This weekend is mostly taken up by Bryan’s dance lessons, but I do intend to get over to the Turner to see the photographic exhibition that’s on there at the moment. I’m not a huge art lover, but the collection does sound interesting – and Bryan is keen to see it too, so it’ll be a nice thing for us to do together. I’m writing this column before I’ve been, however, so I’ll have to let you know how we got on next week.
Weekends are precious to both of us – we’re both busy during the week, so it’s nice to just stop for two days and just take a breath. I could probably do with a third day, but it would be churlish of me to push that point too much.
I’ve been working hard on a novel I’m developing at the moment – all to do with another world, and people from Earth encountering it for the first time. I’ve had the idea for a few years, and even started writing it, but at the time, the words didn’t really flow. I’m by no means a perfect writer now, but I hope that I’m better than I was – and this attempt feels more comfortable and fun than the last.
I’ve wanted to write for as long as I can remember. When I was a teenager, I wrote a couple of short stories all about Star Trek and, when I was in my early twenties, I wrote a story about MI5 (this was when the BBC series Spooks was all the rage). I’m thankful that I’ve lost track of those stories now; they’ve disappeared from everywhere but my imagination.
I’ve even been fortunate enough to have three books published by a small publisher (Inspired Quill), and someone has furiously tried to return one of my books to a well-known bookshop at Westwood Cross because they were so cross at the story. They threatened to go to the papers about it, so I’m told, and I found myself really hoping that they would – it would gain extra readers as a result. Sadly, they never did – or the paper they approached laughed them out of the room.
Science-fiction and fantasy are the areas I’m most passionate about. When I wrote that MI5 story (about twenty years ago now), I enjoyed the experience, but I’ve never had any desire to repeat it. The first two books I had published were all about angels and demons, while the third one was about a prison colony on a far-away world, in an empire ruled by a cruel and evil empress. There’s a certain way my brain works, it seems; I couldn’t ever imagine myself writing a bonkbuster romance or a wacky comedy; I wouldn’t be good at either style, for a start, and I simply would not enjoy doing stories like that.
That said, writers like Barbara Cartland are wildly successful (and pastiched wonderfully by Matt Lucas in Little Britain); Cartland sold well over a billion books by the time of her death in 2000, and she left so many unpublished novels, her son published one a month as an e-book. These books only ran out in 2018. Blimey.
None of that influences my decision not to write romance books. I don’t even write much romance into my books; the plot is busy enough without that taking up space. Give me a gritty sci-fi novel, or an intense fantasy book, and I’m very happy. One day, I’ll get this story finished … and then I need to find a publisher. One thing at a time.
Good man.