Inside Your Head

In my introduction to the show, I respond to the fact that as a result of current affairs, and in response to news bulletins and social media posts, many of us are feeling heightened emotions such as fear, anger, frustration, anxiety and depression.

Drawing on my own experience as a cancer patient during the pandemic, which had a detrimental effect on my own mental health, I share some of the lessons I learned thanks to discovering a form of therapy called Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), a close cousin of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with which far more people are familiar.

To be specific, I focus on a brilliant book by psychotherapist Daniel Fryer called The Four thoughts that F*ck You Up …and how to fix them. This book really helped me to get a grip on my emottions at a time when a combination of the trauma of being diagnosed with cancer, and the treatment prescribed for me, really payed havoc and affected not only me, but also my relationships. I relate how my experience showed how the techniques of REBT were extremely helpful – and they might help you too.

The main section of the show is given over to my interview with the fantastic Georgina Bruce, who not only has a lively account here on Substack, but has also won awards for her short and otherworldly fiction (her White Rabbit won the British Fantasy Best Short Fiction Award in 2017), as well as being a screenwriter and teacher. Her approach is ‘bold as brass’ and forthright, but perhaps most of all she is extremely intelligent, funny and a great talker – ideal as a podcast guest! In a wide-ranging discussion, we cover her decision to become a writer, her creative process, some of the regrets she’s had along the way and some of her experiences dealing with the writing community compared to other creative pursuits.

Finally, my Relaxation on the Beach short, guided meditation continues to theme from the introduction, encouraging you to release rumination about the past and anxiety about the future and focus entirely on the here and now.

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Resources

REBT at the Albert Ellis Institute

Daniel Fryer’s website

The British Fantasy Awards

Alternative Ways to Support the Show

https://ko-fi.com/henryhyde

buymeacoffee.com/henryhyde

I’ve been thinking deeply about just what it is I want to be doing here on Substack. What can this place offer that the other online venues I frequent just can’t?

I think the answer to that question is “intelligent feedback”. The audience here is simply unlike anywhere else on the internet, with a preponderance of highly creative people, whether writers themselves or not.

How best to make use of the gift of your attention, then?

So, I thought it was about time I honoured a commitment to myself to finish a novel that I’ve been working on for a very long time.

I’ve been searching for the inspiration and energy to make progress and get the thing finished but, as you know by now, I’ve had a pretty rough ride over the last few years, which severely dented my motivation to make progress with my fiction. But here I am, with the first inklings of an idea to leave all that behind and set a new course.

So, what’s the plan?

* Firstly, reveal the fact that a manuscript exists at all, so that you can badger me to make progress.

* Secondly, to open up the Scrivener file and start chipping away at the story again, however slowly.

* Thirdly – and this is thanks to a “Eureka!” moment prompted by reading the work of Angeline Trevena – I’ve had a real breakthrough with my worldbuilding, an aspect of fantasy that I really love. I’ve probably created hundreds of maps over the years, and something that should have been blindingly obvious just smacked me in the face a few days ago. All will be revealed in due course!

* Fourthly, to perform the finished chapters in audio format, which I hope will be entertaining for you and challenging for me, both in terms of the storytelling and practising matching appropriate voices to the characters. I’ve already done a few, and it’s quite incredible how reading one’s own work aloud can reveal a lot about the style and cadence of the writing – especially where it’s not working! After all, if I’m stumbling over the language when I read it aloud, then that’s what the reader will be experiencing too, so edits are needed.

* Finally, over a period of what I imagine will be many months, I hope to get to the point where I have, at the very least, a decent, finished first draft, at which point I can draw the curtains behind me and get on with polishing the rough gemstone to achieve a fully-faceted diamond that people are prepared to pay money for and which I will be proud to see on the shelves.

And of course, then it’ll be time to do it all over again.

I also want to thank so many of the folks I know in The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) who I have witnessed doggedly pursuing their writing and publishing dreams over the years, despite all the ups and downs, and a particular shout-out to my friend Roz Morris, author and editor (though she’s already told me that fantasy isn’t her bag so I’ll need to find someone else to do that job in due course) whose single-minded determination to write her remarkable stories is an inspiration.

