I've been working on various life histories in the context of my writing and in terms of what I am trying to achieve in w3. This actually is the personal statement I made to a university in regard a PhD application.

Introduction

There have been very solid achievements in my writing life.

It is also true to say that difficulties in my getting published need to be explained.

It might be best to focus on the latter issues first.

Birmingham and Beyond

When I was studying English Language and Literature at Birmingham University, my academic studies overlapped the start of the rave era in the UK.

Issues

 I had underlying issues I was not even aware of. There were bottled up issues from early childhood, where I spent many years, from very early infancy, in institutional care. There were issues from being moved back in with my biological mother and her partner, at eight, in terms of my stepfather-to-be’s alcoholism, his own cultural issues, as an Indian immigrant, his violence in the home, and my mother’s mental health issues, also arising partly from being in care as a child, and from that relationship.

Enniskillen, Belfast and NYC

These combined issues were further compounded when, at fifteen, I somehow ended up at boarding school in Enniskillen. Indeed this was the real start of my own issues with alcohol. There was a lot of bullying in the school, and I also bullied others. By the time I had been expelled from Portora Royal for drunken violence, I was already up to my eyeballs with personal problems. I had however zero insight into any of them. I arrived at Birmingham from a year out in Belfast and NYC, and I had already developed a taste for soft and hard drugs. And in 1987, it was one year away from the Summer of Love, and Birmingham was a haven of drug taking already.

Back to Birmingham

I dived into the drink and drug lifestyle and became caught up in it very quickly. It was no wonder I dropped out during my finals, and no wonder that I ended up squatting in a derelict flat on a council estate in London, during that second intensive period of drinking and drug taking, there, and later, in Dublin.

At some level it was also true that I had taken a calculated decision to reject the high intellectualism of literary theory, and academia, in search of real life experience.

Dublin

I had wanted to become like Ken Kesey, but ultimately ended up, certainly for months at least, a tramp, on the streets of London, initially, and to some degree, at least, later, in Dublin, afterwards. Dublin was a little different. I had cleaned up at the family home, and embarked on a music course. Things deteriorated again however, very quickly, as the second wave of rave culture well and truly established itself in Ireland in 1992.

Back to London

A friend and I wrote streams of consciousness pieces in the National Library of Ireland, but I was more focussed on a new romantic involvement with a young Irish dancer. She unfortunately had her own woes – she had fractured her knee in a drunken escapade. We moved to London, via Barcelona, and found work in the restaurant and club trade. I went back to complete my degree, attended writing classes at the City Lit, and made strong efforts to stabilise myself, and pursue my creative goals.

I have little writing saved from this time, except a short film script from the City Lit class. This period did catalyse me however, and having finished my degree in English with Writing, at Middlesex, I secured a position reading screenplays for Peter O Toole’s agent, and writing opinions about them. I got to read a lot of screenplays, and wrote my own, but when the agency refused to consider my own film script, I had a temper tantrum and had to leave.

I was offered my position back, later on, when the agency relaunched, but I had lost interest by then, and was trying to write more film scripts. I wrote four. I had attended a seminar by a famous script analyst (Dov SS Simens), who had stated that one had to practise writing screenplays, even if they did not get produced.

Some producers did however ask to see new work, while passing on the screenplay in hand, and two producers met me. Both had worked on violent film concepts. One, the late Hercules Bellville, had been the creative executive on Sexy Beast, while the other, Rupert Preston, had been the associate producer of Bronson.

Neither project submitted to producers was, however, likely to have been viable at that stage.

I was coming to the end of my time pitching screenplays, as I felt I needed to get back into full time work. I moved into business development, and was successful in my roles, but only for short periods of time. I worked for several, fairly creative companies, as a sales executive, and this certainly increased my business skills, but I still felt I needed more if I was to succeed in independent film.

I made some money on a small property development, which very much benefited from the large rise in prices in London at that time, and I raised a considerable amount of money to study graduate law and tax, while also running a small music promotions company.

