…Master Gallacher’s guide to being a trainee Iconic-Author-in-Waiting… ye’re welcome…
…p’raps a huge piece of tongue in a large cheek, this post, but bear with it… yeez might just see a wee glimmer of truth in it… when this ol’ Jurassic played among the backstreets of Dockland Govan in Glasgow, about, oh, a hundred years ago, much of the magic of childhood was alive in the imaginations of myself and my pals…
…fostered by the Saturday cinema matinees, our street games transformed big cardboard boxes into Red Indian tepees… interlocked arm-in-arm with boys of yer own size, yeez became stagecoaches galloping around the tenement courtyard ‘prairies’… wild ‘shoot-outs’ accompanied by tons of onomatopaeic ‘Bang-Bang’s’, with index fingers transformed into loaded Colt 45s were commonplace… other scenarios had sparse bits of grass areas replicating the Iwo Jima battlefields while the ‘shot’ soldiers yeez mimicked fell to the grass, with more histrionics than modern day footballers being fouled on a match day… a simple ‘tag’ got yeez alive again, and into the melee yeez sallied once more… imagination, Lads and Lassies of Blog Land… priceless in growing up… and may I ‘umbly posit, maybe equally priceless now we’re supposedly all ‘growed-up’… quite correctly, we quill-scrapers are well recommended to ‘do-the-hard-yards’ in yer writer’s apprenticeship… learn the basics of how a narrative WURKS… fashion yer characters so that they are credible personifications that yer readers will accept… fundamental ROOLS of grammar, mandatory… yeez know what I’m talking about… and then… then, let yer imagination take over again…
…in yer own heads at least, reach for the literary stars!… believe yer masterpieces are the stuff of reading gold dust! … I know, I know, I know, Mabel… it’s tough sum’times to receive those endless bluudy rejection slips… to wait eons for even a response to a Query Letter to an Agent, let alone getting access to a Publisher… but dream!… imagine!… go for it!… my lifelong hero is Sir Winston Churchill, and of all his myriad famous sayings, the one I treasure most is part of his speech to students at Harrow School, his alma mater— ‘Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense’…
winston
…and that encapsulates nicely my post today… Master Gallacher’s guide to being a trainee Iconic-Author-in-Waiting… ye’re welcome… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
By Seumas Gallacher
