Tag Archives: blogger

A Writer on Holiday

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always great to get away from things and to take a break. Writers though just cannot stop writing even on holiday. Well at least I can’t. I’m currently on holiday in a motorhome in France so how do I mix relaxation with writing? Let’s see if I can successfully answer that. Here we go.

Morning.

It takes me a while to get used to sleeping in our motorhome. It’s only small and there is a little dip in the bed just at the point of my lower back which has given me some backache in the past but lately I’ve learnt to either avoid it or just live with it. Another issue that affects our sleep is the way the van is parked and parking properly is very important. A tilt to the left and Liz will be rolling over and crowding me. Over to the right and I’ll be crowding her. A slight tilt forward and we tend to slide off our pillows and down the bed. If we have to have a tilt it’s better to tilt back toward our pillows but we do have chocks which we can slip under the wheels to level us up. My place on the bed is over by the window and there is no way out for me except by climbing over Liz so one of my rules is to not have beer prior to going to bed. Otherwise I’ll be waking in the night wanting to wee and struggling to get out.

On holiday I find myself waking up pretty early. I’m not totally comfortable sleeping in the motorhome but I usually wake up with my head full of various thoughts for either a blog post or a short story. I tend to lie there and get those thoughts in some sort of order before dragging myself up.

I’m usually the first one up so I’ll shuffle over to the small bathroom for a wash and a shave.

Despite being late September it’s still very warm in the Loire so in a morning I can handle a wash in cold water but when the warm weather comes to a close I’m less inclined to do that. I can switch on the water heater but usually I just put a pan of water on the hob.

Despite the bathroom being small, actually very small, there is a basin, toilet and even a shower in there. To shower it’s important to switch on the water heater first, pull round the panels that keep the water away from the toilet and basin and then switch on the water. In a motorhome I’m always aware that there isn’t an endless supply of water so a good idea is to apply shower gel liberally to the body, switch on the water and get washed as quickly as possible using as little water as you can.

Note to self: Don’t drop the soap as it’s pretty difficult to bend down and pick it up in these cramped conditions.

Shower over, towel yourself down, get dressed and get the kettle on before hanging your towel out in the sun on the bike carrier to the rear of the van.

Next I’ll check my emails while the van chef, Liz, gets herself ready too.

I’m a big lover of breakfast, in fact I’m even tempted to say it’s my favourite meal of the day and I love a standard English breakfast. Bacon, sausage, black pudding, mushrooms, tomatoes and eggs, preferably poached, served with toast. That can be a little difficult on the cramped three ring stove in the van so lately we’ve been having a bacon omelette with some French bread. I’ll either walk to a bakery if there is one nearby or we usually have some bread in our little freezer which always keeps pretty well and defrosts quickly in the sun.

Noon

Another option is to not have breakfast at all but to save ourselves for lunch. In France there are many places that serve a cheap lunchtime menu which will consist of a buffet starter, a simple main meal, a cheese course and a dessert.

We found an excellent restaurant near to Parçay-les-Pins called the Restaurant De La Gare, the Station Restaurant. The buffet starter is always my favourite and I fill my plate with pâté, cold meats, coleslaw and various salad items. A basket of French bread will appear and is usually topped up when it gets low. Vin de table is provided as well as some chilled water and a large bottle of cider. Not bad for 15 euros each!

OK, breakfast (or lunch) over it’s time to grab my laptop and tap out in rough form my ideas for this week’s blog post. Sometimes I can’t be bothered to drag my laptop out of its safe place in the boot so I’ll just write notes in my notebook. The notes you can see here in the photo are typical notes for a one of my Film Connections posts.

We will usually be parked in an aire in France and these special parking places, reserved for motorhomes, tend to have all the necessary things we might need. A very important thing is a place to empty the van toilet. It’s not a pleasant task but I tend to empty it whenever we get the opportunity. A lot of French aires have a water tap to help you rinse your toilet cassette but many require a token, a jeton that is usually available from nearby local shops although there are many aire de camping cars that are completely free.

The van navigator (Liz) will usually have perused google maps for a plan d’eau, a French swimming lake and we’ll be off to find it. We usually factor in a stop for some French bread and some more French cheese as well as a box of wine. This year is probably the first in which we haven’t really been interested in cheese, having said that I’ve still enjoyed the cheese course in a restaurant.

It’s important of course to keep a check on our fuel. We usually fill up with diesel at French supermarkets as they tend to be cheaper than the usual petrol stations, however we were chatting with a couple of English people in a restaurant one evening who told us that ‘TotalEnergies’ petrol stations were considerably cheaper than the supermarkets. It seems that they are under the control of the French government and they are keeping prices lower, approximately 20p a litre for diesel, but consequently most of them had run out and those that hadn’t had long queues.

Our fridge and cooker are powered by LPG, liquid petroleum gas and we always keep a look out for stations that provide gas. The big problem when we first came to France was finding a petrol station with LPG. There didn’t seem to be any until eventually, we realised that in France it’s called GPL! Duh!

Swimming

Over the years we have made a note of our favourite places to stop. A typical camping spot we prefer will have a swimming lake and a parking place for camping cars, (that’s what they call motorhomes in France) and at this time of the year they usually won’t be too busy.

The locals usually arrive around 12 noon with picnic baskets for lunch and few might have a pre lunch swim. I’ve noticed that this year the water levels in many lakes have been low due to the hot summer and in one particular lake we visited the water was only a couple of feet deep.

At another lake we watched a couple of fishermen dip their rods in the water and wait patiently for the fish to bite. We read our books, competed against each other to finish that day’s sudoku and then it’s time for a dip.

Later on we need to find somewhere to stop for the night. Usually, we will stay by the lake or if we are trying to make our way to somewhere in particular, we might get a few miles under our belt before stopping again.

The sun going down after a day by a plan d’eau

Evening

When evening comes we will have sorted out a place to stay the night. I usually get out our little gas barbecue and we will cook some sausages, burgers and maybe a steak to have with our salad. A glass of red wine is always good to wash the food down with and after clearing up I’ll go back to what I’ve written earlier and develop it a little and tidy it up.

I happened to notice something on the internet this week about Ian Fleming and the way he used to work at his holiday home in Jamaica. He was up at 7:30, had breakfast and then at 10am he began writing. He aimed for 1500 words before going for a swim at about 12:15. Later in the day at about 5pm he would write some more, put the pages in a folder and it was time for a drink. Perhaps that is what I need to do, plan my day like Ian Fleming’s day. Then again, I think I prefer things my way!

This year one of our stops was at La Meilleraie-Tillay. It’s a place we have stopped at before and one of the great things about it is that there is a toilet block with hot water. Sounds pretty normal doesn’t it but believe me, when you have not washed with hot water for a week, having a wash and shave in hot water is wonderful.

In the park next to the motorhome aire, a circus had set up, the Zanatteli circus and one night as we sat outside in the twilight we got chatting to Rico, the circus clown. He told us that he was the latest in six generations of his family that were circus people. After that first meeting Rico came to see us every night and told us stories of the circus. Despite a huge array of vehicles and equipment, there were only five people in the circus; him, his wife, his two sons and a daughter. The two sons were jugglers and acrobats. The daughter did some acrobatics too. Rico was the clown and his wife ran the box office, gave out tickets, sold refreshments in the intervals and also acted as a scene arranger. We attended their first afternoon performance before moving on to pastures new.