However, by the end of this time, I had also run out of steam, and in fact my stress had had very negative effects on my addictive behaviours. Although I had been clean since 1998 of all drugs, and alcohol, various programmes had not fully succeeded in helping me overcome all of my serious difficult behaviours. These impacted on me very heavily at this time.

I was studying additional postgraduate masters courses, in addition to what I had already taken, after a year of promoting music, and was managing a rental investment, and the debt associated with my courses. The stress overwhelmed me, despite many years of support in therapy and counselling, and in 12 step programmes, and martial arts and boxing. A relationship breakup followed, and, while my own family were going through an acrimonious divorce, everything got on top of me, and my addiction issues finally got the upper hand.

In some respects this had advantages. It forced me to face up to my debt and my residual addiction and behavioural issues, and it gave me an opportunity to see into worlds I would not otherwise have had the chance to gain insights into: prison, bail houses and probation hostels. I also had to research heavily in terms of the litigation I was involved in, but by the time I was ready to move back into my own apartment, my mother was becoming very frail in Ireland, and I decided to return back to the family home.

Back to Ireland

Once back, I had the opportunity to start writing again, while assisting in managing my mother’s care.

I got involved in the Northern Irish hip hop scene, but there were significant clashes, and ultimately I had to withdraw my interests. But I did spend time in Londonderry, Portrush, Coleraine and Belfast, with a number of underground but relatively prominent hip hop artists.

Eventually I was accepted on the Creative Writing Masters at NUIG, and I spent a term on the fiction and poetry strands, which were helpful, and on the drama strands, which were less so. However, there were difficulties.

The fiction teacher was a lover of experimental fiction, and my own work was probably not finding outlets because it was often too experimental. The poet tutor was very talented, but was not a mainstream poet, and she had a love for esoterica, or very obscure poets. The drama teacher had once been a successful actress and playwright, but this had been in the distant past, so she was not necessarily aligned with contemporary work. The entire course was very supportive of the American students, and the Irish students, but seemed less focused on the English writers, so it was a marginalising experience at some level, and there were significant clashes with the manager of the course.

I was nevertheless happy with the work I did on my autobiografictional writing, and when I withdrew from the course, I spent a good eighteen months working on completing the edit of that piece of work. This brought me up to 2016.

During that year I got involved in other things. I was playing basketball, and spent some time working on some music at home. In 2018 I had to refocus on my own personal development, and on my mother’s care, and while I spent some time editing my draft, towards a PhD application, I only got back to writing at the start of Covid. The four years following on from basketball had resulted in my writing taking a back seat.

My projects

My autobiographical project, In Between the Wretched Chaos, began as part of a 12 step programme, in 2010, where I was writing out my life history in the context of my relationship with money and debt, as my financial situation came crashing down on me in late 2009, one year after the global crash. It simply described all of the events in my childhood, up until 15: institutional care in a Baptists children home in the late sixties and early seventies (imagine that!), and then moving in with my mother and her alcoholic boyfriend at 8, and moving to Ireland at 15. It stopped before I started attending Portora, and covered a lot of my own thinking about the therapy I had engaged in in regard my childhood. When I returned to Ireland, and as part of the masters in creative writing at NUIG, which as I say, I started, and then left,  I adapted it into more of a novel form, but when I sent it to agents I still felt, and so did they, that it needed more story. I turned the first person inner mind dialogue into real dialogue, and converted it into the third person. Names had already been changed, so it was now looking much more like a piece of fiction. As it included some mental visions, I adapted these as part of a secondary narrative, where the fantasy world of the main protagonist became foregrounded. As part of a PhD application in art, I added more artistic sequences, but then decided, on the current MA, that I had overcomplicated it. So the manuscript has gone through many manifestations, and while substantial editing has occurred, it still requires a lot of work.

The poetry I wrote at NUIG was probably the closest I came to professional literary writing – the poems were heavily edited on the course - but the poems explored the many dark themes of my own life extensively, and even today can be difficult to listen to.

