Down the arm flows…

A close friend, who has been a successful blogger for the past eleven years (Corners of My Mind), is also a fiction writer and she is the person who got me into blogging back in 2007, then encouraged me when I joined the writing class in Beeston. She seems inexhaustible to me, although she would tell you otherwise.

In a recent short story she shared with me, she describes the act of writing to near perfection. The one thing I know about writing is that many writers will never get the acclaim they deserve. Writing is like acting and so many other things in life. Connections matter more than ability. With the former comes patronage of sorts. Of course there are exceptions to my generalisation, but I know enough from personal experience to stand by my claim.

My favourite book, A Month in the Country by J L Carr began life as a self-published book in 1980, before eventually getting the attention and acclaim it rightly deserved. Telling others about the book, as I have been doing since 1980, and the subsequent feedback, still gives me pleasure beyond words. 

I know it takes courage to share your work with others. A friend from my schooldays in Wembley, who is writing a life memoir for herself, modestly believes her life is no interest to anyone. It is not a view I share and have told her so on a good few occasions. One day I will write about our relationship and how a reminiscence blog posted by me brought us together again after a gap of fifty years.

In the ideal world I would have an editor, but for the past few years I have enjoyed the support and friendship of a 'writing buddy'. She tells me how she sees it and I love her for that. I will be taking her a printed booklet version of my latest short story, The New Volunteer, on Monday. In meantime I share it with you and would welcome your feedback too. Would you like the story to continue? Would you like to know more about Wendy?

I hope you enjoy.

My first seven short stories

It has taken me a day to set up Senior Fiction and this morning I have posted seven stories. From now on I will add stories to the top of the Story Page list in the right-hand column.

I have a good few to add over the coming weeks and I will post them in no particular order — a bit like how I chose the first seven stories I have posted today.

I am conscience of not having an editor, but I do have friends who read some of my stories and comment on grammar and plot.

My 'writing' days began as Secretary of Wembley South Young Socialists in 1960, when I was sixteen. At first it was letters to The Wembley News, then it was meeting reports and I must have been doing something right because the then Editor invited me to his office and we had a long chat, after which he offered me a job as a cub reporter, but only if I gave up my involvement with the Labour Party, explaining that the paper itself was 'non-political'.

I had left secondary modern school in 1959 with no qualifications. As difficult as it is for some to believe, I left school like many others at the time not knowing what a GCE or a university was. My first job was a trainee animal technician at the Chester Beatty Research Institute attached to the Royal Brompton Hospital in South Kensington.

I chose to stay in the Young Socialists and not to take advantage of the opportunity I was so generously offered. I take the view that had I accepted the job offer I would not have met Susan in 1975, but then again I may have gone to Birmingham in 1969 as a young journalist and not a young distribution manager.

I became a different kind of writer, and I did end up writing news part-time for a living, and this fact, I am sure, impacts on how I approach and write fiction. I write with urgency once I start on a story and I have no idea where my writing is going to go, I have no plot in my head when I pick up on an idea for a story. I just go with the flow and that is what excites me about fiction. It is always a journey of discovery and I love that.

I suspect that a good few will read what I write and say that this lack of plot and direction shows. Well, I can live with that, thanks to the politician in me. I do not expect everyone to share my views or to like me and one thing you quickly learn in local politics is that you only need to win over a small percentage of the electorate to get elected, and so it is with being a successful writer — a very small audience is, in the order of things, all you need.

Once we were defined by the work we did, for this told us much about our class, now it is which university you went to. Thanks to the WEA I know a good few like myself who left school at fifteen with no qualifications and who managed to progress. We had our opportunities. USDAW, my union in the mid-1960s offered me the opportunity to go to Ruskin College in Oxford, but by then I was married with a baby daughter, so I turned down the offer. A close friend from my Wembley Young Socialists days, who I still see, did go to Ruskin and onto to Hull University. Our lives intertwined in surprising ways and there is a story here waiting to be told.

It is only in recent weeks whilst thinking about creating this blog that I have thought about what I write. I write a lot about meetings and life defining moments. I understand why because back in 1975 my life changed in a day. Meeting Susan is a story I have yet to write, suffice to say we took off like a rocket and until that day I had no inkling of the astronaut who lived in my head alongside the father, the husband, the charity worker, the councillor, the poltical writer and the chair of museums I knew Robert to be.

I reached my late-sixties passions undimmed and my idea of writing a memoir got side-lined as I discovered the joys and pleasure of writing fiction. I know I am not alone. Older folk are not often the subject of fiction, perhaps because the young do not understand us and all too many of us are so fixated on the past that we ignore the present and the future. It is these thoughts which are at the heart of Senior Fiction.

Let the journey begin!

Amazed to have the name

I have been writing short stories since the beginning of 2011 when I joined a WEA (Workers' Educational Association) writing class in Beeston, on the south-west edge of Nottingham, but I have been a published writer since the early-1970s, almost exclusively about local government and local history. From 1984 until 2006 I was the news editor for Local History Magazine and also The Nottinghamshire Historian (1992–2013). For the past few years I have been writing a monthly column in the Nottingham Post and, occasionally, for Buses magazine.

A family gathering over Christmas 2010 persuaded me to think about writing a memoir of sorts, but despite having read countless memoirs and collections of reminiscences for the two periodicals I have mentioned above, I was not sure how I wanted to write my memoir. I knew it was going to be 'a story' — for that is what all memoirs/autobiographies are — at best they are collections of jumbled 'facts' and morphed memories. A good friend had attended a writing class in Stoke and I decided to follow her example, which is how I came to join the WEA writing class in Beeston, which I attended until the end of 2014.

I left because we had moved from our house in Lenton, Nottingham, to Beeston at the end of November 2014 and we had a lot of sorting to do, having downsized. To date, my memoir is no more than a few postings to a blog I had started in 2013 called My Wembley 1944–1966, but I had got into the habit of writing short stories.

Christmas 2015 found me pondering the future and what I wanted to do. It had been an eventual year. During the summer I had been diagnosed with two serious health conditions: Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis and Aortic Stenosis, yet I have never felt better and had it not been for a x-ray on the day after the 2015 General Election, I would not know of either condition.

In 2014, on reaching seventy, I had decided to give up on committee work and to do what I wanted instead. From the age of sixteen in 1960 until October 2015, I was always doing a political or voluntary job of some kind.

My health has made me a more solitary person, attending fewer meetings, avoiding crowds and, worst of all, minimising my use of buses and trams to reduce the risk of catching a cold or a cough. As a result, my writing has had more attention. I am not a hermit and go into Beeston most days with my shopping trolley and prepare meals, whilst Susan, my wife, does the washing, ironing and, apart from the stairs, the cleaning. I still enjoy visits to my favourite Beeston cafés, eateries, bookshops and galleries.

From 2007 until 2014 I did a Lenton based blog, Parkviews, and since December 2014, a blog called Beestonweek. Both are now pensioned off, still online. Blogs which require weekly attention are time consuming in a way which I do not expect Senior Fiction to be. Together, they give you an idea of who I am.

So I decided over Christmas it was time to come out as a fiction writer, to share my work with a wider audience and to hope that, by word of mouth, I can attract a few readers. I am a member of the Nottingham Writers' Studio and will be telling them about Senior Fiction (seniorfiction.blogspot.co.uk), a web address I did not expect to be available. I am somewhat amazed to have this name for my blog. I hope it will help folk find my blog by chance as well as via word of mouth and online recommendation.

My plan is to publish each story on its own page, which will be listed in the right-hand column, where you can see who I am. Blog postings will be, well, I'm not sure, so please bear with me.

Robert Howard.