We usually relax in the evenings with a book but a problem this year with our leisure battery meant that our lights faded very early. If I’ve got a good internet signal I’ll transfer this week’s blog to wordpress then access it on my iPad and refine it a little more before passing it to my proofreader Liz for a final check up. Then I’ll add the graphics, pictures and videos and everything is ready for my publishing deadline of 10am on Saturday.

The next problem is what shall I write about next week?

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

8 Questions for a Self-Published Author

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A few years ago, I published a post called 7 Questions for a Self-Published Author. This week I decided to update it and here it is, thinly disguised as 8 Questions for a Self-Published Author.

Question 1:

What made you want to write a novel?

I’ve always been a writer, even as a school kid I was writing stories and screenplays. I used to write scripts and do all the casting. Not sure whether Steve McQueen would have appreciated the roles I was planning for him though.

Later on when I was in my 20s I tried to move away from all the sci-fi and espionage stuff I was writing and write about something more personal to me, something that I had a personal connection with so I started writing about life working on the buses, which is what I was doing at the time.

I wrote about working as a bus conductor and driver and jotted down my observations about the people I met and carried on my bus. Then there were other stories about my personal life, drinking in pubs, chatting up girls in nightclubs, listening to music and so on. Later I realised I could link all this stuff together even though it was just a series of essays and make it into a short novel which is what I did. The process involved rewriting my essays to fit in with the story but that was fairly easy as the story was actually a fictionalised version of my own younger life.

Question 2

How did you go about publishing the finished book?

Floating in Space was turned down by three publishers. That was of course disappointing but rejections are par for the course for any writer. Some time ago I wrote a blog post about books rejected by publishers and I found out that The Day of the Jackal was rejected 4 times, Gone with the Wind 38 times and The Time Traveller’s Wife 25 times. Publishers are only human of course but these days writers don’t need them, we can just publish online, just like I did using Amazon.

The most famous book to come from online publishing is probably 50 Shades of Grey which was first  posted online as a story called Master of the Universe, on a fan-fiction website and later on the author’s own website.

Question 3

Tell me about the problems of marketing and getting your book noticed by the public.

Well, that is the hard part, writing a book was easy in comparison!

Building up a presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube was a gradual process and the same is also true for my blog on WordPress which I started really just to promote the book. I started off with essays about how I wrote the book and videos of me talking about the book and so on.

I read somewhere that over 5000 books are published every day on Amazon, an incredible figure, so how can anyone compete with that? Well, just by getting out onto social media and plugging away with tweets, new blog posts, videos and so on.

Question 4

Tell me about your website and your blog.

Well, my website was originally created just to promote my book and get my message out there to potential readers but it’s also a challenge, a writing challenge. My big problem is that I’m lazy and I need a big push to get me writing so having a deadline, 10:00am on a Saturday morning, is something that gets me motivated as a writer. I know that I have to write something by then.

That deadline actually makes me feel like a sort of writing professional as I’m always working towards it, trying to get something ready to post for my readers. I do feel really pleased when I have no idea what to write about but suddenly on a Friday afternoon I’ll settle down with my laptop and write a really good post.

The crazy thing is that the same problems that apply to my books also apply to my blog. Who has heard about the blog? Who will read the posts? I have to promote my blog as much as I promote my books and even when my posts get attention, does that convert to book sales? Not necessarily! I use social media a lot but I’m not sure I even understand it. Over on X (formerly Twitter) I have over 6000 followers and if all those followers bought copies of my books I’d be very happy, but do they? No. Why not? Well a large majority of those followers are writers and authors themselves who like to connect with other writers and authors. Ok that’s good but what I need are more readers than writers.

Question 5

What sort of posts will we find on your blog?

Generally, I try to write stuff that is similar to my book and short stories, little bits of fluff, anecdotes with a funny twist, things like that. The idea is that if people like the blogs they should like my book, Floating in Space, which is written in a similar style. A typical blog post and one of my favourites, is the one about hoodies (Hoodies and a Shaggy Dog Story) and an incident where an old lady’s handbag was snatched. Another favourite was called the Cat Wars and was about a crazy situation that built up when I was looking after my neighbour’s cat.

The only problem now is that I’m running out of anecdotes but I still manage to write about two other favourite themes, second-hand books and classic films.

Question 6

What about video, do you use video in your blogs and marketing?

Any internet post on social media performs better with images, a 37% percent increase in engagement and even more so with video.

Here are a few stats:

100 million hours of video are watched each day on Facebook.

500 million people watch Facebook videos every day.

Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach on average than a photo.

Two thirds of content on Instagram is now video as opposed to pictures but video has to be snappy. If viewers are not hooked in the first few seconds, they just click away from your video to something more interesting.

I use video on my website to try and engage readers and all my adverts, because I do use advertising every now and then, are all video based.

A lot of years ago, in the 1990’s I really wanted to get into TV and video and I went on a video production course at the WFA media centre in Manchester. Subsequently, I made a few attempts to make some things for TV, all of which ended in failure but as a result I do have a bit of technical knowledge with video editing and production which has helped me a lot.

Luckily, technology today makes it pretty easy to create simple videos and I use them a lot in my blog posts.

Question 7

What are your plans for the future regarding writing and blogging?

Well, more of the same really. I’ve begun to work on a follow up novel to Floating in Space but a novel is hard work and I sometimes wonder if I’m up to the task. Even my latest book, Timeline, which is just a collection of stories and blog posts was pretty hard work. The big problem is just me, being motivated and just getting myself geared up to work and write. Writing short stories is much more enjoyable and I’m really pleased at how my stories have turned out. A few are available for readers to download and enjoy, just click on the download link above.

Question 8

Tell me about your other books

I mentioned above about my short stories and I put together a collection of those in my book Timeline. The title story is set in the present day but in a Germany which was victorious in World War II and there are another 10 stories in the book. Also included are some of my favourite blog posts and a little of my poetry. Talking of poetry, I have also published a collection of poems titled A Warrior of Words. Over on my YouTube page there are a mix of various video types and some time ago I decided to put all my poetry readings onto a separate channel. Click here to watch my poetry videos.

Click the links at the top of the page to read about Floating in Space, A Warrior of Words and Timeline. All are available from Amazon.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really do love it here in Lanzarote. Warm but not too hot. OK there’s a little rain but it only lasts for 5 or so minutes and then the sun is out, drying everything up. If I had the money I would be buying a place here and settling down to a life of sunbathing, swimming and dining out. I could invite all my friends over, for limited times of course. Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t. Either way, I think I’d be very happy.

Sometimes when I’ve had a swim and I’m lying on my lounger just drying off in the sun, I often think about my dad who died back in 2000. Not long ago I came across one of my brother’s photos. It was my dad in the back garden of our old house and he was dressed in a vest and shorts, reading the paper with his dog, a pedigree dachshund on his knee. He was not in a chair or a sun lounger but relaxing in a wheelbarrow, just how he did when he was at work and had finished his job.