I also began a fully fictional novel at NUIG, which is about an Irish gangster who runs a club where teenagers take a lot of drugs, and who is being hassled by Republican paramilitaries. In his past he took a neighbour teenager friend to a rave in the woods, where occult practices were occurring, along with intense drinking and drug taking. He later bumps into this individual, but both are suffering from memory loss in regard what occurred, and the two begin to work things through about their own drinking, with hallucinatory episodes interweaving through the narrative.

This work is over 30 000 words, but has not been worked on for some years. It is called A Cold, Dead Space.

In 2020, after an Artists in Recovery course with friends online, I began to write a road movie about a friend and I in real life, although the road movie aspects are made up. The friend has long standing problems with drink and drugs, and my reformed character is trying to help him, by telling him stories of his adult past. This novel also uses dreams, and visions, interspersed with the stories about the past. The relationship between the two men slowly disintegrates, as the friend refuses to accept his own difficulties, and the character based on my own life has to let go, while on a road journey through Northern Ireland, from Belfast. This too is well developed, and is in the range of 40 000 words plus, and was submitted as the admission piece to the QUB and the MMU MA. It was called The Fragments and Hallucinations of Jethro Devi’s Lost Soul.

At MMU I initially focused on editing my autobiography, and huge developments occurred, in terms of my learning to write in a less cold way, in terms of my having previously written only film scripts. But in my second workshop I focussed on a piece of writing I had begun in the elective on Utopias and Dystopias, focusing much more on realistic writing, in a fundamental chronological form.

Two of my screenplays were based on hallucinatory type experiences, and two were very experimental, low budget, pieces based on my own severe dysfunctions in London. So having written two half completed novels, using similar devices, and having overcomplicated my autobiography, I have learnt some radical lessons at MMU about my writing, in terms of my also interweaving my writing with inner mind visions that, while very visual, do often make my work difficult to read.

Pig Top Farm, the work based on the utopian dystopian concept, is a work that is allowing me to fully discover my own creative self. I am consistently trying to keep it simple in terms of form, but even this writing has to be constantly examined in terms of overcomplication.

In many ways I have had to accept my own mental health issues and my own addiction issues, which, while very much under control, have also heavily influenced my writing style over a long period of time. In addition there have been major issues with writing blocks and creative stultification. Pig Top Farm is undoubtedly my best work of fiction to date.

The reason for this is that it is processing futuristic, speculative fiction type concepts that I find exhilarating, while also letting me look at many of the concerns that have often preoccupied me for long periods of time.

I have never been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders per se. My problems are to do with behavioural and psychological difficulties, and anxiety. Yet despite receiving a huge amount of help in my life from support centres, therapy, and 12 step programmes, and other outlets such as boxing and martial arts, and indeed creative programmes or pursuits, or even in terms of my own businesses, or businesses I have worked for, I have still taken extremely poor decisions, have been consistently overcome by emotional disturbance, and have been rocked by turbulence. So clearly my own impulsiveness has, along with, potentially, deep unresolved issues, heavily impacted on my life.

What then of those with far more severe backgrounds? It is not to denigrate my own childhood in care, but, in spite of that, I had a partial private education, in terms of 3 years in Portora, attended a good comprehensive in the UK, and have spent a long time in university education, and have had some good jobs, and, before my parents divorced, received financial support from my stepfather, and have always had emotional support from my mother, and for many years was involved in a relationship with an Irish woman, which, although unstable, as relationships go, nevertheless contained me to some degree.

Others have far more disturbing backgrounds, have had far more serious drug problems, and have had far more serious difficulties with criminality. So people are rehoused, sent on programmes, sent on courses, but many people do not necessarily benefit in a sustainable way. Many do, but denial, and unresolved issues, run deep. So government programmes fail across the board. This can be seen across the United Kingdom, and especially in Northern Ireland, where criminality  and drug dealing are still pervasive in communities, and people still struggle to reharmonise their lives after a variety of social problems and programmes.

