Among Mods there is a truism: 'Once a Mod, always a Mod'.
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Among Mods there is a truism: 'Once a Mod, always a Mod'.
When I was twenty-one or so I wrote a two act play that was performed over three nights. That was back in 1970. It was called 'The Golem'. At the time I was obsessed with playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, especially the latter and others of that persuasion. I was also obsessed with the notion that I wanted to be a (great) paperback writer. (Listen to the Beatles lyrics of the song 'Paperback writer' and you'll soon get the picture). Well, no matter how hard I tried to be one all that flowed from the pen end was garbage. There were many futile first page attempts on my Olivetti portable typewriter. (I thought the typewriter keys might be mightier than the pen). The waste basket ate up all my efforts. In the end, frustrated, I gave up the dream. It's taken retirement to revive the muse and finally, as if by magic, to write that novel.
Looking back over the years the only successful writing I managed was: a co-authored church history back in the mid Eighties, and a mass of club running and triathlon reports for a local weekly newspaper in the Nineties. Admittedly the church history was no lightweight item at over 200 pages but it was hardly the stuff of best-sellers. In fact, I didn't earn a penny from writing and researching it. It was charitable work done for love when I still actually believed in a caring deity.
So what happened to make a sixty-three year old begin to make the journey from dreamer to writer? I still have no idea. Maybe we'll find out a 'Zen meditate' my way to an answer on this blog.
It began when I wrote an opening chapter and spent two years refining it. Then stopped. A year later I wrote another two chapters. Then I restarted and didn't stop until the magic words 'The End (of Book One)' finally appeared 113,000 words later. That turned out to be the easy part. The revisions and editing went on for what felt as though it was a never ending ordeal, a kind of trial by defective spell and grammar checker. Still, it's done. If you're a fellow scribbler/writer/wannabe author then you'll know by now that was the easy bit. The rejections from agents and publishers is subject matter for another time... So at age sixty-eight I'm venturing down a route that's probably going to takeaway time from writing to acting as my own agent, publisher and publicist (as well as anything else that's going to arise en route).
Will it be worth the effort? And why, oh why, have I even bothered to start writing? I could be quite happily vegetating in front of the TV, listening to my massive music collection and reading other peoples paperback scribbling as I wend my way to the big sleep. There is an answer and it's to be found in the early days of the summer of 1966 when as a sixteen year old my life was shaped by the life I began to live. I became a full paid member of that teenage sub-culture called The Mods, not realizing it was going to be a life long commitment. Among Mods there is a truism: 'Once a Mod, always a Mod'. That about shaped everything to come.