The time has come, my friends, to talk of ALL these things... (10 years of the Writing Blog!)

# "I wish it was last September, so we could lose ourselves in crowds everyday..." - Ben Folds

C.G.Allan circa 2006!

2006 was a very good year… It was also a very different one too – and a vastly varied world to that of 2016.  There was no instagram, Twitter was only just getting going and a younger scribbler C.G.Allan was only a year out of graduating from an MA in Creative Writing and was busy tinkering with his first novel which he’d started on that course and was wondering how to take his writing to the “next level”…

It was also around that time that an old school friend and fellow amateur scribbler (and still best friend, I might add) suggested I get “one of those blog things” and I began to read a little about what exactly an “online journal” was.  It was around early 2006 too that I realised I wanted to create a website for my various first attempts at creative writing - partly to make a record of these for posterity but also to create a base for any readers I might be lucky enough to gain, and potential literary agents, to come to, to find out about my scribbles.

I might add that it was the same friend who suggested I “get one of those blog things”, who I initially worked with to build what was to become my “find the missing reel” writing homepage.  And the blog became an important part of that first build as I began planning what exactly the objects of that desktop photograph would link to as visitors to the page clicked (and eventually tapped) on.

My early "business" card!

I love a mystery story, and try to inject more than a healthy dose of mystery into all of the plots I develop and end up writing, so the website and blog were no different, and over the past decade, as I’ve worked slowly towards finding a literary agent for my writing, this mysterious side of the sites I use to get my writing online, remains a big driving force.  (Who ever wants to give away the ending anyway, right?!)

Coming soon - my first story collection!

If anything, I guess for me as a writer, I look back on it as an important “development” period where I’ve mastered the art of writing online, but also found out the hard way how this online presence can work against your productivity of actually writing – it’s a constant struggle and tradeoff of how much do you write about writing, while you’re not actually getting down to writing the stories you’re talking about you want to write…

The 2006 list of my writing tasks

But as I said at the top of this post, I have (thankfully) over the past decade finished (and indeed redrafted a couple of times) my first adventure novel and begun a second, as well as developing a little at least 3 other books I’d like to write.  And of course, this past tenth year of my writing online, I’m preparing a book of short stories to launch both online as an ebook and in print form too – probably early in 2017 (as I approach my ominous 40th year on planet Earth).  So it has definitely been a productive period for me while I’ve gone about a busy life of working full-time and the other things that fill up anyone’s time day-to-day.  (I even found a writing plan checklist recently from back in 2006 which I still think is a good idea to keep my scribbles organised)

So I thought I’d end off with another organisational list of how the main points that I’ve talked about over the past 10 years here on the blog (these are pretty much the same themes I return to time and again from differing angles, as I try to work out my own writing patterns and voice)…

• the books I’ve loved to read and the authors I’d like to emulate.
• the screen heroes I’ve grown up with and whose adventures most inspire my own stories
• my creative day jobs which I’ve loved being part of but which sometimes mean my creativity slumps once I’m back home, and aiming to write a daily quota.
• the idea of “franchises” and my humble attempts to create a ‘multimedia’ universe of my own…
• that first adventure novel was “blogged” about in its second draft stage (I’m on draft #4 to date) and I even ran some “Fiction Decisions” polls as an attempt to get interactive with my imagined readers.
•  I believe travel here, there and everywhere inspires my writing no end and over the last ten years I've blogged here about many of my real-life adventures around the globe and even around my own little world nearer to home...

So it’s been a pretty full-on decade, and while the main writing homepage has had the same domain and name all the way along, the blog itself has changed titles as I’ve developed what I want to use it for across those 10 years – from the simply-titled “The Blog Journal of C.G.Allan” to “It’s all about the Adventure” and finally settling today, in 2016 on “Scribbling a Life Creative… with C.G.Allan”, and it’s a title that now hopefully reflects more closely ALL of my creative pursuits, not only that of my creative scribbles…