Welcome to Phase Two!
Today I’m taking you all the way back to 1997—my senior year of high school. I sat in class doing what I usually did in school: writing instead of paying attention to the lesson. On that particular autumn day, I began the short story that would become Nothing: A Manic Expression Story, with no idea I was laying the foundation for my life’s work.
Outside of minor tweaks over the years, Nothing has remained largely untouched from the version I wrote thirty years ago. There is a raw, teenage angst to it that I wouldn’t want to neuter through an adult lens. I still consider it one of the best things I’ve ever written—the moment I truly stepped up my game as a writer.
While my original concept for the character of Nothing was a metaphor for depression, over time that ghostly figure emerged as the big bad of the entire Manic Expression universe. When the stories are read chronologically, we begin with Nothing and we end with Nothing. Its sinister influence weaves through the millennium, whether our characters realize it or not.
What Nothing is about: The story follows Timothy from age five to twenty-one. As a young boy he is haunted by a specter that manipulates his senses and sends him into nightly panics. Throughout childhood and adolescence, he feels the presence of this being, which he comes to call Nothing. Inspired by the haunting, Timothy gains a reputation as a gifted painter and finds friends and admirers. But Nothing always lingers at the edge of his vision, waiting to take everything away.
The long, strange road to this release: As I mentioned, I view Nothing as a metaphor for depression, but the first few pages—set when Timothy is five years old—are entirely autobiographical. The voices. The shrinking room. The shadowy figure in my parents’ bedroom. Those are all real memories, written exactly as I remembered them.
Do I believe my childhood home was haunted? Probably not. I suffered from insomnia at a very young age, and my imagination was overactive. Still, I don’t entirely rule out the possibility that my personal Nothing was real. As long as I lived in that house, I remained scared to enter that back bedroom in the dark.
By the time I wrote those memories down and built a story around them, I was trying to exorcise the demon I would later recognize as clinical depression. I wasn’t diagnosed until my late thirties, but my adolescence was plagued by dark thoughts and suicidal ideation. Nothing was a panicked, desperate cry for help. I genuinely believed I was on the same tragic path as Timothy and would inevitably share his fate.
Over the years I’ve made many revisions across the Manic Expression stories. Nothing has always required the fewest changes. That teenage voice is authentic, raw, and strangely assured. As I say that, I feel like I’m praising someone else entirely. The author of Nothing is not the man I am at forty-six. I could never write that story today. It belongs to the seventeen-year-old hunched over his school desk, ignoring his teacher while trying to make sense of the storm inside him.
Nothing is the first story of Phase Two. While the previous releases led to the collection Reflections, this one kicks off Volume Two—Ghosts.
Grab your copy today!
Let me know what you think of this new story. I’d love to hear any ghost stories (or childhood nightmares) from your own youth.
See you next week for another new release!
James Daniel Walsh
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