Facebook: The Hotel California of the Internet

That’s right – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. We are all just prisoners here of our own device!

Ha! But I have left. I found a loophole beneath the newsfeed and slithered though it while a barrage of ‘likes’ encouraged me, ‘pokes’ impaled me and ‘shares’ sang ‘Do you believe in life after love?’ I kept on going until FB was a dot behind me with only the faint hint of a meow in the air and the aroma of gravy, from all the cats and dinners whose pictures I would never see again.

And how does this feel? Well, I’m not going to tell you because I am now capable of having thoughts that I don’t need to share with every past co-worker, school friend, family member, party acquaintance, lover, boss and mate I have ever had. I am capable of keeping thoughts in my head and asking myself if I like them rather than pinning them to the internet and waiting for the ghosts of Hayley-past to validate me. I also don’t need to know what you’re thinking/doing/eating/wearing/reading/panicking about/aspiring to/laughing at/dreaming/philosophising/drinking/driving/playing/fancying/holding/planting/cooking or painting all the time anymore. Let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t stop for a chat in the street if we saw each other in real life and I’m calling you a friend? Facebook has taken the word ‘friend’ and shaken it free of any meaning. I’m determined to reclaim it for the people in my life that I love.

You see, I have spoken to more of my friends on the phone since I left Facebook than I have in the past year. I know that I have been lax, but there’s an illusion at work: when I'm on Facebook I see you every day; you write that you’ve had a terrible day at work and I sympathise; I write a status about a publishing deal and you’re pleased for me; we are abreast of each other’s lives without ever needing to hear each other’s voices. I miss your voice. When you tell me things now I don’t say, ‘Yeah, I know, I saw it on Facebook.’ I’m genuinely excited. I can’t wait to tell you all of the exciting things that are happening in my life and see the look on your face.

But it’s not only the illusion of friendship that has spurred my voluntary exile. I have never wasted so much time on anything in my life ever as I have on Facebook. I work at home as an editor. When I work, I have two tabs open: the book I’m working on and Facebook. It takes a few minutes to edit a paragraph and it’s at this juncture that I check Facebook. That’s after every single paragraph! Every single one! I don’t know whether it’s a reward for the paragraph milestone or a complete compulsion, but at this rate my work rate is split 50/50 between the stuff that pays and the stuff that … what? It’s not as if there’s any danger of the cast of Eastenders hijacking my newsfeed with a naked Flash Mob, ‘Sound of Music’ medley. What exactly did I think was going to happen if I didn’t check it for five minutes?

And then there’s the colour of your grass…

For example, as I cruise my timeline, I see a picture of your beautiful family in perfect formation. Everyone is smiling, smartly dressed and well-behaved. The sun is shining and it looks as if you’re at a zoo or a park. Not a hair is out of place. You are a family clearly taking a day out between a shoot for Hello magazine and auditions for a commercial advertising the kind of shampoo that’s tough on adults but gentle on kids. What you neglect to show are the hundreds of pictures you had to take to get this one good shot because little Timmy’s got behavioural problems and won’t sit still for a minute and little Jesse likes to give the finger and five minutes before had been chewing mud and George would rather have been in the pub and ‘For the love of God, can we just get one good picture for Facebook please, you little fuckers! … And now look – the bastard sun’s gone in again…’

No one is actually putting the real colour of their grass on Facebook, but it’s difficult to remember this all the time. I don’t think I’m the type of person to compare lives because I’m actually quite content, but I’m aware that my subconscious isn’t nearly as chilled out as I am and is using all of this shit to make a compilation CD to play in the background over and over again called ‘How do you measure up, you useless tit? Greatest Hits’. That’s just the way the subconscious rolls.

So, that’s it. I’m out! I’m done!

