Birth of Birth

How it takes 15 years to write your debut novel

After writing 10 full-length poetry books, numerous other split poetry books and one non-fiction book of journalism articles, I’ve already had some people openly turn around and say to you, that’s an easy move to make moving into novels.

It isn’t.

Birth, my debut novel that will be out at the beginning of November (Date to follow shortly), has taken longer than any of my poetry books (Some of which alone took 6 or 7 years) instead of being dangling around for the better part of 15 years in one way or the other.

I won’t share any of the early fragments as frankly as they are best left in the past, but slowed by my own health conditions (Dyslexia / Dyspraxia) caused chaos in the structure of the book.

This proved harder as Word was not nearly as good as it is now (I am typing this on Word 365 and also use Grammarly) and I went through months with Birth writing then deleting, writing then deleting until I nearly gave up with it. The book followed me through one relationship with my partner before Amanda who read little bits of what sometimes I would stop hours before she eventually got up and I knew was humouring when she said it was very good.

When I began dating Amanda when she lived in Cheetham Hill, I watched her begin to produce work which was very different to me in terms of Novellas, Novels and all kinds of fiction and started to draw it out of me as I began to expand my work into other avenues outside Poetry (which is ironic as she began to head into Poetry as I walked away from it) and she encouraged me to start using Grammarly to assist me with the book which it did.

My Father had a heart attack at the end of 2019 and then the lockdown from 2020 to 2021 took me away from the book and span into the start of 2023 when after getting screwed out of a perm full-time, Birth began calling out to me again as a rebirth I guess following on from my poetry - a novel about the birth of a poet.

The drafting proved torturous polishing it off this year as I am a far different writer from what I was then (I’ll let you decide for yourself whether you think I am better now) and some of the dialogue had me sitting down shivering at the awkward-like nature,

But it made sense following on from my poetry in a weird way after struggling with the editing of it.

Could I spend another 15 years writing another novel like this?

I’ll let you decide for yourself there