"Keep It Simple, Scribbler!" - a 2014 Writing PREVIEW!

# "I've gotta get it right the first time, that's the main thing..." # - Billy Joel 

I traditionally start my blog posts with a song lyric, like the one above but I was really tempted to open this teaser trailer of my coming writing attractions for 2014 with a quote from Albert Einstein that I recently stumbled across that says, "Imagination is everything, it is the preview of life's coming attractions..." because it kind of sums up how I approach my creative scribbles - it all begins with an idea that grows in my mind ages before it appears on a page, brewing away until I feel it's ready to preview to the world...



My own personal writing cross to bear though perhaps comes in the form that having lots of ideas all of the time, I spread myself a little thin trying to do them all justice, so my main aim in 2014 has to be to 'write precis' and focus on a smaller number of scribble projects...

I do have to admit though that the scribbling year proper begins for me usually in February time.  One reason for this is that I tend to take a few days off for my birthday during this month and use the spare time to kickstart what I want to get done in the coming 12 months or so... (the other is during the first month of the year, I usually begin by reviewing the previous 12 months, to take stock and see what I still need to do to complete the last year's writing promises to myself!)

(The 'tap' link would take you to my Sound Cloud page )

The main success as I do look back over my last year of advancing my career as a (still amateur) writer was beginning to create my own "Sound Stories" both with AudioBoo and SoundCloud - these are genuinely helping me to practice the art of reading aloud, and hopefully aiding me in finding a writing voice of sorts... So these adventures in the soundscape will continue during 2014... (for a few years now, I've been wanting to have a go at my very own podcast and this could just be the year to launch my "C-Cast"'s first episode...)

But as I said above, my main aim this year is to be productive with my writing on a smaller ambitious scale than of previous years.  There's a saying in film production and also in other walks of life that reminds you to "Keep it simple, stupid!" and I'm definitely going to apply this ethos across my scribble aspirations in 2014.  So, I'm setting myself a humble objective of getting 3 major works completed, and they are:

• One... NEW novel - "my gnome gnovel" which began in the second half of 2013 and continues to be drafted (follow it's progress on my AudioBoo page each month!) 
• One... NEW poem - poetry is a sort of "undiscovered country" for me but I've been  tinkering with an epically heroic (yet comic!) poem for a little while now that I'd like to see finished... (You can see a sneak peak of 'Knighty Knight' on the poetry page of my Official Writing Website.  
• One... NEW short story - last year I began scribbling notes in my pocketbook on my way to work, on my lunch breaks (and basically anywhere I could find space and  time to!) for a brand new story which I'm calling The Return of the Magi - it's a 'loose' follow-up to my "modern urban adventures" tale The Unbelievably Silly But Flash Drive of Jackie Armstrong which you can find to read on my "Indie Fiction" page...  

There'll of course be other writing projects I'll be dipping in and out of, like my continuing research for "my History Mystery" and the collaboration on the new graphic novel prequel to my "Simulacrum" sci-fi story with Rich Windass but the overriding ethos this year has to be for simplicity and a focus on a core group of scribble assignments...

"Imagination is everything...

It is the preview

of life's coming attractions!"

(Albert Einstein)