Excuses, excuses!

Paperback Writer
3 min readApr 15, 2024
Beautiful red roses that I never had the time to smell before

So, before we go any further, I should mention that I took some time off from writing in recent times. I had to deal with some pesky cancer for a considerable period of time. I’ve come up with many excuses in the past as to why my writing homework hadn’t been done, but I outdid myself with this one. Truth be told, there were glimpses of minutes and hours when I feasibly could have written; I wasn’t sick all of the time (but when the sickness was bad, it was horrid). However, I didn’t want to contaminate my love for writing by mixing it up with that dark period of my life. There are many things from that period of time that I’ll never be able to eat again (Big Macs, I’m looking at you….but perhaps I should thank chemo for that), and I didn’t want writing to end up in a parallel aversion category.

All I wrote during The Time of Woe was a series of articles on Substack, but I didn’t attempt any novel writing. I chose to lean in to having the time freedom to focus on, oh, I don’t know…the hue of flowers and all that…nature-y…stuff I never get to see because I am habitually moulded to an office chair. You have to find the positives and all that.

I started the Substack articles because I found great comfort in reading other people’s stories over the course of my treatment — they made me feel less alone — but I found at the time that I didn’t particularly enjoy delving into my own story too…

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Paperback Writer

I discuss life as a writer, traditionally published and self-published, while also chewing the cud on random topics (and cancer) that are of interest to me.