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It’s true, I am.

Look:

A best-selling author who clearly isn’t a best-selling screenshot capturer, earlier.

This best-selling author status comes with caveats – I’ve got caveats coming out of my ears. It couldn’t be any other way, though, not really, I couldn’t be a best-selling author without caveats coming out of my ears. Such caveats include, but are in no way limited to, the following:

1. It’s tenuous and niche as hell. I am the best-selling author in a small ‘Card Games’ sub-section of Amazon and have only been there over the last day or two. If the handful of people who I’ve browbeaten into buying my book refuses to grow, my best-selling author status will evaporate by the end of the weekend.
2. You don’t have to sell many copies to become a best-selling author in a niche sub-section. I couldn’t, for example, buy an island with my royalties. Nor could I buy a plane ticket to an island. I couldn’t even pay for a taxi to the airport. I could afford to buy some stamps and put them on postcards and send them from an island but that, seriously, is about it.
3.  It’s not really a book. Perhaps this should have been at the top of these caveat-bullet-points. Notes from the Poker Trenches is a collection of poker columns from 2012/2013 that have been annotated. These annotations have allowed the 2018 me to emotionally and psychologically beat up the 2012/2013 me. This has been somewhat enjoyable; 2018 me has liked doing this.
4. Seriously, it’s not really a book. It’s self-published and so I’m not sure it qualifies as a proper book.
5. The cover is an homage to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. It’s not just chucked together because I (a) couldn’t afford a cover designer, (b) was incapable of designing a cover myself or (c) just had some vague feeling that “the words should speak for themselves”.

So, yes, caveats. Over the next week or so I will be detailing the process, from the seedling of an idea (in this instance, someone suggesting I collate a bunch of my old poker columns), through formatting (easy), cover design (even easier), publication (press a button that says ‘Publish’) and marketing (this post). Bet you can’t wait.

In the meantime, if anyone fancies maintaining my status as a best-selling author then please feel free to click on this highlighted bit here and part with £1.99. Seriously, it would make me happier than you could imagine.

Regular readers will be well aware that this project (if you can call it that) has more or less been a psychological, emotional, financial and matrimonial (and pretty much any other al-suffix) bap-up since its inception in 2009. Plus: brackets. Way too many brackets.

But then this afternoon as I was idly dodging work and hiding from the scarier corners of my life (read: all of them), I realised that all along I had been doing the whole thing wrong.

By the whole thing, I mean pitching and writing articles. And by wrong, I mean wrong.

Let me explain.

This afternoon I watched the Cambridge Analytica press conference in its entirety. Cambridge Analytica, as many readers will know, are credited with some degree of orchestration in the Trump and Brexit campaigns and have been implicated in the illegal hoovering up of data from tens of  millions of Facebook users. And so today, in order to clear things up, Cambridge Analytica held a press conference conducted by Clarence Mitchell, a former “BBC journalist and PR specialist,” according to the Guardian, who gave a statement before brusquely fielding questions from various journalists.

So far, so normal. I don’t really understand the mechanics of such things, but if I were in Cambridge Analytica’s position that’s exactly what I would do: get a person in to be its spokesperson, preferably someone who doesn’t have any history with the company and who, at a press conference, can answer questions badly (or not at all) about what said company been up to.

One exchange in particular really struck me. It was as if, oh I don’t know, as if Clarence Mitchell held some sort of key to the secret of journalism (and the secret to life, perhaps) and here he was, in all his blunt glory, offering it to me.

Below is a brief transcript from this afternoon’s press conference:

Journalist: “If Cambridge Analytica’s position is that no work was carried out by Leave.EU, why did it invoice Leave.EU?”

Clarence Mitchell: “Because if you understand anything about business, you’ll understand the pitch process, i.e. a bid to get the contract, to get the work, involves a certain amount of time and effort and personnel…” 

And suddenly it all clicked. There was a me before this press conference and a me after. I realised that before I didn’t understand anything about business but that now, after hearing some words from my new guru Clarence Mitchell, I did. I’d been wasting my time. I didn’t need to write for these magazines, I just needed to pitch them. And the pitch didn’t even need to be any good, thank god, as long as it involved a certain amount of time and effort and personnel. After that I could invoice.

