A step in the dark.

My attempt at writing (fiction) rather then being a graffiti artist (Blogger).

In my last post I left myself with a bit of a cliffhanger and the personal question ‘why don’t I at least give it a try rather than daydreaming about it’ : by which I mean make a genuine attempt at writing the fiction that has been only present as a daydream. In that post, in which I discussed the work of J R Tolkien and Phillip Pulman, saying how much I enjoyed both of them for different reasons, I finished with the odd opinion that while Tolkien, in my opinion, rather drew a thick black line under the world of swords & sandals fantasy literature, Phillip Pullman instead has rather left the door wide open and made it possible to tell other stories about one of Tolkien’s later ages especially so given that it’s something he didn’t do himself. What I should have said in that post is that I am (mostly) taking a break from blogging but what I am also doing is laying down the first few words and ideas from my own proto story.

What i’m doing, in fact what iv’e done so far is to create a kind of whodunnit ( and why) all based around the start being a sea story. Later on, in the sections I am writing now, it morphs into an alternative history : a what if, if you will and based around something that nearly did happen historically, My main event and the scrap of factoid that Phillip Pullman writes about so elegantly is the outbreak of Pestilence (Plague) in the colony of Hong Kong at the end of the 19th century and the discovery made by Alexander Yersin : that the Plague had been caused by the organism carried by the rat flea – which we now know as Yersina Pestis. the twist in the tail of my story is that there are three main variants of the Plague and it is a simple children’s song that gives us the clue.

Anyway…..part one goes out with this post and part two is largely already written and being tidied up rather a lot : part one has already had three re-writes and I expect more a bit further down the line. It’s an experiment as much as anything and if it starts to get any interest at all then i’ll work towards releasing it as something like a print to order/self publish….unless of course a literary agent beats a path to my door and starts offering hard cash – honestly I doubt it.

As I write today (midsummer) I currently have ten new posts already written, edited and scheduled for publishing and this morning I find that I have one which urgently needs writing. With the medically assisted dying bill having made it through the house of commons it is my opinion that many ministers have made a grave (no pun intended) mistake and I intend to make that clear to both our own MP and as a seriously written post right here. In the meantime the thing i’m working on every day are the first sections of my first attempt at fiction. What I intend is to complete the first parts of the first section and publish them in my blog or perhaps to run a second wordpress site and publish them there. As a few people at least know my work from here I may well keep it all here.

Anyway, this morning, apart from a long session spent at the computer writing, I took short breaks and in one of those I watched an interview of Phillip Pullman being interviewed alongside another writer and to one of the questions he answered that writing is more habit than anything else and that it was often a step in the dark as he rarely had an exact mental map of where he is going with a developing story or new characters. With my blog posts, especially with anything that is boat related, I pretty well always know, until recently, where a post is going without much planning : that, I now feel, must be pretty boring to the readers while what I have started already seems to have a life of it’s own and what the characters are doing is already surprising,

Chay Blyth – someone that I never liked, Always said that it wasn’t cleverness or inbuilt talent that got you through life but plain hard work and consistent application. Dr Peterson would most likely say that it is trait conscientiousness coupled with intelligence which are the surest predictors of success in life. With anything creative though Dr Peterson says that it is a different trait, that of open mindedness that is important although also that it is a lot to do with the Pareto distribution that ultimately affects how well a creative act performs – or is received – in the real world.