Tom Clempson

So, carrying on from my last, jabbering, mind-excretion (No.2 Part 1) - book two, pressure, zombie kittens… Oh, and yes, I am writing blog posts again! Of course it’s only a temporary thing. Soon enough I’ll be leaving months between each post, not intentionally, but just because I don’t have time. But for now, whilst I have my new book driving me to write about it (share my excitement, vent my anxieties, try to promote my work in a shameless attempt to sell enough books to make a career of being a writer), I’ll just keep on writing. (Most of it will be crap).

Crapness. I think that is the main pressure for a writer – fear of being crap. Actually it’s probably a main fear of most people, but I don’t know much about most people. For me, Crapness-fear attacks from every angle – fear of not living up to your potential; fear of losing any talent you once had; fear of being rejected by publishers; fear of being laughed at by peers; fear of failing in general; and most of all, more than anything else, something that I didn’t even have to consider first time round – fear of disappointing fans. (Okay, I may not have millions of them, but just one is enough pressure for me).

And that brings me to my one and only regret of book 2. There’s not a single part of that book that I would change – like a life lived, a written book is what it is – but I SO regret writing the acknowledgements at the end. I didn’t do acknowledgements for my first book, mainly because I didn’t have a clue what to write, but to not include them for book 2 would have just seemed rude, so in that sense I’m glad I thanked the people that I thanked. The bit that is eating me up inside is all the people who I didn’t thank. I don’t remember what I wrote or who I thanked, but I know it wasn’t enough. And now, looking back at the final sentence of the previous paragraph of this post, I wish I’d written PAGES and PAGES thanking everybody that gave me the encouragement to write a second book – every one of you who took the time to email me from the ‘contact me’ page on this blog to tell me how much you enjoyed book 1; every single person who wrote a single tweet telling me how much OSMUW made them laugh; every book reviewer who had something positive to say about what I wrote; everyone who actually supported me by simply buying the book! You all deserve my thanks.

But, even if I didn’t mention you in the acknowledgements, my thanks to you is on every page prior to that. I know it sounds cliché and cheesy and sentimental and the kind of crap you hear people say at the Oscars, but, seriously, I couldn’t have done it without you. Unfortunately though, my thanks to you may or may not be in the form of a pooed-out a zombie kitten. (That only makes sense if you’ve read the previous post).

A few other posts you might find interesting:

1. No.2 (Part 1)
2. Paper or PC?
3. The Sequel (The Torture)
4. Writing Stuff
5. The Journal 0.0