On the arrival of buses, the darkness of Autumn, and the shocking of hearts
So that's what October looks like this year..!
There’s that well-worn saying about waiting ages for a bus and then three come along at once. And once again it seems as if the completion of my writing projects are just like buses.
My new book - the non-fiction So, you think you’re a Writer - is published from the end of the month. It has been many months in the making, or - if you see it as based on writing experience - many decades in the researching. But now done and dusted.
A reading of the book’s introduction:
The other buses are two books I’m publishing. The first is a collection of poetry - Scattered with Grace, by Richard Lister - and the second - At the Fraying Edge of History - an anthology of poetry written by the Derby Stanza Group (of which I’m a member). Both will be published in the next four or five weeks.
I get a great kick out of occasionally publishing others’ work. Including my own, that will be eleven books published this year under my Coverstory books imprint.
With those buses now departed, I’m once again staring at an empty project list. I was looking at resurrecting a part-finished novel, but I’m still not convinced by the prospect; and I’ve started to think about a new collection of my own recent poetry, but am a little lukewarm…
I find these moments of calm (it’s a more upbeat word than ‘angst’!) both scary and exciting; the excitement comes from knowing that once again anything is possible.
Mind you, October’s not the most cheery of months, is it? Temperatures start to fall away and the clocks go back, which means our days are suddenly - and very tangibly! - shorter. Abandoning British Summer Time does nothing for the spirits.
And then there’s the shock to come next week. Literally. Those few hospitalised minutes when I get put to sleep, wired to some contraption, and my heart is given the gift of an electric shock in order to try and coax it back into a normal rhythm… The success-rate of the procedure is pretty good (c. 90%), so I could be sitting here in a week’s time feeling like a new man, full of brilliant ideas, and not giving a damn about the darker evenings to come!
Not your run-of-the-mill October, whichever way you look at it.
Of course the picture at the top of this post has nothing to do with October but is rather a reminder of what Spring and Summer is like, and therefore a teaser at to what we can look forward to when the clocks change again. Between now and then, six months hopefully not filled with darkness but of opportunity; the gifting of time with which the lucky ones among us can do pretty much anything we want.
There are some great stories on Substack from people who’ve made major changes in their lives, turning them around, setting off on new adventures, harvesting prior experience (often negative) and turning it into the positive. My own recent case is of giving up paid work to write full-time; and going further back, surviving a torrid childhood where I was homeless three times. Perhaps it’s because of those kind of experience that I’d like to think we all have some kind of opportunity every single day, even if in just the smallest of ways and with the babiest of steps.
My baby steps revolve around writing, pure and simple.
Given I can’t do anything about darkness, the temperature, the clocks - nor the ‘shock treatment’! - my focus will be on my next projects, those literary buses I need to catch in order to see me through the winter. And I daresay I’ll share the outcome of my deliberations here - and maybe even some of the early output, who knows?
Have you managed to effect some kind of turnaround in your life?
U-uh, some but good luck with your procedure next week. Definitely a subject to write about!