Dad worked for Manchester Highways and his job title was, if I remember correctly, a flagger’s mate. His job was to lay pavement flags throughout Wythenshawe in south Manchester as well as to work tarmacking roads and repairing potholes. He rode to work on his bicycle every day of his working life armed only with his backpack containing his lunch; his sandwiches made by my mother and his brew can. He used to use that brewcan even when he retired. Where he got the hot water from when working on the roads I don’t know unless he either went back to the highways office or perhaps asked people where he was working to top up his brew can.

I reckon he would have loved it here in Lanzarote. Back in Manchester the Highways depot where he worked closed down years ago and now a small private housing estate occupies the spot where he used to work. Funnily enough, just next door on Fenside Road was my old school, Sharston High School. It was demolished years ago and on the spot there is now another private housing estate which is surrounded by the old iron fence that encircled our school many years ago.

Dad

My Dad, working on the road, directing traffic.

Our school gym still stands on Fenside road. It is now some sort of fitness or sports centre. Apart from those railings I mentioned it is the only surviving reminder of our old school.

The school was large and was built in a sort of ‘C’ shape. There was a north and a south side and inside the ‘C’ were the school playing fields; cricket and football for the boys and rounders for the girls.

On the north side -to be honest I’ve always got the north and south sides mixed up, but the top of the ‘C’ anyway- there now stands a nursing home and it was here that my mother spent the last years of her life suffering with dementia.

I took semi retirement from work to help look after her and my brother and I shared caring duties. We had carers coming in four times a day. Morning to help get her up and have breakfast. Another at lunchtime, one at teatime and a final visitor at night to help get mum ready for bed. The final carer was due at about nine but they started to get earlier and earlier. Once we had someone round at about 5:30 to help mum with tea and then instead of 9 the final carer turned up at about 6:30. I remonstrated with them and said no, you need to come back at 9. I guess it was the last visit and they were eager to get off early.

Believe me, it was very difficult dealing with mum back then. She would forget she had eaten and would demand more food after being fed. Getting her clothes off her to put into the washer was a nightmare and when they had been washed, she complained that the clothes were not her clothes after all but someone else’s.

Once it worked out in my brother’s favour. I used to work shifts and would arrive home about 10:30 and take over from my brother. That night he wanted to leave early at about 8pm. Could I get time off to get to mum’s earlier? As it happened I couldn’t but he and the carers put mum to bed early and when the carer had left, my brother let mum nod off and then he left too.

Some months earlier we had brought a small bed downstairs into the lounge for mum. When I got in at my usual time, mum had woken up and, thinking it was early morning, was trying to get up.

I tended to have a small supper when I got in from work so I calmed mum down, explained that it was late at night and together we had a small supper of sausage sandwiches and we watched some television. I’d recorded a documentary about the comedian Bob Monkhouse and when it finished, we chatted for a while about Bob and his rather difficult life, then we both went to bed.

The next morning when the carers arrived, she had reverted to her slightly mad self, complaining once again that her clothes weren’t her clothes and that this wasn’t her house but some other strange house and that she didn’t live here.

The conversation about Bob Monkhouse the previous night had been one of our last sensible conversations ever.

I think it was 2021 when she moved into the nursing home. She had been very poorly with a cold that had gotten worse and worse. I personally thought it was one of the first Covid cases. She went to hospital and began to recover. We went to see her on Christmas day. We brought her a Christmas present, I can’t even remember what it was but I was surprised to find the nurses in her ward had brought presents for all the patients, hers was a pair of woolly gloves. Sadly she never got to wear them.

When she began to recover her social worker moved her to a nursing home saying she only had 6 months to live although she went on to live another two and a half years. At the nursing home she recovered rapidly and even attained something almost like her normal self. When Covid and the lockdown struck we were unable to visit her. When things eased we could visit but only outside of the windows. What was mad was that Mum was profoundly deaf and without her hearing aids couldn’t communicate. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t seem to get it across to the staff how important her hearing aids were and there we were, separated by a window, mouthing and gesticulating but poor mum, without her hearing aids could only wave.

When the lockdowns ended we could finally visit mum again but sometimes her hearing aids would be lost or without batteries. I decided to take one of her aids home and just fit it when I visited so we could have something like a normal conversation.

My mother in her last years

When I visited mum I used to ask her to recite some multiplication tables in the hope it would get her to use her memory and exercise her brain waves. One day we did a simple one, the three times table. One three is three, two threes are six and so on. Round about nine she began to falter and looked suddenly distressed. ‘I can’t remember anymore’ she said sadly.

We talked about other things and then I told her it was time to leave. The disappointment of not being able to remember her times table was still evident in her face. We said our goodbyes and I went towards the door. As I turned back for a final wave goodbye, she said something and I stopped to listen.

‘Ten threes are thirty’ she said. ‘Eleven threes are thirty-three, twelve threes are thirty-six’. She looked back and smiled. She was a very determined lady.

After she died I put a picture of her on the Facebook Wythenshawe page, announcing her passing. Various people commented but one lady in particular said that she used to work at mum’s nursing home and that she counted it a pleasure and a privilege to have looked after this lovely lady.

As you can perhaps imagine, I was moved to tears.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Travelling and Writing in France

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again Liz and I are in France in our small motorhome. This week I thought I’d talk about our journey and also about my personal journey as a writer.

We came over on the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen after spending the night in a small pub called the Jolly Boatman somewhere in the south of England, actually Kidlington, I think. We have visited this pub once before back in May and it was nice to find that the staff remembered us even after just one visit. The trip over on the ferry was good. We paid a little extra for a top of the range cabin and it was well worth it. We had a little balcony, a tv, kettle and various cold drinks in the fridge. After a bit of a sleep and a shower, we awoke refreshed and ready to find a place to stop for the night in France.

The great thing about France is that motorhomes are welcomed with plenty of free overnight stopping places with toilet emptying facilities and fresh water. Some places require a jeton, a token that can be bought in local shops to obtain fresh water but otherwise most places are free. In England, many seaside places seem to just complain about motorhomes parking up for free but surely those motorhomers are using local shops, bars and restaurants and bringing trade into these local communities.

The Jolly Boatman

The weather wasn’t great at first so we ploughed on south towards Bordeaux in search of the sun. Liz is a great navigator and a real master of google maps and she found us some lovely stopping places, one in particular with a man made beach and a lovely swimming lake. We needed that lake to cool down as the weather became seriously hot.

When I’m away I like to have a couple of blog posts written in advance as travelling in our van I don’t always have time to write. Not only that sometimes it’s hard to get a good wifi signal to upload my posts. Recently I’ve been not only lazy but actually struggling a little  for blog post ideas. A few months ago I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a while and he seemed less than convinced that I could write a new post every week. I’ll bet you use ai to write them he joked. I wasn’t amused.

To be honest, I do use ai, not to write posts but to make the quirky memes and graphics that I use to promote my blogs. This is one over to the right. I had never even thought about using ai to actually write a post. Even so, I thought as I was a bit low on ideas it might be interesting to ask ai what I should write about. It came up with a plan for a post asking me to answer various questions about my work. Anyway, here are a few of them.

Share how you got started writing and what inspired your first book.

I can’t really remember what inspired me to write. I can only say that having been a great reader, I wanted to be on the other side of the coin, so to speak: Not just reading the thoughts and ideas of others but also sending my own thoughts and ideas out there too. I like the feeling of communicating not only to others but communicating over the years. I remember reading Homer’s Odyssey and thinking that here was this man, Homer, sending me his thoughts and ideas across the centuries that lie between us and that his ideas carried on after his death.