But of course, as the song says, ‘You can check out any time, but you can never leave.’ I still have to keep my account so I can run my Facebook business page. Apparently you can’t be a freelance anything without one and you certainly can’t be a novelist. However, I have cut my 'friends' down to a tiny number of people that I genuinely want in my life and wouldn't want to lose contact with, so it serves as a kind of dormant address book - the account deactivated but available. You may have followed a link from Facebook to this blog, which is an irony I’m quite pleased with as I start to leach the marrow from my former captors. The irony of the existence of this blog vs. everything I have just written is one that I hope we can overlook…  

   
 
Diazepam for Sale, the debut novel by Hayley Sherman is now available on Amazon
 
Time travel as a cure for depression, the Mods and Rockers on the West Pier, a vengeful Sat Nav lady, a seagull-stalked Frank Sinatra and Diazepam for sale... 
A fairytale for a prozac nation...
Fiction for a world that doesn't behave the way it should....

www.hayley-sherman.co.uk  

Jennifer Saunders at the Southbank Centre and Why it's Never Cool to be a Superfan

Anyone who follows my blog (as much as it’s possible to follow something that doesn’t actually move for months on end – sorry!) will know that it’s not a Jennifer Saunders fan site. Jennifer Saunders is my holey old jumper that I put on when I’m feeling a little unwell or upset and need to hear jokes that I know the punch-lines to or just be in trusting, uncomplicated, familiar company. You can read my first post for more thoughts on this subject, but the overall point is that we all have these holey old jumpers (authors, bands, comedians, actors, etc.); we just can’t wear them all the time. There are new authors, bands, comedians, actors, etc. to be discovered, work to be done, relationships to be had and life to be lived. In fact, I now use Jennifer Saunders as a marker of how well things are going in my life. If the DVDs are cold then life is probably quite sweet.  

That said…Oh my God!...She was at the Southbank Centre being interviewed and I went and I’ve never seen her live before and…oh my God!...I’m such an unbelievable sap that I almost cried when she came on the stage. What’s wrong with me? I’m a 36-year-old woman attending a literary event not a 12-year-old Justin Bieber fan hoping to get close enough to the stage to have his spit rain down me. How embarrassing! What’s more, I immediately felt possessive. What were all those other people doing there pretending like they knew what Jennifer’s all about, laughing at obscure Comic Strip references as if they understood them? Pah! She’s my Jennifer Saunders! Bugger off! But then it became quite obvious that she’s not just mine; the woman next to me looked as if she was going to kill me when I opened my bag of sweets noisily and she potentially missed a few sacred words from her hero; one weirdo had come all the way from Canada to see her and when given the opportunity to ask her a question couldn’t gather her thoughts to say anything but a garbled mumble about a diamond ring; other people came forward to ask questions, all prefixed by the words, ‘I love you, Jennifer.’ And do you know what? At no point during the whole interview did Jennifer Saunders look in my direction to seek me out, say hey, find out how I am. After all these years and the hours we’ve spent in each other’s company, this was the least I had expected.

I realise that all of this makes me sound a little crazy, but I think that it’s that pretend closeness that makes people crazy. Some part of us really thinks that we know celebrities and so they must know us back. This became apparent to me years ago when I was in a pub in Brighton and saw a familiar bloke sitting on a nearby table. ‘I’m sure I went to school with that guy,’ I told my mate. ‘I should pop over and say hi.’ Turns out it was Will Young, but I was convinced that we knew each other. Thankfully my friend stopped me from making an absolute tit of myself.

With this in mind, I guess meeting our heroes will always be an anti-climax and this is why I didn’t stay for Jennifer Saunders’ book signing after the interview. I knew that I would say something embarrassing and sycophantic or drop a nonsense on the table in front of her and she would probably roll her eyes at me or glaze over because I was the fiftieth or sixtieth mentalist to approach her thinking that there was some sort of closeness between us. So I kept my cool, went home, put the day behind me and put on an episode of Absolutely Fabulous instead.

Before I wrote this blog I thought I would do a quick Google search about superfans (understatedly defined by Wikipedia as ‘[people] who show a great deal of excitement for something’) and very quickly realised that compared to other nutjobs all I have is a mild case of admiration for Jennifer Saunders. There are people who have had plastic surgery to look like their idols, sent them letters in menstrual blood and covered their bodies in tattoos and that’s not to mention devotion shown in phenomenal volumes of calls, tweets and cash spent. One woman changed her name to Mrs Kanye West and another broke her own leg to be like Jessie J when she was injured in 2011. Perhaps most extreme, one One Direction fan killed her own dog to get their attention on Twitter. 

