Intro
For a cab driver, I’m a pretty good writer.
Which is a shame.
For I would much rather be
A writer, who used to be a pretty good cab driver.
Someone once said to me,
Dream on, sunshine.
So I do.
I have served my time without complaint in the slush piles of publishing. But the piles are only really being searched with two ‘benchmarks’ in mind, one being Dan Brown and the other Harry Potter. It was just the same when I was a lad: nobody wanted the Beatles before every body else did.
But times are changing, and the new religion is racing to save the world by predicting its end. But is any idea really new? Twenty years ago there used to be a man who stood outside Wembly stadium on cup final day. He would be holding a large placard aloft that telling the oncoming crowd that ‘The end was nigh.’ Everyone brushed him aside and surged on towards the game, but the poor sod was correct in his prediction. He died six months later. But we can now trace the end of the world by following our carbon footprints, which will lead us to the desperate conclusion that we can only save it by recycling anything that moves slower than we do. The new heresy is putting a green bottle in the bin marked ‘clear glass only,’ and the next Inquisition will be organised by your local council. In the meantime, my life’s work lays naked and unprotected on some disinterested office junior’s desk. I feel that it is just a matter of time before my manuscripts are seized by planet saving zealots, recycled, and then sold back to me as a packet of toilet rolls.
Over the past year, I have tried without success to get an agent to represent my work. But they told me that work by unknown writers is not enough any more. It was suggested that my cause could be helped if I had a piece, which linked me to a torrid and tempestuous affair with a drug fuelled television soap star. They regretfully informed me that an earlier incident in Tesco’s would not suffice. On that occasion was pushed from behind and desperately stretched out my hand to prevent myself from falling. I have never heard a woman scream like that before. I think even the magistrate thought her to be an attention seeker, secretly enjoying her fifteen minutes of fame. It’s a curious thing, but I hear that the lady is having a piece of her own published in a woman’s magazine later this year. I am told that it is something along the lines of: My Terror at the Probing Hands of the Sex Crazed Monster of Aisle Thirty Seven. (Household Fragrances and Toilet Cleansers.)
So we now move from aisle thirty-seven to cyber space. What follows is the last four of my five completed manuscripts.
Each is represented by a short introduction followed by the first chapter. The first manuscript has been recycled to make telephone note pads. And due to the impending shortage of telephone note pads at home, the second manuscript could soon follow. So, it could be that my writing could play a small part in saving the planet, after all.
But: what of you and I? My writing will not change your life. I will merely present to you my charactors and their stories. And you will bring life and reality to them as you hopefully read on. And your reading, in the light your own experiances, will help create a more vivid and colourful story than I have written. Thank you for your time. Andy Gillan.
Read On…
The Pond Skaters
Wainwright’s Folly
A Suffering of Victims
For a Man Who Never Ate Turkey