So this is how I became a novelist

I’ve spent the week working on my latest novel and I’m feeling good about it. So good, in fact, that I’m not sure how to write about it without giving too much away. Writers in general are suspicious and paranoid when it comes to revealing too much about a work in progress, always terrified it will be stolen by some unscrupulous author out there looking for an idea. It’s not something that’s ever worried me. I know how hard it is to write a novel. You could give two authors the same brilliant premise and lock them away in separate rooms and I guarantee they would produce stories that bear no relation to each other. Having said that, I find myself reluctant to divulge too much of the plot of this book because I’m worried that somebody really might decide it’s too good an idea to ignore.

My fears are completely unfounded, of course. Probably. Firstly an author of the unscrupulous variety would have to stumble over this site, which is unlikely. Then said author would have to think my idea is just too brilliant to ignore. This is perhaps not quite so unlikely. I mean, if I didn’t think it was a great idea, why bother investing the considerable time and effort to turn it into a novel in the first place? On the other hand, as I said earlier, a single idea in the minds of two authors will likely produce vastly different books. Maybe what I’m afraid of is that if this did happen, the other book would be better than mine. Or here’s an even worse scenario, maybe the other book wouldn’t be a patch on mine, but the author who wrote it would be much more famous than me (not hard to imagine) and have a publishing deal in place. I did actually read about a case like this involving an author who claimed somebody very famous plagiarised a planned work of his, and the story sounded true. In the end the plagiariser gave a nod of acknowledgment to the aggrieved, poor author, and kept all the royalties, laughing all the way to the bank. I won’t mention any names but the letters J and P are a clue.

So, maybe I am paranoid after all. For now I’m going to keep the story under my hat, at least until I’m far enough into it that nobody could possibly beat me to publication. What I’m going to write about instead for a little while, is how I got started as a novelist. I know this interests people because it’s actually quite a good slice-of-life story, the kind that can cause a smile and make it seem like sometimes all the cards do fall into place when people follow their dreams, despite all the odds against success. I used to tell this story when I did speaking engagements years ago and it got a lot of laughs. People were always far more interested in hearing about how I got be a published novelist, than about the actual novel I wrote. I can understand that. If I want to know about a book, I read it. I don’t actually care for the whole analysis of the story thing very much. Anyway, the story (of how I became an author) is also worth telling because it hasn’t really finished yet. I’m still chasing my dreams although they have changed a bit over the years. In the not too distant future I’m going to take the kind of giant leap-of-faith I did once before and see what happens, so I may as well write about that too and if anyone is vaguely interested you can follow the ups and downs (of which there are sure to be many) right here.

So, this story takes a while to tell properly, so I’ll offer it up in bite-sized pieces here every week and along the way I’ll post updates on the progress of the novel I’m working on – though I won’t be giving too much away. Not yet. The first instalment will be next week and begins with the event that started on my path to becoming a novelist. It was the I day I sold my business, into which my girlfriend and I had invested all the money we had and quite a lot of the banks’ money too. I got a dollar for it.

Something else happened too, that day. What was it? Oh, I remember now, my girlfriend gave me the news that she was pregnant.