Yeah, by comparison I think I’m fine!  

(FYI, the JS tattoo pictured above is not on my leg. Also pictured, chest tattoo of Radiohead's Thom York with nipple for eye. Hmmm!)

   

 
Diazepam for Sale, the debut novel by Hayley Sherman is now available on Amazon
 
Time travel as a cure for depression, the Mods and Rockers on the West Pier, a vengeful Sat Nav lady, a seagull-stalked Frank Sinatra and Diazepam for sale... 
A fairytale for a prozac nation...
Fiction for a world that doesn't behave the way it should....

www.hayley-sherman.co.uk  

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Does Brutally Killing Children in My Novels Make Me a Murderer?

This is a question that all writers will ask themselves at some point in their careers if they’ve ever had to get their hands bloody in the name of plot development. It will be especially pertinent if, like me, you have too much time on your hands, hate January and spent the month asking yourself stupid questions that make little sense and have no connection to real life.

You see, I’m working on a psychological thriller at the moment, which is a bit of a departure for me. I committed murder in my last book, but this new project takes it to a whole new level; the death rate is high and the victims are little children. The murder in my first book was also of a child, but it was different because he deserved it*; the murders I’m writing at the moment are killing pure innocence and it’s my job to make them as realistic, stomach-churning, sickening and shocking as possible, so that by the time you’ve reached the end of the chapter you really will want to call the police and report the atrocity. So, does this make me a murderer? I confess that the inspiration for this book was partly a real-life event that I felt sad about for a while before a familiar twisted thought snuck in – ‘That would make a really cool novel.’ Normal people don’t think this way. They read the newspaper, feel sad and then make a sandwich; thoughts don’t wear them down until they're being held hostage by their biros and forced to kill. I’m a terrible, terrible person.

I literally can’t not write this book at the moment; it’s consuming my thoughts. However, in truth, my commitment to the project exists despite the murder chapters not because of them. To be completely honest, I hate writing them and I’m writing them as delicately as possible, which makes me a reluctant murderer. I don’t want to commit them; I want these little children to blossom, grow up and live positive and meaningful lives, but wicked hands in the book have other ideas. However, I’m the one steering these hands, so I can never be completed absolved. I’m extremely relaxed and groovy as a person and every drop of blood I drain from these children rubs against my conscience; I know that no one is really getting hurt, but it’s troubling that I could possibly have these disturbing things in my head. I’m a terrible, terrible person.

You may be wondering why (as someone who is also quite squeamish) I’m choosing to write this book. The answer is the effect of these killings. I may not be adept at murder, but I know all about the wide and varied ways that the brain gets messed up by life, and this is another exploration into the frailty of the human mind and how life as we know it can be completely blown apart in a moment. My main character is as screwy as you like, and the litter of dead children put in her path drives her completely over the edge. This, I feel no guilt about. All of my favourite books take the reader on journeys of the mind and this is the kind of fiction that I will always write. If you liked the journey and the unpredictable twists and revelations of Diazepam for Sale, you’re going to love this. Watch this space for more info.

*He deserved it? Really? Read the book and you’ll understand.

Diazepam for Sale is available on Amazon

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How a Short Story Nearly Saved the World

I finished my story a few days ago. It had taken ten years. I didn’t mean it to take so long, but each word was a matchstick in an elaborate, glorious model, the kind my granddad used to make – a warship or a plane – and I was never very good with my hands.

The first thing I did was read it to my wife; it was the least I could do after ten years, but I could see that her expectations were low. I felt like I was eight years old and showing her a picture I’d painted that she knew wouldn’t fit on the fridge unless she moved her shopping list, dieting mantras, bills and all the other things that were far more important.

My expectations were low, but as I began to read she began to unravel. Just like that. Her arms unfolded, her legs uncrossed, her facial muscles unwound and I swear I could hear her heartbeat marking every other verb. And when I had finished she began to rise, slowly at first. Her feet were barely there; she didn’t use those, but rise she did – out of the chair and into the space above us, swirling and spinning, gliding and swooping, the shopping list and mantras and bills a distant memory.

