'A Book?' He Wrote.

Hello dear readers!

And a happy Mothers Day to one and all!

Now, I’ve blogged on the subject of my most sainted mama before, namely here, and I think it’s fair to say that the post still stands as testament to the really quite remarkable woman that I owe my existence to.

For this week’s offering I want to move away from the hearts and flowers, and the Hallmark cards and I want to get just a little bit selfish. This week I want to talk about me, (me, me!) and something that is becoming more and more important to me as the years tick by. Something personal. Something I have always aspired to; and something that I am, in fact, doing at this very moment.

I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear that I’m talking about my writing.

Night Nite
It’s been almost five years now since I started this most venerable of tomes. That’s a little longer than I thought and I’m sure it’s longer than the vast majority of readers have had the fortitude to withstand but I’ve checked and this post`, the very first, was posted on the first of July 2015. Hopefully you can detect perhaps just a slight progression from that short and somewhat shaky start.

As those five years have passed the blog has gone through a number of changes. Some have been for the best, others… less so. The latest was the decision to move from a weekly post to a fortnightly one. This had nothing to do with battle-royale shooting games you understand, but it did have everything to do with the changes that MS and the subsequent screeching stop in my nine-to-five vocational activities.

Short Story Long
It wasn’t just the lack of anything close to an active life that informed that decision, although inform it it most certainly did. Blog posts are a little harder to write when a given week has involved sitting around playing Xbox games and doing the housework (Not sure how many of you would be interested in my views on laundry detergent, or my flailing attempts to shoot aliens). Mostly though the sacrifice has been made to allow me to concentrate on another small writing project that I’ve embarked on.

I’m writing a book.

It’s something I’ve always fancied having a go at. Seeing my name on the spine of a book in branch or Waterstone’s or WH Smith’s being a little bit of a personal ambition, albeit one I’ve never thought I would realise. But, in the present circumstances I find myself time-rich, and having had an idea bouncing around in my head since I wrote a short story for a competition on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer forum some many, many years ago, I thought I’d give it a shot. It turns out that it’s not all that easy.

Publish And Be Damned

As it stands I have, after well over a year, completed a first draft. I’ve also begun the process of pruning this first draft into a shorter and more coherent version of itself. Wielding the delete button like a machete, as I cut through the overgrown forest of ‘very’s. ‘she said’s, adverbs, and other word-count-bloating bit’s of fluff while at the same time trying to at least get a handle on my scatter-shot approach to grammar and punctuation. It’s difficult, but, for me at least, perhaps not as much as the initial story telling was, and it’s a process that I’m almost halfway through (lots of work on the last few chapters still to go however).

After that, well after that I’m not sure. I guess I’ll have to work out a way to get the thing published, whether that be by conventional means, or by self-publishing. It’s a daunting thing to even consider, letting my very personal, and very private little story be read by other people. It’s something that fills me with unease bordering on dread, but if I don’t do it then what was the last year for? What has it accomplished? The thing might get turned down more often than I did in my dating days but, as the saying goes, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’. I think I owe it to my characters, to my words, and to myself to at least have a go at the asking.


Until next time.