The Giant Vulnerability Purge.

At the end of this month, I will turn 22.

Me in a blanket decorated with penises.

There is no longer a milestone birthday until I am 40. I’m about as prepared to be a grown up as I’m ever going to be. I have a first class degree and can hold down a steady job. Just because I’m surrounded by people who would swear I behave like a five-year-old 95% of the time I’m with them doesn’t make that any less true.

But I’ve still got a fair amount of sorting-out to do before I’m properly on track. I’m not too upset about this because I know a lot of people in about the same position as me who aren’t doing as well. People who don’t have the same prospects as I do, despite having done basically the same amount of work. I also know I’ve got a great group of people around me who will help me and support me in everything I do.

But I also have a problem I should probably work on if I ever want this to go anywhere.

The thing I’ve wanted to do as a career forever has always been writing. 

Always. 

But I’m hugely self-conscious about it. I don’t know why I am. I remember a time when I wasn’t. I remember shoving my stuff in everyone's faces. If there was a particular instance which made me change my attitude, I don’t recall it. But I don’t like showing people my work any more, unless I’ve written it specifically with the intention of giving it to them. I don’t know why that is. I know that my inner critic can be a bit harsh sometimes, but I also know that that can be a positive thing, if I can use it properly. And I know that that's not really the problem. I can be as happy with a piece as I think I'm going to get and still not want to show it to anyone. I can read back something I've written and think "Yeah, this one is good!" And still keep it to myself. Just because.

I’ve thought about this a fair amount now, because it’s an issue I’ve had for a while. And by ‘a while’ I mean years. Apart from the stuff I've had to share at uni, I don’t remember sharing very much of my own writing with anyone since I was about fifteen or sixteen.

And the conclusion I have come to is that the best way to get over this is to lay out everything I’ve done and see how people react. Truthfully, I don’t especially expect people to react much at all. 

But I think that the act of doing it will be nonetheless therapeutic. I might learn something about myself. I might actually get some responses from people. If anyone actually reads this. I probably won't. But at the very least I’ll feel productive while I’m doing it and proactive for a short time afterwards. And having it out there will, I hope, do something to reinforce what I'm supposed to be doing.

I’m going to try to put this as chronologically as I can. But I don’t know how well I’ll do.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer for a living. Like all kids, I occasionally decided I’d rather be astronaut, but writing was the rock to which I always clung when there was nothing else.

Books were always my thing. I don’t remember it personally, but my dad loves telling the story of how he took me to Toys R Us and said I could pick any toy I wanted. And I picked a book. He says he was so proud. (Cue daddy issues theory about why this stuck with me. I won’t argue that that isn’t a possibility. But I don't especially care either. If I love something, I'd like to be left in peace to love it, no matter what the root of it.)

Lots of people read stories to me. I got a bedtime story every night. There were stacks of books at my house and both grandparents' houses that I read during the day.

I learned to read by myself at a really young age. My mum was a child carer when I was young, so we had loads of proactive learning toys in the house for when other children came round. Things in my house were labelled so I could read what they were. My mum practiced teaching on me with educational toys and games. Words came easily to me.

When I was a really little kid, I’d carry around a notebook with me and write stories in it. I still do. Except, now, it’s more likely to have To Do lists and article ideas in than actual stories. Sometimes that's because I type them up directly on my laptop. But often it's not. I remember being very young – in the Four Plus, or Year One, at a really early stage of my education – and writing a story about Tom and Jerry in my brand new notebook while the other kids in my class had playtime. It was what I enjoyed doing.

Back then, when my huge handwriting took up most of the page, the stories I wrote were awful rehashes of other stories I’d been told. Obviously. I was five. I’m not going to pretend I was some kind of original genius.

Whenever I slept at my nan’s house, she would always tell me a story about a group of little girls who all conveniently had the same names as me and my cousins. It was the same story every time. We – they – went wandering in the forest, came across a cottage, found some kittens and lived happily ever after with our new pet kittens. Not a great story arc, but I must have written it out a dozen times in various forms before I could come up with anything of my own.

After school, there were always tons of other kids in my house because of my childminder mum. I remember very vividly that we’d make picture books. We’d have a piece of coloured card for the front cover which we could draw a picture on and we’d make up the pages ourselves. A big picture on each one and a story or a description or something underneath. Then they’d all get stapled together and then we had a book by us. I remember enjoying that.

I was about three when my dad went to university. I used to try to help him. Another story he tells that I have no recollection of is the time when I stole one of his Business Studies course books. I read it cover to cover in front of him. I wanted to prove that I could help him to convince him to stop kicking me out of the study. Even though my contributions were basically just to sit on his lap and mash the keyboard.