‘Are you okay, love?’

She didn’t answer at first. She was figure-of-eighting around the lampshade and…was that laughing? It wasn’t like any kind of laughter I’d heard before.

‘Wait there!’ I was beginning to panic. ‘I’ll get you down.’

‘Don’t worry about me. Just open the window.’

And I did and she floated out unlike any butterfly I had ever seen. She swooped and spun and just lay in the sky as if it was where she had always belonged, and then she reappeared at the window, completely unravelled. Didn’t anything matter anymore?

She gathered every part of her face with some effort and said, ‘Tell everyone.’ Then she disappeared again.

I hadn’t receiving a review as good as this in my entire writing career. And from my wife too! So I ran into the street, grabbed the first person I found and after some persuasion, read the story again. As I read he looked as if he might fall asleep, but in a good way, as if he had never been hugged before and I had wrapped my arms around him and told him everything was going to be alright. And then he drifted into the air, peacefully lounging in a bed he never knew he deserved.

And then other people were approaching me to read them the story and before I knew it, the sky was full and I was alone beneath the impossible air show, just looking. What else could I do?

‘Get in the van!’ 

It was as good an option as anything else, so I followed the instruction. Where the van had appeared from, I had no idea, but they were wearing masks and I had seen people like these in films. When these people told you to get in the van you did it and when they told you to remain silent you did that too. The next thing I knew I was being cross-examined in the Ministry of Short Stories. Who knew?

The man was nice.

‘Your story is beautiful.’

Blush.

‘We’d like to buy it, with your permission. For our…collection.’

‘You like stories?’

‘After a fashion.’ He had a mole, a big mole, the kind of mole you could take a bite out of without affecting its mass.

‘What do you want to do with it?’

‘We could use it to make the world a better place.’ Mole.

‘That sounds nice. I’d quite like to keep it though. What did you say you wanted to do with it?’

‘Add it to our collection.’

‘I guess you have lots of stories here.’ Big mole.

‘Yes and they all serve a purpose.’

‘Like in the street?’

‘After a fashion.’

‘Hmm!’

‘Hmm! Indeed. We can pay you a substantial amount of money.’

I wasn’t really fussed about money. I didn’t like that mole. I didn’t like the collection. But he was nice so I reached into my pocket and handed over the mangled sheet of A4.

He looked surprised.

‘I know it off by heart, you see.’ I offered. ‘We can make the world a better place together.’

‘Hmm!’

And then silence.

‘This presents us with a little problem.’ Mole.

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, let me take this from you.’ He took the story from me, gripping it with tweezers, and then deposited it in some kind of strange plastic bag that I had also seen in films. ‘We’ll talk again, but first I wonder if you’d be interested in reading one of the stories from our collection.’ He used the tweezers again to release another story from another bag and delicately placed it in front of me as if it might explode if he disturbed it too much.

‘Is it a nice story?’

‘After a fashion.’

I unfolded the page and opened my mouth to read the first word.

‘Wait!’

‘What?’ Mole.

‘I’ll leave you alone to enjoy it.’

I shrugged. He could suit himself. I love a good story and he left the room.

When I was alone again, I settled into my chair. It had to be a good one. Mine had taken ten years to write. This had to be good to make it to the collection, to make it to the Ministry of Short Stories.

‘Once upon a time,’ I began to read.

And that truly was the end.

   

 
Diazepam for Sale, the debut novel by Hayley Sherman is now available on Amazon
 
Time travel as a cure for depression, the Mods and Rockers on the West Pier, a vengeful Sat Nav lady, a seagull-stalked Frank Sinatra and Diazepam for sale... 
A fairytale for a prozac nation...
Fiction for a world that doesn't behave the way it should....

www.hayley-sherman.co.uk  

ENJOYED THE BLOG? 

Tell your friends by clicking one of the sharey icons below. 

Enjoyed the blog enough to get some sheep action going? 

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