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DON DELIVERS HIS DEBUT
Like most writers it seems that my writing career has been a convoluted one, shadowing the peaks, troughs and twists s of my life, writes subscriber Don Baldwin. ‘The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income’ (Ellen Gilchrist) is a salient lesson that I learned when the first cheque for an article came through my front door many years ago! And while many of us may not be in it for the money, per se, children must be reared and bills paid.
So, like a great many writers, (some of whom were very successful), I kept the day job and chiselled away at my writing as best I could: never ditching the dream of one day becoming a successful writer and quitting the day job in construction – a career that was far from my own choosing.
Still, that warm dream, a great many good books, and continued moderate success in my writing, made the toil of the day job eminently more bearable. All too soon the years have rolled around. The kids are reared and flown, the mortgage is paid and forty years later, the retirement is duly earned.
Thankfully, the dream of writing my first novel had never died, and now I was finally in a position to pursue it with gusto! Through the years I had taken courses in English, creative writing and journalism. I had cut my teeth on articles, moved on to solid food with short stories. I had read widely, researched exhaustively. But I still didn’t know how to start that novel.