Don't judge your journey by its beginning

Life does change at quite a pace. I left my second job a little over three weeks ago, God told me it was time. It seems at that point the magazine started taking off. Traffic has jumped up to almost seven hundred and fifty visits a month. Finishing the books is still on the priority list, the second book is closer to finished than the first. I now have the equipment and the time to be able to get them both finished. I remember when I started Nowhere To Be Found roughly three years ago now. I had no idea how long this project would take or that it would spawn a sequel. Now looking back I can see a journey, where I have come from being a child writer to a prolific editor, a new writer to a more season one. I look at my writing and see an heir of maturity. I respect the journey I have been on. Others now turn to me for advice and input. There is no quick fix for this journey, no magic course, it could never happen any other way. I think the mantra of the day is definitely Mark Twain "it's not the dog in the fight, it's the fight in the dog." With every fight we gain experience, with every wound we are left licking we grow stronger and ultimately we get better at spotting the errors in our own writing. I remember handing over a shocking manuscript to a friend Charlie Southwell, I asked him a few weeks ago what happened to that manuscript, he said he got three chapters in and his red pen ran out. It is fortunate we don't judge all journeys by their beginning. The second novel was better, and by the third I was happy I had developed a craft that could potentially give me a second income in the long term. Unspent Convictions and Nowhere to be Found have both been read by three people each. Reviews so far have been promising. Whilst neither book is finished I feel I can now finish them quickly and with a much higher level of efficiency and accuracy than I had previously. Largely because of a new piece of software I started using. In the mean time I spend my spare hours reviewing and picking stories for the next issue of Dark Places magazine. Then in my day job battle to get children to read and write simple sentences and walk in single file up corridors. This is a strange life... but not a bad one.