To this end my current novel has created a luxury commune with every amenity, and an ethos that fundamentally is ethical and holistic. Only human interference acts to disrupt it, and with deep rooted problems himself, my main character, based loosely on someone I once knew, struggles to overcome his own rage, and the disruptions begin to affect him so negatively that he is at risk of falling back into his old ways. Various plotlines act upon his journey, including some which will, ultimately, operate in the envisioned NI community, that provides the backdrop for the story presented for this PhD – the security organisation at my English commune hail from the sect in Northern Ireland, which will set up its own ‘HQ’ commune there. These plotlines can provide conflict and intrigue, and tension, but both main plots in both stories are really about men trying to change. Everything can be provided to underpin the risks outlined above, in terms of personal journeys, but there is either a heavy cost, in terms of the NI concept, or there is human interference, in terms of the story I am writing currently.

Current Situation

I have applied for this PhD as there is funding available and I feel I could develop an excellent project with my concept. I cannot attend any Irish university within driving distance without funding, as my car is fifteen years old, and it will fall apart. Funding is required essentially to either fully maintain the car, or, in all likelihood, to purchase another second hand one that is in better condition. Due to my obligations, public transport is not an option.

While managing my mother’s care, currently planned to be in the home, once a care package is available, and writing projects, and exploring w3, or decentralised platforms, and the NFT market, in terms of fiction NFTs, or digital collectibles, in fiction, it is simply not feasible to manage my situation without a fully funded PhD, and in terms of my projects, and academic and business career, and what I am aiming to achieve, funding is vital. Otherwise I will have to continue on with my MA and convert it to an MFA and stay online, for the time being, while researching the Birmingham University online PhD.

While attending the university at least once a week should be viable with funding, I add that it is a long journey, and I do get tired. As mentioned to Sarah Stewart, I have already explored the context of my proposal physically, in terms of my many visits to NI, and the working class Loyalist cultures especially, of Sandy Row and the Shankill, over the last three years, as well as recent visits to West Tyrone and Western Londonderry county. More is required in terms of the latter, as this is the location for my imaginary commune, and more visits to Belfast will also be required.

I've been working on various life histories in the context of my writing and in terms of what I am trying to achieve in w3. This actually is the personal statement I made to a university in regard a PhD application.

Introduction

There have been very solid achievements in my writing life.

It is also true to say that difficulties in my getting published need to be explained.

It might be best to focus on the latter issues first.

Birmingham and Beyond

When I was studying English Language and Literature at Birmingham University, my academic studies overlapped the start of the rave era in the UK.

Issues

 I had underlying issues I was not even aware of. There were bottled up issues from early childhood, where I spent many years, from very early infancy, in institutional care. There were issues from being moved back in with my biological mother and her partner, at eight, in terms of my stepfather-to-be’s alcoholism, his own cultural issues, as an Indian immigrant, his violence in the home, and my mother’s mental health issues, also arising partly from being in care as a child, and from that relationship.

Enniskillen, Belfast and NYC

These combined issues were further compounded when, at fifteen, I somehow ended up at boarding school in Enniskillen. Indeed this was the real start of my own issues with alcohol. There was a lot of bullying in the school, and I also bullied others. By the time I had been expelled from Portora Royal for drunken violence, I was already up to my eyeballs with personal problems. I had however zero insight into any of them. I arrived at Birmingham from a year out in Belfast and NYC, and I had already developed a taste for soft and hard drugs. And in 1987, it was one year away from the Summer of Love, and Birmingham was a haven of drug taking already.

Back to Birmingham

I dived into the drink and drug lifestyle and became caught up in it very quickly. It was no wonder I dropped out during my finals, and no wonder that I ended up squatting in a derelict flat on a council estate in London, during that second intensive period of drinking and drug taking, there, and later, in Dublin.

At some level it was also true that I had taken a calculated decision to reject the high intellectualism of literary theory, and academia, in search of real life experience.

Dublin

I had wanted to become like Ken Kesey, but ultimately ended up, certainly for months at least, a tramp, on the streets of London, initially, and to some degree, at least, later, in Dublin, afterwards. Dublin was a little different. I had cleaned up at the family home, and embarked on a music course. Things deteriorated again however, very quickly, as the second wave of rave culture well and truly established itself in Ireland in 1992.

