Lazy Sunday Afternoon

This morning I was woken from my peaceful, if overlong, weekend slumbers by an excited phonecall from One Monkey's dad. Being retired and having broadband, for the last two weeks he's been checking 365tomorrows eagerly over his morning coffee, and this morning my story appeared. That woke me up about as quickly as a cold flannel to the back of the neck, and before I was even tea-and-croissanted the message had been passed along to my parents and siblings. Big Brother (the sibling as opposed to the shadowy authority figure. Although...) facetiously asked if I'd had a call from a publisher yet, though you could tell there was a bit of pride there by the way we quickly established that my writing is partly his fault: we used to act out Goon Shows from my dad's books of the scripts, and BB (as we may as well call him, if only for the Goons' 1985 reference) suggested I write one of my own. Thus was born the infamous (in our family, anyway) Goon script in which a mysterious deadly weapon turns out to be my dad's sweaty socks; neither BB nor I can find the script now, which is probably a good thing as it's undoubtedly not nearly as funny as we remember it.

He may not have single-handedly set me off down the path of the writer, but BB and his Goon Show encouragement certainly set me off a year or two later with the equally infamous Boss and Whoops; these bungling burglars created by my best friend T and I in an English lesson at the age of 11 or so, featured repeatedly in English and Drama for the next few years. We started out with a Goons-style radio script, we did stories, mimes, and eventually a full-blown and rather complicated play, rehearsals for which allowed us to stay indoors during school lunchbreaks for a term or two, though due to bad organisation, and one of the lead actresses getting sent away to boarding school to try and keep her out of trouble, the play itself was never performed. This may have been for the best; though T and I had been brought up on Hancock and the Goons, as well as a liberal helping of Monty Python, most of our contemporaries had a very different sense of humour, and I can't imagine that it would have gone down too well.

Which brings me neatly back to today (clever, eh?) - my first wholly independent (i.e. not following on from a previous installment like the BBC7 episode) work of fiction in the public domain. Some people will think it's rubbish, some may offer constructive criticism, and I hope that some will enjoy it. As with everything I write, I look back at it now and see a dozen changes I could make, glaring lines that cry out for improvement or removal, but I've cut it loose now and it has to stand as I left it. The initial excitement gives way to nervousness as I realise how vulnerable a writer becomes with every publication.