Eventually, the only way he could get me to leave him alone was to get me my own computer. Well, to start with, it was a keyboard with a floppy disc drive plugged into a TV and a joystick. But it was fine. It had a Noddy game on it and a keyboard I could mash.

When he got a new computer for himself, I got his old one. I had his hand-me-down computers practically until I left for uni. By that point, I had grown out of Noddy, but this one had a new game.

Microsoft Word.

Yeah, I was that kid.

I no longer needed the endless supply of notebooks. I had unlimited paper now. And I wrote my stories on my computer. Every day. I’d come home from school and I’d read or write for most of the evening. Even when I played video games, I had my notebook and my reading book right next to me and I’d grab them at every save point and cut scene that took longer than five seconds.

I remember having friends round to my house and not wanting to show them any of my actual toys because Word was better. For me. Sometimes, they agreed. I remember spending afternoons with the kids I got on with best just writing stories together.

I’d write all the time. I’d write stories and print them off and give them to people for their birthdays. I'd write stories and show them to my parents and grandparents and friends and cousins just for the hell of it. I’d write stories and forget about them. I don’t remember much of what I wrote because so much of it has blurred into the white noise of generic memory since I’ve grown up. I was young and immature enough that it probably doesn’t really matter.

Every weekend, I'd go to my paternal grandparents' house and play with my cousins. And for a long time, we'd spend that day writing a play. By which I mean, I'd spend that day writing a play and then in the evening my cousins and I would perform it for our Nan and parents. I remember that being a lot of fun. For me. I don't think my cousins enjoyed it as much, especially not as they got older. That stopped altogether when they became teenagers and started having their own lives. My younger cousins never put up with my bossing them around like that.

When I was twelve, my nan collected coupons from the Daily Mail (forgive her, she bakes great cakes) and when she had enough, they would publish my book.

So I had to write a book.

I hadn’t ever committed to anything that big before. I’d always wanted to write books, but I’d never finished anything of that length. If anything ever got longer than a few pages, I tended to let it trail out to nothing. I had so much that was unfinished. I had never really planned anything properly.

I still didn’t plan anything properly. I had very little concept of sitting down and planning each point and knowing what was going to happen next. I didn't even know how long a story was going to be when I started writing it. I had no idea how many words made up a book or how many pages on a Word document made up a decent amount of book-sized pages. I sort of assumed that once something was done, I'd just know and it'd probably be long enough that it mattered. I hadn't ever been exposed to any writers who had gone through the writing process, so I made a lot of childish assumptions. I might have thought to Google it, back when it was the only real interest I had, but I wasn't allowed the Internet for a stupidly long time. (Which I maintain is silly because, even now, in total control of my own Internet and with no restrictions on it whatsoever, I still very rarely come across perverts or porn.)

Then, I liked to go on an adventure with what I was writing. I wanted writing to feel like reading.

For anyone who doesn’t know, this is literally the worst attitude to have if you want to be a half way decent writer. I became aware of this not long after that first abysmal book attempt and I understand it a hell of a lot better now. But as a writer you have to know every single tiny detail of your story world, even if it's completely irrelevant to the story you're telling, even if the reader will never know.

Obviously, my writing was hollow and had no idea what it was doing. For a twelve year old, it wasn’t bad, I suppose. If I looked at any twelve year old now and someone told me they’d written a seventy thousand word manuscript, no matter how much it sucked, I’d be impressed

But because it was me, clearly I was a terrible child and should have put more effort in. That’s just how internal critics work.

At least, it’s how mine does.

Trying to think clearly, I believe I'm stuck somewhere between being way too harsh on myself and hugely underestimating the skills of many twelve-year-olds. I don't know much about twelve-year-olds now that I'm not one.

I cringe when I think of that book. I know it's irrational, but I don’t like the fact that it’s there, a testament to how clumsy and clunky and unorganised my writing used to be. When I was twelve. When I was literally a child. When I was barely into double figures and couldn't spell a lot of long words, despite desperately wanting to be able to use them.

My point is, I got it done. 

I didn’t plan it. I made the whole thing up as I went along. I hadn’t got out of the habit of including all my friends in the story. But at least this time, they were characters, not just plagiarised directly from real life. My editing was half-arsed at best. Most of it was completely unedited – I just scrolled through the pages not reading a single word, thinking “eh, it’s probably fine. All this bit is fine.”

But I spent all day every day on it. I filled my notebooks with it. I got home and locked myself away from everyone and typed up what was in the notebooks and wrote more and more and more until the sound of my keyboard was keeping my parents awake. It helped having a deadline to stick to – the submissions only lasted so long and then coupon offer closed. And I was determined to get my book published.

And I did. It was called The Black Dragon. There are four copies of it in the world. I think my mum has one. My nan has one, displayed in the same cabinet as my dad's dissertation. She hasn't read it all the way through. My dad has one framed above his fireplace in a circle of photos of me and my siblings and cousins. I sent the last one to my friend Heidi, who had a dragon named after her, who had moved to France just after I started it.

