Reading–1959 - Current
I think that the writing process for me really began with the reading process! My mom read to us when we were very little. I remember sitting or lying around the kitchen, while my mom read The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, or the wishing chair. The way my mom read made it easy for me to be in the cupboard sifting through the old coats until I really could feel the snow and ice of Narnia.
My dad was the storyteller. He also reads to us books like Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn, although I found his reading voice disjointed and lacking in the pace and rhythm I needed to escape into the world of the story. When it came to storytelling though, my dad was king. His stories, even when simply describing an incident on the train to work, were multi-media productions incorporating sound effects, wild arm actions and occasionally spittle to really drive home the climax.
Partly genes and partly growing up in this environment, I developed an imagination superseding any virtual reality platform, or film streaming service available today. The result is that from very young, reading became an addictive, mind-altering experience that has continued throughout my life. From Enid Blyton, I progressed to Hardy boys and on to Hammond Innes, Alister Mc clean, Louie Le mar. My mom would go to the local library every Thursday, and it was with great excitement that I would come back from school, race into my bedroom to see what books were on my bed. She always knew where I was in terms of my reading taste and catalogue.
I cannot think of a time when I did not have a book I was busy reading. Books, like music, formed a solid unbroken backing track to my life, many times coming so strongly to the foreground that they defined certain incidents, or stages of my life. The drifters by Mitchiner triggered by final “Not another day” moment that saw me change my life 180 degrees. I survived a depressing journey on a small yacht from St Helena to Ascension island purely on a quote of 100 pages per day of Jerusalem, oh Jerusalem, a book I never even liked. My second daughter spends a large part of her first 3 days on this earth, lying sleeping on my stomach while I read the novel Lusitania.
When I had to pack up our home to more to southeast Asia, more than half of our belongings were boxes and boxes of books. I seamed to spend my early married life firstly creating bookshelves from bricks and planks, then later prober book shelves of sweet smelling pine planking. In all the towns we lived in, the local library ladies (from hell usually) learned to love us, as all five of us would systematically devour the entire local selection and then start on the special orders. An annual trip to the city always involved a full day’s visit to a second-hand bookshop where all members of the family were provided with an unlimited budget to stock up. We carried the books out of the shop in large cardboard boxes into the back of the pickup and headed for home.
Now, I live in South East Asia where book shops of the type I am used to are few and far between. Out of practicality, I now read on a kindle and pay no notice of the sometimes raised eyebrows of the purists. My thinking, if you are noticing the difference between a book read on a kindle or read from paper, then I suggest a new author. I have no problem with waiting in long lines at airport immigration, or the bank, or during quiet lunches alone. In a hammock in the forest during a downpour, a shack on the banks of some tropical river, or a bed bug ridden guest house with my bicycle at the foot of my bed, I am never alone, always with some or other character undergoing challenges different from my own.
Without this love and understanding of the significance of books and reading throughout my life, I don’t think that I could write anything of any significance at all. If I hope others may read my writing, which I now do, then I owe it to them to have and maintain a passion for reading. Even more so than the technical witting, editing, formatting, cover designing skills that appear to form the focus of the self-publishing community.
So maybe my self-publishing process should simply be:
1. Live life to the full
2. Read
3. Write
(All, while drinking the correct amount of wine)
Primary Writing phase.–2016 - 2019
Around 6 years ago, I started writing the “story of my life”. It started innocently enough with just a few paragraphs needed to describe each year, which I posted on a shiny new website I named Decades. Encouraged by the response I received from family and friends, I continued to write, finding that my long-term memory was still packed, not only with the details but also with the feelings and emotions of the time. I set two strict rules without which I could never have progressed beyond a few stiff paragraphs:
1. Only write from my personal experience and make no assumptions about others.
2. Spelling and grammar don’t count for shit.
I also discovered the truth in the wisdom; “Write drunk, edit sober”.
Six years later and I found that I had written down the story for each year of my life, from birth to my 38thbirthday, over 150,000 words in all. At that point, good or bad, weak or strong, boring or interesting, I believe I earned the right to say; “I am a writer”.
Experimental phase–2013 - 2020
From around 2013, I started making up and printed an annual photo-book and several other project books using Print On Demand (POD) software from a company in Thailand. This process taught me the basics of design, layout, and storytelling through images. It’s interesting to look back over these books and see the evolution of my design skills.
In 2019, I upgraded my Adobe package to include InDesign, and started developing photo books, magazines, and trade books which I had printed at our local printer here in Vientiane. Working with a professional printing company taught me so much about the formatting process, paper quality, sizing, layout, bleeds and margins, fonts and families. Later, I started having the printing done through an online book company, Blurb, which was good, but just too expensive when taking shipping into account.
From January to March 2021, I put together a small book of a cycling trip I had done in Oman a few years previously. I called it Oman Oracles. I had it printed for personal use, first in magazine format, then later in softcover and hardcover through Blurb, just to see what it would look like.
Through this process, I learned more about text layout, formatting word documents correctly for table of contents, text sizing and spacing. Looking back on these books now, I can see that while I meant well, I had little understanding of even the very basics of formatting.
Throughout this experimental phase, which is still ongoing, every so-called failed project moved me one step forwards. Good or bad, I still have the privilege of holding in my hand a book, magazine or photo-book that I brought to life, something that had not previously existed. I believe that at the most basic level, this is the definition of creativity.
Planting the seeds - May 2021
May 2021–Encouraged by the Oman Oracles book development process, I thought about my Decades writing, and how I could use that to create a series of books, simply using the current text and grouping them by stages in my life. I did some research around the difference between an autobiography and a memoir and realized that I actually had the makings of at least 3 memoirs, possibly more. The most obvious theme I saw was my decision to break away from city life and go sailing. This really was the turning point in my life.
As a start, I simply cut and pasted all the sections in my blogs relating to the sea with a focus on my sailing trips until 1990. When I read through the raw text, I realized that there was a story emerging, not a pure sailing story, but a story of a young man struggling to find peace in a restless ocean. I gave the manuscript the placeholder title of “Sailing into adulthood” and built the bridges and add the content needed to turn it into a coherent whole. I still had not considered the self-publishing route, thinking I would simply use my newly developed skills and create a nice keepsake for me, my family, and friends.