I've always wanted to write something for World Mental Health Day, but until this year, I've always failed to do so for two reasons.

The first is that most years, I never know the date on which World Mental Health Day falls, until it has already fallen. 

The second is the same reason I'm always having ideas for stories, but rarely writing them down. Why I've spent years writing novels, and I've only ever released one: I'm not really sure that I have anything worthwhile to say.

Most people will be impacted by mental heath issues at some point. According to the Mental Health Foundation, 1 in 6 people in the past week will have experienced a mental health problem. So what could I, an exceedingly average hobbyist writer who hardly ever posts on his blog and has never really written any non-fiction about mental health, add to the conversation? When there are so many bloggers, journalists and intelligent scienticians writing useful pieces on mental health all the time, I fear not much.

But this year, I know the date. So I thought: fuck it. I'll write something to get it out there, and even if it doesn't bring anything new to the table, at least it might give someone a good laugh.

My major mental health episodes began after I left university. I had spent the last year of uni bitter and twisted, mainly just working to get the degree done and staying in at the weekends, because I'd alienated most of my friends by lashing out after a bad breakup and treating everyone like a total dickbag (an episode which fills me with so much regret that I wrote another article about it to post today, which my wife rightly advised that I should think twice about publishing, because she said it read like I was trying to humiliate myself as punishment for my sins... which I probably was). 

But I was getting over that, and love life aside, things were looking pretty good. I was on a good graduate scheme, I had a laid back lifestyle and a small circle of close friends, and I was saving up for my first car. 

I had to do a fair bit of growing up pretty quickly - at university, I had been waking up in the afternoon and going to bed in the early hours of the morning. In the third year, I hardly ever turned up to lectures, because all the notes were online and I was doing well enough without going in. When I did go in, I tended to sit with my friends, making jokes at the expense of the lecturers. But now I was an adult with a real job, so I had to go to bed at a sensible time and get up as soon as my alarm went off. When I was at work, I had to be sober, properly dressed and civil to my peers and my boss. It was a real shock to the system.

But I coped (brave of me, I know), and pretty soon I had enough money to buy my first car. A flashy convertible one, with only three previous hairdressing owners.

That's when the trouble began. After a couple of months of owning it, something strange happened in my brainbox. I started to worry that I would hit someone or something with my lovely new car - despite the fact that I’ve always been a very sensible (slow) driver - and leave terrible destruction in my wake, without even realising it. 

Which made me want to drive it less, just in case my worries came true.

I didn’t drive it less, because I still wanted to get where I was going, and the worry wasn't crippling yet. But over the course of a few weeks, that niggling doubt blossomed into an intense paranoia. And very suddenly, it got to the point where I would complete a journey in my car, then spend the rest of the night worried sick (literally, so worried that I felt physically sick) that I had hit someone on the way, and driven on obliviously. 

I knew that I would have heard the crash, felt the bump of the collision; but my brain wasn’t interested in reason or logical thought. In those moments, I would genuinely believe that I had killed a pedestrian with my car, and my memory had erased it; and I would spend hours expecting the police to knock on my door and bring me the justice I deserved.

Sometimes, the paranoia was so convincing that I would have to get back in my car and drive the same route again, to check that there was no debris in the road, no police cordon around the dead body I’d left on the tarmac. Which, of course, would give me a new journey to worry about. And the cycle continued.

Whatever was happening in my head wasn't content, however, with just ruining my driving experience. It escalated very quickly, and within probably less than a month, I had become paranoid not only about driving, but about everything. 

A stranger glancing at me strangely as we waited for a bus together probably shot me that look because he wanted to kill me, and was planning to do so within the next few days. If a friend said something strange or out of character, it must be because I had mortally offended them and destroyed the friendship, and no amount of apologies would make it better now, because they were out to get me.

News stories about war or climate change or pretty much any volatile situation (so, really, any news story) filled me with a dread that we didn’t have much time left, that the end times were coming.

