My debut book :)

[studmuffin]

At the end of September I was out with my son and his friends and while they were exploring I thought it a good idea to play on his scooter when nobody was looking. Everything was going fine until I decided to relive my childhood and complete a wheelie and show my son how cool his dad really is. As I was part way through the tricky manoeuvre I heard a loud snapping noise which I initially thought was the scooter, buckling under my weight. I landed on the floor struggling to breathe and screaming louder than I had done before.

A steady stream of people looked after me until the ambulance finally arrived and I was given gas, the same gas I was so tempted to try when my wife was giving birth to our son. After a few moments the ambulance crew lifted my trousers and it became immediately clear that my kneecap was not where it should be and they assumed it was dislocated. Once the gas had taken effect, they tried to pop the joint back into place without success, which hurt, a lot!

Apologies, I am going on. Anyway, the fault was quickly identified as a ruptured patella tendon and surgery followed the next day along with a week in hospital which for someone who had never been in hospital was tough.

Eventually I was sent home in a full cast but with feelings of trepidation about how I would navigate the house and conscious that the injury would impact on my wife and son.

I was told I would be off work for about 3 months and as I write and looking at my swollen knee I would guess closer to 4 months. I have always been an outdoor person so I struggled for the first week and ended up getting really down in the dumps watching rubbish on the TV so I decided I had to do something with the time that had been given to me. Due to mobility issues the only things I could to were to paint and to write, so I decided to do both. I started to write my debut novel and people I told were genuinely interested but I deliberately didn’t tell anyone what it was about or show them anything I had written. Because it was a first time attempt I knew that any negative reaction would probably have given me the excuse to write it off as a futile, stupid attempt.

The weeks went by and I persisted, mainly because my young son would come home and excitedly ask how many words I had written. He had no idea what the book was about, or even why I was writing it but he was proud of his dad. Trust me he wasn’t that day in the park when I was screaming like a girl!

I eventually finished the book and then struggled as I went through it time and time again trying to find corrections.
When I started the book I wanted to sell 10 copies to people who were not family members or friends and yesterday I finally achieved it.

This isn’t a shameless plug for the book, well ok a little bit. It is more to demonstrate the power of writing and how the creative process, be it writing, knitting or whatever can really have a positive influence on you. Without writing the book, I would have struggled over the past three months but instead of the injury getting me down in the dumps, I now actually feel positive and slightly proud that for the first time I have done something that I said I would do and seeing the book on Kindle was a great feeling. I did miss a couple of spelling mistakes but hey, it isn’t the end of the world. I did the best I could!

 

If you want a read , it is called My Final Excuse by JC Williams and is on Kindle.

[wrighty]

Well I'll give it a try. Do you want me to post a review here once I've read it?

[studmuffin]

Thanks Wrighty! Constructive comments would be appreciated either on here, or PM. If anyone buys and hated it, just let me know and I will stick the £2 in a charity bucket.

[ans]

Well done on the book, I've been plodding my way through my own for years at a snails pace and I think I've deleted 100x more words than I've kept.

 

I'd just like to add that I suffered the exact same injury just over two years ago. I had two operations, was off work for almost four months, had a full length cast and a monstrous leg brace in succession and although I've never "fully" recovered, I recovered enough to play my sport again (albeit with less mobility) and I'm pretty much pain free now. It's a horrible, awful injury that's incredibly debilitating and you really do have my sympathy. I hope you took photos of your kneecap half way up your thigh, I know I did, even if I was high from the medication and shaking in pain.

[studmuffin]

Ha ha I did Ans. You will appreciate my pain when the ambulance crew incorrectly thought it was a dislocation and tried to manipulate my leg. Can I PM you about the recuperation process because that has been my biggest concern?

[ans]

Yeah sure thing. They didn't try to manipulate me so I avoided that, but I did mine taking off for a jump and what goes up.... landing on it made me black out for a few seconds. Take it to PM rather than derailing your thread further with gruesome injury anecdotes

[Albert Tatlock]

Writing a book or studying something when you're laid up for that length of time is far more healthier and productive for your mind, than is feeling sorry for yourself or doing a 5000 piece jigsaw.

[John Wright]

Always admired creative types. I had a nasty orthopaedic injury in early October. I was lucky, after I got home I managed to work, even through being admitted ( and from my hospital bed) for a pulmonary embolism secondary to the fracture, but if I hadn't been able to work writing might have been good therapy, and stopped me from going insane.

 

I'll buy and read. Maybe offer views by pm.

[doc.fixit]

Yup, at long last I wrote and had published last year, my book, 'Muddy Memories'. I wasn't bothered about selling it but accidently have sold a few. (The bookshop in Peel has a couple in).I used to write a regular article in a four wheel drive magazine for quite a number of years until the mag. was taken over and amalgamated into a, 'lifestyle', format which I personally find nauseating. I edited all the articles and used versions of the best ones.

I found writing it very therapeutic and marked the experience off as another small achievement.

To be recommended IMO.

[Yin & Yang]

I'd love to write a book, based on my life story, although I could never put my name to it!

 

Glad to hear that you made the best of a bad situation.

[Declan]

I read it today. Quite good, especially for a first piece of sustained writing. It was entertaining, was well paced and for the most part interesting. My favourite bits were when the larger than life characters - Larry, Clint, Una - entered.

 

You can kind of tell you began writing without a clear idea where you would end up and kept writing until got there. The narrative is very linear, no flashbacks, the back story is very brief and at times inconsistent (Mike and Carol were at school with Tom but seem not to know his home or native village). The worst bit of the book is the opening scene where like This Life characters they indulge in Pinot Griot and bitchy banter, I really thought I wouldn't finish the book but then you get into your stride and it becomes more interesting.