Talk about your creative routines (or lack of them) — do you write in bursts, or steadily each day? 

I’d like to tell you that I have a routine but actually I haven’t, although I do try to create a sort of routine. What I tend to do is think a lot about writing. I’ll think of a story or a blog, usually the time in a morning when I have woken up far too early and I’ll ‘write’ a blog or a story in my head. I’ll file that away in my head and then either go back to sleep or get up and after breakfast I’ll open up my laptop and write it all down. Sometimes I’ll spend weeks writing a story in my head and when I’ve got a lot of ‘copy’ I’ll start actually writing or typing it out. Years ago I used to use a technique by a self improvement guy called Jack Black who invented something he called Mindstore, a way of using positive thinking to improve your life.

It involved creating an entire imaginary house inside your head with various rooms, just like in a real house. In the bathroom for instance, you could take a breathtaking shower that energised and restored you ready for a big meeting or interview. One room I created was a room for storing my stories and when I’m not in front of my laptop that’s the room I use to write and save my work. My website and my one deadline of 10:00am on a Saturday morning gives me a focus to work at my stories and blog posts and get them ready for publishing. Writing this week has been difficult as Liz and I are working our way across France in our little motorhome although by the time you read this we will have arrived at the lovely gîte we rent in the village of Parçay-les-Pins.

Explore what you love (and what you struggle with) about being self-published.

I love writing and I love publishing my work. I write purely for myself and I write about things I like reading about but I do get a particular buzz every time someone hits that ‘like’ button. What do I dislike about it? Well, I did hope that I could actually make money from writing but so far, that’s just a dream although I do make a few pennies every time someone buys a copy of one of my books. Anyway, I enjoy writing and I’ll carry on writing my blog for as long as I continue to enjoy it. When I no longer enjoy it, I guess I’ll just have to find something else to do. What do I struggle with? Grammar and spelling mostly but luckily, Liz is pretty hot on both of those things and it is she who goes through my work and gives it a good checking over and she’ll correct all the bad tenses and spelling mistakes that appear frequently in my blogs.

A few days ago it was our anniversary. The day before we were parked in a really lovely place with picnic tables and a lake and I thought it would be a good idea to stay and move on the next day. Liz felt that she would rather have a good restaurant anniversary meal so we set off in search of a place to eat that night. Now, the thing about the Loire is that the French don’t seem to eat out much at night. There are plenty of restaurants but most only seem to open for lunch which is the main meal of the day for the French. We tried and tried to find a place but all seemed to be only open for lunch. We found one place, conveniently near a motorhome parking spot but the menu was not only very expensive but didn’t inspire either of us. It was getting later and later and eventually we decided to stop when we saw a kebab takeaway. Takeaways are few and far between in France so we bought a couple of kebabs, parked up for the night and poured us both a glass of vin rouge.

The wine was good but the kebab wasn’t but happily we had plenty of French cheese and bread to round off the meal!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

January, Don’t You Just Hate It?

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I might as well start off this post by coming out and saying what I think straight off the bat; I don’t like January. I don’t like it at all because the thing is, I just hate the cold. I reckon it would be rather nice to just hibernate for the entire winter period just like many creatures do.

I’m not that keen on Christmas so maybe late November would be a good time to just settle down somewhere warm and comfy, snuggle up into my duvet and perhaps wake up round about late March. I know that March can be unpredictable in terms of the weather. It’s generally windy and cold but certainly not as cold as January. Waking up in March would give me time to get my bearings before moving into April, my favourite time of year when the days are getting longer, nature is starting to revive and warmer days are coming.

January 1970

Recently while pottering about trying to sort out the tons of ‘stuff’ I seem to have accumulated over the years I came across my schoolboy diary from 1970. As this post will be published on the 18th of January, I thought I’d take a look and see what I had written. Back in 1970 the 18th was a Sunday and all I decided to record was “Watched Captains Courageous and Randall and Hopkirk”.

Randall and Hopkirk was a TV show first broadcast in 1969 through until March 1970. It was an action and adventure drama despite the slightly tongue in cheek premise. Randall and Hopkirk are private investigators but Randall is helped by his partner Marty Hopkirk who is murdered in the first episode but comes back as a ghost to help his partner find his murderer. Marty stays on and continues to help Jeff Randall for the entire series of 26 episodes. It was later remade with comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer in 2000. Personally, I prefer the original.

Captain Courageous was a film starring Spencer Tracy based on a book by Rudyard Kipling. The story follows the adventures of spoiled brat Harvey Cheyne Junior, the son of a railway tycoon. Harvey falls overboard from his father’s yacht and is saved from drowning by Portuguese fisherman Manuel Fidello played by Tracy. The boy demands to be returned home but the fishing vessel is on a three month fishing expedition and will not return early. The captain offers to sign Harvey on as a crewman until they return and under the tutorship of Manuel he begins to learn about fishing. Harvey becomes close to Manuel and is devasted when he is drowned. Returning home, he is reunited with his father as a changed person.

January 1649

This week I watched an interesting documentary about Charles the 1st. Back in January 1649 parliament was deliberating about what to do with Charles who had been defeated by the Parliamentarians. The parliament was known as the ‘rump’ parliament because any MP who was suspected of supporting the king was prevented from entering. Parliament voted to put the King on trial but the upper house, the Lords, declined to support this and then promptly gave themselves a holiday. Parliament then went ahead without the Lords.

King Charles was put to death on the 30th January, 1649.

January 1965

Another great British leader died in January 1965, Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was an army officer, an MP, an author and a Prime Minister. Nothing I can write in a short post, even one dedicated fully to his life can do justice to this great man’s many achievements but let’s have a go. Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace on November 30th 1874. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, his mother Lady Randolph was formerly Jennie Jerome from the USA, the daughter of Leonard Jerome, an American businessman.

Churchill began his military career with the 4th Hussars but later left to become a politician. He failed to be elected as MP for Oldham then went to South Africa to serve as a journalist. He was captured by the Boers and later escaped which brought him much publicity which must have helped him when he stood again as a Conservative candidate for Oldham in the 1900 general election. This time he emerged as the victor. Later Churchill became a Liberal and later still moved back to the Conservatives. The years between 1929 and 1939 became Winston’s Wilderness years when he was out of office but began to warn against the rise of the Nazis. On the 13th December he was visiting New York when he was knocked down by a car which incidentally inspired my story Timeline, the title story of my new book.

Churchill’s warnings about Nazi Germany proved correct and with the outbreak of war in 1939 he returned as a government minister and later succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister when Chamberlain was forced to resign as the Labour party declined to serve in a national government headed by him.

As well as serving as a politician, Churchill wrote many books and one, My Early Life, was made into a film, Young Winston. I’ve always loved that film but it annoys me no end when I see it on TV these days as for some reason a final scene in which Churchill falls asleep and dreams of meeting his late father, is cut out.

January 2003

Looking at my diary for 2003 I see I was suffering with a sore neck that January. I was off sick from work and my boss was not happy. While off sick I had written a screenplay and wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was living in Merseyside at the time so decided to send it to Phil Redmond, the producer of the Liverpool soap Brookside, thinking that he might like it enough to either give me some advice or even a job on the writing team. I had sent it with a self-addressed return envelope and guess what, I received it back in the post only a few days later minus any sort of feedback or a job offer.