I designed this temporary cover ages ago. Dusting it off, it’s not that bad!

I hope you enjoy the recording.

Henry

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Audio recording, text and cover design © Henry Hyde 2024

Does this ever happen to you?

You stumble upon a track – in this case, a song randomly recommended by Spotify, which does seem to have the most uncannily accurate algorithms that know me all too well – and suddenly, your whole world shrinks down to a strangely sacred place, inhabited solely by your brain and that melody, those words, those soaring chords.

The track takes you to a place that only you understand, evoking emotions and triggering memories that combine to take you somewhere entirely new, somewhere indistinct, somewhere beyond the veil of this world, strangely beyond your grasp, shimmering in the semi-distance of your imagination.

You allow yourself to submerge in this ocean of sound, surrounded by its sensuality, at one and the same time gasping for breath as you plunge into the feelings released by the powerful current of notes and the pulse of percussion, and yet with your eyes wide with astounding clarity about what you must do.

Write.

Write like there is nothing else. Write with an astonishing speed and ferocity, as though your mission is to keep up with the tempo of the tune, to infuse your prose with the spirit of the music, to capture the power within that musical rapture and transfer it to the page as if nothing else in the universe has meaning.

It doesn’t matter what the artist originally intended to capture with their composition. What does matter is what it means to you, the angels and demons it releases within your own soul, the memories or future hopes and fears that fly free as you immerse yourself in the song.

And then the end of the track arrives too soon, in mid-flow of the words you are dashing onto the page in a state of near-frenzy, so you click that little symbol that enables you to loop that single track over and over and over again.

And again.

And again.

And that is how you find me, with this track in my head (Let It Go by the Ambientalist, link above.) It’s been there on and off for days, this afternoon and evening for hours, brainwashing me into creativity, torturing me to tease out the pain that I’ve been feeling about a failing relationship.

You might hate it, or be indifferent to it, or maybe, just maybe, you’ll catch a glimpse of what I’m experiencing as I’m listening to it.

Or perhaps I’m just an oddball, weirdly obsessive in my love of and sensibility to certain kinds of music, trapped by some strange sorcery in the song that has its hooks in me.

But, for me, it’s hard to describe how deeply therapeutic it is to be in the grip of a piece of music in this way, how incredibly cathartic it is to be so deeply moved to purge myself of what I’m feeling inside and splash it onto the page, whether with pen or pixels. Music as emetic, as much as music as muse.

How about you? Do you ever find yourself in the grip of a song and can’t let go? Or even, like me, welcome its embrace, almost to the point of being choked by it, as tears roll down your face and your voice is reduced to a sob?

Don’t try telling me that I need therapy. This is therapy – and I’ve had enough of the formal kind in recent years to know that you release your trauma however you can, as long as it’s in a safe way.

And I know the music will never hurt me. It understands my obsession, and keeps me in its whirlpool embrace, enraptured by its rhythms just long enough for me to exorcise my demons and free my angels.

All is well. At least, it will be.

Thanks for reading Henry’s Second String! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’ve just turned off paid subscriptions (and so my one paid subscriber – to whom I’m extremely grateful – will get a refund).

I may revert at some point in the future, but the fact is that for the sake of my own mental health, I need to feel that this is a place where I can just play, rather than putting myself under the unnecessary pressure of having to produce ‘important’ work on a regular basis – I run a reasonably successful Patreon gig where I already have that commitment, plus I’m writing and self-publishing my own books.

Moreover, I’ve seen plenty of statistics now about the proportion of paid to free subscribers, even amongst some of the leading lights here. That number seems to hover at an average of between 1% and 3%, so until you have amassed thousands of subscribers in total, the likelihood of earning any kind of meaningful income here is slim. And frankly, I can’t be arsed. Instead, my Posts will contain links to my Ko-Fi page https://ko-fi.com/henryhyde where readers can donate if they feel they’ve been sufficiently entertained or informed.

