Nice guys come first

Mark Haddon does seem like a very nice man.  I hope his second novel is a success – he hopes so too, in this interview with the Times.

Why I do this

It’s time for a few words about my writing life before we go much further with this adventure.  Back in the days when the drudgery of 9to5 office life had not yet crushed my soul, I thought I wanted to write.  Well, more than that, I did write.  I even had a couple of poems published in a small press magazine.  That was a decade or so ago.

Go back further, another decade perhaps, and I was the typical bookish kid – read continuously, wrote a little, but writing was not really something people I knew did – for a living, or a hobby.  It would be considered very pretentious, even if these people knew what that mean’t.  But who cared?  For me, reading was all that mattered.

Then in the next decade, as I grew older, I dared to consider writing as something I would/could do without fear of embarrassment.  So I did, for a while.  And then I stopped.  Now, a decade later, I don’t remember why I stopped – it seems ridiculous now, but it must have been that I thought it was pretentious and I persuaded myself that this somehow mattered.

That’s all fine, but the thing is that I recently started again and now I can’t stop.  I wish I could remember where I read it, but someone somewhere once said that he was told that he would never be quite satisfied in life, unless he was writing.  Anything else would not be quite good enough.

It’s like having to scratch an itch that never quite went away.

Hello world!

So this is it, Hello World!

Quite a relevant start because I am in the I.T industry and Hello World is about as far as my programming skills reach.  Anyway, this blog isn’t/won’t be about that.  Well maybe some of the time..

Mostly it’ll be about books, writing and stuff like that.  This is writing exercise to me – some place to come and work out my flabby brain once in a while.  This guy is my inspiration – I’ve been reading his blog for a year or so and am full of admiration for a man who pumps out quality material every day. 

Go read his blog, don’t stay here…Go on, you won’t be disappointed.