Let’s refrain from all notion of making a comeback, or some grand return to the blogosphere, and instead just jump right back into it. Deal?
I haven’t written in a long while, (outside of the realms of social media, anyway), and a large part of that is due to how much work I had to do on this site before feeling comfortable moving forward. I tend to get bogged down in small problems that stack up behind large problems that need solving, and before I have any chance to stop it or catchup with it all, I succumb to the temptation to hide away, pop down the Winchester, and wait for it to all blow over.
But there is no longer a Winchester. It’s been closed for the foreseeable, and with it, my hiding place is no more. Over the past couple weeks I’ve cleared up most, if not all, of the issues I faced here on WordPress, and have had lots of time to think about the direction I want to head in. That gives me a solid, but flexible, plan. A clear, concise notion of what I want to achieve by building my once precious website and community!
Above all, though, I don’t want to overwhelm myself with a list of set-in-stone commitments and grandiose expectations of what happens next. My physical business is responsible for the health, wealth, and wellbeing of my family, and my various coaching elements are extremely important to me on a purpose basis. I love to write fiction and I sometimes like to sketch. I enjoy wasting hours at a time singing to old swing songs and can easily lose myself in a Netflix series. I, as an individual, am very broad in my likes and temptations.
And so herein lies the answer to my biggest, stillness-inducing question about this website. What do I want to project? What do I want to produce? What do I want to put out in front of the world, to equate to some level of success and an expression of my creative side? And that elusive answer, after six months of worry, and putting off, and ‘I’ll figure it out tomorrow’s,’ is embarrassingly simple. ME. Plain, erratic, social, sometimes boring, othertimes awesome, me.
The writer. The thinker. The talker. The drinker. The overall and total wanker: Me.
So here I am. Back, active, and ready to mingle. Of course I’ll be writing fiction for the blog here as I always have, but I expect it’ll be fewer, and farther between. I want to set up a Patreon and various things like that to attach my fiction commitments to. But for now, and most importantly, I want to write, and with it build relationships with the varied, awesome, and interesting people right here on wordpress and beyond.
If you’re interested in doing the same, hit that follow button and leave a comment. I’m excited to get back into it all 🙂
During my downtime, I confronted two key facts in my life. Number one is that I have too many books cluttering up three different bookshelves, and number two is that I don’t read nearly enough. I decided that I need to read a book a week, and stop buying more until I’ve put a serious dent in what I already have.
As readers, we know the benefits of reading are seemingly endless, and that the book is always better than the movie. But those statements alone are evidently not enough to change the mindset of a nation. What if we start smaller? Throw out the 500 page novels that can take a good 50% or more to get going, and convince them with a short, snappy plot line that formed a character, connection, and provoked emotion all in an instant. We wouldn’t expect a middle aged couple that occasionally take a casual twenty minute stroll to go run a marathon would we?
On the social media front, my instagram is about to get a huge revamp. I’m talking a consistent theme, beautiful imagery, and a whole bunch of inspiring, chilling, horrifying, philosophical, and entertaining quotes. That, and an exclusive Insta-story flash fiction once per week. If this interests you, 
You see, a lot of the things that we stress over, are directly caused by the amount of time we spend doing the little, enjoyable things in life, rather than focusing on the larger issues and commitments. The enjoyability isn’t enough to outweigh the stress, and we become overwhelmed as a result of our own procrastination. But if we take a second to fit in all those big responsibilities first, we see that we can still fit in all the small stuff around it, with less resistance and stress at that!
Of those 72 hours, we want to commit a good 20 hours on our big side goal. In this example it’s publishing a book. That includes creative writing practice, courses, writing, editing, networking, and everything else to do with that particular goal.
My first post, and singlehandedly responsible for my return to writing, the eulogy I wrote for my grandfather is a piece I hold close to my heart. While we weren’t particularly close, he being in Germany and me in the UK, he was a truly great man that came with his own presence. He was intelligent, funny, strong, and resilient. Without being forceful or overbearing, he smoothly commanded a level of respect from all who knew him. His death was sudden and unexpected, and from it came an outpouring of words that haven’t stopped since.
Actually my second post here, this is an article that I had originally written for a totally different blog idea, so the tone and voice may be different from what you’ve grown used to. Still, buried within this post is some unapologetic honesty, which forces us to take a close look at ourselves and why we may be unable to achieve what we want. Continuing on this strain, I wrote a post to follow up called “How To Achieve Success in Anything,” which further explored how we hold ourselves back from the things we love and want.
