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Do you remember when you first
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by
Wayne
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May 14, 2013 06:23PM
started writing things down? Your name doesn't count. School doesn't count. I mean for yourself. I kept journals in high school. Not for art's sake. Teenage anxiety more than likely. I know someone who kept journals when she was young, and she's posting excerpts online. Now that takes courage. Never in a million years would I reveal my younger self from those journals.
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I started writing when I was about ten. It took me until I was over fifty to write anything that was remotely suitable for public consumption. I am so very glad that the internet didn't exist when I was a teenager. Otherwise, someone might be able to go dig some of that older stuff up.
I pity today's 16 year olds when they grow up, have children, and their kids go online and search for their parents' names..."Hey, Dad! I found those stories you wrote and posted on Wattpad when you were my age..."
My wife has been using a scanner at work that turns scanned documents into pdfs. From pdf to Kindle is not so hard. It's affordable. We shall purchase one. So by summer's end, I can have converted lots of my old typed middle school and high school lamentations into 99 cent editions. You know "... my entire existence is defined by my need for her love but why why why can we not talk just talk why can I not explain to her" blah blah. Sounds saleable?I started writing funny plays and stuff while I was in elementary school. Journal writing however awaited my first crush.
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At age 9 I started writing James Bond fanfiction. Most of the time I was researching which cars he would drive and inventing gadgets. I haven't made much progress since...
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I handled the handwritten original manuscript of my first novel when we settled in Ireland and stuff arrived in steamer trunks from all round the world. Once was enough. What was good: fresh, strong prose, brilliant ideas, sensitive handling of the love threads, my handwriting was still readable, perhaps for the last time in my life. What was not so good: overwritten, fractured structures (that's a killer for me as a reader -- there's a right way and a wrong way to tell any story), dialect in a couple of places, little details that as an editor would cause me to tell the writer to go out and live a little (and stop reading Hemingway!) before he imposes on my time again. The published book is a lot better: in the retyping I also rewrote it, and I had superb editorial staff of my own choice giving me their full attention because this was the lead title of a small provincial publisher. (A lesson I didn't forget: later, when I published with metropolitan big names, where my "editor" was a dealmaker who would read ten pages of my book, or sometime not even that much, I had it written into my contracts that my book would copyedited by and outsider of my choice.) That my teenage novel turned into a reasonable seller was probably due as much to the steady hand of the experienced editors as to the 12 or 15 years of extra experience I had.
All the same, the experience put me off rush jobs in novels forever. I like letting a novel gestate for a few years, a decade or two, and ebooks have proved me perfectly right. Most of the crap we see wouldn't be published if people stopped and thought before they hit SEND.
You live in Cork! Not that I've been to Cork. When my girlfriend Beth and I were in Wales many years ago we noticed there was a ferry sailing from Fishguard to Rosslare, so we hopped on. We did not have sea legs. We wobbled. The Guinness helped a bit but the Gravol helped better. We were just in the southeast but we enjoyed ourselves. I liked the gritty Waterford waterfront. We both liked Kilkenny and one particular pub. At one B&B the woman who owned it would brush Beth's hair every morning at our table just before breakfast. It was already combed, as much as wild hair can ever be combed, but we thought it was a sweet gesture.
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The people are amazingly friendly, and the country is beautiful. Ireland is a fabulous place to visit, for those smart enough to give the obvious tourist hotspots a miss. I was in Killarney only overnight, and God, it was a misery, not like I remember it at all from when I first went there.
Claudine -- a vampire who drinks animal blood? Sounds like some people I saw on Mother's Day.
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(1) The autospeller in my Mac first gave me "like" in this position, as if these vampire bats -- thanks Claudine! -- are on Facebook.
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I've always wanted to visit Ireland. And Scotland. Not England though. My kids don't want to visit, just in case they have to listen to bagpipes. Again.
The only writing I have ever done is on my blog, which reminds me I need to update it.
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That probably makes me the only writer who has ever held a vampire in his hands.
You don't want to come to Ireland right now. Our summer is like a Cape winter, cold, wet, with the Doctor transposed to winter to perfect the misery. July and August are the best months.
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Andre Jute wrote: "It's romantic walking hand in hand under the oak trees in the rain -- until the first cold drop rolls down your neck..."... and: "That probably makes me the only writer who has ever held a vampire in his hands".
Kench to both, Andre!
