I'm back

 Hello again, good to see you. It’s been a while! Did you miss me?

 

So I am relaunching the blog, you've probably not been here before so I'm going to treat it as if this is a new blog.

So.

 

My name is Dan, I am, for want of a better word, a ‘creative’. This is a term which I think sounds pretentious but when I say writer, musician, craftsman, etc, I worry that looks pretentious too.

 

Although, the fact I am writing a blog is itself ostentatious but I want to put myself, and the things I do out there, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry about the titles I am using.

 

The main things you will learn about me through this blog are that I am a husband, I am a Christian, I am a poet, I am a comedy writer, I am a novel writer, I write about my faith and about Christianity (not sure what you really call that and feels a bit of a stretch to call myself a bible scholar or theologian, and that does sound pretentious). I am a one time condiment entrepreneur, I am an artist, I am a wood worker, I make musical instruments, I am a crafter, an anxiety sufferer and finally I am an Admin officer who works for the NHS.

 

Why this then?

 

Creativity is really important to me, it is what keeps me sane and it has always been my dream to be able to make a living of my creative pursuits. However, I never figured out how to do this.

 

As a child my passion was music, I wrote songs and played guitar, keyboard and sang in a band. We had some success after winning a band contest judged by Mike McCartney (brother of Paul McCartney of Beatles fame who I once saw walking out of Kwik Save, but that is a different story) and Andy McCluskey of OMD and Atomic Kitten fame. We cut a demo with Andy (in the studio where Atomic Kitten recorded their debut album – that’s right, look impressed!) and there was some interest but the other (better) songwriter left to go to university and it just never happened.

 

I myself went to university where I studied Creative Writing and I fell in love with poetry. I was good at it and received good feedback and encouragement from my lecturers and had a number of poems published in journals and magazines. I also learned how hard it was to become a published poet and how it was a profession that also needed support from additional income, such as teaching. I was encouraged to pursue this and invited to take a master’s degree but by the end of university I could no longer financially sustain a student life and also I wasn’t really interested in teaching so it would have just been a self indulgence.

 

I began work but continued to write poetry and also began recording music to accompany my poetry as I was interested in making poetry more accessible. The result was my project “Inertia” which is still available and which I am still proud of. I also self published books of original poetry and interpretations of biblical poetry. I also ran poetry workshops and wrote a book on how to write different types of poetry, which has sold more than all my other books of poetry put together, (which still isn’t many, I probably make about £10 a month, which is still better than nothing) and proves that people would rather write poetry than buy poetry.

 

I continued to write and perform music under different guises, most recently as The Fall Quarter, a coverall for my music/poetry and general music.

 

In lockdown I have taken on a few new projects, wood craft and making musical instruments (lap steels, fretless bass guitars) and have started renovating guitars.

 

I have also had 3 ideas for book which I have started work on, one of which is well under way, not poetry, not fiction, and based on my faith.

 

By doing this blog I hope to share what I am doing a bit, voice my ideas as I work on different things , and just see what comes.