Everything in the world was out to destroy me. How arrogant is that? 

Quite arrogant. But also very terrifying. If you haven’t experienced paranoia like this before, I fear that I am probably not a skilful enough writer to communicate effectively just how all-consuming these fears were. They ate away at me constantly, all day every day, and I would feel physically queasy most of the time, worrying about whichever small event I had chosen at the time which - in my imagination, at least - would inevitably spiral out of control and end in my demise.

When I say everything, by the way, I really mean everything. I was scared that people I knew would overhear me saying bad things about them in my flat, when I wasn’t saying bad things about them at all, and even if I was, I knew they were miles away. 

When I donated old books to a charity shop, I would spend a couple of the following days worried that someone would buy it, find some kind of offensive note or a pamphlet for an extremist organisation enclosed inside, and hunt me down for the hateful views I didn't even hold. I’m not a member of any groups which would hand out pamphlets, let alone the kind of insane ones I was imagining.

If you’re laughing incredulously at how crazy I went, know that I don't blame you. I’m just an average man who has lived a relatively comfortable life. The fact that this kind of issue can come out of nowhere and completely take over my life is mystifying. Laughable! 

But, obviously, I wasn’t laughing at the time; all this fear changed me completely. I went from being very confident and outgoing - arrogant, perhaps - to feeling like a pathetic loser, cowering in my room and never wanting to interact with the scary world outside. I had no desire to talk to strangers, no matter how friendly they were (after all, if they were being so friendly, what were they up to?), and if I could help it, I didn’t really want to leave my flat.

I couldn't leave work in the evening without double, triple and quadruple checking my Sent folder in Outlook, to ensure that I hadn't called anyone a cunt in an e-mail and forgotten all about it.

And to add to all of this, I had a voice inside me the whole time, telling me that I deserved to feel this way. I had treated people like shit at university - especially my ex - and throughout my teens I had disregarded people's feelings as if they didn't even matter; so this must have been my punishment, and it was fair, so I would just have to take it.

I'm sure my mum wouldn't have agreed. I had talked about some of what was going on in my head to my family and a couple of close friends, and while it helped to get the little things off my chest, I didn't want to burden them with it all, and I needed to let the rest out before I became a hermit, locked indoors for fear of immediate destruction if I ever left the house. 

So, my mum found me a counsellor, who I began to see once a week, just to talk through my issues. 

And she was brilliant - exactly the person I needed. She made me think about things differently, showed me where I might be going wrong in my thought processes and taught me new ways to look at the things I was imagining and making real in my temporarily twisted head.

Not that time with her was a magical instant cure. It was a long process, and it was often painful and scary and sometimes I couldn't even face going to see her, because I just wanted to hide away and not talk to anyone about my problems, even someone who wanted to help. And nor was it a permanent remedy - over the course of about five years, I went back three times, for a few months of weekly sessions at a time, because those fears just kept slipping back. 

But it was worth it - I would have done anything, paid any amount, for my life to just return to normal. And mostly, it did.

Today, I can get through most days without feeling like someone is going to bug my home, or like I’m going to crash my car and drive away obliviously. Most of the time, I'm pretty much fine. 

But the fear isn’t completely gone. Promoting my books online always fills me with a little bit of paranoia, because it involves something as personal as my written words and ideas, and a lot of strangers who might be offended enough by them that they want to hunt me down and destroy me. 

Sometimes, when I’m tired, I still have to ask my wife if my driving was alright, at the end of a long journey. That there weren't any incidents that I missed. Perhaps even that’s not healthy, but if it keeps away bigger fears, then it’s a small price to pay.

I don’t watch or read the news at all now. It’s the one thing I’d recommend to everyone, whether they’re having mental health problems or not. 99% of the content of the average news broadcast is not directly relevant to your life, and 100% of it is designed to make you feel anxious and worried, so that you’ll keep watching and waiting for that sweet reassurance that everything will be okay, which will never come. But that’s a rant for another time.

