It’s a commonly held belief in the music biz that your first album is often an awful lot easier to write than your second.
The first one is all piss and vinegar and boyish – or girlish – enthusiasm. You don’t know that what you are doing is often hard, difficult and challenging. You don’t know that for every album that gets released an awful lot don’t. It just all seems like the most natural thing in the world. Bass lines and guitar licks wrap themselves around lyrics; drum patterns punctuate the chorus.
A little while later of course, you try to do it again. Different story.
I’m not saying writing VISCERA was hard, but it was an awful lot harder than I thought it was going to be.
Both of these two collections of short fiction feel a bit like albums. Made of separate tracks, but each one shares a mood or a theme. Each was put together at a particular time in my life and against a background of ideas and events. SILVERBACK is from a time before the pandemic; VISCERA was written in 2020.
In terms of the writing process, in the second book I started a lot of stories that I then lost faith in. I was harsher on myself. It wasn’t that I had less self-confidence but I had more self-criticism.
The big question now is, what do you think of the results?
If you read these pieces of short fiction, and I hope that you do, then please let me know what you think. Post a review on Amazon or Goodreads or write to me on my website. Your thoughts mean a hell of a lot to me.
Love to all xx xx
VISCERA is published by Climbing Tree Books and available on Kindle for £3.99 and in paperback for £5.99.