Friday, 28 February 2025

The Pipe Dream Diaries. (I) Weird, looking back.

 



(I’ll try making my blogger posts a little different to my website blog.)

26 posts in 2014, and then sporadic entries all the way through to 2020 (five that year), and then… nothing at all. The proverbial tumbleweed bouncing across a dusty, deserted town. If I’m honest, I have no recollection of even posting during the pandemic at all. I guess it’s a time we all want to forget.

 

But reading that final entry in August 2020, is hands down, weird. Musings of another, written in their hand, trapped inside their consciousness; all so strange and detached. I remember that sofa, the sun blazing through the window, and it crumpling as I turned. Sticky, uncomfortable… desperately dreaming my way out of international disease, and internal dismay.

And I recall writing the opening 20,000 words of a novel tentatively entitled: The children at the end of the river. Would it ever happen? Truthfully. There were so many direct/indirect obstacles to contend with.

4.5 years on. A slight title change, a late 2023 release (along with images on this accompanying blog), and, I guess, I possessed enough guile and resilience to smoke the pipe dream into reality.

Still, profoundly weird, though.

 

I initially started this blog, back in 2014, to promote Mis-fit, Misplaced, Miss Shelly Clover, and also because I like blogging/getting thoughts down on a page. But in the meantime (and particularly post 2020), I’ve since re-written, and re-released that novel with a different cover… and also released a whopping sequel. (Also, in the provisional stages of planning the third instalment, and the cover is already designed, and visible online.)

On top of this, I have two other books in the bag: a Christmas novella: Mr Buechner’s Christmas on Shrieker Pass; and the horror novel, which I was starting at the time (and that this page is now dedicated to).

Effectively, four novels, since that scorcher in the pandemic… where I had an anthurium for company – and Kevin and Mabel – the two pigeons who would faithfully perch on my windowsill.

Glad to get past all that. 100%. And that the words actually became ‘physical things’ on a page, that people can now read.

 

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