I might never be as confident, loud and outgoing as I used to be, and there might be small fears that niggle at me for the rest of my life. But all of that is okay; I know I can get through it all, because I have before. And in one way, this strange chapter in my life did me a favour, by forcing me out of the brash and overconfident habits and personality traits which made me feel like I deserved those issues in the first place (and caused that nasty breakup I mentioned, and all the other things I hate about the person I was before my mid-twenties).

I couldn't have got through it all without the support of my loved ones and counsellor.

So, if you’re feeling sad, or strange, or scared, and you feel trapped and don’t know what to do, my amateur advice is: talk to someone. Anyone. A family member, a friend, a therapist. Just get it off your chest. It will suddenly become a lot lighter, when you let it out. It might not solve the problem, but it will probably become a lot easier to deal with, when you hear the issue out loud and realise that it’s not as big and terrifying as it has become in your head.

You can do it.

Epictetus said: 'Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.' It might not be that simple in every case, but for me, it was just as clear as that. Any anxieties my mind creates, my mind can discard, if only I choose to let it.

Footnotes: 

1. If, having read this, you've suddenly realised that all my strangest stories aren’t as creative as you thought, because they’re all just expressions of my own real life paranoias and fears, you’re absolutely right. A lot of the time when I’m writing, I’m just working out my issues. Writing is a form of therapy for me - when I feel scared, I write a little story, and I make my fears smaller by putting them on the screen of a laptop, and suddenly they’re not towering over me anymore. Even this article is probably just another attempt to exorcise a demon (although publishing it will almost certainly make me feel a bit scared). Try it yourself - paint or sing or write or dance your problems away. I can’t promise it will cure you, but it might help.

2. If you're feeling fine, but you want to know how best to support a loved one who's going through a hard time, then I can only speak from my own experience, but my best advice is simply: Listen. Don't judge, don't laugh, don't say, 'Oh my days, you're getting so weird!' Just hear them out, let them talk it through, then tell them how you see it. Sometimes, all I needed was a calm, rational perspective to help me see just how - for want of a better word - weird I was being.

This year, the theme for World Mental Health Day is "suicide prevention". 

The following links will take you to websites for organisations who know a lot more than I do, and can provide a lot more help and information than I ever could. 

Mental Health Foundation

Mind

World Federation for Mental Health

Campaign Against Living Miserably: CALM

Have you been waiting for the very cheapest day to start reading the books everyone* is talking about? Are you stuck in the middle of a literary funk, desperately searching for a new favourite author to read every day**?

Well, today is your lucky day! It's my 30th birthday, so I've started a Kindle Countdown deal which means you could grab all of my books for as little as 99p on Amazon.co.uk and 99c on Amazon.com! The price will gradually rise until May 3rd, so click here to go and download your copy now!

Now, excuse me, while I sulk about aging just as fast as my grandparents said I would...

* or at least, I am talking about...

** for about a week, maybe less if you're a really fast reader.

Look, there I am leaning against a tree in fancy clothes.

But that's not the only place I've been this week. I've also been on Amy's Bookshelf, answering questions about books and inspiration and a few things in between.

Check out the interview now by clicking here!

That's all I wanted to say. Aaron out.

I'm back again, dropping some more bookish wedding ideas like Muse dropping mediocre albums*. Let's go.

Bookish Confetti

If you're of the opinion that books shouldn't be destroyed or damaged willy nilly, then you can rest assured that my new wife and I agree. But there are some people who would argue that some books, like say, Fifty Shades, were just never meant to be read. 

So, if you agree with those people, buy a really shit book from a charity shop - to ease your guilt, you could pick one that looks like it's been sitting there on the shelf for years, never being read - then get yourself a hole punch of any size and shape you want, and get punching. Before long, you'll have a load of lovely confetti.

You really don't need that much. We had a whole bag full, and we didn't even get through a third of it.

