charles barrow's writing

Today is the last day of my fifties. Tomorrow I'll blow out sixty candles on my cake, as I enter a new decade. So I've been doing an inventory of the last ten years. This taking stock is something I'm prone to do on a New Year's Eve usually, I mull over the previous 364 days and count up my high points, my high days and holidays amidst the humdrum, just to prove to myself that I do manage to achieve goals that I set out to reach, that I do join in and contribute, that I don't spend my entire life plugged into Netflix, it just mostly seems that way. Obviously, with a decade to consider, there is a lot more road in the rearview mirror, but don't worry I'm not going to rehash it all here. Suffice to say, there was a big change of location and career, some of those sought after highs, and some low points; neither more, nor less than you might expect really. I also formulated a plan for my future, which is a novelty for me. But the thing that stands out, the th...

Really happy to announce that my books are finally available to buy as ebooks on Amazon.co.uk About four years ago I set out, with a plan, to write some books and get them published on Amazon. It's been a long road to get to this point, with lots of ups/downs/caffeine/tantrums/midnight oil burning/fist pumping etc but I finally got here, to this red letter day.

I caught a great shadow on my wall yesterday and took this photo. And now I want to write a noir style crime story so that I can use this image as the book's cover. I've had a great title idea before, and then written a story to hang on it, but it's a first to conceive a cover first. This photo is the author's own.

We have a saying in our family, if someone is being restless and can't settle to anything, 'You're just like Jim Hay's dog.' Apparently the dog always wanted to be somewhere else; outside if he was inside, inside if he was out. Actually, I've not heard it said for a long time. It was something my father, and my grandmother and grandfather, used to say. It definitely came from that side of the family. I was thinking of my dad recently on what would have been his 88th birthday, he died at the age of 72. I was wondering how long he would be remembered. They do say that no one really dies while they live on in someone's memory. It's a comforting thought. My dad will go on while my siblings and I remember him. And he has four grandchildren that would remember him too, and two that wouldn't. So the memory of him is secure for a good few decades yet. Hopefully. Jim Hay I never met, and I don't even know whether he was someone that my dad met, or may...

I'm re-reading books 1, 2 and 3, and giving them a buff and a polish: a comma here, a carriage return there, a shiny new adjective dropped into a sentence. No major changes, then, just a few tweaks. All of this is in preparation for them being uploaded to Amazon, to make them available on Kindle. I have had qualms about doing this, but I have to concede that Amazon is the largest shop window in the world, and if I want to find a wide audience for my writing, for my stories, then they need to sit on a shelf in their store. I don't think I can afford to have moralistic qualms when I'm an unknown writer looking for readers. I've given myself thirty days to get my reading and editing done, and to get the books uploaded and launched.

Day 23 of the Couch to 5K words writing course and I'm still hanging in there. Though I have fallen two days behind, one deliberately - as in I deliberately chose to save one of the exercises for a later date. And then yesterday I was too ill to write. I had a vice-like clamp of pain around my head and couldn't have strung a sentence together if I'd tried. And the exercise was a difficult one to unpick - introduce a well known fictional character into a different well known plot, and see what ensues. My thumping brain couldn't deal with that at all, at the time, so I set that exercise aside too. Now, today, I can see the fun and challenge in it, though I'm still not up to tackling it. Not all of the exercises have been so taxing. Occasionally we get a day away from creating to recharge on someone else's creativity, by reading a book for 20 minutes. Permission to read, that's my kind of writing course. I was reading Fahrenheit 451, so chose to continue with...

I'm sticking with the Couch to C5K challenge. Today's exercise was interesting. On previous days a topic has been set, but today I had to write to my own tune. I had to get down the scene that has been running around in my head for days, if not weeks. I had to make a start on my own story. Which was a canny idea of Writer's HQ, who are running the course. For 5 days I've been working hard, stretching my brain, sweating to complete the challenges that they've set, on topics they've chosen, and this all made making a start on my own work so much less daunting. No worrying beforehand, no finding excuses, no running errands instead of sitting down in front of a blank page, which I might have been tempted to do in the past. I got straight down to it and wrote a couple of hundred words, in the time allowance. And in so doing, I've set the scene, got it underway, so that I can return to it, pick it up, later.