When AI starts eating its own tail

You know how it goes. 

You get side-tracked on social media where someone is telling you to buy this, do this, and CHANGE YOUR LIFE! Generally speaking, they've had some sort of epiphany and realised something that has eluded the rest of us for decades.

Depending on your algorithm, you probably get a bucketful of AI slop too - articles culled from elsewhere and repeated as if the person wrote it, with overly bright dynamic photo-illustrations, or click-baity Tik-Tok content, skewed to your demographic, and inciting you to believe something.

It gets harder each time to sift the actual human content from the nonsense. And at this point, you have a couple of options.

Get off social media. Find a reputable news source and fact-check anything you just read. Bear in mind that you can't really trust Google (it's embedded-AI is embarrassingly visible) and Wikipedia is corruptible, and most print media is owned by someone pushing an agenda. Substack felt real for a millisecond before it also got invaded, and your local physical IRL library probably closed. It is increasingly tough to find online sources based on hard data, well researched and without dangerous bias, but there are some out there. They tend to be associated with a university, are non-profit and often a stodgy read, but like porridge for breakfast, you'll feel better after consuming these.

Talk to real humans. Beware that we all live in an echo-chamber because we gravitate towards people who look, think and sound like us, but hopefully you know a diverse set of well-educated folk who can either direct you to reliable sources or provide their own researched opinion. If possible, pick people who work in different disciplines to you - science, art, politics, education, economics, you get the idea. It's not that they will intrinsically have the answers, but a wide range of influences are more likely to throw up counter-arguments and additional perspectives.

The reverse of this is that AI is starting to be fed by more AI. Like the snake eating its own tail. Here is where it goes really wonky. Extremist views or odd behaviours get amplified and presented as if everyone believes them or is acting upon them. 

Outrageous scaremongering probably infiltrates my feeds about once a month, until I move ahead of its curve. The American dream of AI that does all the drudgery for us, leaving us to live lives of pleasure is obviously fake, (until we have more sophisticated sensitive robots anyway) but most of us are not immune to something doing a bit of work for us when we're overstretched - whether that is a fridge that will place an order for food staples or Co-Pilot writing that dreaded email. It's tempting.

But don't be fooled into thinking you are getting real help. 

AI thinks for you, so you don't have to. See the problem there? Our attention spans are getting shorter, children are not learning handwriting, we are forgetting routes we've driven, poetry we loved, recipes we once mastered. Our brains need those daily challenges to stay elastic, or it becomes too much of an effort to read a book, or even a long paragraph, or remember any instructions. And a dumber population is more easily controlled or duped.

People trying to make a quick buck will tell you EVERYONE has to get to grips with using AI. If they are selling you an AI training course, especially. 

But actually we need to preserve our very human qualities - our lived experience, empathy, nurturing, problem-solving capacities and our ability to rationalise and think critically. Our ability to write poetry and music and art, of course, but also to preserve the reasoning behind why we have those things. Not just as commodities, but as learning tools, creative ways to build tolerance, understanding and innovative thought. To understand other humans, stop wars, feed our citizens and look after the planet.

Don't let the AI Ouroboros take over. Just because it's easy, doesn't mean it's helping us.

Tattoo You

 Vancouver Diary, June 2025.

Yesterday was full of complex emotions. We took an Uber downtown to Slowside studio to get tattoos. The driver politely let us out in a side street saying this was the safest spot for a drop-off but we were a block from the Main Street address. As we walked down from East Hastings, the street people density increased - drug addicts, the homeless and destitute filling the sidewalk. A couple of times we had to step in the road to avoid snappy dogs or people pushing laden carts. It was oddly quiet, apart from the dogs. Several times we stepped past prone bodies lying in spilled coffee and piss. Many of the street folk were hunched over, lost in an internal world, squatting, leaning or in a huddle sharing gear. Tourists, locals cyclists and kids walked past as we did. Sirens were heard 

several blocks away and a couple of ambulances cruised past, paramedics at the ready. One parked on East Pender, the other circled slowly. 