Back to London

A friend and I wrote streams of consciousness pieces in the National Library of Ireland, but I was more focussed on a new romantic involvement with a young Irish dancer. She unfortunately had her own woes – she had fractured her knee in a drunken escapade. We moved to London, via Barcelona, and found work in the restaurant and club trade. I went back to complete my degree, attended writing classes at the City Lit, and made strong efforts to stabilise myself, and pursue my creative goals.

I have little writing saved from this time, except a short film script from the City Lit class. This period did catalyse me however, and having finished my degree in English with Writing, at Middlesex, I secured a position reading screenplays for Peter O Toole’s agent, and writing opinions about them. I got to read a lot of screenplays, and wrote my own, but when the agency refused to consider my own film script, I had a temper tantrum and had to leave.

I was offered my position back, later on, when the agency relaunched, but I had lost interest by then, and was trying to write more film scripts. I wrote four. I had attended a seminar by a famous script analyst (Dov SS Simens), who had stated that one had to practise writing screenplays, even if they did not get produced.

Some producers did however ask to see new work, while passing on the screenplay in hand, and two producers met me. Both had worked on violent film concepts. One, the late Hercules Bellville, had been the creative executive on Sexy Beast, while the other, Rupert Preston, had been the associate producer of Bronson.

Neither project submitted to producers was, however, likely to have been viable at that stage.

I was coming to the end of my time pitching screenplays, as I felt I needed to get back into full time work. I moved into business development, and was successful in my roles, but only for short periods of time. I worked for several, fairly creative companies, as a sales executive, and this certainly increased my business skills, but I still felt I needed more if I was to succeed in independent film.

I made some money on a small property development, which very much benefited from the large rise in prices in London at that time, and I raised a considerable amount of money to study graduate law and tax, while also running a small music promotions company.

However, by the end of this time, I had also run out of steam, and in fact my stress had had very negative effects on my addictive behaviours. Although I had been clean since 1998 of all drugs, and alcohol, various programmes had not fully succeeded in helping me overcome all of my serious difficult behaviours. These impacted on me very heavily at this time.

I was studying additional postgraduate masters courses, in addition to what I had already taken, after a year of promoting music, and was managing a rental investment, and the debt associated with my courses. The stress overwhelmed me, despite many years of support in therapy and counselling, and in 12 step programmes, and martial arts and boxing. A relationship breakup followed, and, while my own family were going through an acrimonious divorce, everything got on top of me, and my addiction issues finally got the upper hand.

In some respects this had advantages. It forced me to face up to my debt and my residual addiction and behavioural issues, and it gave me an opportunity to see into worlds I would not otherwise have had the chance to gain insights into: prison, bail houses and probation hostels. I also had to research heavily in terms of the litigation I was involved in, but by the time I was ready to move back into my own apartment, my mother was becoming very frail in Ireland, and I decided to return back to the family home.

Back to Ireland

Once back, I had the opportunity to start writing again, while assisting in managing my mother’s care.

I got involved in the Northern Irish hip hop scene, but there were significant clashes, and ultimately I had to withdraw my interests. But I did spend time in Londonderry, Portrush, Coleraine and Belfast, with a number of underground but relatively prominent hip hop artists.

Eventually I was accepted on the Creative Writing Masters at NUIG, and I spent a term on the fiction and poetry strands, which were helpful, and on the drama strands, which were less so. However, there were difficulties.

The fiction teacher was a lover of experimental fiction, and my own work was probably not finding outlets because it was often too experimental. The poet tutor was very talented, but was not a mainstream poet, and she had a love for esoterica, or very obscure poets. The drama teacher had once been a successful actress and playwright, but this had been in the distant past, so she was not necessarily aligned with contemporary work. The entire course was very supportive of the American students, and the Irish students, but seemed less focused on the English writers, so it was a marginalising experience at some level, and there were significant clashes with the manager of the course.