Besides, it’s not as though I yet have any works of fiction, poetry, essays or a service to promote that would tie in with my activity here. (I design book jackets and maps, but there seems little point shoving that in people’s faces at a time when AI is affecting the industry so comprehensively. But if you’re interested, https://henryhyde.co.uk/design/)

In fact, what’s really interesting to me is that by meeting and engaging with other writers here, it’s given me new ideas about the kind of things I actually want to write. And for that, I’m grateful and content to separate my activity here from my professional life.

Finally, I edited magazines for ten years and it has to be said that this place feels very ‘magaziney’, with constantly rolling and extremely diverse content, and it’s triggered a familiar response in me to stop and bang out a few hundred words of content, as if for a looming deadline, resulting either from my own thoughts or in response to others, that I know is ephemeral. And if it gets a few likes or restacks or none at all, so be it. The satisfaction and therapy is in the doing – any feedback or payment is a bonus.

And so, folks, everything I do here is now free, and I can simply enjoy the company of a huge number of other creative people. lt feels quite liberating.

Have any of you made the same decision?

(Update: I have now recorded my own voiceover, rather than you being subjected to Substack’s AI alternative.)

I promised my lovely subscribers that I would be sharing ideas that may only have a tangential association with writing and, indeed, being a writer.

So now, as they would have said on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for something completely different: abstract painting.

In my case, that means playing around with acrylic paints on canvas, with the added sparkle of gold leaf.

The abstract painting made with acrylics and gold leaf featured in the first video.

This particular project, created as a commission for a very dear friend, was completed over several days in January this year. The canvas is A2 size (594mm x 420mm), and as part of the deal, I took photos at various stages of the creative process and then stitched them together with some music and intro/outro bits to create a short video.

What’s the point of showing this? Well, it’s an insight into the creative process.

I’m no great artist – though my friend Sandra insists that I am, perhaps to boost the perceived value of the work – but what I have learned is to just relax and plunge in. I don’t plan what’s going to happen, other than in the vaguest terms. Here, my friend had asked for a decorative piece that featured combinations of red, black and gold, to create a warm focal point for a room.

Something I like to do is create a sense of depth in my paintings, working from dark to light, from monotone to bright colour, but with subtle layering and overlapping of lines, shapes, textures and dots of colour, with gold leaf interwoven with these layers to produce an effect that is at once abstract and organic. Beyond that, anything goes.

Perhaps the most important aspect that can be helpful for writers – indeed any creative – is that I allow myself to make mistakes. In fact, the mistakes aren’t even errors as such: they are an integral part of the process. And in this sense, acrylics (or oils, which of course many artists prefer) are extremely forgiving, because you can scrape back or, as I do, simply paint right over the top. In fact, doing so can, in itself, produce interesting effects and send you in directions you might not have considered before.

This is unlike watercolour work, where one needs to do more thinking before applying the paint which, once dry and absorbed into the paper, is virtually impossible to remove. As I will demonstrate in due course, watercolour work is more about the control of the ratio of water to pigment, drying times and the absorbency of paper – in many ways a more technical challenge requiring the acceptance of risk. My work in that medium is more literal and often actual illustration, but equally about colour and certainly more about light.

Perhaps best of all, painting like this is extremely relaxing and deeply absorbing, quickly leading to that state that the famously unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi2 called “flow”, a state of being whereby time slips by unnoticed and we feel contentment and peace with the world.

I also find that the soothing effect of creating a piece like this makes me much more receptive to other creative ideas both during the process and afterwards. Always keep a notebook nearby!

And finally, I cannot overstate the role of music in my creative process, both when painting and writing fiction. (Curiously, for non-fiction work, I prefer either silence or something quite mellow, ambient or meditative.) I have amassed ludicrously extensive Spotify playlists as a result!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little excursion into the long grass of my other interests, and it would thrill me to hear if you decide to take the plunge yourself and have a go. You don’t need expensive tools and materials, especially with acrylics – at various stages, I use household paint brushes to get a lot of colour down quickly, bits of sponge for dappling the surface and ordinary toilet tissue or kitchen roll for mopping up excess colour.

