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Good Morning,

My name is Colin and I am currently having a writer’s mid-life crisis of sorts. I have been writing in some form or other since I was about eight years old. To begin with it was mostly fiction, then poetry became and still is my main drive. I have tried scriptwriting, particularly comedy (my currently dormant satirical news website The Sceptical Poet can be found here if you want to see how satire dies), but I always come back to poetry and fiction. Writing is a function of my being by this point; I cannot turn it off. But it’s never been a financial success for me. I have veered over the years between constant submission of work to intermittent, plagued by disillusion, for a few years severe depression, and occasionally outright laziness. Of late, family commitments have limited my time. There have been some hits over the years but not as many as I’d like. It’s not a situation that I feel can continue in its current form.

So I have a plan. This blog is the start. It is a focus, a way of disciplining myself. This is the final push as they say. If I don’t succeed in writing I will be miserable, so I will make myself succeed even if it was never in the way I had always planned.

This is where the second part of the plan comes in. I have always avoided self-publication as I am well aware of the pitfalls of vanity publishing, but I see people I know distributing their work via the platforms the current technological age of wonder allows and achieving great creative satisfaction. In some cases financial satisfaction, but mostly I see them able to produce and distribute their work in their spare time, professionally, while still holding down full-time jobs, children and everything else, whether it’s music, writing, whatever. It’s inspiring.

And so, I’m following suit. I am planning, over the next year, to release all of my poetry to date in book form via Lulu.com, an online publishing and distributing service that allows writers creative freedom and professionally produced books available online on their site and via major outlets such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The released books will be publicised here, with sample poems. I’m very proud of them, and I’ve been working on getting them print-ready for a while, creating covers, etc..

The idea is to catch up with myself, so to speak. There will be several books over the year, which will leave me with a couple of poetry projects left which will follow at a later date, and I intend to focus more of my time after that on fiction. Specifically short stories and a novel which has plagued my existence for what feels like forever. The blog will always continue, and I will also post work in progress in gaps between books.

This is it now, this is the final stretch. Even if no-one buys a damn copy, the work will be there. The first book will be published within the next few weeks (hopefully the next few days). All information will be posted here. If you’re interested, please follow this blog by clicking on the link at the bottom of the main page. You can also keep track of this blog through its Facebook page, or by its twitter feed.

Thanks for listening.

I’ll speak to you guys soon,

Col.