PAH CHEWI BANG!

Yeap that's a strange one. As a writer I've always played with words.  Sometimes for a joke when I worked at the BBC I would start using a word that I'd invented and see how long it took to catch on.  Mental floss is one of mine - I am proud to say.
 When we lived together as a family we had our own language, most families have their own words for things, but we had our very own secret language called Valeto.

Valeto grew over the years from a few words into a full blown language used at home. Sometimes at school or at work Valeto would be spoken by accident causing embarrassment and surprise.

Hence PAH CHEWI BANG!  The element of surprise in Valeto. I won't say any more after all it wouldn't be a secret language would it?

I thought about this today asI have been on the ChipLit site. I was reading the Blogs and looking at the speakers, and it might as well have been in Chinese, a language I don't speak!

Why? 

I have been writing for years, painting for years. It is said the two go together, most artists write, most writers paint.  I have had articles and short stories published.

What has that to do with the price of fish you ask?

I can write and illustrate my own work.  I have loads of stuff under my belt. At the BBC I have worked with the rich and famous. (Don't know why I put that in!) I have at the moment seven murder mysteries and one history book and one romance out.

But....

I don't communicate with other writers - so I thought ChipLit would be a place to start.
I went to the website and read the biogs and looked at the speakers. No-one writes like I do. Is that wrong?  Came as a bit of a shock that. Can't be, as my books are selling.

I look at the genres, none of them are even mildly like the work I produce.
Yet my books are being bought, and even now being sold on by other traders on Amazon.
So I am totally confused, am I ahead of my time or behind it?

I read a lot. When I was fourteen and a child in Shoreditch. (No it was horrible then, not at all trendy.) I made up my mind to read all the classics before I was eighteen. Almost did it!

I took a writing course and the lecturer said "Read read read." So I did.

"God Jesus, you're devouring that book." My lovely Irish mother used to say, closely followed by "Are you ever going to take your head out of that book?"

My current husband knows that if he gives me a new book he won't see me until I've finished it. Apparently I'm a speed reader.  It takes me a couple of hours to read a book cover to cover, and my darling hubby is still reading The Silver Spitfire that I bought him for Christmas!

Histories, autobiographies, classics, books on art, cookery, women's lives. Even "The theory of almost Everything and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, strange books like the 1970s illustrated "The Book of Men." and the Bible, from cover to cover - more scary than any horror story.

So I'm going to try and go and see if I have anything in common with any of these writers.
Another interesting journey to take.