It has been a long and exhausting journey to get to this stage. My writing has suffered immensely due to various circumstances, and I am also undertaking a Postgraduate Certificate in Leadership and Management with Lancaster University. However, I am finally pleased to announce that I am gradually getting back into my writing and focusing on my projects.
All excuses aside, the good news — I have finally finished my short story Three at just over 13,000 words. It is now available on Amazon (see below). Don’t worry, it won’t cost much at all.
Three was written many moons ago, during the early 1990s. It was the first full-length piece of prose I ever wrote, in my aspiration of becoming an author. It transpired from a hungering interest in mythology, table-top gaming, and extensive reading in fantastical literature, fables, and International lore.
As a child I always wanted to write a fable, and an unusual one at that, but it had to employ a succinct fictional storyline, and (at the very least) parallel the technique and style of the old masters, such as Aesop. The vital ingredients for me were the principal moral lesson, along with revealing a common and inherent human trait. A great undertaking that wasn’t easy.
Last year, I took the manuscript out simply to read it. Then I felt the need to re-shape it, and in a way re-tell it. In the end, I got to the point where I was really happy with it, and wanted to share it, and that’s all I can ask. So, without saying too much about the story itself, I will simply leave you with the preview below.
Venturing into the natural habitat is in sense an act of escapism for me, especially in seeking tranquility from today’s hectic urban demands. What better way to relay your thoughts and observations of the natural world than by putting these visual notes and experiences down on paper. Nature writing is about the writer as well as about the natural world, and is exploratory as well as reflective. If you try to delve a little deeper, then Don Scheese has a great book called Nature writing: the pastoral impulse in America and in there is some thought provoking information and definitions. He describes the place to which nature writers escape is a problem fraught with ethnocentric implications. He goes on to say that the wild or wilderness is a traditional designation meaning land unaffected by humans. He goes on to say that nature writing in a sense is a descendent from other literary forms, it emphasises natural history for it’s scientific bent (the attempt to explain the workings of the physical universe over time); spatial autobiography, for it’s account of the growth and maturation of the self in interaction with the forces of the world; and travel writing (including the literature of exploration and discovery), for its tracing of a physical movement from place to place and recording of observations of both new and familiar phenomena.
I always get very childlike; the adrenaline rush when I race over to my favourite section in a book shop ‘fantasy.’ Even online when I scroll and type away, I am amazed at the variety of both traditionally published books available by known and unknown authors. Even the every increasing eBook age is encouraging more writers in this field to surface and grace the world with their fantastical tales and unique worlds. It seems the demand is there, and the cultural evolution of the genre is evident.
Blood Of Elves