I know some of you actually are working artists, so I’d be delighted to hear from you and learn about your own creative process. Rather like novelists, I know that painters can be ‘plotters’ or ‘pantsers’, some planning their creations to a high degree, whereas others just dive right in and see what happens! Which are you?

Finally, if you enjoyed that video, here’s a longer one (10 minutes) that I created of another painting, using time-lapse photography and a music track some of you might know (Every Other Way by BT). This one shows what you might call my ‘blue period’!

Henry’s Second String is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

See you next time and of course, your support and patronage enabling me to produce posts like this is hugely appreciated.

Henry

Henry’s Second String is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

First of all, thank you to all of you, my wonderful subscribers!

This podcast is, in essence, an audio version of my newsletter, so you can hear what I actually sound like (and for those of you outside the UK, get used to that British accent!) and for me to add a little more information than was in the written version.

This podcast, and many more like it, will only be available to subscribers and there will be other, special editions that will only be published for paid subscribers – so if you want the deeper insights into my creative life and the opportunity to get to know me on a more personal level, then chip into my fund for about the price of a cappuccino a month (and it works out even less if you buy an annual sub). Literally every penny helps!

I welcome your feedback, thoughts, suggestions and comments and, once again, thank you so, so much for subscribing.

Enjoy the show!

Henry

P.S. Bibby says “Hi, now get that phone out of my face and let me get back to sleep!”

P.P.S. here’s the Ko-Fi link I mention in the podcast.

Buy me a coffee!

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My introduction reveals that I am currently facing a health condition that most of us have come to dread for quite some time: Coronavirus. Luckily, my symptoms are currently mild, but the emotional impact has been greater than expected because of the ongoing after-effects of the drug I was given to combat prostate cancer—Prostap-3—so I go on to discuss the impact of this on not just my life, but those of other sufferers too.

The main interview is with Anne Goodwin, a novelist and short story writer who had a long career in the British National Health Service as a clinical psychologist. She spent a large portion of that career in a long-term psychiatric hospital, and she provides some fascinating insights into that work before going on to talk about her novels and the way she weaves her knowledge of psychiatry into her stories.

We cover the history of mental health institutions and how they first came into being during the 19th century, but also how they ended up growing to become far too large to provide the kind of care that was really needed, with both the patients and staff becoming 'institutionalised' in a way that was actually detrimental to mental health.

During Anne's time working with the NHS, these large hospitals were gradually dismantled, with the emphasis shifting to providing 'care in the community', which has had its own set of challenges. But Ann is something of an activist on behalf of the benefits of good mental health care, as well as criticising bad practices, and is particularly motivated to support early intervention, where parents are given the best possible chance to raise young children in a nurturing environment.

Ann then talks about her three novels, Sugar and Snails, Underneath and Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, and the way in which they are informed by her work as a psychologist, which makes her characterisation especially strong and believable!

Finally, the Relaxation on the Beach meditation explores how to allow thoughts to come and go during practice, before focusing on the value of close friendships and ensuring that we express our gratitude for them.

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In this episode, my introduction gives me a chance to talk about showing compassion both to others and ourselves at a time of year that is challenging for many of us. I also review some books that I’ve been reading recently that range from in-depth Transactional Analysis through to tips for organising your days more efficiently and getting more done.

This is followed by an interview with multi-talented author, editor and horsewoman Roz Morris, who provides some insights into the challenges faced by General Practioners thanks to her job editing a medical magazine, including their desire to have more face-to-face time with patients, and the dangers of burnout because of the overwhelming pressures over the last few years, especially as a result of Covid. We also talk about the challenges of the creative process, coping with feedback, and building the grit and resilience needed to keep working on long-term projects. And of course, with Roz on the show, we talk about horses, the psychology of both the rider and the ridden because of the unique bond that forms between owner and horse.

Finally, my Relaxation on the Beach meditation guides you in an appreciation of awe, which can create such positive and valuable feelings, whether it's watching a beautiful sunset, walking into a magnificent building like a cathedral, or gazing up at the night sky full of stars – and I encourage you to make a list of the things, places, people, animals, events or artwork that inspire you.

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