What Started Me Writing – Part Two

If you have been paying attention, and I’ve no reason to suspect that you haven’t, you will recall how, after many years of dedicated toil and the destruction of several trees, I somehow wrote 4 first draft novels and a good hundred thousand words of 3 more without really noticing how much writing I tended to do.  I had even gone as far as to place myself in front of a computer and recreate one of these novels in an electronic form which could be easily shared with friends and acquaintances, assuming I could make some.

In the end I didn’t send the MS out to query, although I did consider the matter very carefully indeed – and by this I mean “hyperventilated at the thought of anybody, anywhere, at all, ever, finding out I wrote”. I tried to picture myself explaining the plot of my novel to my parents, but happily my brain, in an act of supreme self-prersevation, repressed that one like it has never repressed anything before or since. I don’t think it has anyway. If it has, my inability to recall such an event suggests a hitherto unrealised talent in such areas.

What Started Me Writing – Part One

Unlike most people, I have never had the desire to “write a novel”. The thought of going into a book shop and seeing a book with my name on it, there, on the shelf, is neither dream nor triumph. I have no story I want to share with the world. If anything, I’d prefer people not to connect my overly gelatinous form with any printed string of consonents loosly held together with punctuation, let alone one presented in book form. Once upon a time, I felt that if I ever, ever, begin calling myself a writer, I would immediately have to take a flamethrower to my own head.

Two things have prevented this.

1. My overly large head combined with the ever increasing price of petrol have rendered this course of action financially unviable.
2. I began to take myself seriously.