2019 was very much a year of transition.  Wait, let me clarify that.  I’m perfectly content with my sexuality, I didn’t mean…oh, never mind!

Recovering from serious health issues is no picnic and sometimes, it takes as long as it takes.  Three steps forward, two steps back, good days, bad days, days you don’t know how you feel and all that jazz.  But over the course of the second half of 2019, something..changed.  I can’t really articulate accurately what that was/is, nor why or how.  There was no singular event that precipitated it, no great spiritual awakening or cathartic moment of clarity.  I guess it just happened without me thinking about it.  And that is probably a good thing.  If I’d stopped to think about it, I most likely would have fucked it up.

I just felt better and the knock-on effect was that I started writing properly again, as well as rising from the smelly bog of eternal stench that was the aftermath of things that gone cataclysmically wrong in my personal life and had spent two years recovering from.  I had made a lot of progress, of course and I am massively grateful for that, but like the proverbial pig, I had become somewhat comfortable to lie in my own filth and enjoy being comfortable and just not be a depressed person.

We’re all sick of fucking memes, but sometimes they’re true.  “Your Comfort Zone is a nice place, but nothing ever grows there” being one of them.  And sticking with our Pig analogy, I slowly was hoisted out of the bog of eternal stench by whatever it was that elevated me, to a background of gurgly, farty sounds.  I was dirty and covered in shit, but there I was, in full view of the random voyeurs who had assembled at our metaphorical pond, to see me in all my glory, in suspended animation ten feet above the murky slime, just grinning at them in a nonchalant, borderline threatening manner.  But the important thing, was, I was out.

So I started to write.  I went back to my novella The Locked Room, which I have been working on for the past 2-3 years, periodically.  I finished the second draft and now currently polishing the re-writes.  I also started working on a ten-tale short story collection book, my second one since Urban Chiller in 2015.  With the working title “Dysfunctional“, it is a collection of sci-fi, and weird fiction which I am quietly excited about, although it is hard work.

I can see the changes in my writing and I feel I am a much improved author, although I do still have affection for my earlier works.  My ideas keep coming, many of them feel they have the legs to become stories, and I’m not going to ignore this purple patch of creativity.  I’m going to get this shit done.

So 2020 is going to be the year.  It’s going to be the year I make big changes to my life in other ways, too I plan to leave Sweden and move away for a fresh start, step up and stop making excuses as to why I can’t in life.  I can and I will.  Sometimes you have to.   2020 is going to be they year I step up and get the two writing projects of The Locked Room and Dysfunctional done.  And do all the other things.  No if’s, no buts, and above all, no excuses.

No Retreat, No Surrender.

Do not refer to me as the Comeback Kid.  That would be disingenuous.  2020 is to be the year of the Pig.  The Mackem Pig.

I am the Comeback Pig.

//Jonathan