Centurion

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks. I feel old enough as it is but even after I send my cards off to the recycler I’ll still be on the young side of fifty…  just. But sometimes I feel like I’m a hundred. My knees certainly seem that old when I’ve been hill walking or jogging. That’s what I get for playing American Football in my youth I guess.

My knees aren’t really a hundred though, nor is the rest of me. These blogs however, that’s a different story. This is my hundredth weekly report of my life as a struggling writer. I’ve enjoyed writing each and every one of them, even though the vast majority of them haven’t actually been about the art and craft of writing. I’ve written about cooking, sweating, hill walking, watching cricket, needing new glasses, music, things that annoy me (several times), the taxman, mental health and, on occasion, the writing and publishing process. And thankfully some of you have read them. I can’t thank you enough for your encouragement over the last two years.

In that time quite a lot has happened to me. I’ve ended my twenty-year career at a multi-national financial institution (not through choice – don’t believe everything you read about all bankers rolling in huge bonuses) and I’ve started living my life-long dream of being a full-time, self-employed writer. I figured that it was now or never so grasped the proverbial nettle and it’s been relatively successful, as long as you don’t measure success by monetary figures alone. I’ve had my work printed in several magazines and newspapers and have published a couple of short story collections along with half a dozen small quiz books and self-help books. Don’t mock, they pay the bills. Well, some of the bills. If I’m honest we’ve had to cut back on our spending as much as possible so those bills no longer include such luxuries as foreign holidays and satellite sports channels but I can’t say that I really care all that much. Those indulgences helped distract me from my unhappy working life so now that I’m doing something that I love, do I still really have that desire to travel to faraway places? Hell yeah, of course I do! But we take the life we’re dealt and make the most of it. And writing is what I most want to do. Amazingly I’ve got to a point where my long awaited (by me) first novel is on the brink of being unleashed on the market. That’s another ambition ticked off the bucket list.

I’m already well underway with the next novel (a cosy-crime murder whodunit) and there are a couple more quiz books coming, hopefully before the end of the year. And of course I’ll still be posting this blog every Friday for the foreseeable future.

Here's to the next hundred.