Frankie Chase, debut author of Bad Winner, on her route from meandering to meaningful, life’s diversions and finding inspiration where you least expect it.
Authoring is yet to make me my millions but it has saved me thousands. I reach for the pen like Bad Winner’s protagonist reaches for the bottle, and when others might be splurging on luxuries, partying or paying a therapist, you’ll find me stooped over my desk typing, wearing the same clothes I bought a decade ago — probably about the time I started writing my first novel.
The Meandering
I was drifting across South America, subsisting on the little I made from sporadic translation gigs, tired of travelling but reluctant to return to the dire wage-to-rent ratio and drizzle that miserly London sugared with novelty supper clubs and over-priced cocktail bars. So I decided to give myself a vocation: I would be an author. I started a short story and found I couldn’t stop, suddenly bolstered by the meaning and structure my wanderer’s lifestyle had come to lack. Best of all, I could delve back into my past and justify both the painful and the pointless, channelling failures, dead-end journeys, heartbreak and the insidious abuse I decided I had suffered at the hands of modern-day monster London.
I also used it to process moral complexities, inventing Bad Winner’s alternative community Ataraxia off the back of my six-month stint in a jungle cult. What could you do with an organisation that rescued so many refugees and orphans, but demanded guru worship and the renunciation of modern medicine? Put it in a novel! I also fell in love with my dreamy main man Marcel, creating a fantasy romance to distract from and accelerate the demise of my own fading relationship.
Writing Bad Winner at Work
Ten years later, I was back in the thick of the work-rent-drizzle, embroiled in a fling with my landlord (no, I did not get free rent). I had not managed to publish this first manuscript despite enough determination/delusion to see me pestering agents well into my thirties. The corporate Reception desk I wrote behind — initially the greatest writer’s hack — had become a stage for my failure. ‘Any luck with the novel?’ I’d get asked hundreds of times a week by kindly but clueless business people, and I became increasingly distanced from friends who were busy climbing their Monopoly career ladders and starting families.
A sudden primal panic set in and, aware of a sort of ticking sensation around each of my hips, I took the opportunity to move beyond the Reception desk, further into this wealthy and prestigious company’s fold, into a serendipitously available role in HR. I took advantage of the wellness benefits (free therapy) and before long I was in a serious relationship, saving up to buy a house, and words like mortgage, marriage and maternity had found their ways into my everyday vocabulary.
The Meaningful
One of the many reasons I put off having a baby was the effect it might have on my personality. The body horror was no secret, but what would it do to my mind? I kept reading about studies documenting significant brain changes but with no real narrative on what they meant, so naturally I envisaged a lobotomy effect. I’d come out the other side a doting trad wife, appetite only for Disney films and steamed vegetables. Either that or I’d join a mummune (I had a history). Neither of these scenarios played out; I was surprised to find almost the opposite was true. Sure, I looked at my baby through a magical rainbows-and-hearts filter, but beyond that, I saw red.
I crashed into motherhood; all the bougie courses and gadgets the internet told me to buy did zilch to prepare me for the physical demands and intellectual redundancy that new mumming entailed. I was laden with hyper-vigilance, a solid moral compass and a sense of duty — to challenge things. And there was so much to challenge! I met injustice after injustice that no amount of 21st-century feminist policy could counter. I fought many futile battles, notably with my prestigious and wealthy employer (who was refusing to let me return part-time), the council (who offered no solution to a very significant pram vs bin day problem) and my body (there was only so much structural integrity I could afford since the NHS physio was ghosting me).
Bad Winner was Born
I needed friends but community was only available on the end of a phone determined to sell me more gadgets and one-size-fits-all advice. So instead, I went in search of enemies — bad guys to bear the brunt of my incurable fury. I retreated inside my head, invented some patriarchal villains and set them loose in the wilds of Colombia (because I also needed a holiday). I twisted my old abandoned first plot into an adventure thriller that I now recognise as an unintentional allegory for maternal rage. Bad Winner was born.
While Bea, my protagonist, trained, I grew upper body strength my old yoga-loving self could only dream of. Bea fell in love, meanwhile kindness, for the first time, was sexy to me. Bea escaped a villain; I handed in my notice and got a payout that enabled me to keep writing. At every turn, there was a new fire to power my story. I wrote one-handed on my phone while my baby slept on my chest, and it took me back to South America — where I’d tapped out the original tale on a tablet during bus trips and hammock dozes. I was taking a little from that fluid life and using it to dilute my ultra-concentrated present.
(c) Frankie Chase
About Bad Winner:
Black sheep Bea craves freedom as much as her populist dad craves power. Intent on estranging her bigoted family, Bea’s embroiled herself in debt working a dead-end job planning competition prizes, gambling and drinking to forget. She whiles away the hours daydreaming, sparring with sociopathic brother Jonathan, a luxury masculine lifestyle blogger, and winning petty rebellions against boyfriend ‘Gray Ham’, a finance man with all Daddy’s aspirations but none of his charisma.
As the general election looms larger, pressure begins to mount, because Bea’s family rely on her silence to keep ruinous secrets buried. So when a particularly strong dose of escapism catapults her to Colombia, she crash-lands in real danger, Jonathan hot on her heels. Sobering up alongside stranger and partner-in-crime Marcel, she’s dragged kicking and screaming across the bumpy terrain of self-discovery. The body count rises as her battle for freedom becomes a bloody fight for survival, then a furious race for revenge.
Order your copy of Bad Winner online here.
And read more Writing & Me articles on Writing.ie here.
