March 2003: I've always made my living from engineering,
which is bizarre since my primary interests have always lain with
the arts. Human foibles, I suppose. I live on the south coast of
England, near Bournemouth, but worked for a long time in
Aberdeen, Scotland, in the oil industry. I've been a member of a
number of creative writing groups, of varying degrees of
usefulness (my fault, not theirs, I'm sure), but the one to which I
now belong has proved the most rewarding. Since there are so
many members (fourteen, plus) and we meet only once a week for
one and a half hours, length of pieces is limited to 500-600 words,
otherwise they wouldn't all receive an airing. This has forced me to
spend as much time editing pieces as creating the first draft, a
discipline which I am finding increasingly useful. I'm currently
working on the completion of a second novel manuscript that I
started about fourteen years ago (the first manuscript we won't
dwell on at all). I suppose if I have an aim, it's to have a novel
published, but more than that, I'd like it to be something at which I
could look back without suffering cold sweats. Here's hoping.
Go to "A Provincial Problem"
Go to "The Smoking Gulf"
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