which it was quietly reinstated without apology. I’ve always suspected sabotage.
By now I’d given up on the idea of being able to earn a living from the writing trade and had started work for the Royal Mail. I was still writing, both online and offline, and in 2009 I wrote a piece for the London Review of Books about my life as a postal worker. You can read that here. It was written under the pseudonym, Roy Mayall, on the advice of my union, who suggested I might be targeted by management if I was too open about my activities. There was a strike taking place, and the Royal Mail was in the news. The piece went viral, garnering tens of thousands of views, and a new side-hustle began, as an online commentator about the postal industry. I wrote regularly for the London Review of Books and for the Guardian, as well as a variety of left-wing papers. I had a book published, in November 2009, which became Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. It took six days to complete. It’s still, to this date, my most successful piece of writing.
I retired from the Royal Mail in 2018 and have become effectively a full-time writer again. I have a couple of blogs: Fierce Writing, focusing upon my personal output, and Whitstable Views, which hosts material by a number of my fellow writers in the North Kent area. One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s getting harder and harder to promote your material. When Whitstable Views first started we were getting around 2-3000 hits per article, with one of them, ‘Rosie Duffield’s “Brand” Collapses' by Julie Wassmer, approaching 35,000 views. Another of our stories, “Why Canterbury & Whitstable needs a new Labour M.P.” got 10,000 hits in a day and made the national news. Since then the numbers have diminished drastically. We’re lucky to get a few hundred views per article. This shows what power the tech barons have over our lives. A tweak here and there in the algorithms can significantly reduce your numbers.
Today almost everyone’s on the internet and it’s become the global market place in the exchange of ideas. I doubt if I will ever get to the top of the rankings again. I’m fighting people with real economic and political clout, with the ability to game the internet to their advantage.
I saw Russell Brand in an interview on an American TV program a few years back. There was a panel of people talking to him. Suddenly he turned. “All these people are at work are they?” he said, pointing. He was looking off set to what was going on behind him. The camera panned to follow his gaze. There was a bunch of people not more than 10 feet away, sitting at desks with computers, furiously engaged in some activity. A couple of them looked towards the camera as he spoke, obviously aware they’d been noticed.
“Work more quietly,” he called jokingly.
“They’re Facebooking,” said one of the hosts.
“They can tweet, they can Facebook?” asked Brand, surprised.
“They have to, that’s part of their job,” said one of the hosts.
“They are probably tweeting right now,” said another.
It was like an invisible wall had been shattered. Suddenly we were seeing the world behind the scenes. These people were employed to write social media posts about the program to increase its online impact. They were a group of astroturfers paid to promote the interests of the TV corporation making the program. It didn’t matter about the content, their opinions were conditioned by the people who paid them. There was nothing objective about their observations, nothing honest or truthful, nothing reflecting the real-life beliefs of the individuals concerned. They were hired tools of the corporate machine, paid to create an online buzz.
—Follow Chris Stone on X: @ChrisJamesStone