Now, if you're planning a wedding, you'll already know that most venues wouldn't actually let you use this as confetti, because it's real paper and not biodegradable niceness. But we didn't want it for that anyway - we sprinkled it all over the tables, as an extra little decoration. It was a lovely little detail in a very beautiful day.

That's all I have to say, really. It's all in the title. Go to the books page to buy your copy today!

Some couples have wedding breakfast tables named after places they've been together, or bands they both enjoy. But when your wedding is book-themed, you might want tables named after books you love.

That's what we did. And for a long time, we were struggling to think of an inventive way to display them. Because you need to at least try to be original, right?

Then it hit us: Why not make our own covers for those books, and have real books on each table?

It so happened that the books we chose all had at least one quote about love or marriage in them, and they were often funny or silly. So we thought it would be entertaining to add those quotes on the back cover, as an Easter egg for our friends and family.

Fancy making some of your own, or just interested in how we did it? Well, read on, my friends. And once you get to the end of the post, I'll show you the lot, for your entertainment.

How we did it

First, obviously, we chose the book titles we wanted to use. Our requirements were that they be books that at least one of us likes, and that their names could roughly be used to describe a group of people. For example: Little Women.

We had 9 tables, so we needed 9 table names. It would obviously be best if we used books that were the same size, and they needed to be thin enough to slot into a table name stand if possible. So the next step was to acquire some thin, compact hardback books which we could bind with our created covers.

I bought 9 Puddle Lane books on eBay. Remember Puddle Lane? I do. We had these when I was a kid.

So now we had some books that looked like they were the perfect dimensions for table name displays. To make a sleeve for them though, I needed to know the exact dimensions. So the next step was to measure the height and width of the book. The sleeve would need to be the exact height of the book, but the width would need to be (width x 2) + spine + a bit extra to be folded inside the covers. 

So, with my sizes noted down, I started a new document in GIMP (other image editing tools are available), sized just a little bit larger than the dimensions I had just decided upon, so that when I cut it down I knew there would be no white space around the edges that I hadn't accounted for (a word on sizing images and dpi: dpi stands for "dots per inch", and you should find out the max dpi of your printer before you start designing your sleeves. If you design and print an image at 300dpi, that means that every 300 pixels of your image should fill an inch on the page. If you didn't know that already, I hope it helps you size up images and get the best out of your printer in future).

With the document created at the size I wanted, I completed what was arguably the most important step: designing our covers.

As you can see in the above screenshot, I used guides to tell me where the borders of the covers were, where the spine was, and the centre of each cover horizontally and vertically. I really wanted it to look perfect, even though I knew that I was going to be cutting the sleeves and folding them onto the books, so they never would end up perfect anyway.

The next steps are obvious: first, printing. I had to buy an A3 printer to print mine. I took it to a stationers that does printing first, but the girl behind the counter didn't know what dpi was or how to change it on the printer settings and she gave me a lot of attitude when I asked her about it, so I thought it would be best to do it myself at home.

As I mentioned before, this image was an inch or two bigger on paper than it needed to be, in both directions. This was so that when I did the next step, cutting it down to the sizes I measured, I would be sure the colour would be edge-to-edge. In this case, the colour was only grey, but I'm sure you see what I mean.

And then, we were pretty much done. After that, we only had to fold the sleeves around the books, just like them books what you buy at the shops, and they were complete! Look at them:

So there you have it. I hope you liked it, and if you're planning your own bookish wedding I hope it inspires you. Feel free to steal the idea, just don't try to sell it to other people. That's just rude.

While you're here, check out our other bookish wedding ideas, and if you really like them, why not consider buying a book or two? No pressure. I'm just happy you're here.

Have a nice day guys!

Hello loyal fans*! 

As you'll know if you've been following my Instagram updates (or lack thereof) and blog posts (the few there have been), this year has been a very busy one for me. I've smashed through some major life milestones and come out the other side with a smile on my face and a ring on my finger.