January 1986

In January 1986 the spacecraft Challenger was ready to be launched into space. It was a unique mission in that school teacher Christa McAuliffe had been selected to broadcast lessons from space. The flight was the 25th shuttle mission and the 10th flight for Challenger itself. The mission was originally scheduled for July but the date was put further and further back until NASA finally decided on the 28th January. The temperature of -8 degrees was a record low for a shuttle launch and many engineers were unhappy. Their cause for concern was the shuttle’s O ring seal in a joint between the shuttle and the solid rocket boosters. In cold temperatures it was thought that the rubber rings might not be flexible enough to seal the joints. Sadly they were correct. Hot pressurised gas was released which burned into the external propellant tank which then exploded 73 seconds into the flight. All the astronauts were killed.

January 2025

To finish on a somewhat lighter note, today as I write this I was in Manchester. I decided I needed a few items of shopping so I walked into the nearby civic centre. It was still pretty cold despite the melting snow so I wrapped up well.  I had a woolly jumper on, my anorak and a baseball cap and gloves. Happily, it wasn’t quite as cool as I had originally thought. At the civic I popped into the cheap bookshop there but after a few minutes I realised that it was far too hot and I had to get out. Instead of walking further to Asda, I popped into the Iceland store a few hundred yards away from the book shop. After about 5 minutes I realised that in there too, the management had for some reason decided to crank the heating up to a level usually experienced in a Sahara Desert heatwave.

I grabbed the few things I wanted then headed for the till. Sweat was running down my face but there were two people at the till, both with enough shopping to last the entire winter. I opened my jacket and then heard some wonderful words, “can you come this way please?” Yes, a new till was opening up and me with my 4 or 5 items was through and soon out into the open air.

January, don’t you just hate it?

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The Story of My Life Part 2

Posted on by Steve Higgins

OK, here we go. Remember the post from a few weeks back? Life story in less than 2500 words? You do? Great stuff. Here’s the continuing story then, this time restricted to 2390 words.

Only 2390 words? What can I say? I did 1000, then 1500 then after 2200, I felt I’d gone as far as I could, not only that, I felt I had to go out and do some Christmas shopping instead of living dangerously and waiting until December 24th like I usually do. The funny thing is, when we get to Bonfire Night on November the 5th, I always think that this will be a good time to take a crack at Christmas shopping. I always think that. I never actually do it, you know, actually buy anything but I do think about it.

I think I finished part 1 at a point where I was working at an insurance company in Manchester city centre. If you want to refresh yourself with that earlier work, feel free to click here. I really did enjoy my time working in the insurance world. Well, I liked being in Manchester city centre and I liked the world of after work drinks in the city centre, evenings after work in the city centre. Actually, I suppose I just liked the city centre.

Back in the 1970’s there were a number of great bars and pubs in Manchester. I remember an exclusive looking bar I sometimes ventured into on a side road just off Deansgate. It was called Sims as I remember. I used to get myself a bar stool and order a very James Bond dry martini. For a while I wore a grey trench coat and it has just occurred to me I must have cut a figure similar to Delboy in the classic TV comedy Only Fools and Horses. Remember that scene where he leans on the bar but doesn’t realise the bar top has been lifted up? Well happily that didn’t happen to me although I must have looked like a right plonker sat at the bar sipping my dry martini. Of course, in those days I knew nothing about drinks or what to order. I spent quite a few years ordering a pint of mild in pubs all because I hadn’t a clue what to ask for. I remembering ordering a beer and the slightly stunned barmaid asked ‘what sort of beer?’ Luckily just then I overheard someone nearby asking for a pint of mild so I asked for the same having no idea what it was. Later on, when I realised all my mates were drinking lager, I started drinking that.

Sometimes, I felt that I wasn’t in the mood to quaff a full pint, especially at lunch times. We had a short lunch break at the insurance company where I worked so I felt I had to order something smaller. I’m not sure why I didn’t just ask for a half pint but for some reason, perhaps I had read too many James Bond books, I ordered a dry martini and lemonade. My work colleagues were always rather amused by this so I decided to try and change back to beer. It wasn’t easy. The barman at the time in the Beef and Barley had made it his mission to have my martini all ready when I came in. I’d approach the bar and before I could say, pint of lager please he would whip out a dry martini. If there was a bunch of people at the bar, he’d always find time to sort out the martini before I could put my order in. I wouldn’t mind but it wasn’t as if I was giving out big tips, after all, as a committed and fully paid up tightwad, tipping is not only not part of our mission statement, it is completely against our cultural ethos. These days I’d just say, look, I’ve stopped drinking martini, give me a lager. Back then, the only answer was to just stop going in there and walk the extra 100 yards to the Salisbury.

The Salisbury pub in Manchester City Centre

Incidentally, my uncle Raymond, who lied about his age in order to join his older brothers in World War II, once told me he had been arrested by MPs in the Salisbury so that pub has a particular bit of Higgins history that I have always liked.

Another bar I used to frequent, especially on a Saturday night, was the ‘Playground’, a small disco bar on Oxford Rd. Flickering multi- coloured spotlights rotated across the red carpeted room, which, on Fridays and Saturdays was generally packed. It had a small dance floor sunk low like a pit, where people up on the raised bar level could look down at the gyrating girls, and where also, on week day lunchtimes, a topless dancer appeared at the stroke of one o’clock to translate the soul and disco music of the time into pulsating physical motion, the eyes of jaded office workers glued to her as she did so.

My friends and I used to meet up in the Salisbury, by Oxford Rd station, have a few pints and a bit of a natter to any Insurance colleagues who we might find there, then make the short walk to the Playground. There was a paltry fifty pence charge to get in, the solitary bouncer was silent, but not unpleasant and the DJ, who always began the night with ‘Love’s Theme’ by the Love Unlimited Orchestra, played alternate sessions of rock, disco and chart music.  We were all mad about Jenny, the barmaid. She was lovely. She had a kind of round, open face, framed by thick blonde hair and her skin was a creamy white. She served us Worthington ‘E’ and we melted into the hubbub of people on their Saturday night out while the music of the seventies drifted through us.

The Playground as it is today

I’ve got to admit, I’ve cheated a little bit here because that last section about the Playground was lifted straight out of Floating in Space. I loved that bar and I was pretty gutted when it closed down. It’s still a bar today in 2020 but not quite the same. The dance floor has gone although there is still a bouncer on the door. I spoke to him last year before this whole nightmare Covid 19 stuff and he showed me round and said it was OK to return with my video camera and take some shots. Maybe I will in 2021.

Sometimes my friends and I went down to our favourite club. It was a place called Genevieve’s. Genevieve’s was in Longsight, which was a pretty rough area of Manchester and one of the hazards of the place was that you never found your car quite the same as how you left it, if you found it at all.

I remember one long ago Saturday night. My friends and I had to queue up for about ten minutes to get inside but we took that as a good sign. After all, a queue meant the club was busy. A group of grizzly bouncers scrutinised us and under their intense gaze we paid the entrance fee then went on inside. We were met by the warm fireside glow of soft lighting and the loud, pulsating beat of disco music. Coloured spot lights flashed over the four dance floors, in the hub of which sat the DJ, turning slowly around in a revolving booth.