My dad was impressed with it. Sort of.

He pointed out the typos to everyone. But I also overheard him telling someone that he couldn't have done it and that he thought it was brilliant that I’d decided to write it from the perspective of the dragon. As if it had been a conscious decision that I'd put loads of thought into.

After that, I decided I would not write anything shorter than that. If I’d done it once, I could do it again. And I didn’t see the point in writing anything less. It didn’t get attention. People didn’t care about anything less.

(Despite having cleaned out three Bedfordshire libraries, in all of my obsessive personal reading, I’d never really come across anything that took short stories seriously as a literary genre. I didn’t properly until I reached university. Now, I think they’re cool. They’re fun, and Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning was all kinds of beautiful. But … deep down, it’s still books that does it for me. I think it probably always will be.)

So that’s what I did.

I continued to suck at writing long fiction. I got naturally better just because I was doing it more often. The same way you improve at anything. And because I read a lot. But generally, I still made all the mistakes you’d expect someone with no advanced technical training to make.

English teachers loved me. I got top marks in every English class I was ever in. I was dedicated and, when I was asked to write a story, I handed in twenty pages the next day. I got top marks the whole time.

And in my spare time, I was at home writing books. Vague, unplanned, weird books based on passing fancies and Adam Ant lyrics. But they were words on a page the length of your average book and that was what counted as far as I was concerned at the time.

Since that first one, I finished five more. I still have the manuscripts. Saved on the first computer I wrote them on, and every computer I've had since, and every memory stick I used to transfer them over. As clunky and hideous as they are.

They didn’t get published by the Daily Mail. Thankfully.

But my dad did decided to self-publish them on Lulu.com. He wanted to get a real copy of them each for himself. At first, I let him. He has the stack of them at home. I think they’re still available online, if anyone really wants to see. Even if I would rather you didn't. I’ve wanted him to take them down for a while, but we haven’t spoken about them much. I updated them once with a re-edit. They got next to no attention, and I'm quite pleased with that.

I’ve flicked through the bound copies at my dad's house more recently and, objectively, they’re not that bad. For a child. I’ve seen published writers make some of the same technical mistakes and typos. And they’re not uninteresting. As far as children's ideas go.

But there’s just a giant part of me that thinks I can do better. And it won’t listen to the part of me that says it doesn’t matter because it happened so long ago. Because people will know I did it years ago and not consider it representative of what I do now. And yet I still judge.

While I never stopped writing, I became more critical of myself – more like I am now – I haven’t finished anything that length since I was about sixteen.

I remember starting something when I was seventeen. And when the circle of friends who inspired it fell apart, I gave up on it. I started something the summer before I left for university when I was eighteen. And in the first few months of my Creative Writing course, I listened to everything they said about technical skills and planning and ambition and I think I panicked because I gave up on that one a few weeks into my first semester.

Even though it was the most planned thing I’d ever done.

I decided I’d go back to it later and started on a new project.

I never went back to it.

I told myself that, if I was going to take this seriously, I needed to be doing a lot more, with more structure behind it. I gave myself a personal target of 5000 words per week outside of my school work. And I hit it. Every week. They weren’t necessarily good words. But that’s what editing is for. I felt alright with that because we were told over and over again at uni that editing can perhaps be more important to the final product than the actual writing of it.

Sometimes, I’d knock the 5000 words out in a night. Sometimes, I wouldn’t. I'd struggle through those 5000 words a couple of sentences at a time. But I’d always be there by the end of the week.

And then I gave up on that project too. I lost faith in the plan. Probably with good reason. It was kind of rushed. Based on a vague idea. I could have finished it and gone through with it and edited the hell out of it and maybe got it some attention. But I don’t think it would be the kind of attention that would be ideal. Even if it was the kind of attention I might have wanted, for a bit.

It was about then that I decided I wouldn’t bother to write anything that didn’t have some kind of deeper meaning to it. I didn’t want to preach, or anything like that. I didn’t want to tell anyone how to live their lives or what to do.

But I still read so much that most of the books I consume blur away into a grey fuzz unless they really stand out. There are few that are still vivid to me despite not having read them for years. Some for a good reason, some for a bad reason. But at least they stood out.

I wanted to write the things that stood out. The things that make people feel something. I wanted to write the kind of books that you had to calm down after.

So I stopped churning out words. I had started making plans, but they weren’t great plans. They were still quite vague and I hadn’t put much thought into representation or overarching metaphor or even emotion very much. I just had a sort of cool story that I hoped would still be cool if I expanded on it.

And now that I was doing it properly, that wasn’t enough for me. I could’ve tossed out a Fifty Shades rip off if I wanted to. I know a hell of a lot more about BDSM than Erica James, I can promise that. But I didn’t want to.

