Wild Woods
This blog was written for Bridget Holding’s Wild Words website. Bridget asks writers to contribute a blog on various subjects associated with the writing method. This particularly blog thread concerns the ‘Writing process’. How do you write? How do you find the time? What little routines do you have to enact before the words flow.
Historical Fiction
This short story is a kind of historical fiction cum documentary. The story touches on the exploits of Captain Fryatt and other key events of the time set around a drama of a war correspondent coming to terms with governmental imposed propaganda. Upon completion in February 2008, I sent it to a Literary Agent who told me that because of the centenary commemorations of the Great War, stories about the war that focused on peripheral human stories rather than battlefield tactics et cetera were in demand. The Agent asked me to turn it into a novel, but at the time, I was embroiled in other writing challenges and having never thought about writing it as a novel – I never re-worked it. And so it remained in the bottom draw – until now.
Driving Ambitions
This blog is for all those miserable petrol-heads out there, slaves to their cars, who have become afflicted, driven by the tawdry compulsion to own their particular vision of automotive perfection. They ascribe to the vain belief that the car you drive equates directly to the person you are, or much more importantly, to the person you wish to be seen as.
Have you seen yourself in a Ferrari Spyder, a Porsche Turbo, or a TVR (for the older, more discerning gentlemen lecher)? Or perhaps, you are the conservative village doctor in his Rover 60, the East End gangster in his Jaguar MkII 3.4, the laconic software engineer in his Saab, the garrulous mid-wife in her Ford Fiesta, the chaste bluestocking in her 2CV or the cocky football coach in his Triumph stag?
This is one man’s account of an errant, foolish and completely irrational automotive addiction and how that addiction supported a rising ambition and ultimately, the failure of that ambition in the dawning of the era of climate awareness and the fossil fuel scarcity.
I will tell the story through the cars I chose to drive, how those choices effected my outlook on life and how that changed over time.
It should be pointed out that this isn’t a critique of supercars since 1984. This is critique of the more mundane – perhaps the sort of cars that the reader has driven – or drives!