Inside the doorway of the studio, we punched in the code and were let inside. On the first floor corridor, a row of black doors had signs for a fashion house, a GP, Chinese herbalist, IT consultant and Slowside Tattoo. We buzzed again and entered a crisp white studio, with a corner aspect and wide wall-length windows overlooking the crossroads with it's Chinatown dragon gates. Soft music was playing. Water dripped from recently watered ferns and houseplants. There were framed prints and flash designs, and shelves with books on art and tattooing. The contrast was acute.

We took turns to get tattooed. Lounging on sofas to wait our turn, we debated last-minute changes of designs. As Jessie prepped the thermal tracing paper for the first tattoo, I studied the pattern of slick white ceiling tiles. Being on a different continent seemed to be encouraging global reflections. How much are humans influenced by our immediate environment? Those people that everyone passed by like silent grey street trees; how easily we were able to turn away from their predicament? The welcome relief of the white studio. Imprinting art on our skins to carry familial totems with us.

The chill vibe in Vancouver had settled over us, infectious as the laid-back accent, lilting up at the end of sentences with an optimistic 'eh?' Neighbours at the apartment had informed us there were really no unsafe areas of Vancouver. Even the dodgier streets of downtown were patrolled and monitored to provide medical help and advice to those willing to take it. Prostitution, drugs and illegal activities were coralled into a square zone that received targeted attention from the city.

We pulled t-shirt sleeves over second-skin and gathered our belongings, snack boxes and drinks cartons. Wiser to the street layout, we skipped streets to emerge in central tourist Vancouver, full of cosy cafes, vinyl stores and museums bordering green parks.

The bus to Kitsilano was packed with end of the day commuters, hanging straps to chew the fat with bus neighbours. They threw us knowing looks - you may be tourists but we're all world travellers here.

We walked a few blocks of Kitsilano at night collecting mental snapshots of ideal homes with gardens strung with fairy lights versus Halloween hangouts for doomed kids. The scale of construction plots made us feel like hobbits. It was as though Canadian Redwoods set the tone for the size of home-building. One plot covered several acres of forest bordered by ornamental hedges and gates with barely a glimpse of the monstrously-large block-sized residence and sweeping driveway beyond. It had to be owned by a millionaire/rock star/property magnate. But it was next to another of the same scale. And another, in fact there were several blocks of immense homes amid tree-rich landscapes. The ruler-straight streets and zoned blocks were still a novelty, having grown up amid England's higgledy-piggledy medieval villages.

Leaving Kits soon to explore the wider landscapes of Canada. We'll be taking the trails that wind through the Rockies, en route to Kelowna, Banff, Jasper and Edmonton. Places almost mythic since I first watched Roxanne and Northern Exposure in the 80's, and gorged on dudes in lumberjack shirts, with liberal immigration sentiments and a fondness for maple pancakes. Okay. Let's go myth-busting....

#tattooparlour #vancouver #kitsilano #canadianconventions #travelwriting #canada2025

To sleep, perchance to dream —ay, there's the rub.

One day, I was at work at a school Sixth Form. A teenage boy sat at my desk, holding his head forward and using tissues to staunch a nose bleed. A girl had brought him into my office, and I remember thanking her for helping him. She was one of the popular gang and he was a social outsider, so it was an unusual incident on a Monday morning. I found out later that it was the girl that had punched him in the nose and she’d brought him in from a sense of guilt, but I didn’t know this at the time. My mobile phone rang - my teenager was in tears and I couldn’t make out what was wrong.

“I’ve found out what it is. It’s not just me. Other people have it. Hundreds! I’m not crazy, oh my god, it’s not just me!”

The boy, I’ll call him Liam, was trying to exit my office, waving me back to my desk. 

“One sec, sweetheart... Take the tissues, come back after tutor group to put it in the incident book! …Sorry, are you okay, where are you?”

