RyanBushell

I have been out of work since October and luckily my fiancée is incredibly supportive, she has been fine with tightening the purse strings a little but has given me deadline of June to start making some decent money. I have always liked the idea of writing for a living and now I am going to head in feet first with a deadline (or rather poverty line) and see what happens.

I know that it would be foolish to suddenly jump into writing a book with only a rough idea of how to organise my thoughts but then again I don’t have much choice. It has been ten years since I studied any form of English and unfortunately the school I attended wasn’t exactly a centre of excellence. Since leaving I have come a long way academically, I went to college and off to university to study (well let’s say I was at university for five years).

To prepare me to get into the right frame of mind, I wrote a short non-fiction guide over a couple days last week on my other love, poker. My hope is that I can go back and re-edit this in a year or so when I actually know how to edit! I wrote the guide in a conversational prose, I am essentially having an informal conversation with my laptop through my fingers and telling a few old stories and imparting some knowledge I learnt the hard way (the title is ‘Poker Wisdom of a Degenerate’ and can be found on amazon ‘nudge nudge, wink wink’).

I know to be a good writer you should be a good reader. I have always been a terrible reader which is partly through a lack of encouragement when I was growing up and lazy habits as an adult. I had two big hurdles to overcome; firstly why exactly should I sit and read the constructs from someone else’s imagination? I was reluctant to think that what was going on in someone else’s head could be anywhere near as exciting as what was going on in my own. Secondly, what’s the point of it? There is probably a film about it anyway!

I have changed. I can finally come out of the intellectual closet, I really love words. I love the way in which a sentence can be formed and I love the way you can tell a story though grammar alone. Yesterday I bought a few books on writing, one was on sentence construction and the other was laying out fundamental principles on novel writing (can you tell I haven’t opened them yet!). I have also started ‘Catch 22’ as a bed time read. I’ve never seen the film but from what I understand it is a milestone in 20th Century literature, so where better to start.

I will update this blog weekly to let you know how I am getting on with it all. Hopefully when I read this blog entry in the future it won’t just be ‘fuLl Ov Anlyikal MizHaps’ (only joking). It will be something that enables me to pin point the day I started to write.