I pitched an article to an online magazine yesterday. I haven’t written it yet. If they say no, I probably won’t write it at all. It’s a weird one, because it’s about the Book, and that’s something I haven’t really touched on for a while.
I’m not sure I want to write it, but it’s mostly because of the people around me. There would have to be concessions to anonymity. I no longer speak to one of the co-authors, and the other is a teaching assistant. It’s still something that’s a sore point with my family, five years on, because under different circumstances it could have torn us apart. And it’s something I never want my fiancé to read, due to the nature of the content and - though for the work a fifteen-year-old, this should go without saying - the fact that it was just terrible writing.
But. There’s a story in there, and it’s not really to do with the book itself. It’s more to do with the fact that ours was a fairly unique point in literary history - where the phenomenon of print-on-demand self-publishing was easier than ever, right down to organising distribution channels, but still sufficiently quiet (and - not to overestimate my skill level - still at least a little complex) to not be impossible to regulate. There’s the fact that obscenity law in this country is a bizarre, subjective account rather than a hard and fast rule, and that no-one - not even a bunch of teenagers - is exempt. And there’s also the fact that while the things we were writing were truly horrific, films like The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film have still since been screened across the country.
Fifteen-year-old Chris was an odd one - devoid of morals, passionately creative and obsessed with making the internet do new, interesting things. Kids might have written zines like this in the seventies, but they didn’t tend to have Amazon listings and ISBN numbers. That’s a weird combination. I was a weird kid. With just one of those things gone, there would have been no ensuing nightmare. If I was emotionally and morally mature, I could have produced something creatively impressive and entertaining for my age. If I wasn’t into writing, there wouldn’t have been three hundred pages of material begging to be collected together. If the internet wasn’t around, none of this would have ever happened.
The desire’s there to write something that’s personal but reflective - a pathetic, corrupt core with a bunch of offshoots that are genuinely thought-provoking. Censorship law is still fascinating to me. Self-publishing still keeps me ticking. And I’ve turned almost a hundred and eighty degrees on questions of morality, while still having the same frustrations with the institutions that try to enforce it. We’ll see where this goes - and if it’s nowhere, then maybe it isn’t time yet.