My Thirty Eighth Week as a Budding Author

Writing this blog is a funny old game. To you it may seem simple; survive the week, sit back and reflect upon it and then hammer away into a word processor followed by the push of the “Publish” button. I see it differently though. To me it is a commitment with a weekly deadline, designed to discipline me into writing something vaguely amusing that bears some resemblance to the facts as they happened. This is not as easy as it sounds. Even budding authors have repetition and often I get to Friday thinking, “What on earth am I going to write about given that all I’ve done is cycle a bit and record the salient details into a computer?”.

So, I scratch around the week looking for tangential elements that I hope will appeal. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s a fair few of these blog posts that I’d dearly love to rewrite and republish, but they’re done now and it’s time to move on to the next. This week is proving to be another one of the tricky ones. It followed a formula that’s been running for months:-

• pack the van and forget stuff
• ride hard bikes routes and really suffer
• meet lunatics on campsites (Andy Shelley excepted)
• break bits of bicycle
• have “issues” with motorists

Now I think I know most of the people that read this blog by sight. Furthermore a nice little google tool called analytics tells me that I am a long way from being a famous and well respected blogger. Some recent market research that I carried out indicates that you are probably currently lying in bed reading this on a tablet wondering just what the bloody idiot has been up to next (couples, first one to read this..grab a few partner pubes, no returns). Well, the answer is that the “bloody idiot” has been thinking, in fact he’s been thinking quite a lot and I’d like to share some of the results with you and have a little chat.

I’ve been cogitating around “the book”, my big project to enrich the lives of road cyclists with the joys of the highways in Great Britain. There’s a danger it could be a little bit…...boring. I know this because I’ve spent time reading a lot of the books that have gone before. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve flicked through a load of these books but never sat down and read them. All they do is describe leafy lanes and witter on about escaping from traffic on quiet country lanes. After page 40 I’m willing the author to say something INTERESTING even if it’s completely unrelated to the route they want me to ride.

There’s another problem, I find it very hard to write and detach myself from the words on the page. In English, this means I’ll never be a journalist, a proper historian or a copywriter. I’m only really productive when writing from the viewpoint of Dave. This is a problem when you are an arrogant, opinionated little twerp with a warped sense of humour and slight inferiority complex. As I must confess I am. There’s been a fair few moments of head in hands recently as I’ve tried my hardest to bend to a discipline that I’m just not programmed to action. I’ve been tempted to give up and write the last nine months off as “a learning experience”. And then I found this:-

It’s from the front page of the Barrow Central Wheelers cycling club website. I have to confess I’ve never heard of them. I’ll probably be reminded that I know one of their members but my amnesia in the matter will be genuine.

“You've probably read "In Search Of Robert Millar", "Flying Scotsman" and loads of other cycling books.  Well, there's a new one due out next year, and reading this chaps blog on its progress, it should be a cracker.”

Sorry, but I have to repeat that quote. The person that I don’t know who wrote it has inspired me forwards more than they can ever think. Because they’ve made me realise that any book I try to force out is going to be crap. It’s got to be written by me and in my voice or not be written at all. My sister will have her hand in the air and be shouting, “Dave I told you this in February.” Yes Sally, you did. Sometimes I can be a little bit slow on the uptake, take it from me seven months is good going.

Now, there’s no guarantee that writing in my style will eradicate the potential for crap. But hopefully I can sell a copy to the Barrow Central Wheelers with “no refunds” written on the back on bold.

This single (yet bleedingly obvious) revelation has been a huge weight off my shoulders. It has impact, in that I will be drawing a thick black line through nearly forty thousand words and writing “could do better” in the margin. But it frees me to be a little more personal and creative in the description of routes.

For example:-

“The next few miles consists of delightful smooth tarmaced lanes that lead up to a stiff climb to a church”

Can now be replaced with:-

“For f**ks sake eat all your energy bars now before you blow out of your arse on the climb and expire at the top. No worries if you do as there’s a graveyard to hand, it might be worth warning the vicar in advance”.

More so, I can weave my experiences into the routes and try to bring them alive, a sort of “idiot not abroad” type of experience.

The final huge advantage stems from the issue of photography. There are over forty routes in this book in forty different locations and I had naively assumed that I’d be able to locate and cajole forty different riders to help illustrate the rides. Nine months into the project it is clear that this was ridiculously optimistic given that there are probably less than forty people in the UK actually prepared to suffer my company for more than an hour.

I’ve got shit loads of photos of me looking shagged out and fed up with it all at the top of remote hills. These would be incongruous against text that was not describing my own personal journey around the routes. The photos must fit with the words and visa-versa, using my new writing strategy they will.

So there ends this week’s statement from the Ministry of the Bleeding Obvious. This book and the others I am working on will be selfishly focused around my journey and my experiences. Because if they ain’t, I can’t write them.

I’ll end the navel gazing now and apologise for this week’s morose-ity (sic), think of yourself as partaking within a little piece of online therapy that has helped me a lot. Any comments gratefully received, blogging is very lonely without feedback. Please rest assured that I have been riding the bike though, in fact I’ve been riding it a lot.

Cycling activity has been a virtual “war of the roses: having taken place in Lancashire and then Yorkshire. Yorkshire won the battle hands down with 4,000 feet more climbing than Lancashire and a ferocious westerly wind. Riding over Ovenden Moor was probably the scariest experience of the year as I had gale force winds one side of the road and spinning wind farms the other. A complete lack of recent pies meant that I was in clear danger of being plucked from the tarmac and neatly shredded in the turbines. I can now see why the fat lads maintain the lager/doughnut/kebab strategy, on top of Yorkshire hills it makes a lot of sense.

Dave

23rd September 2011

 WEEK 39>>>>>>>>