A journalist post-invoicing, earlier. 

Frankly, I’m delighted with this new slant on getting paid for stuff, of doing business. But it’s not the only thing that I’ve learnt from – and subsequently been delighted by – Cambridge Analytica in the last couple of months. In February 2016 Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix wrote in Campaign Magazine that, “We have already helped supercharge Leave.EU’s social media campaign by ensuring the right messages are getting to the right voters online.”

Yet when questioned by a House of Commons select committee earlier this year about such a statement, Nix said, “Let me be absolutely crystal clear about this. We did not work for Leave.EU. We have not undertaken any paid or unpaid work for them, okay?” But the Campaign Magazine stuff? “Drafted by a slightly overzealous PR consultant.”

Mr Nix also went on to say that meeting and being in contact with various groups and companies could be classed as work. This, again, is gold for me. Over the years I have been in contact with tons of newspapers and magazines about writing for them and in most instances it’s all kind of petered out. Yet because of these new, Cambridge Analytica-shaped “rules” I can now class them among my employers.

That will have to do for now, I’m afraid. It’s late, and I have hundreds of invoices to send and a new CV to write.

n.b. In a breathtakingly daring move, it appears that I’ve leapt straight from, ‘Why I stopped working for Alexander Nix: Part One,’ to, ‘Why I stopped working for Alexander Nix: Part Three.’ This is (somewhat) explained down there a bit. But even though we’re not at part two, we are at least somewhere. Usually on here when I write “Updates to follow,” or “Next time I am going to be writing about this, this and this,” the updates don’t follow and we never get to hear about the this-es. So this is something, at least. 

When the Cambridge Analytica/Alexander Nix scandal (properly) broke early last week and was the lead item on BBC News at Six, I was sitting in my Nan’s living room with my Nan and my Mum.

“LOOK, LOOK, LOOK” I said to them, drowning out the opening clangs of the BBC News, “THAT’S Alexander Nix. THAT’S who I used to WORK for.”

I’m not sure my Nan believed me. I’m not sure my Nan thinks I’ve worked for anyone.

Then, a few minutes later:

“…and we now go over to our North American technology reporter Dave Lee…””

“I KNOW HIM TOO – Dave Lee. He reads Pitching the World.”

My Nan reached for her phone book and started to turn to the page marked, “NUMBER FOR STEVE’S SECTIONING”

“Oh, this is big,” I said. “And weird. Big and weird – and check out what I’m reading.”

I went into the kitchen and fished out of my bag the book I wanted them to check out.

“Look – The Nix.  This is big and weird. Not the book, the news.”

Most of the above is true. It’s true that I did find it all a bit big and a bit weird. It’s true about Dave Lee and working for Alexander Nix, too. The bit about my Nan having a page in her phone book marked, “NUMBER FOR STEVE’S SECTIONING” is (probably) not true. And I am reading The Nix. I’ve even got the book with me now, see:

That book and this post, earlier. 

So I was a little heady last week. Let’s be honest, I’m a little heady every week. To deal with these headiness I sought some kind of sanctuary in Pitching the World and wrote, “Why I stopped working for Alexander Nix: Part One,” and (somewhat) promised a part two. On Tuesday I sat around and tried to write that part two but flapped up. I tried again yesterday and flapped up some more. For example, yesterday I wrote stuff like this:

But it turns out that I am worse at leaving companies than I am at whistle-blowing because, a short while after coming back to London, I started working for them again. After slinking off, I slunk back. Some moral conviction that was. But SCL Group did plenty of well-grounded, interesting and socially benign work and I liked (and still like) doing this kind of work and was happy to work on a per-project basis. But after a while I ended up quitting again. Then I went back. This little pattern, this moral-dance, continued for a while. For a couple of years I periodically freelanced for them, mainly writing copy. Then, a couple of years after St Kitts, I went back to work directly for Alexander Nix: I started work on Monday morning, went to the pub for lunch on Wednesday afternoon, had a raft of pints, took my drinking to the park, turned off my phone for two days, and never went back.