 

There's no real detail, and personally I'd like some. Given that the key dynamic is the tension between city and country, it's odd that the city is unnamed, we don't know where the countryside bits take place, or even what country it is in, and there's not really a description of the countryside. Because there's a festival we know the last chapter is set in summer, but until then we don't know at what time of year the events occur.

 

So, well done, you've done a really good thing, you've written a sustained bit of fiction that hangs together as a whole and retains the reader's attention to the end. For your development as a writer I'd suggest investing more time in planning your story beforehand. I don't mean necessarily knowing every twist and turn before you start writing but try asking yourself basic "who, what, why, when, where, how" type questions before you set off. You might also want to consider your first splurge of creativity, where you get your ideas down in paper as a first draft that you are going to revisit and polish.

 

Was it difficult to go from completed draft to ebook on Amazon?

[studmuffin]

Hi Declan, thank you for reading and I really do appreciate the constructive feedback.

 

You are pretty much on the nail with some of the initial concerns I had, particularly the backstory and the lack of detail such as place names. The place names was because I modelled it on places I knew in the IOM but didn’t want to use a real place in the UK I didn’t know well. I suppose this is a research issue or do you think there would have been any harm in making a place up but using more detail to describe it?

 

The development areas you suggest are particularly useful and things that I will genuinely follow up on.

 

Going from draft to amazon was not particularly difficult, but quite fiddly and for some reason I am now paying 30% US withholding tax because I live in the IOM?

One thing I found about writing the book is that your tolerance to do things dramatically increases. The book to write, took in total about 250 hours according to MS Word so things that I would get frustrated by, such as Amazon, didn’t seem to faze me as such. I am doing a collection of short stories 2/4000 words each at the moment, and from the pain of writing the book, this is enjoyable and I have written two stories since the weekend of the total of ten I want to get to. Once I get to ten I am going to design a book cover and get that on Kindle as well. Really enjoying it!

 

Kindle is a wonderful thing and I would encourage anyone to give it a go.

 

I am pleased that on the whole you enjoyed my book, and thank you for being so generous with your time!

[John Wright]

I've finished. Nice shortish story, ideal airport holiday stuff. I didn't find the lack of seasons a problem like Declan, there is mention of time of year and of passage of time. I could work it out without being told it was 20th of June, or whatever

 

Do agree you need to be better on description and location and consistent back story Tom's mum clearly knew Mike but Mike didn't know the family house or village - that is bizarre.

 

There are huge passages in the likes of Dickens and Hardy (as examples) which don't move the story on but give a strong sense of place or person. Yours lacked sense of person or location. I don't mind village or city as descriptions, but be consistent. you capitalised, and then didn't, City and city and Village and village.

 

One of the reasons I prefer to read over V or film, is that I have a strong visual imagination and form my own picture of where and who. It's why I prefer radio as well. The characters live in my mind. Often the visual representation on TV or celluloid doesn't live up to my own imaginings. I got no picture at all from this story, I cant picture the main characters or the locations at all.

 

The one thing I do suggest, whether you get an agent or not, is to get someone to edit, and re edit. get several people to print the draft and mark up spelling and grammar and other inconsistencies. Is there a creative writing club or circle here to go to and criticise and encourage each others work?

 

It rambled a bit, spelling and grammar were atrocious and chapters were arbitrary and text just jumped between characters and locations with no sub chapter divisions.

 

BUT, its better than I could produce, so well done

[studmuffin]

Hi John,

 

Thank you for reading the book and like Declan the feedback is really valuable for me. I really enjoyed writing the book so hopefully it will be a catalyst to others and with the honest constructive feedback, I can only get better.

 

Thank you also for your valuable time it is genuinely appreciated!

 

ETA - I am going to take the book out of Kindle. I want to make some revisions using the great feedback received

[wrighty]

Well I'm now the 3rd (at least) forum member to finish your book - I tend to read in bed and get through books a bit slower that the other two as I fall asleep. This is no reflection on the writing however, as I've fallen asleep many a time to Ian Rankin, John Grisham, Lee Child...

 

Firstly, I finished it, at no point thought about quitting, and towards the end was quite keen to find out what happens next, and whether or not they succeeded in their 'project'. In that alone you've achieved something worthwhile. I enjoyed reading it, and would be happy to splash out £2 or similar on your next effort (incidentally, how much of that do you get, and how much goes to Amazon?)

 

How can you improve for next time? I think John and Declan have said most of it. You definitely need an editor/proof reader. When reading, some things just grate with me and spoil the flow - for example, 'of' instead of 'off' and vice versa, there were some spelling mistakes, but the prize for the biggest one has to be confusing 'astrological' and 'astronomical' - it at least made me smile imagining all these Russell Grant types turning up in a field in the countryside looking up at the dark skies trying to work out if a capricorn will get off with a taurus at the next office party!

 

Characters could have been introduced a bit better in some places, and at the start I thought there was a bit too much dialogue which meant it was a little hard going, as I had to keep thinking 'which one is Tom, and which one is Mike' etc. Larry was a bit underused in my opinion - perhaps he could be more central in your next installment?

 

I'd definitely recommend you keep at it. Perhaps you could at the same time do a creative writing course - there are MOOCs available that cover this topic, a quick Google came up with this : https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/start-writing-fiction

 

Good luck, and send me the link for the next one.