My First Blog Post

In the Beginning…

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

The blank computer screen with its blinking cursor is intimidating enough when I’m starting to write a new novel. Chapter 1, Page 1. Gulp. But that’s nothing compared to staring at this blank page…

Fiction is a walk in the park compared to trying to decide which aspect of real life I want to write about. When I’m writing fiction, I can have my characters do just what I want them to do. Waggles eyebrows in a dictator-like fashion. It’s the best fun. Except when my characters tell me, in no uncertain terms, that they don’t want to conform to my plan and proceed to tell me what they intend to do instead.

Hmm. Perhaps this blog thing won’t be so different, after all.

I’ve spent the majority of my life listening. I’m the quiet one. I’m the one set on receive, rather than send. I’m happy like that. ‘Introverted’ appears to be the official title, but I like to think I’m more complicated than a label. And my forty-something (clears throat to hide exact number) years on the planet has proved to me that most things about life and people are more complicated than we are led to believe.

So, I suppose that is what my blogs will be about. How nothing is straightforward. How, just when you think you have a handle on something, the sands shift and the goalposts move and it’s a mystery again. And how that’s fine. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Trust me – I know that’s right, because I heard someone say it.

It’s good to meet you…

I’m an aspiring author with dreams of being bound in leather one day… No, hang on, that came out wrong…

It took me a good forty-five years before I felt like I had something worth saying and I sat down to write my very first draft of my very first novel.

Needless to say, that draft and the redrafts which followed will probably never see the light of day. But it doesn’t matter. The important part – for me – was unleashing the possibility.

As far as I’m concerned, reading is akin to breathing. Savouring a good book is more pleasurable than (almost) anything else. So, the thought that I might write something which other people will enjoy reading one day is exciting.

In terms of my blogs? They won’t be anything heavy. More likely, they’ll be things that are inhabiting my brain, with no intention of giving in gracefully without being given a platform on which to exist…

And you? Well, I’d like to think of my readers as people I’d like to meet up with for a pot of tea and an enormous slice of chocolate Guinness cake. Breakfast tea for me – none of that fancy lap sang suchong stuff, or anything involving fruit, if it’s all the same… Or a G&T… With a squeeze of lime.