My non-binary child told me a story that I didn’t expect to hear; of dreams experienced whilst awake, lasting days at a time, of assassins and castles, where they could fly and jump and kick, and daily life had to take a back seat because they were immersed in a vivid story playing out in real time. Dreams that were hyperreal; glowing colours, sights and sounds beyond anything they’d experienced, and how they couldn’t tell us anything about it, because it would sound insane.

“Wait, are you talking about a videogame? What is making you so upset?”

The bell was ringing, and there wasn’t time to fully understand this complicated story. But that night, we sat down together and they showed me the online forum called Wild Minds Network*.

They’d stumbled across it, and had been up most of last night reading comment after comment. A divorced dad in Jamaica, a teen from Arkansas, a young girl in Yorkshire, a nurse with a qualification in psychiatry; all described similar obsessions, starting in childhood, and hidden in shame. They explained how they needed space to move around and often used music to lull themselves into an almost hypnotic state, at which point they conjured stories with their eyes closed. But these went beyond daydreams. 

In these stories, sometimes beginning with scenes from films or books or games, they met people, made friends or had lovers, became famous or lived out fantasies, but the dream didn’t stop there. It continued, day after day, becoming an epic tale, where they explored relationships, tried out lifestyles and imagined whole interactive worlds. It was fascinating and more exciting than their daily existence. They might stay up all night, pacing in these dreamlike states, so as to carry on without interruption. They might wait until the family had gone out or they would feign being ill in bed so that they could carry on world-building. It wasn’t written down, it was held in their memory, and it had layers of complexity and emotional involvement. Many explained that they neglected family or friends to continue with their solo adventure.

They called it maladaptive daydreaming.

My non-binary child told me of an Israeli professor of clinical psychology who had coined the phrase, and that his name was Dr Eli Somer. They told me that they understood that people used it to escape their problems, but that it wasn’t ONLY that, it was also a space for joy. They told me that they hated being interrupted when they were pacing in their room, because they were fully immersed in this world, and snapping out of it was jarring. It was an immense relief to be able to talk about it with me, but they were in tears, convinced that it meant they would likely be alone for the rest of their life. Who would live with someone who was half in the real world, but mostly only happy out of it? 

They shared very few details of the landscape and people in their maladaptive world. Mostly from embarrassment, but also because they found it hard to describe a whole world. Mixed in with their feelings about it sounding childish or ridiculous, they also described how they sometimes started from a TV plotline, and then explored some aspect of it, re-enacting scenes, replaying them, trying multiple outcomes, switching characters, finding resolutions.

I realised that they had been doing this for years, even as a young child. As parents, we hadn’t comprehended what was going on, but we’d heard them ‘dancing’ in their room, and we knew they had a sleep disorder and a diagnosis of autism, which I’d pursued because they found school environments a sensory challenge and I’d thought the teachers would help them uncover coping strategies. They initially disagreed with the educational psychologist’s summary, but came to accept that autism is just one way of describing brains that are different from the norm. 

It isn’t fair to my child to share more of their story. Especially as they are now an adult. But I wanted to understand how it must have felt to hide this secret for sixteen years. 

So I wrote ‘Outlandish’ - the story of a boy, living on a remote island, collecting sounds from the natural world. Felix has similarities with that long ago boy with a nose bleed and social anxiety. But he is also a maladaptive daydreamer, making sense of life in Bristol with his single mum, as Covid hits and the real world turns upside down.

What purpose does dreaming serve?

A playground for our overheated brain? A chance to explore the subconscious mind, full of oddities and half-recollections from the days before? Scientists will tell us dreaming is about problem-solving, emotional regulation and memory consolidation, and I can think of dreams I’ve had, including recurring ones, that hint at fears or buried anxieties I was wrestling with at the time.

I’ve read about Jungian archetypes, their symbols repeated in dreams, which suggest a collective unconscious world-mind that we can access in a dreaming state. There are examples of people who dream of snakes but have never seen one in real life. Are they accessing human memories encoded deep in our DNA?

Or what if dreaming goes beyond even that?