There were five bars. Two small corner bars, two long bars, and a circular bar at the far end of the club. It really was a well set out place. We headed for one of the corner bars and my mate asked “bitter Steve?” I nodded and he called out to the barmaid.

A small army of bouncers was wandering around the club and as we waited for our drinks an argument broke out at one of the slot machines. Without any questions two burly bouncers grabbed the offender and propelled him expertly to the door. Another hooligan tried to come to the rescue by jumping on the back of one of the bouncers but a third bow-tied, black suited gorilla punched him solidly in the side, twisted his arm up his back and quickly removed him also. It was the sort of place where they didn’t stand any messing and the beer tasted like 3 parts water to one part beer and your feet stuck to the floor as you walked around. No one to my knowledge ever decided to complain to the management.

Genevieve’s attracted all sorts of people. There were smartly dressed, obviously wealthy people, peeling off rolls of bills to pay for whiskies and gins and other spirits. There were many attractive, well dressed girls. The younger girls drank halves of lager, sat in groups, and danced in groups to the Motown music of the sixties. They would drop their handbags onto the floor as they converged together for the formation dance routines for ‘Jimmy Mack’ and ‘Third Finger Left Hand’.

There were groups of lads too, who held cigarette packets and lighters in their hands, or placed them down in front of them on the tables while they drank, talked and eyed up the girls.

I spent a lot of my young life in that club. Tracks like Bus Stop by The Fatback band and Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton always remind me of Genevieve’s. Despite the watered down drinks and the frequent fights, my friends and I had a lot of fun there until one day it either closed down or we found a better place to go.

Just to try and give you a better idea of the times, in 1978, Jim Callaghan was the UK Prime Minister and Jimmy Carter was the US President. The movie Grease was released starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. The Bee Gees released Night Fever and the biggest selling hit of the year was Rivers of Babylon by Boney M.

Anyway, after a few years of working as an office clerk my friend Chris and I decided to pack our jobs in and go and work in Spain in a place called Lloret de Mar. His sister was based there and according to her it was a great life; sun, sand and of course, the young ladies.

We both decided to finance the deal by selling our cars. My car was a major mistake. It was a Mini Cooper and although it was a great car the insurance for that particular vehicle for a young man back in 1978 was pretty horrendous. When I came to sell the car, it attracted young men like me, all of whom were pushed to pay the insurance. Then a whole lot of problems occurred with the car and so I ended up selling it for a measly £50.

Chris and I hitchhiked down to London then got the boat train to Paris and then after being becalmed in French hitchhiking hell for days, we just jumped on a train direct to Lloret.

We met two girls on the train and had a fun time travelling together for a few days. ‘My’ girl was called Lee, which she said was short for Emily.

On arrival in Lloret we found a small pension consisting of a couple of rooms and a bathroom and spent a lot of time going down the pub drinking beer and chatting to girls.

We were pretty popular for a while. A short while. Later I realised our popularity was directly related to the money we had. The locals we met, by locals I mean the British ex pats who had flocked to the area just for the same reasons we had, all had pretty much nothing and anyone else who either was a new arrival with money or an expat who had some kind of a job was fair game to cadge off. For a short time I worked in a pub. I wasn’t paid any money but they gave me a meal for my trouble. Any time I was behind the bar collecting plates and glasses for washing, my new mates all hissed ‘Steve, pour us a lager while no one is looking!’ I didn’t and as a result my popularity plummeted. One night I was in the pub drinking with friends and after an evening of fending off various cadgers I told one of them to, in polite terms, go and have sex with himself. Alas this did not go down well and I became somewhat unpopular in that small Spanish town. After a few weeks I got a little fed up of this and so I moved on and left my friend behind. He was happy, he was a popular guy and he spent the summer with new friends loitering about Spain.

I started hitchhiking back north through France. I remember meeting an American guy. He was doing something similar to me, he had packed in his insurance job, sold his car and was travelling around Europe. We travelled together for a while. Every night he checked into a hotel and I put my tent up somewhere nearby. He had his evening meal in the hotel, I had some bread and cheese from the local shop and we had a few drinks together of an evening. Like all Americans, certainly those I have met, he was a friendly guy. It was clear to me he was dining well and I of course wasn’t. I must have ponged a little though after all those weeks on the road and I have to say I wouldn’t have minded using his shower, but the offer never came. After a while we parted company.

Not so long ago I found my old notebook from those days and written neatly in there are his name and address and phone number in the USA. I’ve always wanted to visit the USA and the Americans are such friendly, outgoing people. Wonder what he’d say if I turned up on his doorstep. Remember me? Steve Higgins? France, 1978? Any chance of using your shower?

I fondly remember turning up at home. My mum answered the door with a look of shock. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. I thought you were going away for six months?’

I’d returned after about six weeks. ‘I don’t know where you’re going to sleep’ she went on. ‘We threw your old bed out the other week!’

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7 Questions for a Self-Published Author

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Question 1:

How did you come to write your book?

I’ve always been a writer, even as a school kid I was writing stories and screenplays. I used to write scripts and do all the casting. Not sure whether Steve McQueen would have appreciated the roles I was planning for him though.

Later on when I was in my 20s I tried to move away from all the sci-fi and espionage stuff I was writing and write about something more personal to me, something that I had a personal connection with so I started writing about life working on the buses, which is what I was doing at the time.

I wrote about working as a bus conductor and driver and jotted down my observations about the people I met and carried on my bus. Then there were other stories about my personal life, drinking in pubs, chatting up girls in nightclubs, listening to music and so on. Later I realised I could bring all this stuff together even though it was just a series of essays then, and even make it into a book, which I eventually did.

Question 2

How did you go about publishing the finished book?

I had the book turned down by three publishers, not really a great amount.  I wrote a blog post a while ago about books rejected by publishers and I found out that Day of the Jackal was rejected 4 times, Gone with the Wind 38 times and The Time Traveller’s Wife 25 times. Publishers are only human of course but these days writers don’t need them, we can just publish online, just like I did at Amazon using their website Createspace which is now kdp.amazon.com

Question 3

Tell me about the problems of marketing and getting your book noticed by the public.

Well, that was the hard part, writing it was easy in comparison!

Building up a presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube was a gradual process and the same is also true for my blog on WordPress which I started really just to promote the book. I started off with essays about how I wrote the book and videos of me talking about the book and so on.

I read somewhere that over 5000 books are published every day on Amazon, an incredible figure so how can anyone compete with that? Well, just by getting out onto social media and plugging away with tweets, new blog posts, videos on YouTube and so on.

Question 4

Tell me about your website and your blog

Well, it was originally created just to promote my book and get my message out there to potential readers but it’s also a challenge, a writing challenge. My big problem is that I’m lazy and I need a big push to get me writing so having a deadline, 10:00am on a Saturday morning, is something that gets me motivated as a writer. I know that I have to write something by then.

I even feel like a sort of writing professional because I have my deadline, my one deadline, and I’m always working towards that, trying to get something ready to post for my followers.

Question 5

What sort of posts will we find on your blog?

