I’m a writer.

I’m aware that you may know this already.  It’s not exactly hidden. I have written stuff ever since someone put a pencil in my hand.  I was a published child poet, won prizes and filled the school magazine with poetry.  I stopped doing it because it seemed too easy and because my mother was prone to making me invent a poem and read it as a trick for her dinner parties and I hated it.

At college I wrote in the magazine, was on the editorial committee and did a cartoon, which was so long ago the cartoon was reproduced by someone actually carving a wooden block to go to the printing press.  I’m practically mediaeval.  When teaching I was the teacher who wrote the phonically sensible comic to help struggling readers, my finest hour there may have been an entire page about an elk on a cab which was also funny.

It seemed a short hop to the bit where I morphed into a magazine writer, first doing the funny column because I thought people were taking themselves very seriously then interviewing all those with a story to tell and there were plenty of them.

And after various fits and starts here I am writing a novel again and liking the writing a lot.  I am nearly 50,000 words into it, which is probably half a novel.  I love my characters though my love of them has changed since I last wrote a novel.  The first novel, the one that eventually garnered a literary agent who was so fake the police hauled him off, was obsessed with the baddie.  He was in nearly every chapter and had more scenes than the protagonist, who appeared briefly in three chapters.  I think there is little doubt that the novel reflects the life of the novelist.  Even stories set in outer space or fantasy land are still about the everyday struggle of yer average human.   If you are a writer and there is a lot of conflict it will be there in the story.  Judging by television drama I’d say many dramatists have terrible conditions and physical violence in their lives.  It might be why comedy is much more difficult to write, few lives are a laugh a minute.

This time, though the protagonist is not in every chapter and there is a secondary hero, the baddie, who is horrible but heavily disguised as a philanthropist, does not take over but he is nasty and the main hero will win.

Well, I think she will, at the moment she is in it up to her neck.

So, if you’ll excuse me I must go and mount a rescue mission, or at least get her safely to the next morning.

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