I don't know what it is about flu, which is often ridiculed in men, I've had it maybe four or five times and unlike a heavy cold has such overbearing psychological impact that I've grown to dread it. It's the rollover lottery of depression and leaves you spiralling down in that heady mix of wallowing self failure and an inability to actually enjoy anything. I mean anything, an you ache and cough and your skin hurts. But there are some rewards in the hallucinatory shivery bed clothes. Firstly, I've lost nearly a stone in weight. That should be packaged up for folks. Buy your flu here, double strength, max strength flu with combined emaciation. Secondly, it always causes a kind of degraded life assessment, the kind when you think everything's gone wrong, everything is awful and you need to take up a new career, like highwayman or corporate drone in some faceless cash-ridden, advance-spewing trade publisher. Yeah, I could really go that. Let someone else pay the goddamn bills for once. So there I was down my lowest ebb, in fact less an ebb more a kind of stagnant low puddle, a smelly one loaded with dead memories, and I started thinking about the po biz and writing and the silly factions and nepotistic back scratching, the prize fixing, the militiaristic lauding of some talent, like old farts playing their pawns on the literary chess-scape. And for a moment I thought, well, that's it, I've really had my fill, someone else can try breaking new talent, broadening the art, I'll go back to being a writer and see if I can find a way to ride the gravy train. But this self-hating phase has now passed, so the damn virus must be leaving my worn out bod, and I feel refreshed enough to remember that we just have to keep going, that there's no giving up. That we will win through because we will just never stop. If that sounds vaguely combative, I guess it is. What so often helps indie publishers to succeed is sheer bloody-minded tenacity. As the fug of flu recedes, I can see that more clearly. All I have to do now is find time to get a private life back and write and write and write.