Today I'm handing over to J.J. Patrick, author of Forever Completely. I first heard about this author when I saw a tweet by his publishers Cynefin Road asking for book bloggers to read and his book. Of course as soon as I saw the tweet I immediately headed off to take a look even though I'm not taking on any new books at the moment, it doesn't hurt to look right, and book bloggers have their own personal TBR's as well even if they are all very dusty and neglected! I thought that the book sounded interesting but I really couldn't take on another review book so I offered to do a hand over post instead so I'd like to introduce you all to J.J. Patrick and welcome him to The Haphazardous Hippo.
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| Photo courtesy of Cynefin Road |
James
once did a good thing. He now lives a quiet life and is happy with his lot,
which is all that really matters. He’s been compelled to write ever since he
can remember.
J.J.
Patrick — or JP to those who know he’s nothing but trouble — was born in the
New Forest and did most of his growing up in Derbyshire.
He
served as a police officer for ten years, resigning from New Scotland Yard
having acted as a whistle-blower, kicking off a parliamentary inquiry into the
manipulation of crime figures by the police. He received open praise at the
highest levels for his integrity.
At a
bit of a loose end — largely being seen as an unemployable risk to skeletons in
closets everywhere — he opened a pub. Wrestling a road closure, along with his
own demons and ghosts, he was bankrupted and lost everything in the spring of
2016.
If
you knew him, you’d say that the broken pieces fit together much better
nowadays.
Forever Completely is an unapologetically
unique debut by J.J. Patrick, set in a haphazard world of love, psychopathic
primates, hodgepodge witchcraft and the apocalyptic end of mankind.
He
doesn’t matter. That’s how he feels, writing a bitter note on a Saturday
morning. He’s lost his relationship, gone bankrupt and lives in a drug infested
sink estate…until he’s shown a vision of the end of the world by two ancient
deities.
Join
a lovelorn mess of a man as he is forced to face up to what he deserves and
save the Earth, with the help of a nice old dear and her collection of
eye-popping tracksuits…
“A brilliantly
haphazard, broken glory all of its own. Forever Completely is utterly unashamed
of itself…”
“I can’t
compare this book to anything because I have never read anything like this
before. Witches, the apocalypse, love, hate and redemption. I don’t usually
read fantasy fiction, but the author makes an unbelievable world so believable
that I didn’t want the book to end”
“This deserves
to sell a million and be made into a film, top drawer stuff. Reading it was the
literary equivalent of smoking a joint, drinking five pints of scrumpy,
listening to early Pink Floyd with Syd Barret while watching Saving Private
Ryan.”
Forever Completely is available worldwide now. You can find it listed on all online retailers and distributors in hardcover, and in all ebook formats including Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, Booktopia…and everywhere else.
* * * *
Five Things About J.J. Patrick and
Forever Completely:
J.J. Patrick was serving as a police
officer, working as a specialist analyst for Scotland Yard, when he uncovered
the mass manipulation of crime figures by the police service, to make it look
as if serious offences including rape were reducing. Despite being disciplined
and threatened with dismissal for raising concerns he approached Parliament and
sparked the Public Administration Select Committee inquiry into crime
statistics. As a result, police recorded crime figures were stripped of their
status as a trusted national statistic and the Home Secretary and Prime
Minister made commitments to improving the protections for whistleblowers. In
the final parliamentary report he received the highest possible praise: “We are indebted to PC Patrick for his
courage in speaking out, in fulfilment of his duty to the highest standards of
public service, despite intense pressures to the contrary”. He retired from
policing in May 2014.
After a year of struggling to find work,
he managed to privately pull together some money and took on a dilapidated
public house in Essex. The building was first constructed in the 1700s had been
in steep decline for many years but he took on the renovation work himself,
transforming the building inside and out, working gruelling eighteen hour days
before opening the doors on the new pub in April 2015. However, all was not to
be plain sailing. Due to the years of adverse pressure his marriage collapsed
in September 2015 and then, in October, Essex Highways closed the road on which
the pub stood for four months and the business simply could not survive. In
March 2016 he closed the doors for the last time and was bankrupted on March
the 17th. He lost his business and his home in one day. He was left broken and
had his heart broken not long after.
With help from his father, he managed to
secure a bedsit in Colchester and found work as a gardener. Talking about this
period, he says: “It’s a bedsit, and not
a good one. I can’t describe the horror of lying in the dark, listening to the
sounds of an alcoholic Scot screaming and urinating on the floor directly
above, leaving you to wait for his bodily fluids to seep through the plaster
and drip into your space. Between the 29th of March and the 28th of May this
year I was paid £570, out of which I had to pay my phone bill, so I could talk
to my kids, and £380 rent for the room. You can’t even get a payday loan when
you’re bankrupt and I’d run out of things to sell so I lived on crackers,
despite the job being physical, and eventually had to resort to accepting
charitable offers from people as the effects of malnutrition set in. I had no
body fat at all by May. There comes a time when you take a look around and
realise you are fucked. You reside in a hovel, well below the breadline, and
you aren’t living. A useless fucking charity case, you’re just looking for a
way to survive. There is no near miss, you are either destitute or you’re not.
I was and it’s fucking awful”. He has chosen to donate 10% of the proceeds
from Forever Completely to charities supporting people in poverty.
James turned to writing as an escape
from his surroundings, each day returning from work and sitting until the early
hours writing, bleeding at the typewriter in the best tradition of Hemingway as
he desperately tried to survive. “Within
a week I was staring at the rough draft of Forever Completely, and those 30,000
words saved me. By the end of May the final draft was done and when I
tentatively sent the manuscript out to beta readers I started to believe the
magic in that story could do more than take me away from my soul-crushing
surroundings. More than provide a waking dream. I saw a way out and played my
usual game of Kipling’s pitch and toss, one of the reasons I get affectionately
referred to as the walking embodiment of If”. There was a desk in his room but
no chair, so the whole book was written with James sat on a scraggy sofa,
pulled up close the keyboard with two cushions underneath him.
J.J. Patrick refuses to give up, even though he
probably should have, and he is never ashamed to say he came close to the rope
once or twice when things were at their worst. But he’s still here because of
his two children, whom he loves more than anything else and is determined not
to stay down for long. His policing and whistleblowing memoir, The Rest Is
Silence, is being released on the 19th of November 2016 – the third anniversary
of the parliamentary inquiry and he’s currently writing two more fiction works,
due in the spring and summer of 2017. He also has to fit in a few weeks in
Mexico, helping them review the way they record and audit murder.
I'd like to thank both J.J. Patrick and his publishers Cynefin Road for today's post.
