Why did I write the first novel?

Why did I write the first novel?

Honestly, I was bored in the long afternoons after finishing teaching at Gulf English School in Qatar in 2004.

I assigned 1 hour each day to write a diary piece on the fictional character, Richard Buchanan. I had some really badly behaved boys in a science class and I allowed Richard to vent my anger and rage at the people he met on his voyages.

It was a catharsis, and I also took images and drawings and adjusted them to illustrate each chapter heading. The dates were the actual dates I was writing, all I did was change the year.  It was later on that I had to readjust the days of the week to match the real calendar of the time.

The one hour writing slowly drifted into 2 or more as I became more embroiled in the story. I spent more time researching the locations and then using Google Earth to worth out distances between locations, the currents and prevailing winds so as to see how long it was between landfalls.

Diagrams and pictures took longer and longer to complete and the story started to take over. Each day I had to find out what had happened historically to see if it could be used or would affect the story. Was there an alliance between England and France or England and Spain at the time. England being the catch-all term for Britain as the crowns were unified but not the parliaments yet.

Being the time of great scientific discovery with Newton and others around at the time. I discovered that pocket watches were available at the time of good quality and could have been used to work out longitude by an enterprising sailor with some genius. Just because the actual use of chronometers came 100 years later, didn't preclude the experimentation into their use in this story.

Likewise, a game of football, although not following association rules, could still occur as villages played against each other in medieval times.

In that respect, the story was historical and fictional with a bit of science fiction.

The writing continued from October 2005 through to April and May 2006.

I wrapped the story up, edited it and let a few colleagues read it to see what they thought.  I've always been pleased that history teachers I have met have liked it.

Two people who gave early encouraging words were Rachel Green- Roche and Linda Bonnar (nee Cunniffe).

The following year (2006) I met and then married my wife (2007) and so the writing with on hold and was forgotten about completely.

By the time I got to Abu Dhabi in 2009, the book was a file buried in a hard drive.  One on my colleagues in the CfBT school improvement team working for the Abu Dhabi Education Council was an American Wayne Brown who had his on publishing company. I mentioned the story, " Any Means to an End" and he encouraged me to dig it out polish it off.  He wanted me to pay him money to vanity press the book, but that didn't seem sensible given I was leaving the UAE in the summer of 2011.  What would I do with 1000 copies of a book? Excess baggage? I don't think so.

I sat on the idea again fir a few months until I heard again from a chap Peter Malone would had been at GES and was then in AD at the AD British International School. He told me about FeedaRead.com a self publishing group. Again I sat on the information while I had a brief foray into Alexandria to teach for a month before returning to the UK.

I was face with the prospect of not working for a while.  The benefits system was going to be 13 weeks delayed. The book had to be published.

I went through it again, came up with a parchment looking cover and published it. The family say the cover and objected. Suggestions arrived and eventually my mother used an image of the Wasa warship (as a basis of her painting for the cover) going past Tynemouth priory.

It was not going to save the family from starvation. I had to contact the mortgage company to freeze the payments for a few months.  I got a job through CfBT to work for the Mongolian government and Cambridge University international examinations, to go to Ulaan Baatoor for three months to improve the scores of the first cohort of students there doing IGCSE chemistry.

That gave me time to write. I cheekily submitted a chapter of the book to the Rosetta Press 2012 literary competition as a short story and got 2nd prize.

The prize was to have a cover done. But I didn't have a book needing one. I therefore wrote the follow-up, Protective Craft and it also got edited at the Rosetta Press.

Being in Mongolia became a prolific writing period. I finished Protective Craft. I got angry at some of the other UK staff moaning about working overseas, so I wrote the ebook version of Teaching Overseas - A Short Guide.  I then wrote Fishing Trip - An Introduction to Trout and Fly Fishing.

Protective Craft went off to FeedaRead and the following summer I used Photobox.co.uk to make a glossy version of the fishing book to give to my  daughter. It may well still be available there.

Sales were spotty to say the least. The next year 2012-13 I was in Kazakhstan and tried to use Twitter and Pinterest to boost sales, to no effect.

Only free giveaways on Amazon in 2013-14 (after I'd moved to Kuwait) seemed to shift copies and no reviews were forthcoming.

I did get a request to make the  teaching guide a paperback which I did in 2014 using FeedaRead. The content of those paperbacks was all black and white, an I was loathe to waste the fishing book on anything other than colour.

After shifting schools in Kuwait in 2014, another history teacher came to my rescue. He like the rights of man parts and the anti-slavery stance of the protagonist and decided to use the book in his teaching.  The students took to the book, made reviews as they bought ebooks and read on Kindle unlimited.

Income started to arrive. £18 a month, then 23 then 27,  43 and now it's £75/ month on  ebooks costing £0.75 each. The royalty is £0.33 per book. It's taken a while but things are moving along now.  It all started in 2005.  It's now 2019, but return on the time invested is occurring.

I started watching Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel in 2018. The was a note about unagented submissions for novels in February 2019. My wide encouraged me to write one.  So I did.  I submitted it and am awaiting the outcome.

I've seen my pension plans decompose over the years. E books seem to be a possible solution. A steady income while you sleep once written.