It was a fiction that allowed me to escape. I created my reflection as a character at the end of ‘The Imnothero Principle’. I was very depressed at the time and simply no longer wanted to be myself any more.
Becoming my reflection enabled me to step surreptitiously sideways and be released from responsibility for what I was writing. It enabled me to become Melissa in ‘Splatterpuss’. I was able to escape to a world where I could be a beautiful, sexy woman.
I’d found somewhere I could be happy and have fun. I couldn’t do that in the real world at that time. The escapist aspect began with “Im-not-hero”. At the beginning I pronounced that “I’m no thero”.
Swapping myself with my reflection catapulted me into a whole new sandpit where I could safely build my silly castles and utilise my personal impotence and hopelessness to create mayhem. At times I would fall into the vortex. I usually felt like I was camped beside it on a ledge. When I fell in I felt utter despair but I also felt a form of omniscience where I could link anything in the universe with anything else.
This feeling has eluded me in my later writing. I am no longer suicidally depressed. It passed. But so did that exalted place on that ledge balanced precariously beside the vortex.
