Er, more writing (to prove I am as good as my word)

Well, there you are, a man as good as his word and you can’t often say that. As I am sitting in the Costa Coffee branch on the Old Brompton Road, Earls Court, London (the A3218 for those who need to know these things, though I can’t think why) and killing time, I might as well make good on my intention to ‘write every day’ to ‘keep my hand in’.

I’m killing time because I’m waiting to go to London Paddington to catch my train home to North Cornwall. That is at 12.03 and it is now 9.58. I stayed the night at my brother’s just around the corner, the nearest Tube station – Earls Court for those who need to know these things (and I use the entrance on the Warwick Road, A3220) – is just a few minutes walk away from his flat (US apartment) and if I leave there at just after 11am, I should get to Paddington in very good time (and shall, in fact, be obliged to kill a little more time).

Then it is a trip of just under four hours – quite long by British standards a mere trippette for those of you living in the US or Brazil, India, Russia or China, of course – and then from tomorrow it will be back to the old routine, which, though, no longer exists now that I have pretty much dotted every I and crossed every T of my ‘Hemingway bollocks’ and must now set about establishing a new routine. And that might not be easy.

I have long had something else in mind to attempt. In fact, I have long had several things in mind to attempt, but its best to do things one at a time or risk doing none of them as well as they might deserve.

I shan’t say what it is because for some time I’ve believed that the more you talk about ‘what you are going to do’, the less ‘you are likely to do it’. And frankly – to my certain knowledge to my late father’s increasing irritation – I spent rather to much of my life talking about what I was going to do and doing absolutely fuck all about it.

OK, I know why I did fuck all about it (though I shan’t bother explaining here because it is not only irrelevant but rather uninteresting), but the salient fact is that I did fuck all. I still have, somewhere, pretty much every short story I’ve written, an attempted novel and a novella, but it really does not amount to very much at all.

That I have kept them is for one reason only: I had no very good reason to get rid of it all. If I did, if someone did come up with a good reason which convinced me, into the trash it would all go (and no tears shed by me or anyone else).

The thing I have planned is superficially quite straightforward, but what I should like to try to do is a little more subtle. And there’s the rub. Because I have now – at 74 – got to the stage that I am just writing to ‘amuse’ myself and the chances that any of it will ever be published are as close to non-existent as they might ever be, I want to take the more difficult route, and that requires quite a bit of thinking.

Well, actually not that much thinking, just thinking of the right kind, and frankly I’m not much of a thinker. I can bullshit as well as the best of them and better than many. But thinking?

I keep plugging ‘my novel’, the only one I have so far written, and I might as well admit that it is a good example that we should never judge a book by its cover. Here’s the cover, back and front. Don’t judge.

It, too, is not – or rather, I hope it is not – as straightforward as it might appear to be and I do believe I have succeeded in doing what I tried to do. Whether anyone else will agree – would agree (the will/would are crucial here) is another matter.

But what I attempted with that gave me the idea for what I might attempt with the next one. I’ve had ‘the story’, ‘what it’s about’, for some time, but I came to realise that if it was to be worthwhile in any way, it will need an added dimension. I know what that dimension is – a safer way to put it is ‘might be’ – but what I don’t yet know is how to create it. Hence the thinking.

Savvy?

Two and a half hours later . . .

I should have published these links, US Amazon and UK Amazon. Happy reading (as if).