Famous last words?

How many times have you heard someone say, “I wish I could write a book” or “I’m sure there’s a book in me”? 

One of the things my mother said when she was dying of cancer was, “I never did write that book, did I?” It was something she’d often talked about. She had wanted to put down in black and white all the remarkable events she’d lived through. But she never did, and by then it was too late. 

So why is it so hard to write a book? What stops people doing it? Well, to be blunt about it, it’s bloody hard work. It takes effort - a lot of effort. You need to put your bum on that chair and work. And keep working until you’ve got at least 50,000 words that make some sort of sense. And then you have to keep rereading and rewriting until you’re happy with it. It’s no exaggeration to say it took me about three decades to finish my novel The Glens of Carnegie, from the first moment I put pen to paper to when I finally clicked Publish. 

So after all that effort, why did I decide to go down the self-publishing route and not submit the manuscript to a ‘proper’ publisher? Well, mainly because I consider the themes in the book synonymous with the time in which it’s set (mid 80s to mid 90s), and therefore perhaps not appropriate or palatable for today’s readers. And apart from that, I was tired of looking at it and wanted it out of the way. If it hadn’t been accepted and it had remained languishing untouched in a folder, it may never have seen the light of day. And I might have been one of those people who, in their final moments, say, “I never did get round to writing that book, did I?”