Coming in at under 300 words for a weekly writing group contest, The Man In The Hat was a short exploration of a character I’d held in my mind for a long time. Two characters, actually. The mood of the piece is enigmatic, and it really doesn’t give much away. While the situation isn’t one I saw for a longer novel, I enjoyed setting these two characters free just for a few hundred words. If you’d like to go check that out, it’ll take less than a couple minutes and you can have a go at figuring out who the man in the hat is. Hopefully it wets your appetite for one of my near-future works! You can find it here: 
Growing in cultural popularity as of late, Vikings have always been a huge thing of interest for me. Having a northern heritage myself, and feeling a particular calling to that wild pantheon of Gods and Godesses, it’s always fun to explore the darker aspects of Viking behaviour throughout the Middle Ages. I wasn’t entirely happy with this piece, but it was received well by all who read it, and reading it back now, I actually love it. Cleverly titled Fury Of The Godless, we question whether the Godless in question are those who’ve slaughtered a monastery of men, or those from the monastery itself. The Northmen had Gods, and they loved them freely. But did the Christians truly love their God? You decide for yourself here: 
My most recent piece of fiction comes in at under 750 words for a YeahWrite weekly contest. The prompt was catalyst, and metaphors are this month’s main theme. Being new to YeahWrite, I wanted to make an impression, and weaved a metaphor throughout the entire piece. I’ve fallen in love with both characters in that story, and wish I had more words to fully develop and explore them. Writing this piece was easy. The main character pulled me through smoothly, leading the way as I translated her thoughts through the tapping of the keys. I think I’ll revisit this at some stage and weave a full short story or novella from it. I seriously loved writing it, genuinely love reading it back, and hope you will too. You can check that out here: 
I’m sure you figured this already, but if we’re gonna drive a blog to success, we’re really gonna need to up our writing game. This doesn’t mean writing the most pretentious, verbose copy you and your thesaurus can come up. Rather, the opposite. Your work should be short and sweet, clean. Just because it’s one blog post doesn’t mean it shouldn’t follow the same level of care and respect as anything else you’d write.
So now you’ve written your copy. You’re happy with it, it flows, and you’ve concisely delivered your message. You’ve added relevant, high quality media to your post, and set yourself up as best as you can to develop relationships with your readers, by putting their needs at the forefront of the post. it’s almost time to publish. But first, we need to help others find your work, and we do that by adding some basic SEO principles to our post.
So you’ve done all that, and written the perfect blog post. Not only is it relevant, informative and entertaining, it’s discoverable, easy on the eyes, and will (hopefully) stand the test of time. But the work isn’t over yet. Now we need to give your post a little boost to get it out there. We do that through social media.
About this he is absolutely clear. If you’re serious about writing as a career, you’re gonna need to start taking your writing seriously. That means treating it as a job, and scheduling in x-amount of writing every day. Whether it’s 2000 words a day, a couple hours a day, or any variation of the above, you need to set a target, and sit down to it, without fail. No writers block, no lack of ideas, no excuses. You turn up at the same time each day, and eventually your muse will turn up to sit with you.
One of the most immersive and engaging factors to any Stephen King story, is the care and attention given to his characters. If you’ve read anything by him, you can instantly see that his stories are—for the most part—character driven. He spends a lot of time getting to know them, breathing life into them, and letting them steer the rest of the story in whichever direction best suits them.
Unless you’ve spent ten years on writing and editing the most perfect novel of all time, you’re gonna have to develop a thick skin, and an otherworldly determination despite all rejection letters. Because you’re gonna go through loads of those. Magazines will sit on your manuscript for months, to simply send a thanks, but no thanks. Others will tell you ‘resubmit, your story wasn’t for us, but the next one might be.’ With patience, determination, and a love for writing stories, you will break through.
Stephen King is the perfect example of sitting down and writing what’s in your head, even if the story may end up a little shaky. After all, he did write Maximum Overdrive (LOL).
Dealing with the death of a loved one is difficult. Losing a family member is the last thing anybody wants to go through, and yet one of the only things we all have to. On the fourth of July, 2018, my grandfather died. It was sudden, unexpected, and exactly how he would’ve wanted it. At eighty-four years old, he was one of the most active men I knew. He went on long bike rides, worked in the garden, and went on hunting trips all over the world. He had only been back off a three week hunting trip a couple of days before he died! With him, went my naive imagining of limitless time. A sad fact of life is that it runs out. It was on this day, that I decided to change myself, and live the life I wish to live, before I no longer have a choice in the matter. This eulogy is the final gift to my grandfather, a send-off. Closure, if you will. More than that still, It’s the first piece of writing I created since deciding to get serious about my craft. I hope you enjoy it.