The Yips February 2026

When I was 13 or there-abouts, my mum and dad decided to send me boxing. This wasn’t because of some deep-rooted working -class aspiration or ambition for a way out of the gutter, it was – to paraphrase them at the time – an attempt to ‘knock some of the arrogance out of me’. They were, in-effect, sub-contracting these arrogance reducing duties to some working-class Chorley boys with wide shoulders and fast fists.

As predicted, those real fighters wasted no time knocking me down and bloodying my nose.

I remember physically looking up at them through watering eyes from the cold canvas, even while I mental squinted downwards and thought to myself… Yeah, but I’m still way smarter than you!

You wouldn’t be able to tell from my educational records, but I’ve always been reasonably fast on my mental feet, wide at the intellectual shoulder and more than happy to throw rhetorical fists with anyone willing to try me. And yes, while I have attempted to tamp down and temper it over the years, I’ve always carried myself with a certain, generally unattractive arrogance.

It doesn’t help that my writing process is pretty much as fast as my two fingers can track across the keys and, through most of my career, the working process has been type, deliver; rinse, repeat. There’s often barely enough time for the first draft, let alone the luxury of a second or the ability to consider other options, possibilities or alternatives.

And then there is the writer’s curse…

Whether a project has a long gestation and time to simmer or a lightning fast turn-around; I write it, I deliver it and then it is no longer mine. I can no longer control how the words are changed or delivered, how the plot is adjusted and how the film or TV show is actually made. Usually, to my obviously biased eyes, the end result (if I get to see it at all) is a sad and sorry shadow of the glorious thing I pictured in the limitless wide-screen of my imagination.

But let’s remember that skinny boy (oh were it still so) shivering in a Chorley boxing gym and admit, my first and often most important audience remains myself. I crack myself up. I make myself weep. I pretty much always like what I write, often love it. If I didn’t think the finished words were pretty f’in good I wouldn’t hit send, no matter how close the whooshing deadline.

All of which makes this aggressive case of the Yips as brutal as it is unexpected and unfamiliar.

I started writing The Sub[bed] Version Anthology in January 2022. I wrote the first draft of The World Weavers one afternoon in August 2023. During that 20 month writing period, and for the two years since, every story has gone through multiple story writing drafts and then many multiple editing and sub-editing drafts. I’ve also continued to noodle and nudge and mutter through multiple approval stages as we’ve formatted and laid out the book, and then again as we’ve closed in on pressing send on the approval for the first print run.

In all that time, I’ve only had myself to blame. The final choices and decisions have all been mine. Which means there’s no-where to hide. Even worse, this lengthy process of decision making and the attendant need to start marketing the book, has forced me to read these words as if for the first time, and that as a stranger - without any vested interest or pre-existing relationship with the arrogant asshole writer.

Last week I found myself both selecting writing samples for the very website you hold in your hands, and reading the introductions to the book while trying to imagine how those words might fall on the eyes of the fine people in York who will be printing and distributing my book. How would they see and read them like a baby? How might you? And is any of it even remotely good? Or is it all just self-indulgent, self-delusional Ai Slop - without the advantage of being able to claim either A or i?

Having been told on multiple occasions how his father does not suffer from writer’s block, or any of the doubts and uncertainties experienced by lesser writers and actual artists, my son thinks this is all absolutely hilarious. He thinks his years of whispering Memento’d mories in to my ear have finally born fruit. He also thinks this might also suggest that his ape like dad might finally be accused of committing and act of actual art, one the yipping and tapping ape is now being forced to abandon, as unfinished; just as every legitimate work of art allegedly is.

Me? I’m just remembering that 13 year old boy with the bloody nose as he looked up from the canvas, arrogance undiminished… maybe the lesson has finally sunk in?