Where ever I have lived or stayed there will always be a time when you will find me curled up in bed by the glow of my reading lamp, reading a good book. If I rewind all the way back to my childhood that is still where you will find me, with either a book or a comic. One of the first books I can remember reading was a book I got for Christmas, it was in two parts, one part was about the mythical King Arthur and the other about the legendary Robin Hood. I have been interested in both of those two people ever since, perhaps because of that book. King Arthur and his knights of the round table: Was there really a round table, was there a Camelot? Was there even a King Arthur or was it just the imagination of Sir Thomas Mallory who wrote the book Morte d’Arthur many years ago. Was there a man called Robin Hood? Well, those are just two stories that continue to fascinate me and are still with us in books and in the movies.

Errol Flynn played Robin in the wonderful ‘Adventures of Robin Hood’, Kevin Costner also played Robin in a more recent movie and when I was a schoolboy as well as reading about Robin I could rush home and watch the Robin Hood TV show with its cheery theme song ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood riding through the glen’.

Reading stories like that is the catalyst that makes someone into a writer. It’s not enough to read a great story, you want to tell one too. I have been a writer as long as I can remember and if there is a pencil and a notebook handy I will write in it. As a TV obsessed child I invented numerous TV programmes, wrote scripts for the pilot shows and cast all the characters. I wrote stories too and English was always my favourite lesson at school. I do a great deal of writing in my car. Well, not the actual writing but the thinking anyway. I’ll get an idea and think about it then I’ll store it somewhere in my head and return to the theme on my next journey. I have an old dictation machine in my car, a small hand-held gadget with mini tapes and I frequently grab it and mutter something into it. When I get an idea that I don’t have time to stew over or even when some phrase or line of poetry comes to me that I think is worth hanging on to, it is quite a handy gadget to have.

I started this blog as a way of publicising my self-published kindle e-book but now I think I’m more interested in the blog than the book! Because of this blog I’m becoming more of a seasoned and professional writer. After all, if I was a professional journalist or columnist I would need to be thinking ahead, what’s happening in the world, what can I write about? What can I comment about? Now, just like a professional writer I’m looking ahead and I always have two or even three draft blogs in the pipeline. Whenever I’ve started to worry about what to write next, something has come to me and usually it’s a couple of related ideas that I can make into two separate blogs. Blogging is increasing my output as a writer and making me think more about my work. Yes, I’m actually becoming a proper writer!

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