I wanted to be so much better than that. I still do.

But I felt a bit out of depth with my planning.

So I focussed on other things. I wrote some short stories, some for uni, some for myself. I didn’t really do much about them. They were for me to practice. I think I did okay. I still like some of them, which is about the most I can hope for right now. I wrote and produced a bunch of short films. I’ve blogged about them before. Some of them went really well. Only one of them went really tits-up. And we’ve made our peace with that one. I tried poetry (I got really into Phil Kaye) but I don’t think I did it all that well. I don’t think I’ll go back to it too much. I wrote a comedy set for a module at university and that was brilliant. It was loads of fun. I have friends – friends who are comedians, in fact – who tell me I should do it again. But … I don’t know. Maybe it’s because it’s more effort going into something that wasn’t what I wanted to do long term. Maybe I’m just judging myself some more. I suspect it's more to do with being more comfortable doing it around other people who have only done it once. I don't really want to do it around people who are good enough at it that they're attempting a real career in it. I started this blog. For a while, I maintained it fairly solidly. Then it started overtaking my university work. And I relaxed for a bit. And then I got a bunch of part time jobs around university and this and I slacked a bit with it. But I’m hoping to get back to this more often now. I think I can manage that at least.

I wrote some articles in my first year of uni for a friend of a friend who was running a website. I stopped when it changed to vlog format. He started a new website shortly after I left uni, and now I get paid regularly to write seven articles a week for him. I enjoy that.

Writing for the site keeps me sharp, keeps me good at writing for deadlines, and gives me some sense of hope that I still might be a proper writer one day. One that doesn't need a day job. Theatrical sigh.

And it’s nice to be able to say that I get paid for my writing. Even if it’s not a lot. It feels nice. And hopefully it looks good on my CV. And James promises to be an excellent reference if I apply for any writing jobs.

I have half a plan left over from my Novel Writing module in my third year of university. Sometimes, I decide I’m going to get back to that. I have some other ideas I’ve jotted down that I’d like to get on with. At some point.

I have a nine-to-five day job to pay the bills. That takes up a lot of my time. What with writing seven articles a week as well, I don’t find a lot of time for other writing, and I’m mentally drained more often than I’d like to be.

Or maybe I’m still just scared. And I just tell myself I’m exhausted and busy. Because the part of me that has judged me really harshly before is now more afraid than ever because I don’t have a tutor there to tell me specifically and objectively what I’m doing wrong.

As if any of my old teachers wouldn’t reply if I emailed them.

I know that I have a huge problem with the publishing industry in itself and I won't pretend that that isn't holding me back. I don't like how driven by money it is. I have the same problem with film and music and I go out of my way to back Kickstarter projects and listen to new stuff on Soundcloud because I don't believe that what makes the most money is what is definitely the best. And the writing industry is the same. It's why clickbait articles exist. Because writing that is all style and no substance appeals to the lowest common denominator makes money. And so it gets the most funding and marketing by the agencies that profit off it. Learning about the publishing industry in university, about how they market you and about how they decide what they can do with you and about the sacrifices you have to be willing to make if anyone is going to take you on, put me off getting involved in altogether.

I've looked into self publishing and I don't like it. It has too much of a negative reputation attached to it. Too many people self-publish truly shitty stories that it's not worth trawling through it all to find the stuff that might be good. And I am desperately sorry that I feel that way, but I do.

I've thought about generating an online presence - being active on Twitter and blogging a lot and maybe throwing some stories around and hoping that people will start recognising my name. From every angle, it seems that that's going to be the best way to go about this. To gather a bit of a following and then maybe get an Unbound book going and hope that I'm popular enough that people will fund it. And there isn't a reason I haven't put more effort into that. Into keeping up this blog and sharing stories in different places. Into actually telling people I still write sometimes.

Not unless it's just this self-critical sense of it all being so scary and impossible. I was in a big London Foyles recently and I wandered through five floors of books. And I love going to huge, flagship bookshops and seeing all the literature and getting excited by all the words I can have.

And now that everything is starting to feel all real, like I have to be a proper grown up now and that there's no more chance to put this off, it's daunting. Seeing bookshops with five storeys of literature and knowing that I have to compete with that after I've got the attention of a publisher. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

But there.

There is my purge. And it is going where people can see it.

I need people to. When I was started the Novel Writing module in my third year, the first thing we were asked as a group was if anyone had completed anything that was novel length, even if it sucked. By someone who I knew to be lovely and supportive and honest and who I knew at the time would've been impressed by that, but would be disappointed now knowing that I didn't say that.

No one else in the class raised their hands. So nor did I.

And I didn't even make an excuse to myself for why I didn't want to.

