I don’t read a lot of novels, and much to the amusement of my kids by the time they were teeenagers they had each read many more novels than I have in my entire life! However I do like them as a form to tell a story, although I’m far more interested in the story as the artistic vessel than the language used to express it.
If I had a choice probably all my stories I would make as films, and some as theatre, but these are long and involved processes that require a lot of people, time and money – and not always possible, so I like novels as a way to still express the story.
I’ve self-published three so far, with hopefully many more on the way – I’m even interested in turning some of my screenplays into novels.
The Forest of Life was my first one and had quite a protracted history of getting completed. Female Planet is I think my most complete one in terms of how it tells the story. Show So Fair is the first part in a series of police procedurals. All these books are available in paperback or eBook.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably never going to get a publisher or publishing contract, and I’m okay with that. There’s a few reasons for this ~ basically I don’t want to (and just can’t) conform to the commercial requirements of publishers — both in content and the way it is expressed.
So it makes me think – why am I writing? To me it’s an unknown urge – I just have to do it – it’s a way of expressing and examining feelings and ideas, and there’s a lot of joy in creating an artistic form. Yes I do want people to enjoy them as well but I don’t want to put the cart before the horse as it were.
I’ve been told my punctuation style is “eccentric” (which is a kind way of putting it) – and I have tried, and I mean really tried, to make it more conventional – but I just can’t. I just have to write things the way I feel them and they way they come to me – and the way I can best and most naturally express that. If I try and alter the form or the language or punctuation in which it comes out in, then I destroy my ability to actually create it in the first place, and to generate and be connected to the content. I’ve tried in so many ways to make it more conventional so it’s more accessible to people – and a wider audience of course — either by writing it that way off the bat, or editing it into that afterwards, and I just can’t – it just doesn’t work and it inhibits my ability to express it in the first place.
So it is what it is, I do re-read and re-write but that’s to make it the best version of how I write, not how someone else writes.
So if you can get through all of that I hope you enjoy the books, and if you don’t that’s perfectly okay too.
And while I’m at it I’ll just mention I LUUUUURV WordPerfect! I usually write in it and then transfer the file over to MS Word for formatting and the last stages of editing. Pictured above is WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS running on the vDOS emulator. There’s plenty of instructions online about how to do this – for instance here and here.
So why do this? It’s the beautiful simple clean interface ~ just you and your ideas. I still don’t know why modern word processors don’t offer this as a separate mode to run in. I think WordPerfect for DOS is one of the best programmes ever written, and I’ve been using it in one form or another for almost 40 years now – good grief!
