I Don’t Know what it’s about exactly, but I’m Writing a Book.

This won’t be the first attempt from me at playing author, in truth I did it for most of 2020, and much like my aspiring career in acting it was very stop and start. I just wasn’t committed enough and it came down to me writing fiction.

One of the more unusual quirks I have as a person is that I am intensely creative, often thinking up some of the most out there characteristics for the characters I play (much to the bemusement of directors on set) and sometimes for the things I draw, but when it comes to what I read I can’t stand stories not grounded in some reality. It’s why I love autobiographies, because it’s real. I can’t escape into books about stepping into magical cupboards or flying through the air without an engine or wings. I can’t relate to that because it can never happen and the only exception to the rule is Lemony Snickets’ A Series of Unfortunate Events but that’s because it’s a masterpiece.

The first book I attempted to write that I couldn’t commit to was about an average man, with an average job, in an average part of the world who decides to play pretend. Where he decides that he wants to live multiple and more interesting lives by pretending to be multiple people. It’s not a bad story, but it bored me in the end because it wasn’t realistic. Nobody could keep that up for too long, not even the evil con-men, women and people of the world can that’s why they always get caught. I’ll write a similar story someday but with a lot of changes. I’ll make it that he discovers how to adapt his character to the situation instead of pretending to be someone else, and then what changes as a consequence. How you lose and gain things from it. That happens every day so I can enjoy relating to it but for my first book I’ve decided to do something even more relatable.

I’m writing about living in the everyday as myself, but with a difference. It’s going to be about how I interpret this madness we call living and it’s going to be about…whatever I feel like writing about. It’s not going to be a manifesto or whatever bollocks other people try to do in self-help, pseudo-psychology or critical thinking books to get you to think differently. I hate when books do that. Instead I just want it to be as if you were having a conversation with me over a cup of tea. Where anything and everything is on the table and we can talk without fear of being offensive or being offended. So I do want you to think, that is the purpose of this book, but you don’t have to change and you don’t have to agree with me either.  

The first criticism I can imagine facing from me writing a book like this would be that I was arrogant. That maybe I was attempting to write something that told people how I see things is the only way and the right way. What I can tell you is that I really hope it doesn’t give that impression, but that if it does then there’s simply nothing I can do. It’s someone else’s impression, I don’t have any part in it, but that’s the point of the book! It’s my impression of things and I can be wrong! The aim is to get good people with the best of intentions to talk about anything and everything without having to be afraid of consequence. Maybe even to get some bad people to talk so it’s easier to identify them.

One of the biggest problems we have right now is that we are afraid to disagree and are afraid to be disagreed with. It’s true, we try to blend in and that just isn’t healthy. It makes us dull and boring when nobody is meant to be. You’re meant to be different from everyone else and you’re meant to talk about whatever you want. You’re meant to meet people and have them agree to stay beside you from this or to leave because they don’t agree and that is brilliant. It’s called living.

What I hope to do from this book is to make it clear that you can talk to me about anything, but that you should be free to talk to anyone the same. It’s supposed to say that small talk is ok but the really out-there, off the wall sort of conversation is always best. It’s meant to be a bit silly, it’s meant to analyse things from my perspective but it’s also meant to then give the reader an opportunity to analyse the same from their own. It’s a friendly chat with some awkward silences followed by laughter and a hug or a handshake. Most important of all though it’s becoming a book that I want to share because of how much I’m enjoying writing it, because you might not have expected me to write it. Where I could walk past you and you’d never know I wrote it because anyone could if they wrote what truly was going on in their head.

Hopefully I can finish it before the end of the year, and it’s a year that I think might be special for a lot of people. You know what’s been going on for the past 2 years, I promised never to write about it again, but I can possibly see the year ahead as a much more different and much more honest one.

Why write this book now? Because it’s a year where lots of people probably will do it as well. They might not write something like I will but there will be lots of new authors, and lots of new faces in many different spaces. All attempting to do something outside of the normal. I’m writing a book this year to be amongst the crowd of authors and to be amongst the crowd in general, in my yellow coat with my headphones on and playing, eating a sausage roll on my way back to work. I’m writing it because above all I don’t see why I shouldn’t and it makes me rather happy to think about who might read it. Simple as that.

Also apologies for not writing much lately. I’ve had my moments dealing with no finding the right place to live, my own fears and work. I’m completely fine but I’ve been missing out on time given travelling back and forth work which has at times been a pain in the arse. I did however complete my first stage show before the year ended and I’m making TikToks by the dozen. Think I’m doing better than okay going into the year, anything else is now a bonus.