At that point, I’d been regularly posting to this blog for a year. I’d been sharing my fiction with my teachers and classmates more than I had in years and I was getting consistent Firsts and generally pleasant feedback on basically everything I wrote. And I still didn’t want to share the things that I used to do, even though they were things that I’d tell anyone else to be proud of.

So I needed this. So that you can tell me I’m judging myself too harshly and that I achieved more than most teenagers do and that all I have to do is stick with it. Because that is the obvious response to something like this

What I needed was to put this where everyone can see it. Because I have friends that already know this, and they tell me to be proud of it and to tell everyone. And even though I respect and value their opinion more than most other people, I still don't do it. If it's out there already for people to find and know and challenge me with, then I have no excuse. But I have to be the one to make that decision.

Whatever happens next, writing this has been nice. I feel alright about things. I am aware that in places, I seem terribly self-deprecating and miserable about it all. But I actually don’t feel bad at all. Surprisingly. I was sure I’d feel more trepidation about publishing this where I know people are going to see this. Maybe it's because I don't actually expect anyone to look at it. I definitely don't expect anyone to read to the end.

But I’ve got this strange feeling that it’s about time.

Failing all else, I just wrote more than 3500 words in less than three hours. And that’s got to count for something.

People Are Flinging Shit At Me.

I've recently been introduced to a new smartphone app called Fling. If you don't know what it is, it's your generic photo-sending app but, instead of sending it to a specific person or group of people that you select, it flings it to a random 50 people who also have the Fling app.

A friend of mine told me she was enjoying it and advised me to have a look at it if I got bored.

Then I got bored.

I thought it sounded like a laugh. Honestly, my gut reaction to that description of it was somewhat naive. My first thought was how much we could learn about the rest of the world. I thought about all the things I didn't know about culture in other countries that I'd pick up from the things that strangers found interesting enough to share. I thought how cool it would be to take it round a museum and share the things that fascinated me with people who weren't there.

And after using it five seconds I realised that that's actually quite a childish thought.

Because obviously people aren't going to send interesting things. They're not going to send the kind of exciting things you'd get excited about. They're going to send photos of their duck faces and their genitals and, for some reason, their knees.

I've been using it for not even two days and I've lost count of the times I've seen "mycock4urtits". As if there aren't boobs aplenty to be found on the internet. Without the hassle of asking for them. Or risking having a stranger mock a photo of your dick. (Because that's what girls do. We judge them. I promise.)

And yet, I am going to keep Fling. I am going to try to resist the urge to send photos of "no one cares" scrawled on a Post-It note every time I get a selfie or a testicle. And I am going to take it to museums and galleries and parks and places that are exciting and interesting and I am going to try to use it to educate some strangers.

I'll probably fail. But, I'll also enjoy knowing that I tried.

Your Offendedness Offends Me

It's Boxing Day now. Yesterday, I had a great (if weird) Christmas day with some amazing friends and my dad. A lot of my friends didn't have anywhere else to be so I didn't spend the day with my family so that I could get them all together to spend time at my house. One my friends has a three-year-old who spent Christmas with me because he has no other family to be with. One of my friends was raised a Jehovah's Witness and, at the age of 18, had her first ever Christmas. She had as much fun as the three-year-old for all the same reasons. It didn't matter that none of us really cared about the Nativity. It was definitely different to every other Christmas I've ever had, but I thought it was great. It was still about what Christmas was about - getting together with people you care about and sharing and laughing and wearing crappy hats.

I'm not religious. I never have been. I don't pretend to be. I still like Christmas. It's a cultural thing for me. It's something my family do and, though I know some of them claim to be Christian, we don't enforce any religious teaching strictly. I enjoy it. I like seeing my family, I like buying presents for the people I love.

Although I don't buy into the doctrine that gives society Christmas, I like some of the traditions the holiday has given us.

I like that it encourages people to take some time out of their lives to think of others - whether it's humankind as a whole, or just the people important to them. I like that people remember the importance of togetherness.

But I feel like, if the country I grew up in didn't have Christian foundations, I would still not buy into the prominent doctrine and I would still appreciate having a time of giving and togetherness. If it wasn't Christmas, it would be Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or something else, and I would feel exactly the same way.

Which is why this kind of shit annoys me:

 

I don't care what greeting you want to give people. Say "Merry Christmas" if you want, but don't act like that makes you better than someone who says "Happy Holidays". It just doesn't. You belittling them for giving a different greeting makes you a dick.

I don't understand why this is offensive. If anything, it is more considerate. I - and pretty much all of the people who I've seen sharing these pictures - live in a secular society that accepts all different religions. And Christianity is not the only religion that has a special occasion around this time. If someone says "Happy Holidays", they are not making broad assumptions about your religion - they know that you might be Christian, or Jewish, or atheist, or any other religion - and they want to wish you goodwill regardless. They're hoping that at a time when this country recognises a national holiday, you enjoy whatever you're doing with your life at that time, whether you're celebrating something or not.