I was nevertheless happy with the work I did on my autobiografictional writing, and when I withdrew from the course, I spent a good eighteen months working on completing the edit of that piece of work. This brought me up to 2016.

During that year I got involved in other things. I was playing basketball, and spent some time working on some music at home. In 2018 I had to refocus on my own personal development, and on my mother’s care, and while I spent some time editing my draft, towards a PhD application, I only got back to writing at the start of Covid. The four years following on from basketball had resulted in my writing taking a back seat.

My projects

My autobiographical project, In Between the Wretched Chaos, began as part of a 12 step programme, in 2010, where I was writing out my life history in the context of my relationship with money and debt, as my financial situation came crashing down on me in late 2009, one year after the global crash. It simply described all of the events in my childhood, up until 15: institutional care in a Baptists children home in the late sixties and early seventies (imagine that!), and then moving in with my mother and her alcoholic boyfriend at 8, and moving to Ireland at 15. It stopped before I started attending Portora, and covered a lot of my own thinking about the therapy I had engaged in in regard my childhood. When I returned to Ireland, and as part of the masters in creative writing at NUIG, which as I say, I started, and then left,  I adapted it into more of a novel form, but when I sent it to agents I still felt, and so did they, that it needed more story. I turned the first person inner mind dialogue into real dialogue, and converted it into the third person. Names had already been changed, so it was now looking much more like a piece of fiction. As it included some mental visions, I adapted these as part of a secondary narrative, where the fantasy world of the main protagonist became foregrounded. As part of a PhD application in art, I added more artistic sequences, but then decided, on the current MA, that I had overcomplicated it. So the manuscript has gone through many manifestations, and while substantial editing has occurred, it still requires a lot of work.

The poetry I wrote at NUIG was probably the closest I came to professional literary writing – the poems were heavily edited on the course - but the poems explored the many dark themes of my own life extensively, and even today can be difficult to listen to.

I also began a fully fictional novel at NUIG, which is about an Irish gangster who runs a club where teenagers take a lot of drugs, and who is being hassled by Republican paramilitaries. In his past he took a neighbour teenager friend to a rave in the woods, where occult practices were occurring, along with intense drinking and drug taking. He later bumps into this individual, but both are suffering from memory loss in regard what occurred, and the two begin to work things through about their own drinking, with hallucinatory episodes interweaving through the narrative.

This work is over 30 000 words, but has not been worked on for some years. It is called A Cold, Dead Space.

In 2020, after an Artists in Recovery course with friends online, I began to write a road movie about a friend and I in real life, although the road movie aspects are made up. The friend has long standing problems with drink and drugs, and my reformed character is trying to help him, by telling him stories of his adult past. This novel also uses dreams, and visions, interspersed with the stories about the past. The relationship between the two men slowly disintegrates, as the friend refuses to accept his own difficulties, and the character based on my own life has to let go, while on a road journey through Northern Ireland, from Belfast. This too is well developed, and is in the range of 40 000 words plus, and was submitted as the admission piece to the QUB and the MMU MA. It was called The Fragments and Hallucinations of Jethro Devi’s Lost Soul.

At MMU I initially focused on editing my autobiography, and huge developments occurred, in terms of my learning to write in a less cold way, in terms of my having previously written only film scripts. But in my second workshop I focussed on a piece of writing I had begun in the elective on Utopias and Dystopias, focusing much more on realistic writing, in a fundamental chronological form.

Two of my screenplays were based on hallucinatory type experiences, and two were very experimental, low budget, pieces based on my own severe dysfunctions in London. So having written two half completed novels, using similar devices, and having overcomplicated my autobiography, I have learnt some radical lessons at MMU about my writing, in terms of my also interweaving my writing with inner mind visions that, while very visual, do often make my work difficult to read.

Pig Top Farm, the work based on the utopian dystopian concept, is a work that is allowing me to fully discover my own creative self. I am consistently trying to keep it simple in terms of form, but even this writing has to be constantly examined in terms of overcomplication.

