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From Writing to Writing

If I’m brutally honest, I didn’t think blogging was even still a thing. Not since Twitter-now-X decided that 280 characters was enough for someone to express themselves.
I suppose my only real exposure to blogs is when I have to trawl through somebody’s personal history just to get to the list of ingredients for a recipe that I’d looked up online. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic that you have now reunited with your estranged brother after 40 years but I’m kind of wanting to know how to make a hollandaise sauce over here…

Nonetheless, Eggs Benedicts aside, encroaching into the world of publishing has in turn led me to embracing the remnants of blog culture ahead of sharing my first piece of literature with the world.

So here it is: me trying to explain to whoever has stumbled upon this page how it is that I found myself writing a novel. Two novels, in fact, and hopefully more to come.

Since you made the effort to open this page and see what I am all about, I will strive to do you the courtesy of avoiding cliches such as, “I’ve always been into writing,” and, ‘there’s a book in everyone.”

…

In truth, I’ve always been into writing. From about the age of 12, I received my first guitar and, more or less, proceeded to write love songs, based on my very, very limited experience of love as a young teenager.

It was the early noughties so, naturally, I was listening to the Beatles and any other artists in my parents’ CD collections.

Before too long, I was starting to compose increasingly complex music, often telling stories with a beginning, middle and end, condensed into the space of 3 or 4 minutes. Songwriting became the bedrock of my emotional realm; a place where I could dictate what I was thinking and feeling, sometimes allowing the guitar — or, later, the piano — to do the talking for me.
In fact I have a song on this very matter called Piano Talk.

Still, in order to avoid further rambling, I will jump ahead to 2021 when the seed of an idea for a book landed in my head. The precise inspiration for this idea is probably worthy of a blog in its own right, but suffice to say I was determined to pursue it.

I firmly believe that my years of songwriting has greatly sculpted the way that I think about language and the way that I write. Music and the odd song do appear in The Curiosities of Perciville Harper but only to season scenes with a little melodic taste.
Admittedly, my beginning, middle and end have been fleshed out much more than I’d been used to. Don’t expect to digest this story in the same 3 to 4 minutes as you might one of my songs, but the principles are pretty much identical: establish a setting, a character, a plot, a twisting journey and a neat conclusion.

The Sarsen Series wasn’t my first attempt at writing a novel, but it was certainly my most serious attempt.
I guess, as I stand on the precipice of publishing, that there really is a book in everyone…

Ingredients for a hollandaise sauce:

• 125g butter
• 2 egg yolks
• ½ tsp white wine vinegar or tarragon vinegar
• squeeze of lemon juice
• pinch of cayenne pepper

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