And I also wrote stuff about finding Alexander Nix being “funny, engaging company” and said that although he used to be part-monster (we all are), in the years since I stopped working for him he appears to have transitioned to, well, if not quite full-monster then something pretty close. And yet, I wrote yesterday, when I used to know him he was involved in “a lot of good work.” He also got me a job writing for £3 a word.

I know: far out.

This aborted part two read like something I would have written had Alexander Nix tied me up in his basement, surrounded me with remote-controlled cat bombs, and was whispering in my ear, “Write that I was funny and engaging company and that I was involved in a lot of good work otherwise I’m detonating these cat bombs.”

And that’s not quite what I wanted. What I really wanted to say was that I stopped working for companies and people like that because I wanted to concentrate on writing things that helped people. But despite this being true, in the intervening years I’ve catastrophically failed: granted, I’ve written a handful of things that I’m proud of, but the bulk of my published work has been throwaway, morally-neutral, unimportant puff.

So where does that leave us? I suppose in one sense it leaves us here, at Pitching the World. This project is actually one of the few things I am proud to have done and from a number of messages I’ve had, it has actually helped people. One editor, who I later worked for, said that reading about the break up of my marriage on here actually enabled him to deal with his divorce better. So that’s something. And a number of people have contacted me saying that by presenting myself in a fizzy, haphazard, often lazy way they feel better about their fizzy, haphazard laziness. So I suppose that’s something, too.

Something, but not enough. Updates to follow.

By the time you read this I may well have been prodded with a ricin-tipped umbrella, or mowed down by a car, or been blown up by a remote-controlled cat-bomb. This is what happens when you spend years shredding your mental health: something big happens in the world, something that you were a part of, so when you see a cat ambling towards you on a near-empty street your first thought is, “BOMB CAT?”

Let me explain.

Back in 2009, in the opening post of this blog I wrote, “Let me explain,” and went on to detail (somewhat) my previous life as a political speechwriter and how this harebrained scheme, Pitching the World, came about. Here is what I said:

“Prior to be stoned in Darwin, Australia I was a political speechwriter in St Kitts, the Caribbean. I left that job for reasons far too complicated and numerous to go into right now, but the main reason I left that job in St Kitts, the Caribbean was to go back to being a freelance journalist. That’s right: at possibly the worst time for freelancers I left my prestigious, well paid and more-exotic-sounding-than-it-is job to go back to journalism.” 

And so with Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group and that particular St Kitts election campaign screeching across the news, perhaps now is the time, some eight or nine years later, to go into those complicated, numerous reasons.

 Umbrellas, earlier. 

But perhaps now isn’t the time, perhaps last year was.

Last year I was sitting in a Jacuzzi in a health club – borderline homelessness, even after eight years, can sometimes be glamorous – and I thought about drawing a curtain across this blog with one final post. Now readers, I was going to begin, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for all of the support and the comments and the offers to buy my never-to-be-written book. And not only do I want to offer my thanks, I also want to offer my apologies for often conducting myself in a lazy, haphazard and monstrous way – it’s just that sometimes I am a lazy, haphazard monster. I try not to be, but I’m a bit of a let down, to be honest. Yet this project has been very dear to me, and you all have been very dear to me, it’s just that all these years later I am still in psychological, emotional and financial ribbons and, come on, I think it’s time to draw a line under all of this. Things haven’t really worked out. I grind my teeth until my gums bleed. My drinking has ballooned. Other recreational peccadilloes have ballooned. While all the good stuff – relationships, my career, industry, health – have anti-ballooned. This is what happens, I suppose, when you leave prestigious, well paid jobs. Anyway, bye.

That’s what I wanted to write. I’m quite glad now that I didn’t.

Although last year, as silly as it might seem to me now, thinking about writing those words began to overwhelm me. Particularly the bit about things being dear to me. “Oh, good,” I thought, “we can now add Jacuzzi to the various other items – boiled eggs, hamburgers, pillows, voids – that I’ve cried into.”

The only free photo I could find of a Jacuzzi (and I’m not even sure it is a Jacuzzi) earlier. 

