• The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘Normal as Hell’ ii. I finished the first book of my series shortly after returning from holiday – not a bad accomplishment for a seventeen-year-old dropout. It was written by hand, and took up two-and-a-half A5-sized exercise books. Immediately, I redrafted, beginning in a new exercise book, one that was A4-sized (I was moving up in the world, after all) but it felt redundant. I’d done the handwritten book. My productivity tapered until I wasn’t doing much of anything for the next month or so. Then I felt like I was losing myself. One night, I went out with my cousins. We were coming home from a bar when we…

  • The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘Normal as Hell’ i. The Arabs were coming! 427 million of them! Almost a year after breaking my arm, I’d gone with my parents on a holiday to Canada and to Greece. Now we were staying at my parents’ village in Greece at our cousin’s farm. I’d awakened in the middle of the night, terrified that 427 million Arabs were about to invade. The village was tiny and sat in the mountains isolated from civilisation. It was maybe half a kilometre long, and comprised a single road with houses on either side. There was probably only a population of six or seven hundred. There was no way we’d be able…