My Tenth Week as a Budding Author

Week ten! Almost one fifth of the way into this project and I’m still riding the bike and attempting to write lucidly about the experience. To be honest I’d always wondered whether I would have cracked by now and skulked back to my old job with enquiries about “consulting”. In fact I was offered a little bit of wedge by another company to talk bollocks about IT to them, but I’ve held fast and wasted my time reading cycling magazines instead.

Anyone who has stuck with me this far may remember that in week seven I acquired a huge volume of cycling magazines. This week I’ve been ploughing through them, gleaning all sorts of useful snippets of research and inspiration. This has not been the easiest task and my record is 75 magazines in one sitting. You’d have thought that sitting on your arse in a shed flicking through magazines would be about as taxing as reading a Katie Price novel, but you’d be wrong.

After 30 or so magazines I’d developed a weird form of RSI, my shoulder and left hand were both hurting from the repetitive strain of flicking through the pages. To overcome this, I tried a new technique of licking the index finger on the right hand and using a deft cross flick to switch pages. This worked 60% of the time, the other 40% simply deposited phlegm onto the page. So I tried lying on the floor instead, but this gave me tummy ache and I was scared of the woodlice lurking near the skirting board.

This author lark is filled with hidden pitfalls. When you become a fireman or a nuclear scientist there are manuals and training courses that ease you into the profession. Where the hell would I find a mentor or guidebook that would inform me that attempting to become a writer comes with the risk of catching odd forms of strain injury from piles of magazines.

Anyway, enough of my moaning, let me do some for my wife Helen by proxy. I’ve been thinking about the impact of my career change upon the household and Helen in particular. It would be tempting to imagine that I’ve turned her life upside down with the irresponsibility of leaving a good job and the chaos and insecurity that comes with this decision. However, I realised that not much has changed really because she is married to a cyclist, and being married to a cyclist is an absolute bloody nightmare.

Lets take the house as a starter for ten. It’s hard to find a room where cycling has not had a major impact. Starting with the kitchen, or more specifically the sink we had installed in the utility room to help with washing up and vegetable preparation.

Oh dear, it’s full of cycling crap. Then we have the living area that we spent ages sorting out, including knocking down walls and reflooring, it too is full of cycling crap.

Moving on, we have the garage, whoops, lots of cycling crap.

Then there is the spare room, TWO bikes, one on the turbo trainer and one on the wall (for the record, it’s Helen’s bike on the wall).

You’d think the bedroom would be a sanctuary devoid of cycling paraphernalia, this photo is my bedside table, which is unfortunately heavily burdened with books, a large percentage of them cycling related.

Finally we come to the shed. We built this as playroom for young and old alike, the idea was that it was somewhere that anyone of us could go in order to escape the routine of day to day existence and murder some aliens on a games console (or murder a perfectly good tune on Dave’s electric guitar). Currently the shed is out of service, not due to any technical fault, but entirely due to it being filled with cycling magazines.

I don’t care what anyone says, I know that other cycling homes are the same, because I’ve been in them. It’s one of those pastimes that creeps into every area of the house like ivy and no matter how much trimming you do, it finds a way back in. This then got me wondering about other households, for example; what does a gynecologist’s garage look like? would it be possible to live with a steam engine enthusiast? and does a campanologist fret for days about their doorbell chime being out of tune.

But coming back to the original point, you can see that I’ve spent years preparing Helen for this career move and I’m sure that she would agree that whilst there has been a slight increase in the volume of scuddy cycling shorts, it’s pretty much business as usual in the Barter household as far as cycling tat is concerned.

In terms of book writing progress, I have actually made some this week and also have a very exciting announcement to make, but will keep you hanging for that one. Last week I wittered on about the lack of flair and panache within a lot of my writing to date. So this week I applied myself properly to the task and to coin a phrase I used to use a lot at work, I’ve come up with a decent amount of “fluffy wank”.

For the Americans in the audience don’t bother googling “fluffy wank” it’s not Australian for sellotape. “Fluffy wank” is that stuff that you don’t need to make something work, but it looks a damn sight better when it’s added to the mix. In my old days working in IT “fluffy wank” was churned out by our web designers when they took a break from Lattes and chanting obscure Tibetan mantras. I need some of this stuff for the book and have spent a fair few hours writing depressingly few sentences. But I’m starting to get somewhere with it.

The IT professional in me could not be suppressed though and I’ve even managed to create a process for writing some “fluffy wank”. I wasn’t sure whether to be elated or extremely depressed after developing the two mind maps shown below.

This is a dangerous game, mind maps will morph into full process charts, which in turn will require implementation plans and then quality plans and gantt charts. Soon, if I’m not careful, I’ll re-enter that wonderful world of technology projects where the actual doing of stuff will be totally eclipsed by the time and effort of planning to do it and realising that this time spent planning has meant that the doing can’t be done now and more planning is required to work out how to do what you were going to do anyway in a shorter time period but with the same amount of planning and control.

So based on past experience, I’ve decided to dispense with the planning stage and just muddle on with the doing. And where I am at the moment is pretty much one fifth of the way in with four fifths to go. But being a man that likes a challenge I’ve decided to up the stakes a little.

Inspired by a Facebook friend who has recently published a cycling novel via Amazon, I’ve realised that I can get some of my work published electronically for the Kindle and use this experience to gain valuable feedback prior to attempting to push the “big project”. I’ve also spent years researching a little known area of cycling that is perfect for the interim project. So I’ve given myself six months to get this research into shape and publish it for the Kindle. This means that I’m now writing TWO books instead of one.

Hopefully, the new project will be worthwhile. It is a story that needs to be told but there isn’t really enough to fill a standard paperback book. However, the Kindle is perfect. Jon published his short novella and sells it for 75p, at that price it will always be worth a look and the reader will not be disappointed if they don’t get a full on novel. I’m putting aside a day a week for the new book and hope to have it finished and proofed by August. Hang on..that sounded dangerously like a plan!

Dave

11th March 2011

WEEK ELEVEN >>>>>>