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| On a good day, this is how it feels |
The memories are fading, but the record is still there, buried away in the journals I’ve kept since 1994, around the time I was awarded my first book-length commission and decided to cut the ties to full-time work once and for all. I mean the memories of times when I was absolutely desperate for work that paid.
Right now I have three, perhaps four book projects on the
go, more lined up, and beside me a shelf containing copies of a dozen books
I’ve written or ghosted in the past six or seven years. It’s a long way from
the days when my journal entries logged as many as thirty projects I was trying
to kick-start – stories, articles, interviews, broadcast documentaries, travel
pieces, a novel or two – all of which were stalled, awaiting replies from
editors, agents and producers. Oddly, when the flood-gates did open and the
work did start coming in, it wasn’t one of those thirty projects that bore first
fruit. No, everything that came my way came from left field, from people I’d
never come across, far less courted. I have no idea why.
The main strand of my current workload is this memoir of the
British guy who went to the States and worked for twenty years as a bounty
hunter. I’m 40,000 words into that, enjoying it far more than I thought I
would, and it’s going like a train. At the same time I will shortly publish a
new travel book for the American market. Then there’s the novel I completed in Taos Leeds
talking to a publisher who are keen to take on the history of York Brewery,
which I completed just before Christmas. If I tell you that the bounty hunter
is already talking about further books, whereas I am planning another of my own
- subject: Nature, and my life-long engagement with it (or Her) – you can see
why I occasionally whistle a happy tune while double-digging down at the
allotment. On top of that lot, I should add, I have undertaken to edit and
prepare for publication my mate Greg Christie’s magnum opus, the life and work of Eric Knight, the man who wrote Lassie, Come-Home – and an awful lot
more that people have forgotten about.
So, everything going swimmingly. But I still look back and
ponder those difficult, penurious days – desperately depressing and frightening
days, some of them – and wonder what I did right to bring on such a change of
fortunes. Well, I can say I deserved a break. But how did it come about?
I do believe in luck – or should I say good fortune? But I
am also a great believer in hanging in there. As the father of a daughter who
is striving to make a living as an artist (and her partner is about to go to
drama school), I do preach tenacity. The longer you stick at doing what you
love, the more you’ll find that all those other people – the competition, you
might say – have for some reason or another had to give up. Or elected to. I
remember a fellow student when I was doing my M.A. at East
Anglia
There’s also the business of freedom. Commit yourself to any
one job and you’ll find yourself restricted. You’ll see a tasty residency or a single,
short-term funded project and won’t be free to go for it. A week off work is always
possible. Three months? No way. But if you’ve cut the ties that bind you to a
steady job, here at last is the upside. You’ll be constantly struggling for
money, but when something unusual or exciting comes by, you’re the one who can say 'yes'. That, I think, is what has been the crucial difference
for me. Luck? Fortune? You may call it what you wish, but that’s my perception:
that if you hang in there, don’t give up, you become the thing you hoped to be.
The label attaches itself to you; and the opportunities sort of know where to head.
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