When Jude died, life felt impossible. There are entire months of time that I can barely remember. Somehow, we got the important things done; Oscar went to school, we ate, we slept. We had a lot of help. We watched a lot of television.
The television we watched was mostly old stuff that we’d seen a dozen times before. It was comfort food. One thing I remember watching was Friends. It was a good show to watch because nothing about it was too serious and we had both grown up watching it as kids, so it was familiar. There were a good number of episodes, so we didn’t have to think about what to watch next. Just start it on Netflix and let it keep going until we started falling asleep in the evening.
It was also the first time I realized I had a problem with endings. Not just me, either. Without needing to discuss it, neither Tamzin nor I wanted to watch the last episode of friends and have it end. I have noticed the same thing with books and other television shows.
The books I read tended to be things that went on for a long time. I started re-reading the Discworld books, and even now I haven’t finished the series. It is just there, unfinished.
You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize why endings were such a problem for us; we had just dealt with the ultimate untimely ending and the idea of anything else finishing was hard to handle. Plus, there was no need for us to handle it. No one cared whether we watched the last episode of Friends. It didn’t matter whether I read the last few Discworld books.
There is one place where it does matter, though; my writing. If I can’t end a story, then I don’t really have a story. I quickly found that I did still have the desire to write (which surprised me, in the early days I had assumed I would never write again) but couldn’t bring myself to finish any of the stories I wrote.
It took me a long time to get over that, and along the way I found other ways to get the comfort I desperately needed from books that I was reading and books that I was writing. But it still isn’t easy.
I couldn’t tell you the number of times I have thought about writing this. It’s something important, and it’s difficult. Although it is never far from my mind putting it into words, let alone writing it down, is painful and I have been avoiding it. But I can’t keep avoiding it. Writing this preamble is a form of avoidance. The original title of this post was Honesty, and that was also avoidance. And it’s time to stop avoiding this and start being honest.
Jude Robert Victor Loscombe died on 1st June 2021. My son. He was seven years old. It was the most painful thing I have ever felt and two and a half years later, that pain is still there, barely beneath the surface, ready to come out again with the slightest provocation.
Jude was our first child. He was amazing. The most loving person I have ever met. Losing him was worse than losing a limb.
We don’t know why Jude died. He was at a holiday club when he went to sleep and never woke up again. Something happened in his brain. Tamzin got a phone call from the people running the club who told her he’d been sick and gone to sleep, but he seemed okay. She went to collect him and on the way home, he stopped breathing. She gave him CPR in a lay-by until the ambulance arrived.
I was working from home and my mum had collected Oscar. When I got the phonecall, she drove me to the lay-by and by the time I got there Jude was in the back of an ambulance and a paramedic was using a device to breathe for him. The police had closed down a lane of traffic and took Tamzin to the hospital. I took the car home to get stuff we would need and arranged for Oscar to go to my mum and dad’s house. Then I went to the hospital.
The whole way there, I was telling myself I was overreacting. Jude was going to be fine. I almost convinced myself because who can really accept the fact their child is dying?
At the hospital, there was a lot of waiting before a doctor came to see us and tell us that Jude had had a catastrophic brain incident and that it was unlikely he would live. We cried. We didn’t want to believe it.
They had put Jude in a private room and he was covered with tube and wires and it was awful. The next few days were terrible. We told Oscar that his big brother wasn’t coming home. Our families came and said their goodbyes. The nurses and doctors were amazing. It was the worst experience of my life.
I want to be honest, but I need to do justice to Jude. There is a lot more I could say about those final few days together, but Jude was much more than how he died. So much more.
Jude had additional needs and never learned to talk, but he had other ways of showing us what he wanted. Of showing us, he loved us and was happy.
He loved music and books and writing things with plastic letters. I miss finding the little messages he would leave for us around the house, things he’d seen written somewhere and copied out. He used to come and get us and lead us over to what he’d written so we could read it out for him over and over again.
There is no way to adequately sum up a life in the space of a blog post, but I can no longer avoid writing about it here. My son died, and that has really fucked me up inside. As it should. There’s no way you can go through something like that without being damaged.
It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but there was more shit coming my way. Five months after Jude died suddenly, my dad got diagnosed with terminal cancer and a month later he was gone as well. Shortly after that we moved house and then our cat died and then I lost my job and then some other shit happened that I’m not going into here, but it was unpleasant.
It has been a really bad time and I still don’t know how to talk about it properly, but I feel like I have to. I can’t keep acting like nothing has changed while my world is falling apart.
This post isn’t the end of talking about this stuff. It’s the start. It isn’t enough, but it is a beginning.
It seems like a long time ago now, and, in fact, it is twenty-years or so, but once upon a time, I wanted to be a filmmaker. Or, to be more precise, I wanted to be a screenwriter.
The ambition was a logical extension from my early years of writing stories in notebooks. Back then, there was no independent publishing the way we have it now. If you wanted to be a novelist, you either had to work with a traditional publisher, or vanity publishing. Neither of which were things that I particularly wanted to do.
