Hello again everyone.
I can't beleive it's been three months since my last update. I have to apologise for this - it's not acceptable to not keep everyone informed. When all the days melt into each other, three months ago feels like last week.
I have been working on the book nearly every day since the last update. Sometimes I get a lot done, other days I barely manage a couple of hundred words. As it stands at the moment, I have 20,000 words I'm happy to go to press and god knows how many that I'm not.
The last few months have been intense. I've been right down to the very bottom again, and here I am getting out. Writing this book is a bizzare kind of therapy - and my biggest struggle at the moment is the pacing. I know that a lot of you support me because you see paralells in your own mental health struggles, and I do think it's important to include them in here (hence the title). However, a book about video games that stopped me from hurting myself has the potential to be emo as all bobbins, and I don't really want that. I want it to be relateable and fun. I so desparately want you to like this piece of work I'm tangling myself up a bit in the content.
Below is another excerpt, one which will be near the start of the book. Again, it's another one less focused on video games, but is about the first game I think I ever played. Please note, it's not the final version of content that will go in the book, this is straight from my word processor.
I have set an alert in my calendar to do another update soon, so this doesn't fall behind again.
Louis x (Octavius King)
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Any days off from primary school, whether from sickness or during the holidays, were dull as bobbins at mum’s place.
The Man Who Was Not My Father would work all day in His hotel. It was a red-painted townhouse perched on the lip of a railway tunnel near York city centre, with daubed ionic columns and a cursive, swinging sign. Behind it was a little house, or ‘flat’ as mum called it, directly attached via a flight of stairs and storage rooms to the hotel kitchen. This ‘flat’, a little two-floor apartment, was where He and mum lived and where my brother and I were left to our own devices for hours.
He would sometimes pop up to see us, presumably to make sure we were still alive, but on the whole we wouldn’t see Him until late in the evening. That was when He would wander up the dusty stairs with His pint of fosters and a Bacardi and Coke for mum.
Mum would usually not be out of bed until the afternoon, unless she had menus to write. At this young age, my brother and I still slept in the same room as her – one of us in a grubby camp bed, the other top-tailing in the grown-up bed – and during holidays we’d be booted out as soon as our wittering together prevented mum from sleeping. We’d be excommunicated down to the living room; a yellow-stained space boasting a constantly dusty carpet and a squishy green sofa, the latter of which had piles of VHS tapes at one arm and a series of ashtrays at the other.
We existed in this room, all day, every day. And it really was just that. Existing. We weren’t allowed down the steps where the door to the hotel kitchen yawned open in the darkness. We most certainly weren’t allowed outside. Sometimes we would balance on the living room sills to poke our arms and faces out of a slip of open window, watching the trains pass below or the cars bob in and out of the tiny hotel carpark.
There was a TV in the living room – an absolutely hench badlad CRT He had purchased for mum on finance. When it was turned on, the click was more of a decisive thud. One that said ’yes, it is time to watch Candy Candy and My Little Pony on VHS for the millionth time.’ Then at lunch time, Sesame Street would come on.
I used to look forward to lunch time so much, and not just because of Big Bird. Mum would sometimes wander into the living room, and He would come upstairs with sub or roll sandwiches wrapped in waxy paper, and hand us one each. The little kitchen next to the living room never had anything other than crackers or coffee, so by that point we would be ravenous. Sometimes both He and mum would watch Big Bird and Oscar sing while we all ate. They would both have their own in-jokes, adult ones we didn’t understand, and when He went back to the hotel mum would click about with clip art on her beige Advent.
’Mum, look at this!’ I’d say, pointing at The Count doing some funny song about bananas.
’Yeah!’ She would say, not looking but with enthusiasm. Always that ciggarette perched in her willowy fingers.
After that, she would go downstairs through that dusty portal to the hotel kitchen and not return. Boredom set in in her place.
We did have toys - ‘cuddlies’, as mum called them. Also, bizarrely, stuff like a football which we were expressly banned from kicking about. I had a basketball emblazoned with the head of a red bull, remaining clean and untouched as the walls become yellower.
I can remember feeling so bored and hungry that I felt sick. I remember doing odd things like shoving my head into the sofa cushions and flinging my little legs over the back, so that the three episodes of My Little Pony my brother and I were watching for the millionth time felt different.
One day my half-brother brought home a chunky yellow handheld device. With a yellow joystick and a big black screen, the thing needed so many big batteries to work that it would feel so heavy and resolute in my hands. My brother and I would sit together on the sofa, flicking the joystick back and forth, amazed by the soft green glow of tiny characters alive on the screen.
According to the arch of letters on the case, this game was Puck Monster. The star of the show was a little three-quarter, greeny-yellow moon shape who shared his (its?) maze with a bunch of tiny dots and angry, red ghosts.
Of course, this device I predictably became hyper-fixated on was a Pac-Man rip-off; one of many.
Pac-Man's original name was ‘Puckman’ in Japan, where he was conceived by a team at Namco - led by Toru Iwatani - as a potential arcade cabinet star who would appeal more to females. And so in 1980, the little yellow roundboy was famously chased around a maze by brightly-coloured ghosts; as you likely already know, he became a huge hit in the arcades.
The popularity of the game led to a burst of maze chase games such as Data East’s arcade game Lock and Chase (1981) and console games such as Taxman (1981) and Devil World (1984). And of course there were some knock-off handheld versions (in addition to the official one). The game my half-brother brought home that day was one made by Gakken, this UK release imported by Computer Games Limited of London. It was likely released in 1982, a good few years before I was born.
Japanese company Gakken, which at the time of writing is still an active company making electronic and educational toys, released a whole bunch of plasticky goodness in the form of handheld video games. My Puck Monster was just one.
There was something magical about the little world inside that yellow case. I wasn’t especially good at the game, but I was delighted by the little ghost shapes and the way they would sneak around the maze. The fluorescent screen was lovely and bright with three great colours, and looked especially awesome if I played it under my jumper. And those bleepy bloopy sounds – they sounded crunchy, loud.
The bright ghosts and Puck Monster himself would start to fade when the batteries of the unit were struggling. I’d play as long as I could, squinting at the screen – almost panicking, that feeling of knowing the game was about to end, the tide rising to the shore and swallowing the sand.
I’d tear the living room apart trying to find more of those enormous bastard batteries to refuel my yellow boredom saviour, raiding the ash-soaked dish on mum’s computer desk where she kept a mismatch of used batteries. I’d rub them together, like dad did with TV remote batteries. I’d shove multiple AA sticks into the four C slots, desperately pushing them against each other, slamming stacks of dead batteries into the great block and pushing the switch on, off, on, off, onoffonoffonoff.
A few years ago, a viewer took note of my mentioning having this game as a kid and sent me one. I played it in bed that night, blanket over my head, marvelling at everything I had forgotten.
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