Or maybe, they're including the New Year, which is relevant to everyone who uses this calendar, in with Christmas (or whatever) so would still come under the pluralised heading 'holidays'.

The fact is, I appreciate that someone wants to offer me joy. "Have a nice day" is good enough for me. But it doesn't always happen. This is generally the only time of year people will go out of their way to wish you goodwill (where I live in England at least; I hear people are much cheerier in America, for instance).

I think it's nice. I think anyone who doesn't is a fucking idiot. Taking someone else's kindness and getting upset about it because they said it wrong is the behaviour of the worst kind of narcissist.

The number of friends - good mates, who usually I really like - who I have seen sharing this has actually upset me. I hope by next year, people will have learned to appreciate when someone is being nice.

And in the meantime, I hope that everyone has some happy fucking holidays.

Please Don't Die, Kickstarter

Why does everything I love collapse and die?

I think Kickstarter, and its crowdfunding allies (indiegogo, Patreon, and so on), are incredible. I love that someone thought them up. I love how they're used. Mostly. I love, basically, the whole idea of crowdfunded and crowdsourced work.

Personally, I love it from an artsy perspective, because everything I learn about every creative industry makes me hate it more. Seriously, don't bother going after a creative career unless you're willing to either put in all the work yourself or compromise every artist value you have. I am getting closer and closer to a sincere belief that dealing with the established media is like making pacts with every evil entity from every religion and superstition man has ever dreamed up.

Or maybe it's not all that bad and I'm just upset. But my exaggerations come from a legitimate foundation.

Crowdfunding, to me, seemed like a way around all of that. It was a way of letting people choose what they wanted to consume, rather than being forced to drink the generic toilet-water Simon Cowell expects us to accept as 'art'.

I adored everything about it. Immediately. I followed Amanda Palmer's Kickstarter adventure religiously. I've backed loads of projects on Kickstarter - music, films, games - and even when I can only offer a few pounds, I like how much more involved backers are made to feel. For instance, creators will send regular email updates on projects that have more meaning that just to sell you more crap. They write in such informal, friendly tones that you really feel their gratitude. The distance between artist and consumer, when broadened by the industry middle man, only looks wider when you've got the communal feeling of a crowdfunded project to compare.

And then I backed a project called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a PC game based on an H. P. Lovecraft story. It was a high-profile project that get over 100,000 views in the first couple of days, not to mention shares on FaceBook and Twitter by all kinds of people. By rights, it should have done insanely well. It should have hit its goal with no trouble at all.

Instead, it got fewer than 2000 backers. Which is pitiful.

The makers of the game sent regular progress updates to everyone who pledged, thanking them for their involvement and generosity and letting them know how things were going.

On 30th October 2014, they sent their final update. It thanked everyone who had been willing to help, and regretfully informed us that the project had fallen through. It explained how they had gone about their Kickstarter campaign in huge amounts of detail - there was practically no way they could have generated more interest in their game. They tried to fathom where it had all gone wrong.

They seemed forced to conclude "Kickstarter is dying".

This is definitely something I did not want to believe, but they offered some really good statistics to back their arguments. They did everything right, but crowdfunding had failed.

And this breaks my heart.

As someone who, one day, would like to make a living doing something creative, and who thinks our arts industry is horrifically broken, I was really excited about crowdfunding.

I am well aware that it had its problems, its kinks that needed fixing. There are plenty of 'crowdfunding gone wrong' stories floating around. There are plenty of people ready to use honest crowdfunding platforms to abuse the generosity of others.

But, at its core, it is a beautiful thing.

And even the slightest suggestion that people have already given up on it disappoints the hell out of me.

Things You Should Know: TFL Rules

In what little time I can snatch between working and sleeping, I have been following up my recent angry blog post about TFL with some research, as I posted it well before I had a chance to do some proper Googling and the information it contains is the result of only brief search. I am yet to call TFL (seriously, look at my working hours, they're disgusting), but have had help from a number of people on various social media who know about these things.

The most useful thing I have found was shown to be me by a helpful person on Twitter, and it was this page taken from the most recent set of guidelines gives to TFL drivers:

 

If you can't read that, it says;

Vulnerable passengers

Do not leave anyone stranded if they are vulnerable or obviously in distress. For example:

•   Young or older people 

•    People who could be at risk if left behind, including those in isolated places or at quieter times

•   People who are disable, injured, unwell or who have had an accident, assault of similar incident  

• People who show you a travel support card and may have learning difficulties. Not all impairments are obvious

This seems generous enough, but it does mean that allowing people onto buses without charging is left entirely up to the driver's discretion as the rules are very vague.

