An Introduction

I've had a couple of blogs in the past few years, none of which are still out there awaiting discovery...but it still took me until now to really adjust to the idea that actually, maybe, a blog might be just what I need for this specific thing.

And what is this specific thing?

Well...I have a story I would quite like to see out there. I have another story just beginning to achieve some kind of tangible form in my mind, too, but the first story I already have written. It's nothing so epic as any kind opus of 100,000 words (or more). It certainly is an opus, don't mistake me: I've worked on it for a long time, and at just under 40,000 words it's a complete novella unto itself, I feel.

A bit of a ramble first: who am I, and what led me here? (If you want a TL;DR summation of this post, scroll right to the bottom)

My name is Simon Randell. I'd love to tell you I'm a graphic designer, an artist, a writer, an all-round creative. And I am, for sure; I'm just not someone who can claim to be any of those things career-wise. Rather, I'm a neonatal intensive care nurse with dreams and aspirations towards the creative.

My earliest memories (which of course are nebulous and inexact, but as a storytelling convention the idea works) are of drawing. I've always drawn, and much of my drawings have been of animals. I have a great amount of the books read to me (or by me) as a child sitting stacked in a bookcase in the living room of my flat which possess my renditions of lion families, ant nests, cows and the like. Many of the are "addition" pictures - there once would have been an illustration of one animal, and I've judged it prudent to add in a mate and a baby for it. Such things were always important to me when I was growing up.

I used to write a lot, too. I do have to admit that perhaps my earliest memory of writing, or rather of having written, is centred upon the feedback I got from my teacher when I was perhaps 6 or 7, informing me that my story wasn't very complex. And certainly it wasn't: memory serves to tell me I wrote "I went to the zoo and I saw a lion", which wasn't particularly imaginative or inventive. Judging from that story alone you might think I wouldn't develop the desire to tell stories I possess now.

But I do remember discovering, one day, my mum's old copy of Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jannson. It was already weak in the spine, and soon fell apart, but I remember reading it and really becoming almost instantly entrapped by the realm it had created. I don't mean to be too clichéd when I say so, but it was preoccupying and more than somewhat haunting. I don't think I'd ever read anything quite so perfectly detailed in its overall feeling of loneliness and isolation, of magic, of darkness not being something to be scared of. I remember imagining the scenes described of Moomintroll awakening in the dead of winter and the house being still, the scent of old pine needles hanging in the air, the occasion waft of a netting curtain as its edge was caught upon a draft. It's stuck with me ever since. I even wrote my own version of a sequel to it, which in hindsight was probably full of the predictable amazing plot-twists that you come up with when you're 9 years old. At the time, though, I was endlessly proud of my work, and I remember standing at the doorway to the kitchen while my mum and dad made tea in the evenings, reading the progress I'd made. I must've been forming the story as I wrote it, as I can't remember ever really having a plan (except that the Groke had a baby, and Too-Ticky had a twin sister, Too-Tocky) - so you can just imagine how painful it must've been for my parents to have to feign interest in. It was really the first time I'd felt truly proud of something I'd written though, I think, and I appreciate that my parents never gave me reason to think they were bored or disinterested.

I've done other writing over the years, including for a fan-run webisode series based on the Roswell TV show after it was canceled (a note on "canceled", just in cause it catches your eye: I tend to stay true to British English, as that's the official English language of New Zealand. "Canceled" is not British English, though - it's American English. I'll explain the quick change in a later entry, perhaps! For now please accept my apologies for any annoyance it may cause you), called Roswell: The Final Chapter. That was really the first audience I had for my writing...and it was endlessly encouraging.

Over a series of university qualifications I managed to write a fair few tens-of-thousands of words (some of which even got me A-grades), and since becoming a nurse I expend a decent amount of time, energy and ink on patient notes. That, though, is not the kind of writing I enjoy the most.

Not long prior to sitting my New Zealand nursing registration exams at the end of 2009, I started writing my own unofficial entry for the NaNoWriMo challenge. I had an idea - one which sort-of just came to me in some iteration, the most complete story that had really ever presented itself to me before I'd started writing - and, on the 1st of November, I started writing.

I wasn't the most diligent typist ever, and some days I only managed a few hundred words as opposed to the 1,500+ I would've needed to hit 50,000 by the end of that month. In the end studying towards registering as a nurse and then going on a trip to California for a few weeks had an effect and it wasn't until mid-December that I had the 32,000 words that were the first draft of this now-40,000 word novella.

And then I put it down for a time, and left it. In early 2012 I sent the draft to a friend of mine in the UK, and he did a short reading on his Audioboo account. A friend of his got in touch with me, asking if she could read the whole thing, and I obliged, a little bit astounded someone were interested. Since then she's become a really dear friend of mine, and has given me a lot of encouragement to pursue this project further. There's a real potential that without that encouragement this story would still be sitting on a memory stick somewhere, unedited, a whopping 32,000 in raw draft form. There's no telling what might happen from this point, but I am very grateful to that friend for her support.

This blog is dedicated to my pursuit of review, publication (perhaps self-publication), and promotion of that 40,000 word novella. I hope there'll be some interest. I won't tell people how to write, though I might post about how I write. I'll probably do a bit of delving back into way-back-whens as part of the process of introducing my story to you. And I do intend to do present-time blogging of progress on both getting this story out there into the world and also crafting a new story.

It's 11:10pm here in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. It's the 31st of December, 2014. Tomorrow I start writing again. For now, goodnight.