Ghost Writers

Pottering about in Stoke

 

Hallowe'en looms and heralded another return to the Gladstone Pottery Museum. It was an unfortunate reminder that I'm not writing as assiduously as I should. I dutifully churned out another chapter in the life of the ghostly Rossmuirs, and delivered it to an audience who laughed appreciatively in all the right places.

Then I looked around at my fellow authors and realised how many of them have delivered finished work since the last time we did this gig. My year's output has been a few thousand words in a stalled novel and 1,500 more to fulfil my commitment to produce an annual hallowe'en ghost story. In that time, Jan Edwards and Misha Herwin (first and second from left) and Malcolm Harvard (third from left, back row) have started, finished and published two or more cracking novels.

Malcolm's output is a particularly uncomfortable sting. He co-authored It Never Was Worthwhile with me back in 2014. Released for the centenary of the outbreak of WW1, it became Amazon's no.1 best selling collection. Since then, he's a raft of quality material, including his latest, LMF, for which I designed the cover. Follow the link on the left to find it on Amazon. you won't regret it. When, by mutual agreement, we withdrew INWW from print, it was so that we could each include our stories in new collections. Malcolm did; I'm still working on it.

I can, to an extent, justify my poor performance by pointing to the need to work for a living - authors seldom earn the big bucks from their writing - but others with similar commitments produce whole libraries. i'm looking at you again, Havard.

So I'm going to change. I'll do better. I'll work. I'll achieve... oh look what's on the telly.