What, for instance, counts as "young"? I am 21, which is generally considered young, but I am the oldest I have ever been and, for the most part, I feel pretty grown-up right now. However, if that is the only excuse I have to getting on a bus for free, I will take that excuse.

The terms "isolated places" and "quieter times" are also somewhat vague. I wouldn't consider Hammersmith in general an "isolated place", but it does feel pretty damn isolated when it's 3am and no Oyster stops are open. As for "quieter times", I can only assume that that means, "in the middle of the night" rather than "when there's only one person on the bus, no matter what time of day". To me, that leeway seems to have been put in place purely for instances such as the ones I have experienced.

What is clear from those rules is that the woman with the broken leg I saw get refused definitely had the right to board the bus regardless of fare. She was certainly "injured" and, if she "had an accident", had clearly suffered a "similar incident" that would have justified her needing to get transport instead of walking to her destination.

Given that this information is in the rule book given to bus drivers, there really shouldn't have been a dispute in either of the situations I experienced. I have downloaded the above photo and have saved it to my phone so that, should it happen again, I can show it to the offending bus driver. TFL have said that they have given all their bus drivers "refresher courses" so that they know this information, but the ones I have dealt with either forgot or purposely ignored it. It is a shame that I consider it in my best interests to have to carry it around with me.

Should this fail, I have learned some other things.

I had already assumed, based on what I've gleaned from past experience and my knowledge of other company's policies about abuse, that if you swear too much at a bus driver, they have the right to ask you to leave.

However, if you remain calm and talk to the driver, they can't actually do anything. They can't physically touch you to remove you from the bus, because that is legally considered assault and you can sue them for it. If you remain standing on the bus, they are allowed to call the police to have them remove you. If the police arrive, you can complain that it is the bus driver who is in the wrong and that the rules do in fact say that they should take you to your destination, and now you've got your photo evidence to prove it. If they still ask you to leave the bus, it is then the police's obligation to ensure that you are safe. As you have not committed a crime, and provided you have legitimate reason not to want to walk (for example, it is 3am), they then have no choice to but to escort you home.

Personally, I think this is a waste of police time and that bus drivers should just be more compassionate and remember that, actually, they are allowed to use their discretion to ensure people aren't endangered by being stranded at all hours of the morning. The only reason I can think of for them to not want to help people get home is that they will have to "issue an Unpaid Fare Report", and no one likes having to do extra paperwork.

Sadly, I don't have a photo of the page in the rulebook that explains quite how that works. But, personally, even if it is a lot of hassle as far as paperwork goes, I'd still rather do it than leave someone abandoned in the middle of the night.

But that's just my personal opinion.

Ideally, the bus system should just not allow people to get stuck in these horrible situations and hopefully one day these decisions will be repealed so that this sort of thing stops happening. In the mean time, I hope that people will share this information as much as possible so that no one else gets left behind.

TFL's Compassionless Bus System

It is gone 2am. I am on my second bus home from work, having worked an eight hour shift. I am tired. Everyone else on the bus is tired. I am looking forward to being in bed.

My bus, the 33 from Hammersmith to Fulwell, pulls into its stop at Barnes Station. A couple of people get off. A handful of people are waiting.

A woman with a broken leg gets onto the bus and swipes her travelcard, valid until 4am. The machine refuses it. The woman shows the driver the travelcard and explains that it's valid for nearly two more hours, it's late, can she just get on the bus?

No.

Someone impatient squirms past the woman with the broken leg, swipes their Oyster card and gets on.

The driver tells the woman to get off the bus. The woman turns, as if about to.

The guy behind her tells her to stay on the bus. He swipes his Oyster card and tells the driver he'll pay for her fare too.

But London buses don't accept cash any more. The driver refuses the guy's money and tells the woman to get off the bus. The guy insists that the woman stays on the bus.

"Mate, she's got a broken leg, I'm not letting her get off this bus in the middle of the night."

The driver kills the engine.

Anyone who hadn't noticed until now, is suddenly aware of the tension at the front of the bus. A disgruntled, yet curious, murmur spreads through the passengers. From where I'm sitting at the back, I can't see the driver. The woman shrinks away from people staring at her, mumbles, "It's fine, it's fine, I'll manage."

The guy gets angry. "Mate, I'll pay. I'll give you money. She can't walk home like this." And so on, to an unresponsive driver, getting increasingly worked up until he calls the driver a dickhead.

This is not a good move. Ever. I know enough about working in customer service to know that if someone swears at you, most places will consider that abuse. I don't know exactly the rules for TFL, but I know that a lot of workplaces will give you one warning for you first swear word and will stop dealing with you on your second on grounds of verbal abuse.

The driver, I imagine, told the guy not to swear at him, to which the guy replied, "But you are a dickhead."

And then he got asked to leave the bus, having already swiped his own Oyster.