Thankfully for me and for other guests of my health club, this Jacuzzi-crying soon stopped and segued into something better. I began to think about leaving my job as a political speechwriter in St Kitts, the Caribbean, and the reasons for doing so. And I thought that instead of writing a meandering, well-trodden final post about how Pitching the World has been an abject failure, I would instead write a post about how even though my life has fallen apart, I’m pleased that I left the Caribbean and pleased, too, that I no longer worked for or with Alexander Nix – that I might, in fact, be a good, honourable man. With piercing accuracy, I was going to call this post, “Why I stopped working for Alexander Nix.”

Because officially, I left that project on moral grounds. Unofficially, I also left on moral grounds. I’ve just re-read the email that I sent after leaving which begins with, “Gentlemen, You deserve an explanation as to why I hot-footed it out of there,” and ends with, “I feel terrible to have let you down. If it wasn’t for these bloody morals, I wouldn’t have done.”

Far out.

Do I publicly want to delve into these bloody morals? Why am I even writing this? It certainly isn’t any kind of expose. And I’m pretty sure it isn’t a clumsy attempt to piggyback upon Alexander Nix’s notoriety and raise my profile. I don’t really care about my profile – I don’t even have a profile, but if I did I wouldn’t care about it. I suppose what it might be is some sort of public record in case I get blown up by a remote-controlled cat-bomb. Or it might just be a neat bookend to my Pitching the World project. Opening post: I left my job as a political speechwriter in the Caribbean. Closing post: I’m actually quite glad I did.

Beady-eyed readers will have noticed that this is called, “Why I stopped working for Alexander Nix: Part One.” This suggests there is going to be a part two – possibly even parts three, four and five. Let’s see. I’ve had a few beers since starting to write this and am starting to feel a little heady.

Anyway, bye.

A remote-controlled cat-bomb, earlier. 

Imagine hearing that your best friend is chained to a radiator in a small room somewhere. You don’t know where. And imagine the radiator isn’t really a radiator at all – everyone gets chained to radiators these days – it’s a grizzly bear. The grizzly bear is full of Etorphine and won’t wake until next Friday. When she does wake next Friday, she will groggily paw your friend’s knees and ribs and shoulders for a few minutes and then rip your friend’s face off.

Battling with this terrier-like entity though, even after only a week of it, is wearing a bit thin. He always wants to do stuff. Bad stuff. Well, bad-good stuff. Good-bad stuff. Stuff. Often it’s pub-stuff.

“Oh come on,” he says, “Let’s go to the pub. Down the old pub. Pub pub pub. You like the pub, remember?”

“”I don’t want to go to the pub. I want to go swimming.”

“Swimming? What are you – five? Who goes swimming these days?”

“I go swimming these days.”

“Right,” says my terrier, “let me get this straight. You spend two decades in the pub. You whisk me in there before midday sometimes and then slope off well after it gets dark. You swan in there on the slimmest of pretexts at all hours – I barely know where I stand half the time – and feed me all of these treats and now…this? What even is this? You used to spend days in bed with a bottle of wine glued to your lips now you’re just snatching it away, now you’re giving me…fucking mackerel.”

“That’s right, now I’m giving you fucking mackerel. I’m giving us mackerel.”

“What about Fuck Club?”

“What do you mean, ‘What about Fuck Club?’ Now you’re just showing off. We’ve never been to Fuck Club.”

“No, but we could. People sell crack all around Fuck Club. We could buy some crack and smoke it and go to Fuck Club. And fuck in there, obviously. You’d be happy then. It’d be good for your writing, your precious writing. Monday Afternoon Fuck Club.”

The terrier has a point.

“We don’t smoke crack. And we’re not going to any sort of fuck club. We’re playing tennis instead. Then yoga. Then weights.”

“I hate weights.”

“I hate weights too. Now eat this spinach.”

“And that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is.”

And that is how it is. Bit of a battle, this, but one I appear to be winning. Sometimes I have to talk to the terrier as if it’s a convalescing grandma (“Come on, twenty minutes in the sun and you’ll feel a whole world better”) at other times like an errant schoolboy (“Look, this is getting silly. One way or another these push-ups are getting done…”) but we’re making good progress.

Monday afternoon Fuck Club does sound fun though. Much more fun than tennis and spinach and industry. Updates to follow.

Monday.

