Where The Road Led

For my first blog I wanted to talk about when I was younger and what led me to where I am today. I’ve never honestly written a blog before. I’ve read they’re supposed to be of a professional tone, but I don’t think you’re going to get to know me better on a formal basis so I’m opting for something casual. Writing about personal things should be just that:  anecdotes, life lessons, reviews and opinions - they’re all about what I think or don’t think. In the future I also want to be able to share where I got my inspirations from and all sorts of other things, so conducting it like an interview just won’t work for me.

Anyway, going back to when I first started, I believe my professional writing journey began when I was sixteen/seventeen. I can’t remember exactly when the spark hit and I was like this is what I know I want to do for a career in the future. I was in sixth form studying economics, history and IT. You might ask why not English Literature - the simple answer is I had no love for the subject itself, even if an excerpt from an exam introduced me to one of my favourite books. At the time, I found the subject teaches you how to clinically dissect words and an author’s meanings from the text. It’s not necessarily about enjoying the works for just what they are.

 I loved reading, especially at a younger age when I had more time to savor it, so to take stories and put them into that context made it less fun. I was an only child and bullied for various aspects of my existence, mainly my glasses (I hear they’re a fashion accessory now). I wouldn’t say reading for me was escapism, as I had friends; I just  enjoyed it, the same as I would TV shows. The adventures, the morals, the heroism and the just cause of doing what’s right. Things are simple in that mindset. It’s only when you start looking up what actually happened on set on your favourite show and someone was bullied for being gay for example, or that the cast actually argued and hated each other that it slightly skews your view on it. You get a bit more grown up with information like that and then that innocence becomes a difficult thing to hold on to. It would be easy for anyone to become a bit more jaded by reading things like that.  

I’m actually glad to say that I managed to keep hold of that part of me, even now, even when sometimes you have to bury it to keep it safe through rough times. I thankfully can still watch the same shows and get goosebumps when I hear certain music or know a dramatic scene is coming up. I even still get pits in my stomach for the loss of a character if they get killed off. It might seem childish to a lot of people; however, I believe keeping that close to my heart makes me a better writer. I want to be able to imagine those dramatic scenes that I enjoyed so much, and make the reader really feel like this could be the end of their world unless the heroes can stop them. It’s that unity you experience with any form of media where you’re rooting for them to win and there’s fantastic fanfares or gnarly electric guitar music ploughing you on through this epic scene… I want my readers to be able to share with the characters they’re so invested in.

What type of shows did I watch? At sixteen my friends and I loved cartoons and anime (yes they’re different), so why wouldn’t we want to insert ourselves into our favourite canons. We were on a website called deviantART, which is still going surprisingly. This was in the days when texting was your main source of contact, so your main direct messaging options were on the home computer. I made online friends on there whom I’m still friends with today, and some I even had the privilege of meeting offline. Even with them I was role playing - we built adventures out of characters we’d very sneakily inserted into video game or anime lore. Sometimes it was both at once, because who doesn’t love a crossover? It wasn’t long before I started creating standalone characters of my own, and drawing on all the inspirations and morals that had made me love everything I had connected with in the thousands of hours of media consumption I’d experienced whilst growing up. I did go outside sometimes I swear!

With this new momentum I began planning and writing my own first novel in a series. I can’t remember how long it took me to finish my first draft of what has now become Stellium, but I do know who read it when it was completed – my mum. Obviously she was impressed with her son for writing so much drivel, but likely wondering why he wasn’t studying harder on his law degree at that point; but the new want for writing was already there. You’d be surprised, though, how hard it is to get people (even if they’re readers themselves) to actually read your book. Even if you plonk the giant printed folder into their laps it still takes constant nagging. I think maybe three people in total read it.

I do recall someone whom, for the privilege of them reading it as a favour, wanted me to print out a personal copy for them and mail it rather than receive an online copy and print it off themselves. I somehow doubted I was going to get any feedback in that instance, so put a pin in that idea. It wasn’t long after that I discovered the different layouts and number of chapters and everything else that literary agents and publishers demanded of their submissions, so as you can probably tell, I quickly got in line.

On a quick side note while I remember to tell you - the first draft of Stellium was absolutely full of Easter eggs in a homage to things that had inspired me. I’ve still got a notebook detailing what meant what in each scene just in case I forgot. I’ll probably dissect it at some point in another blog, because I don’t think any of that (or very little) is in the final version.

Back to the route of being traditionally published… now you’ve got a manuscript burning a hole on your hard drive. Even when you think you know everything about a particular subject, there’s always a curveball or more you didn’t consider. I’m certainly still finding this out now whilst on this leg of my journey (I’ll cover this in another blog as well on how I became the indie author). At twenty, would you know how to get published, deal with the inevitable rejection or how to avoid ‘vanity publishing’? That was one of the main things that killed it off for me the first time around. The only people who were interested in taking it on wanted £2k to make it a reality. Only when you start doing online searches of ‘is this normal’ do you realize you should have done some more research, rather than just buying the book with all the publishers’ names in and sending your manuscript out. It doesn’t hit home well when your mind has been filled with the hope and optimism of ‘this author managed to get published at this age’ or ‘that one has global recognition’. How do you cope and carry on with this thing that you’re passionate about but you can’t get your foot in the door to showcase your creation? Short answer is – you don’t.

Every writer at some point in their lives will have put down the pen, stopped typing on the keyboard and wondered: why should I carry on? This is when my moment came. Since that time, the advent of technology has increased so much in the processes that allows indie authors to even merely exist and share the same website or space with people who have managed to become traditionally published. It’s levelled the playing field massively for some unknown people to just crash through the wall and say: this is what I wrote… and it can become a success. Back then, however, not so much. The advent of serious self publishing didn’t exist when I was at that point of needing it; when the doors were closing, it might have kept me going rather than putting it all down for over a decade and uselessly declaring ‘I’m done with this’.

The method at the time was that unless you had lots of money for your own copies and went out and sold them by hand, your options were limited. This time around, however, I can sell to people on the other side of the world at the click of a button after uploading the manuscript and a cover. There’s so much more work that goes into it than, that don’t get me wrong! The mere fact it can exist now, though, has become the most important thing to me. If people want to read this it’s there, it’s real, I’ve got my own physical copies that I didn’t need a print run of 200 units to obtain. I’ve not lowered the scale of what I want to achieve, but I have become satisfied that what I wrote is in the world and sitting on someone’s shelf, even if it’s just my own.

This is why the most important thing to me is that I held onto that part of me I mentioned above. I need it now more than ever to grow and shape myself into a better writer. With all the work I have put in, and continue to do behind the scenes, I’m now having experiences I never thought I would get the opportunity to enjoy in my teenage years or early twenties. Now I’m here, I never want to stop. The way forward is clear and it is to keep writing. People may buy, they may not buy, but now it can exist in my hands. I realized that was what mattered more than anything else. Opening that box up with my freshly made books inside was one of the happiest moments of my life. If I don’t give up, I can experience that again and again with every new title.