MARK MORRIS

I've been meaning to update this for a while now, but I've had a horrendous couple of weeks. It started a week last Tuesday when I woke up with a sore, red eye. At first I thought little of it, but the next day it was worse, so I made an appointment with my local GP, fully expecting him to prescribe me some drops or something. However he diagnosed an ulcerated eyeball and said that I needed to go immediately to the Eye Clinic in York. He even telephoned them while I was in his consulting room to let them know I was on the way.

Of course, his prompt action was commendable, but it was bloody alarming for me as the patient - not least because I was on my own for the week. My son was off on a school skiing trip in Italy, and, because it was half-term and I had a ton of work to do, my wife had taken my daughter down to London for a few days to visit some friends and see Wicked: The Musical.

So off I toddled, via bus and taxi, fully expecting to be told I'd be blind within a week and dead not long after. Fortunately the diagnosis wasn't so extreme, but apparently they do like to treat these kinds of things quickly because there is always the possibility they can develop into "something nasty" if left - a shuddersome phrase if ever I heard one. After various ocular examinations, I was given three lots of drops, some ointment and some tablets and was told to be back the next morning at 8:45a.m.

The next week or so was pretty horrible. I had to take daily trips to the Eye Clinic for status reports, and despite all my medication the eye got worse. By the weekend I couldn't work, read, watch TV or sleep. The pain was roughly akin to having a eye-full of barbed wire. I had blurred vision and was extremely sensitive to light, which meant my instinct was to close my eye the whole time. The only trouble was, closing my eye was utter bloody agony.

I finally turned the corner a week or so ago, and - touchwood - have been improving steadily since. I still had blurred vision and was light sensitive up until this weekend, and will still be putting drops in my eye for at least the next 10 days, but I'm finally back doing all the things I couldn't do a week ago.

Anyway, enough of the physical ailments and back to the writing malarky. I have finally, albeit a little later than I anticipated, submitted my final draft manuscript of The Deluge to my US editor, Don D'Auria at Leisure Books. I'm really pleased with the novel, and I only hope Don is too. All being well, The Deluge should see publication late this year (it's currently scheduled for December, so stick it on your Christmas list).

One thing that cheered me up during my eye nightmare was the news that Cinema Macabre (see Books page) has been nominated for a 2006 Stoker (World Horror Award) in the Non Fiction category. The Awards Banquet will be held at the World Horror Convention in Toronto on Saturday 31st March, and I'll be there - I'll be flying out on Thursday 29th with fellow Brits, Tim Lebbon and Stephen Volk - so keep your fingers crossed.

And finally, my good mate Sarah Pinborough recently "tagged" me on her website - which basically means that I have to reveal 5 previously unknown facts about myself. So here goes:

1) When I was two or three I was staying with my paternal grandmother after my grandad's recent death, and happened across a metal sieve in a cupboard full of his many pills. Thinking they were sweets, I scoffed the lot (I have a vague memory of being disappointed that they didn't taste very nice) and had to be rushed to hospital to have my stomach pumped out. Apparently as I was lying on the operating table having plastic tubes rammed up my nose, I directed a constant stream of expletives at the medical staff (well, according to my mum I kept shouting the word "bugger" over and over again). Ah, you see, even back then I had a way with words.

2) Between the ages of 5-9 I lived in Hong Kong. In front of our block of flats was a triangle of trees and bushes which we referred to as "the shortcut", and which I walked through every day on my way home from school to get to the block of flats where we lived. One day I was about to enter the shortcut, to put my foot down on a black log in my path, in fact, when the log moved. Realising it was a snake I ran home the long way and told my mum there was a snake in the shortcut. For the next hour we stood out on our 10th floor balcony, which overlooked the shortcut, to see whether anything would emerge. Sure enough, a huge black snake eventually appeared and slithered across the road. I'm not sure how long it was, but I have a vivid memory of it stretching from one side of the road to the other. We looked it up in my dad's Snakes of Hong Kong book and discovered it was a mountain snake of some kind. It was the biggest snake in Hong Kong, though apparently not poisonous.

3) I was at school in Huddersfield in the mid-70s during the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. I had a friend called Nick, who lived at the far end of a very long straight road which stretches out of Huddersfield town centre and eventually leads on to the M62 motorway. At school, the morning after Peter Sutcliffe had murdered a Huddersfield prostitute called (I think) Helen Rytka, Nick told me that a man had called at their house the previous evening asking for directions back on to the motorway. I remember him telling me that the man had a beard and strange eyes and that he was acting as if he was drugged (this was later confirmed by Nick's dad). A few years later, when Sutcliffe was eventually caught, both of them identified him as the man who had called at their house that night.

4) When I was a student in Leeds, Soft Cell singer Marc Almond used to come round to our house for tea. He was a friend of another of my housemate's, Kirk. I never really got to know him that well, though from the brief conversations I had with him he seemed like a nice guy.

5) I used to be a lead singer in a punk band called The Noise. We gigged around the local area, and briefly became notorious when a concert we did at a Huddersfield college ended in a riot. The event was a local Bands Night, and we had brought a big following with us - we had a largish group of fairly dedicated fans called The Noise Boys. The trouble started when the security at the event (the college rugby team) got nervous about our fans pogoing at the front of the stage as we performed. After two songs we were told to cut short our set, whereupon an argument, and then a fight, ensued. Within a few minutes this had escalated into a full-scale brawl, involving flying chairs, broken windows etc. The next day we were on the front page of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, where our notoriety was likened to that of The Sex Pistols (a proud moment). This, however, proved to be the height of our fame. Due to internal ructions we disbanded soon after.

Okay, that's my lot. And now, as tradition demands, I have to tag a couple of other people. So Stephen Gallagher and Kealan Patrick Burke, consider yourselves tagged.