What if dreams help us build ourselves as human beings? Our waking moments give us experiences and reactions that we don’t have time to process until we lay down to sleep. After two hours, we slide into deep unconsciousness to fully relax our tired muscles, while our brain ramps up a gear and begins sifting and performing tricks and storing memories in layers, building sense from nonsense, and while it is doing this, it is creating an image of ourselves, building an identity, storing moments that are rational and irrational that help us to become who we are.

If this is the case, it explains why lack of sleep is so disturbing. We don’t feel like ourselves. Our sense of reality is off kilter because our brain hasn’t been able to reinforce our stored identity, remind us of the sum of our experiences and integrate us back into a whole persona by morning.

So, I've written other novels, but this one feels like a mission. If you know a literary agent, please share this with them. Over four million people worldwide are estimated to have this condition, hidden from their closest friends and family, feeling shame and embarrassment. And yet we live in a society obsessed with games, stories, playgrounds, distractions - so can't we all relate?

pennylapenna@gmail.com

Inside the pain

     Those of us with a neurodivergent tag may be familiar with being told to sit with uncomfortable emotions. It is difficult work, and essential for healing (whatever that means to people who are not therapists of one type or another).

    But it isn't something you should be expected to do daily. Nor on first waking. That would be considered as living in trauma.

    But we are forced to confront some awful realities alive and virulent in the world today. The atrocities being committed in Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and other regions. The floods in Texas. The living hell of being a person of colour, a disenfranchised woman, someone who needs an abortion, or trans or LGBTQIA+ in countries run by dictators, (and yes, I do mean the United States). 

    The climate emergency and those who speak out being imprisoned with inordinately long sentences. 

    The mental health crisis among our young people.

    It is so ever present as to be unbearable.

    And yet we have to live inside this pain of knowing. For anyone empathetic or humane, the daily toll of this weight can be heavy. It feels that the least we can do is bear it, and maybe this will prompt us to action as an ally, to join in with the protests, to use our voice however we can.

    Taking a step back, I realise that we also need to lift this burden from our shoulders sometimes. Once we have taken action, no matter how small, we need to put the pain aside, lest it consume us. Akin to putting on our oxygen mask first.

    So, take a moment. 

    Initially, sit with the pain, and the despair. The sadness of our oft-times inhumanity. Think of the pain of those Palestinian parents. Identify that fear inside yourself. The daunting world out there, that seems so huge and scary, where our little attempts to recycle and be good to our neighbours feel not enough.

    Sit inside that pain, roaring loud enough to drown out everything good.

    And then let it abate. 

    Let it recede like the floodwaters, like the retreating armies. 

    Let the daylight in. Water a plant on a windowsill. Take a coffee outside to a quiet spot only you know.

    Curl up on a sofa, or under a duvet. Breathe in your tiny moment of calm and comfort. 

    And then on days when we feel sufficiently strong, and dynamic, and our ability to fight returns, we will be able to create solidarity, across streets, counties, regions, countries, the globe, and continue fighting for what's right.

    Politicians may not be the solution. But communities are. 

    We are a big global community if we can but realise it, and now that we are all able to talk across distance, across difference, we can unite and come into our power. The power to say No to violence, hatred, indifference, dislike of the other, and instead extend a hand across to other communities. 

    If we all rise up, united, they cannot imprison us all.

#globalsolidarity #freepalestine #stopthewarinUkraine #supportLGBTQIA+ #globalcommunity #climatesolutions #protestisahumanright 

From 1984 to 2024

In my lifetime, there has been extraordinary change affecting human life on the planet. 

The speed of technological advances means that the average person has no understanding of how systems operate - from AI to satellite systems, global weapons to data analysis, even how we make ultra-processed foods and pandemic medicines. We simply use the technology and rely on someone else's knowledge of how it was created. We eat food that may not be good for us, use mobile phones incessantly and compulsively, and yet we have access to vast stores of human knowledge and scientific advancement - which we mostly ignore. 

We are the Proles....

At home with a high temperature and possible COVID symptoms, I reread 1984. This is ridiculously relevant now in 2024. (Okay 2025, but it wasn't when I was writing this...)

