Getting on with it

There is an awful lot of advice out there about creative writing. Some useful, some not so useful. Much of it is being offered by people who have never been published - whether that is a bad thing I don't know. Some very good writers have been passed over by Publishing Land and some very poor ones given book deals, loads of publicity and big prizes. (No, I'm  not going to say who I mean here, but if you read widely you will have a few suggestions of your own.)

I've been published, I've been Not Published, I've been in various states of discouragement and general lack of self belief in the 25 years or so since I first got a short story in a magazine. (In fact, it's 28 years - I published a short story called 'Santa at the Beach' in a 'style magazine' called Fairly Serious Monthly in 1987.) I am an Official Veteran. 

Anyway. Some advice from the coal face as I resume work on my fourth novel: Get on with it. However slow the progress, some progress is numberless percentage points more productive than no progress at all. Cue for picture of slow but gradual progress, with nice view.

Image courtesy of  Phil Richard, https://www.flickr.com/photos/philwirks
Creative Commons 

Not very erudite, and I'm sure Stephen King, Graham Greene,Virginia Woolf, Gertude Stein and various others have put it far more elegantly, but that is my advice. To you, and to myself. (Bearing in mind I haven't even blogged for two months exactly! What the hell is going on? With that in mind I will be posting every week until I go to a writing retreat - of which More Later...)