So a few months ago my working life was shall we say, turned upside down and I had to work out what I wanted to do next with my life. After essentially spending the summer chilling out, my girlfriend and I sat down to talk things through. What I wanted to really give a go was writing some fiction books. It was something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Luckily I had squirrelled away some money for a rainy day so I could actually give it a fair crack of the whip and earn peanuts for a while to see if I could actually do it.
I’m happy to say I have written a few short stories and the sales are trickling in. It is a slow process but my latest work has come out of the gate at a reasonable pace and is already well on the way to earning me the same money as if I’d have worked a minimum wage job for the hours I’d put into writing it. I won’t promote them here because I am writing in a genre where having a pen name and anonymity is nice. You can probably put two and two together but still…
What I will promote here is another sideline I’m writing and that is quiz books. I have three already live (one 500 question Pub Quiz book, one World Cup Quiz Book (1966-2014) and a short sports anagram book). These are what I write when mentally I don’t feel creative but actually want to get something worthwhile done. I have several more in mind that I’ll hopefully collate and publish over the coming weeks and months.
The big one though is the Pub Quiz book that you can buy for £2.99 on Amazon should you be interested in challenging yourself or others to a 50 round marathon of General Knowledge questions (and if you do buy it, giving me a nice review would be grand). This has been my most consistent seller out of my non-fiction works and is something I’m genuinely proud. It took a lot of time to research and work on.
Some of the rounds I’m most proud of that are not exactly standard pub quiz rounds are Friends Guest Stars, Speakers of the House of Commons, Where to Eat/Drink in TV/Film, Norse Mythology and Comedian One-Liners. There is something for everyone though and if you are planning to run a quiz but don’t want to have to sit down and write it, this is the ideal book for you. If you just want to sit around and test yourself against 500 General Knowledge questions then it is ideal in that respect too.
Anyway enough with the shameless self-promotion. I just wanted to write a little bit on why this blog has been slow recently, it is because I’m either writing and researching quiz books or I’m writing fiction. To that end I have my first novella length book about 60-70% written (already 20k words) and another 10-15k book set to launch within the next few days. So I am busy and I do still care about politics and such, it is just I’m writing so much that will hopefully net me a quid or two that I don’t have much time to dictate to writing on this blog at the moment (and yes I know, don’t worry, I have an editor who shortens my rambling sentences and notices erroneous words etc).
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