The feeling of the world constantly at war, so that we all just get used to living with it. The Newspeak - a language of propaganda and misinformation. Trump's doublethink - where he tells us that Ukraine caused the war that they are fighting against hostile invaders. Where protestors are arrested and imprisoned, and those who speak out against dictators or the wealthy elite are quickly silenced.

How easily did we slip into this state of affairs, with all of us complicit because we have no knowledge of how to rise up and stop this rule by oligarchy, this demonisation of immigrants, the poor, the disabled, this stressful existence where we are encouraged to look the other way for fear of losing our own jobs, our own fragile stake in the world.

What has the power to subvert this descent into societal breakdown? 

Who or what can stop climate change?

I feel oddly well-positioned to answer these questions. Like many authors of dystopian fiction, I have read sci-fi, been schooled in global war scenarios, played games that destroy planets, and grown up on literature that forewarns how we get to Gilead.

The antidote is CONNECTION.

The current Labour party is not socialist, even though it used its socialist roots to appear like an alternative to Tory corruption. Young people distrust politicians - for good reason - see what they have allowed to happen on their watch. So it doesn't feel realistic to suggest we can vote ourselves out of trouble.

Instead, we have to build grassroots resilience, communities that are inclusive and well-prepared, and be ready to download manuals and knowledge, and preserve practical skills for the day when our ruling bodies cease to function. I am not talking about becoming preppers - it's bigger than that. It's about how we bring the rest of the world with us - all those who want to live via community, empathy, honesty and decency.

Remember those balloon debates in school? They taught us that capitalism was going to swallow us up unless we preserved our individualism, and had a better reason for being saved than the next person. 

I disagree.

We want to bring everyone along with us - all the divergent, messy, broken people whom society has placed a low value on. These are the people who actually know how to survive in an intolerant world. We need the crazy scientists and fantasy writers, people who pray and those who don't, carers, workers, farmers, healers and musicians. And we don't need big impressive leaders who got where they are by treading on all of us.

We may be the Proles, but we are also the industrious ants and bees, the fruitpickers, the dambuilders, the vast swarming hordes who can build and grow and care and survive.

Turns out WE have the power. And the more we work together the better our future becomes.

Singular Cake - Mk II

Most of us occasionally enjoy a spot of schadenfreude (a positive reaction to someone else's misfortune) if we are honest, but there is also its counterpart, freudenschade (a negative reaction to another's good fortune), which in its Germanic way is oddly a very British concept.

But which of these really applies to George Monbiot's article in today's Guardian? I did smile  so I'm going for the former...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/24/extreme-wealth-super-rich-devon-society-planet#comments

Living close to the Devon coast myself, I have also seen the yachts and superyachts come and go, and the overt displays of wealth and privilege at the private boat clubs, bars and country clubs. But I don't envy them OR feel pleased if their existence is less than perfect. 

I'm comfortable in my own existence.

But I do wonder about how to reach across the divide and talk about sustainability, and the mantra of Singular Cake to those whose only measure of success has been EXCESS.

It's as though we need a new arena for discussions - how to live collaboratively in a post-colonial world, how to scale back on over-indulgence, how to promote projects that benefit the planet AND provide joy and fun for human beings.

All I can say is that there is a certain pleasure that comes from living within your means. Taking what you need, and no more. Enjoying the simplicity. Instead of proving you are successful, or looking for outward approval, just BE successful - on your own terms. It's freeing.

#singularcake #sustainability #onlywhatyouneed #agoodexistence #georgemonbiot #guardian

New House Vibe

 A few years ago, we bought an old house. I started a poem about it - it was old and unloved, the wires needed stripping, it had 'efflorescence' on the walls (look it up, it's nowhere near as gorgeous as it sounds). Generally speaking we've made slow progress, although I have a kind of vision for the house - white-walled art gallery meets book-nook library with a smattering of natural history curios thrown in.

The garden is more of a challenge. How to develop a botanical jungle that resists slugs and snails, is fragrant with herbs and feels like an oasis when I only have about 4ft square to play in....