And it has passed so quickly, hasn't it? I know everyone says it, but the older I get, the quicker time seems to pass. I've only just got used to writing 2018 in the date, and now we're two months away from a new year! Can't believe it.

But I'm not done with this year yet. I've been working on a new book, and I wanted to get it to you before the end of the year. So, without further ado, I'd like to announce Removed Without Warning, my new collection of short stories, out on December 1st.

Check out the blurb and possible cover below. I say "possible" because there are a few I'm torn between at the moment; but I'll decide on one in the end, and you'll see it when you buy your copy anyway, won't you?

Wild animals in your driveway. Bricks through your windows. Emotions in bottles, and demons in your toys. 

All of this and more awaits, in this collection of twelve new stories from the author of Gods and Conquerors and Everything Around Me is Destroyed or Damaged.

Gritty, dark and oddly funny, Removed Without Warning is another handful of warped tales from lives you never knew you wanted to hear about.

Like the sound of that? You can preorder it on Kindle, or wait until December 1st to get yourself a paperback version from all good Amazons. It's not like you'll forget - I'll be going on and on about it till it's out. And if you're a #bookstagram reviewer, feel free to contact me if you're interested in an advance copy for review purposes. If I'm not feeling too scared that day, I might be able to hook you up!

There. That should keep you occupied for a while, until I finish that second novel I haven't even started yet...

*or, as I like to call you, mum and dad...

I thought I'd share some of the smaller ideas we had to make our day a bit bookish, since not all of them deserve their own post, but they're all easily doable and might help you with your own big day.

Books as Centrepieces

Look in the dustiest corner of any charity shop, second-hand bookstore or even antique shop, and you'll probably find some lovely bound books. We bought a shitload of these (more than 65, some for as little as 10p each), and stacked them up in piles of 5 or 6 to make lovely centrepieces for our tables.

Plonk a pretty bunch of flowers on top, and badda-bing, badda-boom, it's all Instagram worthy. I didn't get any photos of that, so I'll have to wait till I get the real photos and update this post. Watch this space.

How many guests are you inviting? Could you afford to give them a book each? Maybe. Penguin's Little Black Classics are only £52 at time of writing. That's 80 favours in one big box for 65p each! If you have even more than that, you could add all the books from the Modern Box Set in for 71p each.

Slap a cheeky ribbon around them, maybe whack a name tag on, and pow! A sweet little favour for everyone at your breakfast. Why is it called a wedding breakfast anyway? Who drinks wine at breakfast? This is madness.

The love of my life and I are getting married soon, so I thought I'd share some of the ways we've let our love of books light up our big day. I'll be making a few posts over the next couple of months, pretty much one for every good idea we have. Why keep them to ourselves, when fabulous Internet strangers could benefit from them too?

Our first idea: writing a book, to use as invitations.

I got the idea when I saw how cheap it was to print each copy of my novel, Gods and Conquerors, on demand. Comparing that to the price of some wedding invitations (wedding suppliers seem to just pick a number out of thin air), there was really no contest. Writing our own book to celebrate our very bookish day seemed like the best choice.

You can read our book at the end of this post, or simply read on to find out how to make one yourself.

First, you need to find yourself a print-on-demand self publishing service. I used createspace.com, but other services are available and no one is paying me to advertise for them, so I encourage you to shop around. It should also be noted that createspace is closing down and its services moving over to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), so that won't be an option soon, if it even is at the moment.

It's very easy to set up an account and create a new title, so I won't patronise you with a guide for that.

Next, you need to create the content: write a story to go in the book, and design the cover. Anyone who knows how to use Word (or similar) can easily create the interior, as KDP and createspace both provide good templates. For the cover, you might want to involve someone who knows a bit about graphic design. We didn't, because we were happy with our amateur cover; but if you want it to look really snazzy, perhaps you need to call in a favour or two.

