Month: November 2012

I mean really talk, snuggle in a bit closer to the screen because I don’t want everyone to hear this, it’s kinda shameful. I wouldn’t mention it at all but it’s also kinda relevant.

I used to be a ‘perfect proofer’. Typos leapt off the page, grammatical errors made me physically unwell. I’d have to stop reading a book completely if I found more than one mistake, it was just too painful. I ended up proofreading, writing and editing for everyone I knew, it was the only way to survive the agony. I happily made beer money charging a pound a time to write ambulance accident reports for people. My proudest moment was getting Bugsy off a charge of impaling his vehicle on a scaffolding pole, by using big words that the scrambled egg brigade didn’t understand. (He had impaled the ambulance on scaffolding though, I saw him do it.)

Eventually I drifted into copy editing for a living. That was when I decided to have a go at writing, how hard could it be? I was trawling through some terrible stuff and these people called themselves writers.

Guess what? It was easy. I turned my life into a series of humorous articles and people liked them and asked for more. I sent a spot of travelling whimsy to the Rough Guides and they published it! Hey presto, I was a real writer. There were compliments, a reporter friend told me, “Anyone can learn to write but humour takes talent,” and I wore that comment like a medallion. Yeah, some of us have talent. Continue reading “Can We Talk?”