Am I Now An Author-ity?

When I first started this writing malarkey, I was reluctant to tell anyone except my immediate family what I was doing. I have to admit, even they were sceptical about me writing a book. I didn’t have a good track record of finishing anything (so they say), though I did have three children…well, we won’t go there.

Anyway, I digress. It took a long time for me to tell anyone else I was writing a book. It was almost as if I was ashamed of it. After all, my heroes, such as Asimov, and Pratchett, as well as the likes of Shakespeare and  Tolstoy, they were writers, authors, wordsmiths, whatever you would like to call them. Me? Well, I’m just prattling on about a few things that have entered my head, getting them down on paper (Why do we say that when these days it’s mainly done  electronically? Shouldn’t we be ‘getting it up on screen’…maybe not, something about that sounds really wrong!)

There I go, another digression. So where was I? Oh yes… eventually I started to tell people  I was writing a book. After that, I couldn’t stop telling them. It became part of my name. ‘Hello, I’m Glen, I’m writing a book.’ Like many before me, and I’m sure there will be many after me, I got a range of comments  such as; ‘that’s nice dear,’ … ‘oh that’s fantastic,’ and ‘I would love to write a book, but I don’t have time.’ Now, here’s the thing, they still didn’t consider me to be a writer and neither did I.

Then came the release of Fishing for Stones on Kindle. I had done it. I had completed a manuscript, The day you see your  book on Amazon, available to the public (yes, the public…not family… not friends…but the PUBLIC !) is a fantastic feeling. Almost as good as when your  type ‘THE END’ in your first manuscript.  So, that was it, I was an author, right? Wrong. I still didn’t feel like an author, and people still didn’t see me as one.

Something was missing. A book, that was it. I didn’t have a real book. It’s all very well having something published electronically, but what about putting it in the real world? I started the process of getting my masterpiece (if I don’t call it that, who will?) into print, which these days is not that difficult  for independently published authors.  Manuscript formatted, file submitted to the printer, and a few day later a proof copy drops through the letterbox. I was there, journey over, I had published a book in print, I was a fully fledged author. People began to see me as an author, and I was being asked to talk about my experiences as an author.

The trouble is, I still don’t feel like one, I still feel to be a bit of a fraud, and I think I always will. Even if I manage to hit the dizzy heights of a best seller list somewhere, I will always believe I need to improve to become a real author. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.