My Writing story:

 

In the beginning...

  I began writing seriously at the age of 17 when I was stuck out in this little village out in the countryside with no friends in the area. I picked up a pen and an old exercise book and wrote.

  Through out my life I have kept coming back to this and have written all kinds of stories, though it's fair to say most of them never got finished.  As a full time teacher I found that there was just no time at all with all the demands of preparation, planning and marking to write except at Easter, christmas and the Summer holiday.  When I had carried something for a couple of years plodding on and adding bits to it in those time and then read it back, I would find that the style would change in the gaps. I just got so frustrated with it all, I gave up.

Eventually ...

  I left school teaching in 2013, and I began to dabble in writing again.  I've had some pieces published in a couple of anthologies published by Sputnik, but it has been very sporadic. Basically I was thinking that writing is just a little side hobby and that I was not good enough to ever get published.

And then...

During this pandemic and lockdown peried of 2020, I set myself a writing challenge: I set myself the goal of writing for at least an hour a day, and to hold myslef accountable to that, published on Facebook. That challenge has now passed and I have suceeded in what I set out to do. I wrote some 26000 words during that period. I often wrote for a lot more than an hour a day. Where things were growing in length, I wrote it in a number of parts posting one each day. I wrote poems and stories, a song and biography.  I loved it!

And now...

I am giving myself to my writing much more wholeheartedly and leaning out towards publication. I am making a compillation of my poetry over the years as well as continuing to write new material. I am working on a novel for young adults I started a couple of years ago and I am writing an autobiographical account of my  artist journey.