In many ways I have had to accept my own mental health issues and my own addiction issues, which, while very much under control, have also heavily influenced my writing style over a long period of time. In addition there have been major issues with writing blocks and creative stultification. Pig Top Farm is undoubtedly my best work of fiction to date.

The reason for this is that it is processing futuristic, speculative fiction type concepts that I find exhilarating, while also letting me look at many of the concerns that have often preoccupied me for long periods of time.

I have never been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders per se. My problems are to do with behavioural and psychological difficulties, and anxiety. Yet despite receiving a huge amount of help in my life from support centres, therapy, and 12 step programmes, and other outlets such as boxing and martial arts, and indeed creative programmes or pursuits, or even in terms of my own businesses, or businesses I have worked for, I have still taken extremely poor decisions, have been consistently overcome by emotional disturbance, and have been rocked by turbulence. So clearly my own impulsiveness has, along with, potentially, deep unresolved issues, heavily impacted on my life.

What then of those with far more severe backgrounds? It is not to denigrate my own childhood in care, but, in spite of that, I had a partial private education, in terms of 3 years in Portora, attended a good comprehensive in the UK, and have spent a long time in university education, and have had some good jobs, and, before my parents divorced, received financial support from my stepfather, and have always had emotional support from my mother, and for many years was involved in a relationship with an Irish woman, which, although unstable, as relationships go, nevertheless contained me to some degree.

Others have far more disturbing backgrounds, have had far more serious drug problems, and have had far more serious difficulties with criminality. So people are rehoused, sent on programmes, sent on courses, but many people do not necessarily benefit in a sustainable way. Many do, but denial, and unresolved issues, run deep. So government programmes fail across the board. This can be seen across the United Kingdom, and especially in Northern Ireland, where criminality  and drug dealing are still pervasive in communities, and people still struggle to reharmonise their lives after a variety of social problems and programmes.

To this end my current novel has created a luxury commune with every amenity, and an ethos that fundamentally is ethical and holistic. Only human interference acts to disrupt it, and with deep rooted problems himself, my main character, based loosely on someone I once knew, struggles to overcome his own rage, and the disruptions begin to affect him so negatively that he is at risk of falling back into his old ways. Various plotlines act upon his journey, including some which will, ultimately, operate in the envisioned NI community, that provides the backdrop for the story presented for this PhD – the security organisation at my English commune hail from the sect in Northern Ireland, which will set up its own ‘HQ’ commune there. These plotlines can provide conflict and intrigue, and tension, but both main plots in both stories are really about men trying to change. Everything can be provided to underpin the risks outlined above, in terms of personal journeys, but there is either a heavy cost, in terms of the NI concept, or there is human interference, in terms of the story I am writing currently.

Current Situation

I have applied for this PhD as there is funding available and I feel I could develop an excellent project with my concept. I cannot attend any Irish university within driving distance without funding, as my car is fifteen years old, and it will fall apart. Funding is required essentially to either fully maintain the car, or, in all likelihood, to purchase another second hand one that is in better condition. Due to my obligations, public transport is not an option.

While managing my mother’s care, currently planned to be in the home, once a care package is available, and writing projects, and exploring w3, or decentralised platforms, and the NFT market, in terms of fiction NFTs, or digital collectibles, in fiction, it is simply not feasible to manage my situation without a fully funded PhD, and in terms of my projects, and academic and business career, and what I am aiming to achieve, funding is vital. Otherwise I will have to continue on with my MA and convert it to an MFA and stay online, for the time being, while researching the Birmingham University online PhD.

While attending the university at least once a week should be viable with funding, I add that it is a long journey, and I do get tired. As mentioned to Sarah Stewart, I have already explored the context of my proposal physically, in terms of my many visits to NI, and the working class Loyalist cultures especially, of Sandy Row and the Shankill, over the last three years, as well as recent visits to West Tyrone and Western Londonderry county. More is required in terms of the latter, as this is the location for my imaginary commune, and more visits to Belfast will also be required.