Fiction report

 I've long thought that novelist, or fiction writer, was a proper job and poet less so. It's much harder for a start. That I can have some modest success with poems shows how easy that is but prose fiction is a different matter.

Time After Time, a few years ago now, was a very basic effort completed only so that I could say I'd done it- 50 thousand words in a 'blizzard of errata' that I never looked at again. But the urge to do something better persisted until the abandonment of the next big idea came with a pledge to never, ever waste time on anything so ambitious again.

I have, though, now produced the short story version of it - 3400 words which is 7 pages of a Word doc. To say that it is my best effort at fiction isn't saying much for it. A Brief Lapse of Confidence appeared in a magazine called Fisheye in the 1980's but I'm not sure this will see print. However, it is the satisfaction of having done it that is of value.

It doesn't have a title yet. It was called The Decline of the English Novel, partly referring to George Orwell and partly deprecating itself but it isn't a novel now. It won't need a title if it's not going anywhere but it isn't really finished without one.