A Daft Occupation

I might be writing a book

When people ask me, and this happens very rarely, how many books I’ve published, I’m genuinely ashamed. It’s not that my books are particularly awful, but to be fair they are not culture altering literary masterpieces.

Also, there’s 14 of them, they are as follows:

The Reconstructed Heart

The Man in the Rubber Mask (far and away the best seller)

Thin he Was and Filthy Haired (autobiography and not too shabby)

Therapy and How to Avoid it (with Nigel Planer)

The Man on Platform 5 (my best selling fiction)

Punchbag

Behind the Scenes at Scrapheap Challenge (not my title)

Sudden Wealth

Brother Nature

Sold Out

News from Gardenia

News from the Squares

News from the Clouds

Some Old Bloke

I’ll be totally honest, I had to Google the list to check, and I’d forgotten Brother Nature.

These were written between 1992 and 2018, so much less than one a year, but still. Looking back now it seems insane.

What this long list actually represents is literally thousands of hours of solitary tap tap tapping on numerous keyboards. Hours and hours working on plot structure, character names, research into obscure areas of human experience I know nothing about. Then more hours going over corrected manuscripts, reading the book again and again and trying to improve it.

Then reading it out loud and realising whole paragraphs make no sense or are so badly structured they need a major rewrite.

I also have a small box full of broken keyboards, I’m a heavy typist, I learned to type on my mother’s Corona manual typewriter and you had to really hammer that baby to get anything resembling a letter on the paper.

So maybe I should describe my typing not so much as tap tap tap but thud thud thud.

And some people have been very kind about my books. Even proper newspapers have given me fairly positive reviews. And in one case, with ‘The Man on Platform 5’ I sold the film rights for a considerable sum back in 1998. An actual Hollywood film company bought the rights and have never made the film of course. I’m not sure they ever planned to, they just didn’t want anyone else to make it.

But as you can see from the dates I was busy writing, I have stopped for the past 5 years. I just lost the will to spend that much time sitting alone thud thud thudding.

Until about October 2021.

It’s like a curse. I had an idea while I was on a long walk. I often have ideas when I’m walking, and like everyone else, 99.5% of them are either stupid, bad, they’ve been done before better than I can ever do or I totally forget the idea before I can make a note.

However this idea would not leave me, I did not forget it and it has not been done before. I resisted writing anything for at least 18 months but I kept thinking about it. I didn’t want to write another book, seriously, I truly don’t, it’s a daft occupation, I’ve got better things to do.

But this daft (or maybe brilliant) idea had taken root and I started to make notes, collect ideas, develop back story, think about locations. Dammit, I was doing it again!

The last 4 books on the list above were all published through Unbound, a kind of Kickstarter for books publisher that has been incredibly successful. I’m proud to say my first book with them was literally the 4th book they ever published:

https://unbound.com/books/news-from-gardenia/

So late last year I got in touch with John Mitchinson who is one of the founders of Unbound along with Dan Kieran and Justin Pollard. I explained the premise to John and he seemed to like it. I was double cursed.

So now I am writing another book. It will be quite short, it’s more Tik Tok than feature film, and I think I’m about halfway through.

I don’t want to put it on the Unbound site until I’m really sure I can finish it and produce it, visually, in the way I imagined.

However, if I do start a new Unbound campaign, I will be sure to write about it here on Substack.

So if you have been, thank you for reading.