My first alternative was writing plays. I was in year eleven of secondary school, when I wrote my first (and so far, only) play. It was called Walking in Shadows and maybe I will tell you about it some other time. Although my career as a playwright was short-lived, the script was enough to get me onto a new course called Moving Image at the local college.
I stayed at the college for four years, getting a National Diploma, followed by a Higher National Diploma. During that time, I wrote a lot of short screenplays, several of which were filmed, and there may have been one or two feature length scripts as well.
The course was not specifically in screenwriting, however. As well as writing scripts, I had to film things, both fiction and non-fiction, and edit them. Editing was my least favorite part of the course. Perhaps it was because the computers were slow and it took ages to do everything, but I think it is something more fundamental than that. Even today, editing is my least favorite part of making books. I much prefer having the ideas in the first place.
Fast forward to today, and I am an independent author trying to get the word out about my books and I thought one way I could do that was by making a short video trailer. Imagine my surprise when I discover how much I enjoy cutting images together with music.
It was not what I’d expected at all. I’d expected the work to be dull but worthwhile. Now here I am thinking of all the cool things I could do with a thirty-second teaser trailer for a book.
The trailer is basic. I am cutting it together using iMovie (at college we used Final Cut) but this might just be the start. The hours spent huddled with friends in the editing suites are coming back to me and I’m enjoying it immensely.
I should finish the trailer this week, and I should have it on YouTube next week. Who knows what I am going to make next?
Last night, while I was cooking dinner, Tamzin and Oscar put up our Halloween decorations. I know it’s only the start of the month, but we do this most years. Usually while listening to the soundtrack from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It seems that every year Christmas decorations go up sooner, and stay up longer, and as much as I enjoy Christmas, I find this annoying. Not so much with Halloween. I think, if I had it my way, we would leave the Halloween decorations up all year around.
I have always enjoyed Halloween, and am looking forward to a season of watching seasonal specials and films. One that has quickly become a family tradition is Muppets Haunted Mansion. Obviously we will also watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Corpse Bride. Then on Halloween itself, after Oscar is in bed, Tamzin and I will watch a proper scary movie.
Eventually, of course, the decorations will have to come down to make way for Christmas things.
If you are looking for a scary read this Halloween season, why not check out Unhallowed Ground, the newly remastered edition is currently on sale for $0.99 for a limited time only:
I have been writing stories since I was a kid. I can still remember lying on the floor in front of the TV with my new Ghostbusters notebook and pencil and writing a story about how Slimer became a Ghostbuster. That would have been when I was around seven years old.
It was all just for fun, but that was all it needed to be.
Many years later, I was still writing, although school and socializing meant I didn’t have as much time for it as I used to. I wasn’t reading so much either. Honestly, if things had carried on the way they were, I probably would have given up on the whole writing business.
Then I read The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition.
If you’ve read it, you know it’s a big book. Certainly the biggest I’d read up to that point. I went through the whole thing in a single weekend, and I was hooked.
From that point on, I read every Stephen King book I could get my hands on. There were a lot. I raced through them all. Some I loved more than others, but every one of them had something special about it. I started reading interviews, and then tracking down the books that he loved, and reading them as well.
And a funny thing happened along the way. It wasn’t just a love of reading that returned; it was writing as well. Suddenly, I was taking the idea of becoming a professional writer seriously.
After that I was buying the writers digest, submitting stories to magazines and following King’s advice from On Writing. I was on the journey that would lead me to where I am today and wherever I will be in the future. None of it would have happened if it wasn’t for Stephen King.
My son Oscar is seven years old and just starting his reading career. Until now, most of the books he has read have been single-sitting stories. He’s an excellent reader though and at school they are getting him started on longer books with fewer pictures. However, since he went back to school at the start of the month, he has been carrying the same school book around with him and doesn’t make any progress on it.
This morning I asked him if he was enjoying the book and he admitted he wasn’t. So I told him to stop reading it and ask his teacher for another one.
When we are young, there are too many people who tell us we should finish every book that we start. I used to think that way as well. But it makes little sense. There are far more books in the world than anyone could read in a lifetime. You couldn’t even hope to read a fraction of the books that you might love in your life. So why waste time on stories that you don’t like?
I should really start keeping a list of all the books that I start and abandon. At a guess, it’s probably as long as the list of books that I finish.
As Oscar grows up, there are going to be books he has to read for school, which he won’t like very much. I remember brute-forcing my way through Tess of the d’Urbervilles at secondary school. If I never read another description of rolling fields, I will be happy. I then studied for an English Literature degree and there were plenty of books there that I didn’t enjoy, but read because I needed to for my course.
The school book Oscar is reading isn’t because he is going to have to write an essay about it. The book he is reading is not high literature, and it’s not because he finds it difficult that he’s not enjoying it. He is reading it for pleasure and for that purpose, there are plenty of other books he could read and enjoy.
So really, what I’m saying is give up on the books you don’t enjoy reading. Every book we read which we don’t enjoy, is one less book that we would enjoy.