Generally I try to write stuff that is similar to my book, little bits of fluff, anecdotes with a funny twist, things like that. The idea is that if people like the blogs, they should like my book, Floating in Space which is written in a similar style. A typical blog post, and one of my favourites, is the one about hoodies (Hoodies and a Shaggy Dog Story) and an incident where an old lady’s handbag was snatched. Another favourite was called the Cat Wars and was about a crazy situation that built up when I was looking after my neighbour’s cat.

The only problem now is that I’m running out of anecdotes but I still manage to write about two other favourite themes, second-hand books and classic films.

Question 6

What about video, do you use video in your blogs and marketing?

Any internet post on social media performs better with images, a 37% percent increase in engagement and even more so with video.

Here are a few stats:

100 million hours of video are watched each day on Facebook.

500 million people watch Facebook videos every day.

Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach on average than a photo.

2 thirds of content on Instagram is now video as opposed to pictures but video has to be snappy. If viewers are not hooked in the first few seconds, they just click away from your video to something more interesting.

I use video on my website to try and engage readers and all my adverts, because I do use advertising every now and then, are all video based.

A lot of years ago, in the 1990’s I really wanted to get into TV and video and I went on a video production course at the WFA media centre in Manchester. Subsequently, I made a few attempts to make some things for TV, all of which ended in failure but as a result I do have a bit of technical knowledge with video editing and production which has helped me a lot.

Luckily, today’s technology makes it pretty easy to create simple videos and I use them a lot in my blog posts.

Question 7

What are your plans for the future regarding writing and blogging?

Well, more of the same really. I’m actually very slow at producing video content so I need to maybe speed up a little with my video production.

I really need to work more on my follow up book.

I’ve written some screenplays that were rejected so I plan on turning those into a book. The big problem is just me, being motivated and just getting myself geared up to work and write!

Floating in Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.

https://youtu.be/wknjLnEk1Yw

 

4 Simple Secrets of Self Publishing

Posted on by Steve Higgins

One of the bylines I use on Twitter is ‘hear it straight from a self-published author’ so I thought it might be an idea to write a post about just that, about being a self-published author.

1. The first thing to remember in the world of self-publishing is that it’s just you, no one else, just you.

You are the writer, the editor and the proofreader all rolled into one and there is only you to tell you that that bit is good and that other bit is not so good and that the book is too long or too short, or anything else for that matter. Sometimes you might find you need a little help, particularly in the area of proofreading. After I wrote my book and then rewrote it a few times I personally began to develop a sort of word blindness and I tended to see only the words I thought I had written and not the ones I actually had written. Spelling and grammar checkers will pick up things like repeated words, bad spelling and so on but a really good idea is to get someone to proofread your work. How many mistakes Liz has spotted in my work I shudder to think!

2. Once you have clicked the button at Amazon to publish then another thought may begin to enter your head: Who is going to buy your epic work? How will they even know about it?

The answer is marketing, and who will be marketing your book? Well, for a self published author, it’s going to be you! Yes, that’s your cue to start Facebooking, Tweeting and Blogging so you can get your message out to all those eagerly waiting readers; a new book is available, come and get it.

A thousand websites are out there that will tell you about the intricacies of marketing and blogging. Some will drop a tiny sliver of free info onto your doorstep, others want you to sign up for their webinars and their courses all guaranteed to sell your book, at a price of course.

For me there are a few select websites that I read regularly and I do follow their advice,  particularly when I decide to shell out some money and actually advertise. Apart from advertising, I publicise Floating in Space in all the usual places I have mentioned plus I have a raft of videos to bombard the public with, some short and snappy and others that go into more detail. Then of course, there is this humble blog, going out once a week in the hope that these short missives about life, the universe, books and classic films will hopefully entice a few people to buy my book and bring me in a few sales. Will you be a best seller and make lots of money? Some writers do of course but when £5 a month drops into my bank account, sometimes more, sometimes less, I count myself very happy indeed.

Got yourself an author blog? No? Get yourself one ASAP. An author blog is a way of communicating straight to the book buying public. WordPress is a great way to start, fairly easy and free. The only thing I pay for at WordPress is my website address, http://www.stevehigginslive.com

3. Have you self-published at amazon?

Well if you have, having your author page at amazon is very important too. Get yourself a good bio sorted and some juicy stuff about your book. Another place that’s important is Goodreads. Take some time to set up your author page there too and try to interact with readers and other authors. Take a look at my Goodreads page here.

4. One last thought.

Ok, you’ve gone down the self-publishing route but that doesn’t mean you have to stay self-published. Keep on researching publishers and keep on sending off your manuscripts!

Oh and one other thing, just because you have found these four ‘secrets’ published on the Internet, that doesn’t mean that they are right, or good or even worthwhile listening to. I am just like a thousand other writers knocking out works like this that float off into the internet. I have no editor to tell me my post wasn’t helpful or interesting or generally up to much. I just have me and some grammatical support from my lovely proofreader who labours away correcting my tenses and spelling and other errors for no monetary gain at all, although I do take her out for a meal now and again.

So if you fancy becoming a self published author and blogger, join the club. Floating in Space is currently rated by Amazon as the 520,413th most popular book on their site. Almost a year ago it had hit the dizzy heights of 4,536th most popular so that is quite a fall, maybe it’s time to consult my head of marketing (me) and maybe sort out a new video from my personal video producer (me) for a new ad campaign!

Floating in Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.

 

 

2018 and All That

Posted on by Steve Higgins

OK so there it is, 2018 all done and dusted and we look forward to 2019. How was your year? Good, or bad? Was it all that you expected, or not? Here’s a quick look back at my personal 2018 with some of my blog highlights thrown in for good measure.

In January, Christmas and New Year quickly receding into the murky past, Liz and I were looking forward to a long break in Lanzarote. Lanzarote is really lovely at this time of year. Sometimes it tends to get a little windy and a few times in the evening temperatures dipped a little causing a flurry of fleece jackets to appear in the bar we frequented. The bar I should add was substantially an outside rather than inside bar and we sat alfresco under an awning while we drank, ate tapas, nibbled on olives and nuts and listened to some soothing pop classics performed either by a local pianist or the local sax player. I went into more detail in Thoughts from a Lanzarote Sun lounger but it was a very relaxing time.

The only problem of any significance was some annoying keyboard issues with my laptop. The letter O key was not working which caused some difficulties in producing a TV themed blog called ‘Putting the ‘O’ in Columbo’. Columbo being the famous TV detective played by Peter Falk and one of my very favourite TV shows ever. I had taken the laptop to my local computer store who had replaced the keyboard but when I arrived in Lanzarote ready to pound out some more blogs and possibly even add a few more pages to my new book I found the keyboard misbehaving again! I was not happy and a lot of the blogs I wrote while I was away were produced mostly on my Ipad.

There were some lovely restaurants in Lanzarote but in one of them the antics of one of the waitresses put me in mind of an old friend of ours, a waiter called Giorgio. He was a lovely fellow Giorgio. As a waiter he just wasn’t one of the best but he always made us smile and one sunny afternoon I took a break from the pool to write a post about him and some similar waiters called ‘The Giorgio factor.’