Move

Amber-eyed, 

the Overlord presides 

over the detritus of the living room

where I have badly stacked the incoming boxes

such that the bottom one

is compressed and extrudes its contents.

Arms ache from van trips and stair treks.

In the echoey dining room, rows of vertically-filed vinyl records 

are causing the IKEA cupboard to sag in the middle, 

temporarily shored with two garden bricks

yanked from stacks behind the weather-beaten shed.

The exterior brickwork has a white efflorescence 

that suggests water seepage.

Electrical wires hang from door jambs like stripped veins.

She’s old and weary, like us.

The front door mat is curled to catch unwary feet.

Things move in my peripheral vision

and move back again when I stare 

like scenes from a scary movie

where the new owners have disturbed the lives

of those who came before.

That first night

I sleep like a cat with fleas

hearing sounds of the street all night

through the meniscus of my dreaming.

The house has a broad back of centuries,

wrapped around me, dusty, impregnated 

with other handprints.

Years pass.

She is still weary but her rooms

are lit with light, filled with echoes

of our noise-making. You painstakingly

revealed her wooden window sills, smoothed walls

and ceilings. We infuse her with splashes of passata,

garlic hummus, chilli oil from the garden vines.

Family

is what you become when you live

in the same nest. Cats morph on the retaining wall.

Vinyl crackles as the needle drops. This year

we’ll give you a new roof and stem the damp

although you don’t seem to mind it.

You’ve seen worse.

Factchecking and the Forest World

It is reassuring when even the most exciting new science is questioned and fact checked by peer scientists. We need this, in a world of disinformation, AI-written articles and deep fakes. Even those who witness and catalogue signs of climate change encourage peer review that may contradict their findings based on longer-term evidence or differing analysis models.

So I dug into a Guardian article about discrediting the concept of the 'wood-wide web' with avid interest, having aborbed The Overstory by Richard Powers and followed the explosion of interest in Suzanne Simard's 1997 study that inspired it.

I was not expecting to find Daniel Immerwahr's article so richly rewarding with its nuggets of peripheral but related information. His fascination with trees goes beyong merely critiqueing Simard's stance, and providing the context for the outpouring of enthusiasm that her research engendered, and instead takes us on related pine-strewn paths of his own interests from the explosion of new plant writing, to what botanists bring to the table of ethology (plant and animal psychology). Full of intriguing diversion (trees can smell themselves, can a rat's spinal cord act like a brain, do some plants have a form of sight?) it's well worth a read, and nature writers may find inspiration in it for worthwhile exploration for their own writing.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/23/mother-trees-and-socialist-forests-is-the-wood-wide-web-a-fantasy?

How Many Years Does It Take to Write a Novel?

I don’t appeal to everyone. Or even try to.

My writing is about the things that fascinate me - things that make my brain go “Ooo, OoO!” and wave my hand to talk over you because I’m so excited. And that changes weekly, daily, oh, alright, hourly. (I may have ADHD.) 

Crafting a novel is therefore a wholly absorbing series of wanders down side streets and blind alleys, stopping to exclaim at certain points, followed by tangents through ferny foliage into impenetrable forest, being rebuffed and finding my way via pine needle-carpeted trails that take me over scrubby ranges and down into gullies, and short detours along a riverbank, and discovering that I have ended up on a promontory, overlooking where I started but with a whole different point of view. Pause, reflect. 

And then I might jump character. Or time zone.

So, I get that it wouldn’t make sense to most people that this novel has taken six years to write.

For context, I started it the summer before my dad died, when I was working at a secondary school, spending hot days in exam invigilation, watching kids with additional needs struggle in the rigid environment. A year later, with some funds that Dad left me, I took a writing retreat at the Arvon Foundation’s Lumb Bank and got some feedback, resulting in a major rewrite. Buoyed by my experience with Arvon, I asked the tutor for a recommendation which ultimately secured me a place on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and that blew apart the whole structure of the novel until I had a three-person perspective, a much better understanding of suspense and dialogue, and only half the word count. Cue more late-night writing binges.

