By The Book

Hello, dear readers!

You’ve got to have a dream, as Captain Sensible (And more properly Juanita Hall of South Pacific) once infamously sang, or how you gonna have a dream come true?

It is a sentiment I completely agree with. You have to hold ambitions, hopes, and yes, dreams, no matter how far-fetched they may seem, and as a bit of a dreamer myself, I’ve harboured such pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams pretty much all my life.

This week, one of those dreams will come true.

Authorial Intent
Those who know me, and those who have the patience to wade through the dubious punctuation and random typos of this blog, may have twigged that I enjoy writing, much in the same way Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards enjoyed Ski-Jumping. It is, in fact, a hobby that I have held dear to my heart since childhood, when I would make up stories featuring pirates, ninjas, astronauts, and occasionally all three. Adult life, and the necessity of earning enough money to buy such luxuries as food and shelter, meant that as I grew, I put writing to one side. The dream of being a published author, though? Well,that dream persisted.

I’m not sure how I planned to achieve this dream without, at some point, putting pen to paper, or at least fingers to keyboard. Maybe some kind of telekinesis, or astral projection. Perhaps I wanted a ghost writer in the literal, supernatural sense of the word.

I think what may have actually happened is the dream faded as an ever-increasing workload of drab responsibility and soulless, 9-5 workdays featured ever larger in my life. Time and energy were sapped from me, to the point where even the thought of committing a few words of fanfic and to a page became a luxury. I had no idea how or where to express my latent creativity, and neither the drive nor the courage to find out. The dream of writing was dead.

Then I was diagnosed with MS.

The Write Time
It was a diagnosis that proved life changing, and not just in a shmaltzy-channel five-everyone learns an important lesson-daytime film type of way, either. I found myself unable to hold down that 9-5 workday schedule (something I’d probably been struggling with for a while) and, as there is only so much daytime telly one man can take before his brain starts dribbling out of his ears and ruining the shoulders of his T-shirt, I cast about for a way to fill my time. That was when I decided to write a book.

Now, for those racing toward any conclusions, I will just spoil the ending a bit by saying right here and now that although said book has been written, I am still nowhere near having it published.

However…

Author, Author!
In order to get a book published by a recognised publishing house, it is useful to have already published work. It’s a bit of a catch-22 situation, the old saw of needing experience to get your first job. There are, however, ways of getting round this, and one of those is to write short stories for already planned and themed anthology competitions run by small online presses; and this is what I have been spending my time doing.

So, after a long and waffling preamble, I am pleased to announce that The Curse of the Proteus, my first published short story, will be included in a Breaking Rules (Europe) anthology called Death Ship:Mortem Cycle 2, available for actual sale this coming Friday (the 27th of August). That’s right, although I’m not sure I can bring myself to believe it until I have an actual copy in hand, I will soon be able to call myself a published author.

For those wishing to have a read, support the authors, and perhaps own a book partly written by someone you know (or at least heard of), Death Ship should be available online from most good bookshops, including Waterstones and Amazon, and will also be available by following the link, here (but not, of course until Friday!).

Now where, exactly, does one buy oneself a smoking jacket and fedora in which to look out of a rain covered window and agonise over the human condition?

Until next week.