For days now (I have no idea how many) every minute of every waking hour I’ve either had a drink in my hand or been within three feet of one. The only times I haven’t had this luxury of proximity is when walking to the pub. I say walking, but the sheer elation I know I’m going to feel at getting inside one of those things, coupled with body and mind screaming out for alcohol means it’s less walking and more half-shuddering, half-body popping. I know, not ideal.

Yesterday I was forty. Today, I woke up thinking I was a Greek fishing village. I didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel like anyone else either. I felt like a Greek fishing village, thought I was a Greek fishing village and contained everything that was going on there. There is no other way I can put it. 

Naturally, I’m both simultaneously fascinated and terrified by this peculiar turn of events. Wine helps to ease the struggle of getting through the day as a geographical oddity. Later my brother says, “I once thought I was the rock of Gibraltar,” which immediately thrills and comforts me, before adding, “But that was in a dream.” I crumple.

A Greek fishing village, earlier.

Tuesday.

Everything aches. I sit in a hot tub in the rain. I almost fall into the hot coals in a sauna, then almost wish I had. I drink.

Wednesday.

Wake up with almost unbearable tinnitus: a deep, whirring hum in one ear and a high-pitched yelping in the other. I’ve had years of this. I’m not sure I can take much more of it. If there were a nest of vipers at the foot of my bed I would happily slither in and join them. If a canyon full of broken glass, shards of metal, and wild animals existed outside of my bedroom window I wouldn’t think twice about leaping in there. Unfortunately there isn’t, so I settle for attacking my mattress and beating up my pillows for ten minutes. The rest of the day is spent drinking. 

Thursday.

Trying to get off to sleep on Thursday night I soothe myself with thoughts of that time I worked out in Singapore, or that time I worked in the Caribbean, or that time I took a train with my then wife through the centre of Australia and how much I enjoyed seeing the seemingly endless miles of scorched red rock. I feel calm thinking of having lunch under a jungle canopy.

Then it stops calming me. I don’t think of it as me going having lunch in the rainforest, but my brain. It’s not me slicing through the centre of Australia seeing things, it’s my brain interpreting light waves and sound waves and making sense of things. My brain is making my fingers punch numbers into a phone and it’s making sounds come out of my mouth, then it’s making my limbs carry bags and whisk it off to the airport and it gets me to feed it booze and gets me to stick my hand up my then wife’s dress to give it pleasure. My whole sense of self dissolves, and I’m just this terrier-like entity, this mush, this interpretation-machine, existing in my skull. I take quadruple my usual amount of sleeping tablets.

A nest of vipers, earlier. 

Friday.

Friday is better. I eat fish and plants. I play tennis and win. I swim. I try not to think about my brain. I drink one beer. When you’re better, I say to myself, you should spend the rest of your life being nicer and kinder to people. This thought pleases me. You should also, I add almost unconsciously, try being nicer and kinder to yourself. This one scares me. Have I ever been either nice or kind to myself? I meditate on this for a while until I realise that, not for the first time this year, I’m in danger of crying myself to sleep.

Saturday.

I play tennis and win. Without having to give it much thought, I play poker and win too. I eat fish and plants. I lift weights. I do some yoga. In the evening I buy an avocado in the rain. I turn off my phone. I drink one beer and wash the grill pan. Saturday.

Sunday.

Busy for a Sunday: Internet-taught yoga, internet-taught Shaolin Kung Fu, winning at poker, swimming, sauna. I feel, possibly for the first time, that I’m beginning to work as a person. Colours are sharper than normal. Flowers leap out at me and I sit and stare at them for hours. When I go to the toilet, it no longer smells of corroding metal. I stop feeling scared in my own body and in my own mind. 

People in Boscombe are buying crack cocaine and heroin when I leave the health club. People in Boscombe are on their way out for the night, happy. People in Boscombe are sitting outside drinking and look to be enjoying themselves. Temptation is everywhere here. Part of me wants to join them, to get into trouble. Part of me wants more physical and psychological scars. But another part of me – a bigger and better part – doesn’t. That part of me is intrigued by how far I can take this: this plant-eating, this exercise, this non-drinking, this new-found industry. I feel as if I’ve been on the fringes of my mind’s unedifying canyons this week and, well, I don’t want to be on those fringes  far too often. Let’s see, shall we.