A time to write.

When I decided to satisfy my desire to be a writer, I was just a few months into running a pub, which had been closed and boarded up for several years. 

It sat decaying and looking forlorn in a Lincolnshire market town when I stumbled upon it.  It was still an attractive building and seduced me into wanting to put my twenty years experience into saving its life.  I spent several Monday to Fridays away from my other pub in Nottingham, project managing the building work whilst doing much of the labouring and redecorating with a friend.  My wife, son and I eventually left our previous pub, and home of seven years, and moved in.  However, we could not have foreseen, when we reopened in July 2008, that fatcats within the banking system were greedily lining their pockets and creating unstable markets, which would eventually plunge the UK into a global recession.  Or so I was led to believe by the press - I was too busy swimming against the tide to worry about the mechanics of the problem.  The pressure was already well and truly on when we discovered my wife was pregnant some 4 months later.

It was about that time, during one of the bedtime story sessions with my eleven year-old son, I decided that I was running out of time to do something I always knew I would one day do.  Pub hours were long and seven days a week.  We worked until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, chasing the late night drinkers and dealing with the antisocial crap they brought with them.  We had bills to pay and staff who relied on us for employment.   Takings were precariously low and overheads high.  I felt under a ton of pressure.  Yet I knew I would eventually have to find the time to realise my ambition and it might as well be now.  If the adage 'When you want something done, ask a busy man to do it' were true, then the timing was ideal!

I had read many Enid Blyton books as a child; The Famous Five, The Find Outers, The Ship,Valley, Mountain, River of Adventure etc and had revisited many of them through reading to my son in recent years.  I had noted how dated they seemed, and how the freedom enjoyed by kids in the fifties seemed unrealistic in today's 'nanny society'.  Even growing up in the sixties and seventies I used to envy these youngsters who went off on great adventures without parents to supervise them, and we had much more freedom then, than kids seem to enjoy today.  I decided I wanted to write stories that took a central character on adventures similar to the ones Enid Blyton wrote about, but in a modern, and therefore, harder hitting way.  I wanted to create something that would resonate with modern teens/young adults, but I didn't want to write fantasy.  I wanted the reader to truly empathise with the characters and recognise potential events in their own lives within the stories.  I adore travel and therefore wanted to take the main character, and the reader, all over the world - and that meant giving him the means to do it.  I also wanted to encourage readers to appreciate the English language, and whilst I acknowledge that there must be a degree of realism in the writing, I vowed to avoid the 'yoof-speak' and text language that afflicts this generation. Finally I decided that my main character had to be like a son I could be proud of, with sound morals, a sense of fairness and an innate concern for the plight of others.  As an atheist, I wanted to do this without any whiff of preaching. 

Reece Winner, is twelve years old and the story starts on the day his parents split up.  He lives in a pub overlooking the North Cornish coast.  His parents have bought it a few months earlier, after his father had spotted it for sale during a family holiday the previous year.  He's a slightly eccentric boy, with dyspraxia, which makes him awkward and hence prone to isolation and bullying.  Nonetheless, he is likeable and quite introvertly smart.  One of his coping mechanisms is to find humorous anagrams of the names of teachers or other antagonists.  Hence, his bullying enemy Robert Fathaby, becomes 'Fart-Breath Boy',  Rupert Poutril the PE teacher becomes 'Pupil Torturer' etc.  However, he is often afraid of telling anyone, for fear of being thought a 'geek'.

He suffers a series of unhappy events which turn his once-stable life upside-down, including falling into cliff blowhole in a quickly rising tide, whilst out researching a homework assignment.  His father, racing to help him, has an accident and suffers serious injuries which land him in intensive care.  He is helped through all this by his new friend Kara, an equally out-of-place girl, whose father committed suicide a few years earlier.  His parents' split, the pub being hit by recession, debt collectors calling at all times of the day and night, and his father's tragic accident, all threaten to throw Reece and his dad out on the street and force them to leave his beloved Cornwall - but I've haven't called him Reece Winner for nothing.

We recently sold our Lincolnshire pub and so had to find somewhere else to live.  I was so desperate to finish the first Reece Winner story, I persuaded my wife to move to Cornwall.  We now live in Polperro (which is on the opposite coast to where I set the book), but I have a stunning view from my lounge window over Polperro Harbour.  The weird thing is, I have written much less since moving here than I did before, when I had the pub to run.  When I set out creating Reece, I would drive my son to school at 8.30am and continue driving to a picnic area in Willingham Woods where I would sit outside in the freshness of the morning and get a couple of hundred or so words into my laptop.  There was a snack hut which opened at 9am and the owner gave me a discount on tea because I was there so often.  I would stay there until 10am when I would return to the pub to get ready for opening at noon.  Ironically, the writing seemed easier then than it does now.

Okay, so we do have a baby, now aged 15 months, and a teenager whose self-sufficiency is limited to not having to be reminded to breathe.  Our apartment has only one lounge/diner where I can sit and work and I often have to give that up because my daughter wants to sing along to The Teletubbies whilst discovering what happens when she presses the buttons on the TV, the stereo, my laptop or the telephones.  When I've removed all of these, or barricaded the side of the room where the TV sits,  she will steer her Scuttlebug (a wonderful sit-on device designed to allow children who cannot yet walk, access to every socket, hot coffee and drawer full of life threatening implements on the ground floor) towards the parrots cage and poke her fingers through the bars.  Cassie the Cockatoo, has so far been very good about this and only pecked her once, but I am afraid that as her obvious warning nip has failed to deter young Jasmine, Cassie might think the next one ought to remove the digit at the knuckle.

During the summer I have tried taking my laptop across the cliffs to sit in the sun and write.  Unfortunately, it's impossible to see a laptop screen in the intense sun that has blessed Cornwall this year.  During the tourist season, sitting in a cafe for a couple of hours sipping overpriced tea, is not going to put you on the owner's Christmas card list.  The shelters in town are full of people noisily enjoying their holiday and so writing outside the house has not been all that successful and I can't really afford to be driving to isolated locations.  I chide myself all the time that these are pathetic excuses for surmountable problems, and to a degree that is correct.  However, when I do find myself with the time and environment criteria met, that can be the time when I'm simply not in the mood.  Or that is when Facebook or Twitter will appear like the angels of Beelzebub and promise me writing fortune and fame if I just read this post or that blog, or make a cuttingly sarcastic witticism about an ex-customer's spelling of 'gawjus' and other such inanities.  

Then I have my writing class, which, because we live in Cornwall, is a 50 mile round trip every Wednesday night, returning home in the fog, which swirls off Bodmin Moor.  With homework!  Yes, bloody homework!  I have enough of that to do for my son.  My homework assignment this week is to write 200-500 words starting with 'The son took leave of his father, placed himself in a small boat and the father had to push it off with his own foot.'  If he's not careful, my son will be the one in the boat.  For real. 

I guess I'm hoping that chronicling my progress in this blog will be a cathartic excercise to download the mental detritus and leave my brain uncluttered for the creative task at hand.

I remember reading, many years ago, an interview in which an author, (whose name is lost to Alzheimer's) was asked if she enjoyed writing books.  She replied, 'I enjoy having written a book', and this sums it up for me.  What started out as an enjoyable distraction, has now become an obsession - and that's serious shit.  Reece Winner makes new daily demands for more effort, harder work, more research, more learning and more polishing to perfection.  And whilst I know that sounds like a complaint, it isn't.  It's the very least I should be prepared to do - but I'll be damned glad when I've finished!  It's presently at 54,000 words and I think it will probably finish at 70-80,000.  Any advice from fellow writers/readers is welcome.  Just don't interrupt me when I'm writing!