I started writing when I was twenty one. I had this great urge to create. I loved writing. I was imaginative. The trouble was that I wasn’t very good at it. It is a craft that has to be learnt and mastered. But I enjoyed it and persevered.
For years I would write down my imagination into weird and wacky new creations. I have a number of them still littering my room as poorly typed manuscripts tapped out on my old Remington typewriter. I believed each one was a gem of ground-breaking new genius. Unfortunately they weren’t. They were the adolescent ramblings of someone struggling to find a style, a plot and a control of language. They are unreadable.
I started writing novels. I created structure and honed the language. I sent them off. I had some nibbles and lots of rejections and voids where replies might have been.
I wrote Rock histories, biographies and autobiography.
I stopped sending them off and did them for myself.
I had a career teaching that was quite draining of energy. I had a family who needed my love. I had interests and friends. Time was of the essence.
Late at night when the children were in bed and the wife was dozing on the settee I would slope off to the type-writer and luxuriate in my one finger symphonies. The book would sit in my head, clogging it up with ideas, words and images. I had to release the sluice-gate and allow the ideas to trickle through at a rate my digit could keep up with.
When I had a book that I was giving birth to I would start work at 10.00 pm and work through until 3.00 am, catch four hours sleep, work, do the prep and marking, hug and play with the kids, love the wife and be back there again at ten. I could do that for the four to six weeks it took for the reservoir of neuronal sparks to be transformed into a couple of hundred pages of scrawled symbols.
By the time I had retired I had amassed over forty five books of all hues. I now have the time and some of the energy.
I selected the ones I considered worthy of attention and started to rewrite them to the highest standard I could achieve. I published them on createspace and kindle. They are all my babies. I have lavished my thoughts, dreams, stories and imagination on them like oodles of thick creamy sauce. I love them.
As a writer I hold nothing back. What is in those books is pure me. I write for no market or commercial interest. I write for the joy of creativity and the desire to communicate the stories, ideas and thoughts that agglutinate in my mind.
The tens of thousands of hours I have spent writing are among the happiest and most fulfilling of my life.
I now have published some nineteen books. I have another nineteen to do. I am writing new ones as well. The juices are free and broiling. I can’t stop. My books range from Rock Music, alternative novels, Education, the Environment, Sci-fi novels, antitheism, philosophy and biography.
My books are my essence. I would hope you would enjoy them as much as me.