It took me two years part-time to complete the MA (while working full-time) but it was a springboard to a job in publishing and a sense of self-confidence. (Thinking about an MA? Do it !!! And tell me how it goes). Patrick Rothfuss has been working (or not-working) on his novel The Doors of Stone for over 12 years. Plenty of authors have taken longer - with varying excuses - but I guess it takes as long as it takes.

Last month I was made redundant from a job I loved. Three weeks have passed, where I've been applying for insane numbers of job applications for every sort of creative role imaginable, and still not one interview. Yet. The university has been supportive. They said with my CV they’d be lucky to have me on their temporary admin team  - and I’ll be glad to get some work (and money) under my belt in a week or so. 

But this week, I’ve written the final chapter of Outlandish: a novel about a boy with maladaptive daydreaming. 🙂

(Thanks to Farley Lapenna for the illustration - https://www.instagram.com/lapastaillustrations/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/farley-lapenna-19b938180/)

 When I first started this blog in 2006, I felt like a lone voice. Funny how movements galvanise groups and grow, and now SO MANY more people on the planet are following the 'Singular Cake' path - even if they don't call it such.

The idea was simple. Only take one slice of cake. 

If that is all you need, take it, share it, and enjoy it. Don't take more than you need. So YES - that means no billionaires. It means no dictators. It means no multi-national conglomerates building oil pipelines or companies strip-mining natural areas.

It's a simple philosophy and can be applied to all areas of your life. 

I actually just looked back at some of my early blog posts and re-read my God's Bet story, and still feel it's right on the nose. Do take a look; back in sweet 2006....

So, how do we persuade everyone to adopt this mantra? One person at a time? That may take too long and the planet is kinda in crisis and can't really wait ten or twenty more years.

We've gotta be more proactive. Tell a friend, who tells their friend, sure. But also tell groups, and communities and people making TV programmes and radio shows. Tell your old cranky neighbour and your 4-year old niece. Tell famous people (they get about a bit.) Tell someone you know in authority, and get them to put pressure on someone higher up.

Feels like we're ready for this change, and I have spent the last 17 years espousing it in one form or another - from the colleagues I work with to the poems and novels I write. If you want to be part of the solution (and if that means your descendants get to survive, who wouldn't?) please take the time to explain it, far and wide.

Just one slice of cake. Only take what you need. 💗

When is a First Draft not a First Draft?

     When it's been edited along the way, over the past four years, locked down in a third floor flat during a pandemic with a view of treetops, and subsequently workshopped and torn apart and reconstructed during MA seminars and a week long Arvon course, and with writer-ly friends, and shared with my target audience ie other Maladaptive Daydreamers for feedback, and then scoured for themes and foreshadowing and nitpicky errors during hot sweaty nights after work.

I mean, it is STILL technically a First Draft.

But boy, she's almost watertight.

If I were giving advice to anyone but myself, I'd be saying this is STILL a First Draft. 

Because? 

1. You don't have the distance from the text that you need for rigorous copy-editing.

2. If you had it published tomorrow, are you SURE you wouldn't want to change a thing?

3. It isn't a Final Draft until cold hard professionals have had their hands on it, and she still sails.

Sigh.

Okay, so maybe I can call it a First Draft (Revised with buoyancy aids). 

It's painful, and I am impatient, but I'm off for another tack around the bay....

Rites of Passage

In almost all known societies, from Amazonian tribes to the Incas to modern Europe, there exists the concept of a Rite of Passage. In its basic form this is a journey that every person goes on, to travel from a child to an adult. Human groups have highjacked this concept to serve many purposes. But historically, this is for the good of the society – to bind its individuals together with common experiences, to strengthen the society as a whole and preserve its societal norms and beliefs. Stories which do not encourage acceptance may exist within small groups but will not reach a wider audience so Rites of Passage tend to have broadly agreed themes. Scholars have also proposed that a rite of passage is about our mental history – our shared folklore of what it is to be a human.

