My father’s departure by tractor
Darkness had descended on the garden and I noticed that my father’s windows still stood open. Normally by that time he would have come inside to administer the daily ritual of afternoon tea.
He and my mother had come to live with us in a self-contained flat some 10 years before. My mother had passed quietly away after a couple of years leaving my father to become a fixture in the lives of his grandchildren, always to be found working somewhere in the garden during the day, or in his sitting room in the evenings, pleased to receive their company.
From my office window I could see that his car was in the garage, so I knew he had not gone out. Arming myself with a torch I set out to investigate.
He had always joked that he would be happy to die on his tractor lawnmower – a sort of British version of Don Vito Corleone keeling over in his garden while playing with his grandson. I believe Vito’s last words in the novel were, ‘Life is so beautiful.’
And there I found my father, sitting on the tractor in its shed, struck down by his heart in just the same manner as Vito, exactly the end he had hoped for. Life can indeed be beautiful.
And still I know nothing
In his seminal book Adventures in the Screen Trade, Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman famously came up with the phrase ‘nobody knows anything’. His contention was that no one could predict which films would become blockbusters and which ones would flop hideously and expensively, no matter how experienced they were in the industry.
I guess the same is true in most professions and most walks of life, but I know for sure it is true in book publishing. For more than 40 years I have been taking stories to publishers and have been constantly surprised by the ones they would turn down and the ones that they would get into a bidding frenzy over in their desperation to buy. Once the books are published I am still repeatedly shocked by which ones the reading public take to their hearts and recommend to their friends and which ones sink without trace from the day of publication.
The only thing I know is that if you want to make a living from writing you have to keep producing work on a daily basis and you have to keep trying new things. If one project in 10 does all right and one in a hundred becomes a monster hit you may be okay, but you will never be able to predict which ones they are going to be.
The joy of self-publishing and the developments which Amazon and other technical pioneers have made possible mean that it is now easier to get a hundred projects up and running, no longer being dependent on the whims of publishers to even get into print, but still you can’t predict which of the millions of books being produced is going to turn out to be Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest selling book of all time. Nobody knew that was going to happen, any more than they realised that Ian Fleming and J.K. Rowling had created cultural icons that would become known throughout the world, growing into billion dollar businesses. I doubt if either Shakespeare or Dickens would ever have believed you if you’d told them how widely their writings would still be being read and performed centuries after the work of their contemporaries was largely forgotten.
Perhaps that uncertainty is one of the reasons that make writing and publishing such interesting professions.
Acknowledgements
With unbounded thanks to all the publishers, editors, agents, clients and readers who have helped to provide the raw material for these tales.
Confessions of a GP
by Dr Benjamin Daniels
Further Confessions of a GP
by Dr Benjamin Daniels
Confessions of a Male Nurse
by Michael Alexander
Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver
by Eugene Salomon
Confessions of a Police Constable
by Matt Delito
Confessions of a Showbiz Reporter
by Holly Forrest
Confessions of an Undercover Cop
by Ash Cameron
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Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 19