He called the driver a dickhead a bit more, then left the bus. The woman went with him.

The rest of the people on the stop got on the bus. The driver started the engine. As he pulled away, the passengers who had started whispering amongst themselves about the disturbance grew louder.

It's gone 2am.

She's got a broken leg.

Should've just let her on.

And, actually, he should have. When TFL introduced the cashless bus system, one measures they said would be part of it was "Refreshed guidance for all 24,500 London bus drivers to ensure a consistent approach is taken when dealing with vulnerable passengers". If anyone can be considered "vulnerable", I think, it's someone with a broken leg who needs a lift home in the early hours of the morning. In this instance, it seemed like someone who was averse to confrontation, too. She kept apologising to people in the front rows of the bus for delaying their journey. If these regulations don't make exceptions for injured people in the middle of the night, I would sincerely question their definition of the word "vulnerable".

I am honestly ashamed of this system. And I'm ashamed of the way that no one could help. I don't know if anyone wanted to, but as long they don't accept cash and a lot of people don't have contactless cards, it's not easy to help people out. If your fare is short a few pence, someone helpful can lend you a bit. But with this system in place, people aren't allowed the opportunity to help out.

Last night, at 2.50am, I boarded my second night bus and swiped my Oyster card. It didn't take. I looked at the driver. He shrugged at me. I smiled and got on the bus, foolishly assuming that the shrug meant that he wasn't bothered.

The driver killed the engine.

I was half way down the bus. I turned, confused. My friend told me not to worry, it wasn't about me. I sat down. Everyone else sat down.

The driver left the engine off.

Someone said, "There's a problem with someone's fare."

I got up and went to the front of the bus.

"Are you actually going to stay here?" I asked.

The driver shrugged and stared out of the window.

"I can't top up," I told him. "The tube station is closed, the top up machines are locked away."

The driver shrugged.

"You want me to walk home? It's 3am nearly. My house is an hour away. There is nowhere nearby open where I can top up."

The driver shrugged, stared out of the window.

A woman in the front told me to use my contactless card.

"I don't have one."

"You're screwed, then."

Helpful.

I don't want a contactless card. If I lost it, it'd be too easy for someone to spend a lot of my money very quickly. If they went into five shops and spent £20 using the contactless technology, I'm out £100. I don't have enough money to just lose £100 like that. It's also far too easy, provided I don't lose my card, to buy lots of cheap junk because it's easy. Ease of purchase is one of the main reasons I have so much rubbish I don't really want off eBay. I don't need it to be easier to buy cheap crap.

And I don't see why I should compromise my opinions of contactless cards to accommodate a system I actively oppose.

My friend tried to use her contactless card, but the machine refused it because it was for a Australian bank. We offered to pay the driver, and he refused to take our money because London buses are now cashless.

Although, last week, from the back of the bus, I had been aware of everyone on the bus being of the side of the injured woman who wanted to get home, for some reason last night I feel painfully aware of everyone wishing I would get off the bus so they could get home. Maybe I imagined it. Either way, it was a nasty feeling.

The driver refused to look at me, instead staring directly out the window and just shrugging when I tried to appeal to his sense of human decency and compassion.

Eventually, another passenger pulled out a contactless card and swiped it for me. I thanked him. A lot. He told me not to blame the driver, "it's just his job".
 
The cashless bus system they have introduced in London is disgusting. I don't care if it is just his job, you don't push people out into the street alone in the middle of the night. It's common human decency, and the system that not only allows but forces this to happen is putrid and sickening. Frankly, if my job called for me to kick any human being out into the streets in the middle of the night, I'd break the rules until I lost that job, then I'd cause an internet storm by telling everyone that the reason I lost my job was because I showed basic human compassion.

The new measures they have introduced to make this transition easy aren't nearly enough. The "one more journey" measure (where your Oyster will go into debit for ONE bus journey only) is stupid, especially if, like I do, you have two or more night buses (or even day buses) to take. The exceptions they will make appear to be vague. I have Googled for some guidelines about what kind of exceptions they will make - what they would consider an emergency - and I can find nothing. I fully intend to phone them (on a day when I don't have to rush off to work) and find out what the rules are specifically. 

So far, it appears to be that, no matter who you are, how vulnerable you are, how late it is, or anything, if you can't pay, the engine will be turned off until you get out of their hair.

I have had arguments with corporations and companies before. I expect to be treated fairly by people who are taking my money. And if I find that I'm not being treated fairly, I stop using them. I don't eat at McDonald's, I don't shop at Tesco's and I don't buy from Amazon. I can't boycott TFL. I need to use public transport to get to work, so that I can earn money to pay my rent and buy my food, so that I can live. I depend on them to survive.

And as long as I do, I consider it my responsibility to make sure their services remain fair.