Rites of passage may have three parts or five, depending on custom and variance. But broadly speaking, the sections are birth, separation and death, or child, transition and adulthood. They are the biological processes of life mirrored in our mental journey to maturity. For this reason, much of our culture, literature and art reflects on these rites of passage.

One of the common themes of this journey is about finding oneself, and one’s place. It can therefore be very important in reinforcing what the group (tribe, culture, society as a whole) believes is the ideal – whether that be an idealized type of person, or a role that a person must play. So, for instance, in a patriarchal society a rite of passage is commonly seen to be about a boy’s transition to become a man. Whether this is the stereotypical story of a child who must undertake a trial or challenge to be worthy of leading the tribe (The Lion King) or a boy who is different, awkward, unloved who leaves the tribe to explore the world and returns an adult hero, loved by all (Hercules) – many of the stories will be about the male lead. That is not to say that there are no female hero’s in the making, but the patriarchal society may have to cloak their rite of passage story in order to reveal it (Mulan). This tells us much about that societal group – it has to re-frame a women’s story in the pattern of a man’s in order to show the woman as a hero. Mulan would not be acclaimed a hero if she stayed at home and dealt with the challenges of a woman’s life, (as women were oppressed and confined in her society). Instead, her rite of passage had to be shown in the male mould – going to war and fighting our enemies.

I notice that another theme is often gender – because this mirrors our life processes when a child seeks out who they are, discovers the confines of their gender, and rebels against it to emerge triumphant as their own version of their gender. This is seen in novels by women who were ‘not allowed’ to be authors, taking on a male name in order to tell their story (George Sands). There are also many rites of passage stories that help us to overcome our limited beliefs and understanding of others. A child may not know their own true nature, but by testing themselves against societies rules, they may discover their full adult self (Boy in a Dress) or it may allow the author to scrutinise our prejudices and bigotry where we follow a person’s journey through these challenges to emerge victorious and redefine our society as a result (The Elephant Man).

Ancient societies often had strict definitions of roles for men and women, but recent historical finding reveal that some societies may have accepted non-binary definitions. But in many cases, someone who defied these basic descriptions was hard to categorize and place in society. This is reflected in stories where a person was born one gender but aspired to the role of another gender – and their rite of passage story would be crucial because it would allow both the person and society to understand how they might find their place. A tribe that can support all of its members to be active, useful participants would be a stronger unit, so it has always been important for society to understand that some people are gender-fluid, and others are non-binary, and their story from child to adult is a lesson for us all in tolerance and acceptance. A rite of passage story for any individual must support them to discover who they truly are, their strengths and weaknesses and then society can embrace and celebrate their unique contribution. We need more writers to tell these rite of passage stories to help us walk in someone’s else’s shoes for a brief while.

A rite of passage is also reflected in our customs and traditions. Spanish boys are encouraged to run with the bulls at 14, and young people in the UK go to bars for their first alcoholic drink at 18, but both are viewed by adults as a rite of passage. Perhaps in the UK, we need to study the rites of passage on offer and develop ones which better model our ideal future citizen?

Europe may have lived through a period of relative peace and stability in my and my parent’s lifetime, so our rites of passage may no longer be about preparing for war. Instead they reflect new challenges to society. Climate change, mental health and political instability are big topics affecting us all on a global scale, as is the challenge of pandemics. Rite of passage tales now will reflect these global concerns. Where our tribe used to be only those around our firepit, now it is those of us on the same planet, including all living species and our interconnected environment.

Rites of passage now could be the journey we all take to delve a little deeper into who we are and who we want to be, embracing our physical and mental wellbeing, and preparing to contribute to the planet, the people and living things on it.

 

Happy Reading !

The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger, The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath, Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad, To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee, The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins, The Fitz and the Fool Robin Hobb, Curious Incident of the Dog in The Nighttime Mark Haddon, She Who Became The Sun Shelley Parker-Chan...

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/rite-of-passage

https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/genderfluid

https://booksandbao.com/non-binary-books-fiction-nonfiction/