Irreverent/ unpredictable fiction-writer Seumas writes an online blog (which he sees as a modern-day equivalent of the author’s candle-lit garret) and pours the overflow into Tempo…
…ye can’t get to there from here…oh yeah?…just watch me!…
…having been at this writing game ‘properly’ for just going on a couple of years now, I’m delighted to say that the initial pink-cloudness is still hanging around…let me back up a bit…y’see for the best part of nigh on 45 years, I donned the pinstripe-suit uniform and attendant sober necktie demanded of the financial world…yes, I confess, I was part of the banking fraternity…although I hasten to add, of the ’older school’ that still believed in ‘my word is my bond’…and a handshake was better security than a lawyer’s guarantee…then…
I ‘went over the wall’…I escaped, and given the pawn broking debacle the global money markets have devolved into, no happier man than I to be out of it…but here’s the thing, the idea of formal retirement has never sat well with me…I set up my own wee management advisory business in Abu Dhabi, focused on restructuring and troubleshooting for corporates…keeps me out of mischief…but more importantly, has allowed me the luxury of indulging in my new-found love of writing…and what an amour de Coeur it’s turned out to be…
They say ye can’t teach an old dog new tricks…well, with no false modesty here, it seems I’ve been catching on quite fast…20 months on Amazon Kindle have resulted in 65,000+ downloads for my first two crime thrillers, THE VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY and VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK…comes now the question…‘how the heck did that old bustard manage that?!’…it confounded me at first…but with a little time, all becomes clearer…I picked up early in the piece that writing is a business…I’m a businessman… always loved the process of any corporate operation…
It’s the kind of stuff I fix for a living now…and the process with the writing only BEGINS with the actual book/novel/short story/poem/play/whatever…the real task is getting it out there in the big wonderful world of readers…and bang on cue, the coming of age of SOSYAL NETWURKIN fits right in…at no prior time in history has it been possible to potentially connect with hundred of millions, if not billions of people with nothing more than a click of a computer mouse…this old Jurassic had to re-align the grey cells and ‘get with it’…and the ‘it’ has certainly been ‘got with’…I budget daily time across the various elements of the business…writing, editing, blogging, Twitter-ing, Facebook-ing, LinkedIn-ing, Goodreads-ing, and Anything-else-ing, that helps to BUILD THE PLATFORM…the spreading of the word (quite literally)…it’s not about spamming…it’s not about pleading for book purchases…it’s about developing personal linkages…being a PERSON, Heaven forfend…and d’ye know what?…it works…so next time sumb’dy says, ‘ye can’t get to there from here’…invite them to stick it where the sun don’t shine and get busy on yer keyboard…ye’ll have to excuse me now…I’ve got another best-seller novel, SAVAGE PAYBACK, to finish…see yeez later…
Follow Seumas on his blog at seumasgallacher.com
By Seumas Gallacher