When it comes to content, you probably need at least 14 pages of story before you reach the wedding details. I think all print-on-demand services have a minimum page count, so you couldn't just make it a simple invitation with no other content even if you wanted to. Why you would want to is a mystery to me - the whole point of this is to create an original and amusing book for your guests to read - but just in case, I thought I'd mention it.

We wrote ours in rhyme, the story of our relationship from beginning to now.

Once formatted (and re-drafted, and formatted again and again), you can upload your interior as a simple Word file, and your cover as .pdf. Then, you can order your proofs and approve your book.

"But, once it's approved, it's basically a self-published book - doesn't that mean anyone will be able to buy it?!" I hear you ask. And it's a valid concern; it was my biggest worry, too. But no, you don't have to publish to any online stores if you don't want to. On createspace, you could set it so that the only way to buy your book was through createspace.com (whether other services provide that facility, I couldn't say). We bought all our own copies, and then we trashed it after that.

So, as you can see, it's really simple. Don't let anyone charge you for it; if you're struggling and need some assistance, just reach out and I'll help if I can.

The pages I haven't included here contain all the vital details that would bore the average reader of this blog: accomodation, gifts, and RSVP requirements. There was nothing especially creative about those pages, so I'm sure you'll manage without them.

If you like this idea, feel free to copy it, and check out the rest of our bookish wedding ideas here. If you like them all, why not show me some love by buying one of my books? 

Sorry I haven't been around for a while. I've been on and off of Instagram too, doing various life admin things like organising our wedding and stuff. Also writing a new book, but more on that another time. For now, here's a picture of a cow and a roundup of short Instagram reviews I've written recently.

"The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal."

There is a Russian mole in the British intelligence service, and George Smiley is asked to come out of retirement to find him. He must wade through the secrets and lies of all the people he used to work with, uncovering things about his past and the lives of his colleagues that he had never known before.

Somewhere between the excellent writing style and the subtle and complex story of espionage and intrigue, this book hooked me. I absolutely loved it. The relationships between the characters; our thoughtful, quiet protagonist; the interlacing of past and present... It was all just brilliant.

Something I really loved is the quaintness of it all. No mobile phones, no Internet, no complicated forensics or global spy networks; just people, and paper, and telephone calls, and manilla folders in hotel rooms. It made the story more human, which is hard to do now that technology has taken over.

Not that that was a conscious decision - it was written in the 70s and set in the 70s, so they were quainter times.

Anyway, the mystery was also good. And the film is good too. Can't recommend this story highly enough.

5/5.

"When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction."

Devin Jones is a twenty-something working at a theme park over the summer. There was a murder at the park a few years ago that remains unsolved, but really, most of the book is just about his love life.

I wanted to like this book. Apart from the fact that the cover is great, it was also bought for me by the love of my life, and I like it when I like the books she gives me. But King just wouldn't let me like it.

It's marketed as a crime novel. It is published by an imprint called Hard Case Crime. But it's no crime novel at all, and certainly not hard. The mystery is alluded to a couple of times, then you have to wade through a very tedious 200 pages (yes, 200!!) before he decides to start investigating it, then he forgets all about it, and it is instantly solved for him around page 250. I'm not even exaggerating, the crime is that irrelevant.

So if it's not a crime novel, then what is it? Boring, mostly. It's just a novel about working a summer job, making friends, living a normal life. Yawn. Honestly, what you learn in the first 200 pages could have been told in 30. And it's so wholesome and PG, even a few F-bombs and a couple of C-bombs can't make it any edgier.

It was also intensely irritating that every woman in the story seemed to fall in love with the protagonist. He's the most boring nice guy in the world, but every woman he walks past wants to strip off for him as soon as she meets him. Awful.

Should have been a short story, at the most.

"In the midst of life, we are in death."

10 people are invited onto an island owned by one very mysterious U N Owen, for a variety of reasons. But when they start dying and learn that they are being killed for past crimes, they just wish they could get off it again.

This is my second Agatha Christie book. And this one, just like Murder on the Orient Express, felt like it was written for kids. Or by someone who hasn't read much, or didn't have an editor. But this is Agatha Christie, so that can't be true. It's just her style, but I'm not a fan.

