Being Discovered, Being Lost, Being Found

Being Discovered, Being Lost, Being Found ©

By Michael Casey

Paddington Bear was found at a train  station that’s how he got his name, though my small daughter probably knows more about this than me. She knows all about Winnie The Pooh too. She says she wants to be a Bear scientist when she grows up, my belly does remind her of a panda too.

It’s all about beginnings really, we all start as nothing and then we become something, then we die and are nothing for ever. I had a nice comment on my Wordpress site while I was deleting the spam. I should tell the spammers only I see their rubbish then its deleted in seconds, so why waste your time, nobody reads it, they cannot even see it.

But back to the nice comment, thank you very much for it. The idea of all the posts is to influence people to go and buy ebooks,  just look for my fat face in shades, Amazon Kindle world-wide. I don’t really write with dollar signs in my eyes, or pound signs either, I am in Birmingham England after all. I write because now after all these years its part of me.

You can be discovered by one person and they pass it on, then finally you get noticed and you finally get a few sales. You persevere with the emails and chances and half chances. Mandy.com is a good site, it offers Hope for writers and all sorts of media people. That’s how I heard about film producers, paying and non- paying, you can look for yourselves.

You have to wait a long time for any feedback from anywhere, in the old days it was six weeks. You’d post your treasure to a publisher and wait and wait and wait. Then you’d get your bulky A3 sized envelope back, a note attached “thank you for your pieces of paper.”

Can you face this kind of rejection? At least your bedroom or wherever you write is now artistically decorated, with rejection letters pasted to the wall like wallpaper. You may win a Turner Prize for your wall, along with your crumpled bed.

You may get a few fans who take your feed, or put links on their websites. Or more likely you get strange people gravitating to you. Facebook is a good tool, but you also get total strangers wanting to friend you. My own FB has died as I cannot remember the security question, and you cannot contact FB if you cannot get in in the first place. This is like the man who was declared Legally Dead, and cannot get it overturned in the USA  Courts.

Coming back to Mandy.com  there is a new publisher looking for writers, so I’ve send an email, whether I get a reply or whether they like my stuff is another matter. Life IS so random, which does make it more interesting. How do you describe your writing, your stuff? That can be the hardest thing to do.

Are you a comic writer, and remember in England this means humorous, or do you write Batman comics? Are you spiritual or thoughtful, is it horror or suspense, or just out and out sex? You don’t think of these things when you write, because you just write.

Americans go on courses to learn to write, and end up writing exactly like their teachers. Spend time reading and listening to speech radio is my advice. I did 20 years of listening, and not to mention reading by the yard before picking up a pen.

Reporters have the I’m so cool and bored style of reporting which I consider to be rubbish. Your own ego should be in the trash when you are reporting. If you are commenting that’s another thing. A reporter is passing on a story, he is like a postman. It is a complicated thing, I’d need a lot of space to explain,  or perhaps I should make a video.

My title refers to being lost and being found. When you find your style that IS a big day. There is a lot of rubbish style out there, just be yourself, write as if you are holding a conversation. That’s how I do it, be natural. People get stiff when they are talking in front of people, they have to learn how to relax and not blush in public. Writing is exactly the same.

I don’t know about you but when I watch tv, Body of Proof being a family favourite, I spot the bad phrasing, is this a bad habit? Or because I write, so I spot things? There is natural speech and there is speech the writers write.

Some phrases are so obviously not how really people speak. If you walk everywhere as I do, I hear natural speech at the bus stop, in the school yard and in the store. I use the word “store” because I assume that the few readers I have are in USA. If I heard the word store instead of shop I know that one word is in England and another in USA. “Have a nice day” is never used in England, in USA it’s almost  like a curse, it’s always used but never meant.

So choice of words gives the game away. Just as our accents give away our background, and our vocabulary or lack of it gives away our education. Though I will say the nicest people can be the roughest and toughest SOBs, they are more useful on a desert island.

People can try too hard with words, when a hug in the street can say far far more than all the words in Webster’s Dictionary. Having received a hug in the street yesterday, I know this to be so so true. So do I want to be discovered? Yes, it would be nice to know I haven’t been talking to myself all these years.

It would be nice if more people liked my writing style, and the content too. It would be nice to be able to afford to move house and buy a cat for my girls and a dog called Subway.