It took me thirty years to get around to writing books…
I have been writing books since I came to Thailand in 2004.
In my own mind, I started writing books because I live in a remote rice-farming village where no-one speaks English. It just seemed a better alternative to talking to myself. However, it is also true that one day, I counted how many words I had written for website content the previous year, and I was flabbergasted to learn that I had written 1,200,000! Let’s put this figure into perspective. A novella might have 25k words; a short book, 50k; an average book, 70-90k; and a longish book, or epic more than 100k words. Therefore, I had written the equivalent of ten large novels in one year!
Types of writing
OK, writing 200 x 500-word articles is not the same as writing a book. However, I didn’t know that at the time.
I also found out that several of my oldest friends from my home town, Barry, claimed to have urged me to write decades before that. I don’t remember them doing so. Nevertheless, I do recall my stepmother telling me to write my memoirs in the days before she disowned me shortly after my father died. We used to go out for lunch once a month back then. During lunch, after I had recounted one of my exploits, she suggested that I put them all down on paper.
I didn’t do it immediately. In fact, I have never done it as such, but I have woven stories around my most memorable adventures. Which reminds me that I still have a few to tell. I will need to find vehicles for them. Times like when I was the galley slave on a voyage in a home-made concrete yacht from Barry to Gibraltar. Or when I was involved in a Suriname revolution wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “The Empire Strikes Back”. There a a few involving hitch-hiking too, and getting lost in a jungle at night…
Writing books takes the right environment to work
I get lots of time to write, thanks to my wife, but I waste most of it promoting previous books. It’s not really wasting time. If I don’t do it, nobody does. Then, I sell no books, but I’d rather be a writer than a a marketeer.
Would you like to have a go at promoting, selling and receiving a good revenue share, if so, please get in touch with me 🙂 ?
If you’d like to sample my writing, this is a link to a couple of dozen first chapters.
By the way. When my stepmother had read my first novel, she said: ‘I suppose writing is like any other trade… The writer improves with practise!’
She was right. Writers do improve with practice. Nevertheless, it was the cattiest, most unnecessary comment anyone has ever made to me in seventy years.
Family, eh?