For example, sometimes there will be a paragraph with a few revelations in it! And every sentence will end with an exclamation mark! As if that will increase the impact! But it doesn't! And there are other annoying things too... Like overuse of the ellipsis...

Anyway, that aside, this is a very entertaining story. It's fun to try and work out who's next and who's doing this, and she did well to hide it till the end - it wasn't the bloke I guessed it would be.

Recommended for fun and murder. And yes, I am going to pretend that this book didn't have a very different original title.

A woman stalks and harasses a man she barely knows, because she has convinced herself that she is in love with him. She writes him countless letters, and even sends an inappropriate fax to his work.

Sounds like the kind of creepy story I'd love. And I might have, if it wasn't true. This Dick is a real person, and the protagonist is Chris Kraus, the book's author. How minging is that?

But since it's apparently a novel, I don't know how much of it is fact and how much fiction. So let's pretend it's all fiction.

The protagonist of this book comes across as an obnoxiously pretentious intellectual who thinks that raiding the thesaurus and constructing all the most convoluted, overripe sentences she possibly can, each with as many obscure references as possible, will make her seem as intelligent as she keeps saying she is.

There doesn't seem to have been an editor. Whole paragraphs are begging to be cut, and the grammar is often questionable. Also, it's littered with this's. THIS'S. How is that better than "this is"?

Anyway. The book slaps itself on the back for saving feminism. But for the first half, you wonder what's feminist about it. Are you showing that women can be insane stalkers just as well as men? Well, I don't doubt that.

To be fair, in the latter half there are some good points about the injustice of how women are perceived compared to men. But they're hidden in such a flood of tangential, irrelevant crap that you wish a good book had made those points instead, so that they would be presented in a way that would be interesting instead of... this.

There is an afterword at the end of this edition, which says that the critics are wrong about this book, and then tries to explain why. What this told me was that they knew it was bad, and they felt the need to try to persuade us it isn't.

"Some people, if they didn't make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep."

Augie March is a likeable, normal American living in the 30s, growing up around people of all social standings and attitudes, trying to work out who he really is. And that's it really - this book is 500 pages of someone living a life.

In a way, it's like Stoner, which I loved. Nothing much happens - there is some action every now and then, but mostly it's just someone plodding along through life, doing stuff normal people in the real world might do. The problem is, where Stoner really got me, this one didn't.

I don't know why. It was well written, often amusing, and the "normal" things he did were actually often quite ridiculous so should have been more entertaining, but I just went through it feeling... Meh.

So it ended up being a struggle. But I must emphasise that it was well written and in places was quite fun. Just didn't do it for me, overall.

"You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself."

Spares tells the story of Jack Randall, drug addict and ex-cop living in a city which is a former flying shopping mall, trying to solve the mystery of who has kidnapped the clones be rescued from a life of slavery.

Except, it's not really. He forgets about the clones ("spares") pretty quickly, and really, for most of the book, I think he's just trying to work out who's shooting at him.

In my opinion, a good whodunnit should make the reader care about the result. They should want to know who did the crime, they should crave justice. But this book didn't achieve that for me - it changed its mind too much. One minute it was about the spares, then Randall's dead family, then a random bunch of murders in the city... Yes, it all comes together in the end, but on the way there were too many twists for me to care.

I also wasn't blown away by the writing. I saw a lot of my own style in there, from when I was just trying my hand at writing. And when I write like that, I hate myself. Clumsy sentences; paragraphs that are supposed to be funny and whimsical but end up missing the mark and being a bit embarrassing; poorly formed relationships between characters; bad dialogue...

BUT having said all that, when it worked, it worked. MMS came up with some great metaphors and some passages were very amusing. It was a mixed bag of ideas and half of them should have been cut, but the other half were good. It was also never slow or boring. It just wasn't a great whodunnit, I thought.