Showing the results of my son's snowball target practice!!
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I am a professional worrier. I worry about everything, will I make it through the night at work on only 4 hours of sleep? What will happen if I don’t take the dogs out today? Will my writing ever be good enough to make a living from?

Sometimes this worrying is useful, such as making sure the house is secured before I go out. Making sure I give plenty of time to get to that appointment. Mostly, though, it is a handicap.

I drive lorries not because I want to but because I believe it is the only thing I am any good at doing.  It is the easy option. As a result, I find myself in a rut. I have a well paid job but I don’t enjoy it. I need this high level of pay in order to meet my bills each month. To change careers to something I enjoy at my stage in life would be financial suicide.  As you can see I am a bit stuck, despite vowing never to allow myself to fall into any ruts. I am good at helping other people to sort their lives out but seem blind when it comes to sorting my own life out.

There are two areas I have always had an interest in and would have loved to have built a career in. 

The first is computers: I can build PC’s and I am reasonably good at troubleshooting them. I am currently learning about programming and this is an area I am interested in developing. At the moment it is a hobby and I guess it will always be that way, after all 45 is a bit late to be starting a career in I.T. it is a young person’s game where they can start at the bottom and build a lifetime career. I would need to start halfway up the career ladder in order to match my current wages. I don’t suppose anyone would employ me now.

The second is writing: from a very early age I used to write short stories and English was always my favourite subject at school. Often, when we were asked to write an essay or story as homework I would get carried away and write more than I really needed to. I was recommended to pursue a career in journalism at school, so naturally I went into the post office!!  

In adulthood my writing, like my computer hobby, took a back seat as I got married and started a family. It was not until my first marriage ended 14 years ago that I resumed writing (and computing).  In the 16 years between leaving school and the end of my first marriage my imagination had dried out somewhat as I learned how to be a serious adult. 

I have many story fragments written that just need developing. Writing, such as this post and stuff I put on my old blogger account, are like practice for a fantasy future in which I can sit here and earn my living in my dining room while the rest of the world battles with traffic and soulless offices!! 

Anyway, who knows what the future holds?  Hopefully not any more navel gazing and depressing blog posts like this one and my last post eh? :-)

I promise that my next post will be about something more optimistic, like what I want to achieve in 2010 and what sort of year  2009 and even the last decade have been for me. I may even post some photos, after all this account was meant to be my random, no agenda blog where anything goes and there doesn’t have to be any reason for it.

I’ve always wanted to be a professional writer, right from an early age. Many of my teachers at school used to say I had a good writing voice and some even went as far as to say I should consider journalism when I leave school.  I really wish I’d listened to them. But I was far too weak minded in those days, I didn’t think I was a good enough writer to even consider it as a career. After all, look at the books I was reading, C.S. Lewis, Watership Down, Enid Blyton to name but a few. How could I possibly ever be as good as them?  I didn’t even stop to consider the option that they all must have had stacks of drafts of their books that sucked and probably had tons of notebooks with unused sketches and snippets of story ideas in them that they never used because they were not happy with them!

So, I quietly slipped into adulthood thinking myself only good enough to do unskilled manual work, first in a shoe shop, then at the post office.  Then came marriage. fatherhood and Bills took over my life and before I realised, I had slipped into a predictable rut of just existing rather than actually living.

And here I am, 27 years later and a lifetime of unfulfilling jobs later with only fragments of a dream to be a writer staying with me.  However now I find myself in a position to have a go at actually writing something and trying to get paid for it! Here I sit, off work with a bad back, unable to do my full time job of lorry driving just in case I put my back out again. This leaves me with a few weeks of spare time which I have decided not to waste in browsing the internet or playing computer games. This time I have given myself two projects I want to try while I have the time: 

The first one is relatively easy. I want to learn how to write computer programs. I have a book on the basics of programming and when I finish that I will get myself a book on C++ and learn that.  That is the easy bit because this follows a structured lesson path for 2 hours each day which I can alternate with dog walks to exercise my back ready for my eventual return to work.

The other project is not quite so simple. I have laid myself the challenge of re-discovering my writing skills. But I want to go further than that. Before I go back to work I want to have been paid for a piece of writing. Not only does this mean I have to re-learn how to write. I also have to research the writing industry and find out where the writing jobs are advertised and what sort of writing is in demand at the moment. Then, of course there is the tiny matter of getting someone to pay me for a piece of my work.

Ok, these are my 2 challenges. I’m guessing I will be off work for 2 weeks, which will have me returning to work on the day after Boxing Day. This gives me eleven days to try to achieve these goals in.

Wish me luck I think I’m going to need it!

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