Back home in the UK I was spending an increasing amount of time looking after my elderly mother who was 89 in 2018 and has the beginnings of dementia. Only two years ago or so, I used to call up Mum and say I was coming to stay. Arriving there after work I would find my little box room all neat and tidy with fresh covers on the bed. My Mum is probably the only person I have ever known who irons socks and underwear and it is sad to see her today with her memory loss getting worse by the day and it is me who irons things for her, and me who puts the fresh bedding on the beds. In Some Random thoughts on Boxrooms, Stormy Daniels and Action Man I talked about how good it felt to return to that room, surrounded by the old books, vinyl records and cassette tapes of my past life. When I am there I sometimes feel that I have never really grown up.

I had a small health scare earlier in 2018. Nothing exciting just that a check up revealed slightly high blood pressure. The end result was that I was advised to check into the gym and see if a little work out might help. The practice nurse handed me a free three-month course at the YMCA which was my very first introduction to the world of pumping iron, the gym and physical exercise which until then I had completely shunned. I actually enjoyed the course, it was nice to feel healthy (well, healthier) and I jotted down a few remarks about the experience in a blog called Working Out That Sweet Illusion!

In May I was working hard on one of my videos, a look back at the places which inspired my book Floating in Space. I visited Manchester on a few occasions and shot plenty of video, a great deal of which, sadly, wasn’t of a particularly great quality. One of the problems in shooting video on a visit to Manchester is that I tend to combine filming with a tour of my old pub haunts in the town, as well as visiting some new ones so at the end of the day my hand tends to become a little rocky on the lens when too much beer has been downed.  Eventually after a number of false starts I put together a short film about Manchester and added a narration compiled from some old blog posts, text from Floating in Space itself and some new observations. I still wasn’t happy with the video and was struggling to get it right so I decided to use the narration (re-purpose I think the correct phrase is) in a blog post entitled Manchester, 41 Years On.

If you want to see the video which I eventually finished, click here.

Picture courtesy Wikipedia

Anyway, in June I decided to turn to something much more interesting than my little life and write about two of my most enduring interests, books and the Watergate Scandal. President Nixon must be one of the most interesting figures ever to become President of the USA and his journey to the Oval Office was remarkable. Nixon spent two years as vice president to Eisenhower, looked like winning the election in 1960 from relatively unknown John F Kennedy but it was Kennedy who pipped Nixon to the prize. Nixon ran for governor of California and lost, declaring to the press politics was over for him: ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore!’ However, in the tumultuous year of 1968 he was back, once again the Republican candidate for the presidency and this time he won. When Lyndon Johnson left office he advised Nixon to make tape recordings of his conversations as he had done, saying that they were invaluable in preparing his memoirs. That advice proved to be Nixon’s undoing.

In a post called ‘Writing and the Big 300‘ I published my 300th blog post, a small milestone for an amateur writer like myself. I concentrated on the flip side of writing; the continual search for content and some of my other writing projects, things like my scripts. In particular I talked about a sit-com idea I had that I submitted to the BBC Writer’s Room web page. Alas, after many a month in deliberations the BBC decided my project was unworthy of putting into production. Pity really because I thought it was rather good.

Getting back to my holiday travels, Liz and I journeyed back to France once again for a wedding in the Alsace area of France. We went in Liz’s new motor home and after the wedding festivities were over we travelled through the north of France taking in many of the famous World War One battle grounds and cemeteries. The summer as you will no doubt remember was hot, in fact very hot indeed and I put together a post about our travels in the motor home, my impressions of visiting the military cemeteries and my frustration with mobile wi-fi! I also had time to make a short video about the military cemeteries which you can see here.

In August I turned my attention to Manchester Airport in a post called Airports and Things. As a schoolboy, Manchester Airport was one of my favourite places and my friends and I spent many a happy hour cycling down the quiet lanes that back on to the runway where we jotted down aircraft numbers. In 2018 the Airport Authority introduced a controversial drop off and pick up charge of £3 which caused many complaints from the public and in the post I argued the case for a larger number of smaller airports rather than fewer huge airports.

A lot of my posts are inspired by the books I read and one fascinating volume was a book by Noel Botham about the death of Princess Diana. He claimed the Princess had been murdered by elements of M16 loyal to the Royal Family and went on to explain various issues with the accepted story of the Princess’ death. Whether the Princess was really murdered or not, numerous parts of the story do not add up and they all contributed to a story of mystery and intrigue.

To round up my personal 2018, a meander through my old diaries prompted a post called Dear Diary and just to get in the festive mood in December my brother and I went on a pub crawl in Manchester In Search of Dark Beer. You just can’t beat a perfect pint of mild!

Well, that was my year. How was yours?

Floating in Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.

Videos, Blog posts and the Search for Content.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It doesn’t get any easier, the search for words and ideas for a weekly blog post. And it just goes on and on, just like marketing. You write a book, self publish it on Amazon, then realise that if you want to sell a few copies you need to promote your book more and more on social media. After all, before people can make a decision about whether to buy or not, they need to know more about your product, and if they’ve never heard of it at all there is only you who can tell them about it.

One of the ways in which I have worked is to show the public something interesting through either my blog posts or videos and hope people may think, ‘hey that was interesting. Wonder what this guy’s book is like? That’s the theory anyway. In practice coming up with varied content week after week is hard work. Sometimes I have to cheat a little. Cheat did he say? Well a little bit. Sometimes I take an old blog post and liven it up a little, rewrite it and add some new images and graphics and hey presto, new blog post!

Sometimes I’ll take content from a stalled project and use it for something else, like another blog post. Back in 2017 I was in Manchester, the location of the events in my book, Floating in Space, and shot some video of the town as it looks these days. I had a vague idea of talking about the city and how it has changed during the last 40 odd years and looking at some of the pubs and bars I used to frequent. Back home I saw that my footage wasn’t brilliant and there didn’t seem to be enough useable video to work with. One big problem for me is that when I visit Manchester, the lure of my old pubs and haunts is just too great and I tend to have to go and visit them and of course, have a pint or two in them too. Then there are new venues that need to be tried out and evaluated. This process of evaluating is very important, especially to a top blogger and chronicler of Manchester, like me! The thing is, after a few pints, which of course are essential to the evaulating process, I’m not necessarily in the mood, or the state, for shooting video!

Making a documentary film, even the short ones I make, is pretty hard. I started off putting a rough cut together then working out a narration but things just wouldn’t come together. A better way, I found, was to sit down and write something and then try to select images that fit together with my words. Editing, especially the way I work, can be a slow process. After that particular video project stalled for the umpteenth time I realised my Saturday blog deadline was fast approaching and that I had little worth publishing. That’s when I decided to take my narration and re-purpose it into, yes, you’ve guessed it, another blog post.

My post Manchester 41 Years On, was a nostalgic look back down memory lane and a sort of appreciative look at present day Manchester. It combined a lot of text from Floating in Space, written quite a few years back now with some new fresh words inspired by my recent visit to the old home town. I liked it so much that I determined to get back into the editor’s chair and sort out that video!

After numerous re-edits I finally got things in some sort of order. I did have a version with some background music but it was annoying so that had to be removed. My narration wasn’t perfect but after a session with the old sound mixer and the snipping out of those many errs and ahhs, things seem a little better. Not Oscar nomination material I suppose, but a pretty reasonable short video. Take a look and see what you think!

By the way, this post came direct from French mobile internet hell! Stay tuned and I’ll tell you more next week!

Steve Higgins is the author of Floating in Space, a novel set in Manchester, 1977. Click the links at the top of the page to buy or for more information.