Life Gets In The Way

It’s almost a cliché with writers. We all want to be able to sit and write but life gets in the way. The truth is that without that interruption, we’d have very little to write about.

Neil Colquhoun

This is a story about a young child who believed that life would go on forever – well, not really forever, but it feels that way to every youngster.

When one is young, the days seem endless and the nights are long. What goes on in the big world outside the little bubble that the child occupies is of no consequence. Nothing else matters but that safe, isolated and tiny slice of life. Yes, when a person is young, life is long and mortality is never questioned. Time is elastic and there seems to be plenty of it to go around.

And, the idea of invincibility is de rigeur for all children. But, don’t get me wrong here, the young child in this story was not a superhero. He had no ability or protection that would enable him to fend off the bad guys or the bad things which pervade the world; to be armed with a youthful unwavering determination to live for a long time was all that was required.

Then, during the teenage years, even though some ideas about what it was like to age came to mind, to be thirty, forty and beyond was so far off in the distance that it didn’t register much with him.

In school, the boy studied the quintessential dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell, Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck along with several others. The content of these novels must have struck a chord as he began to play with words.

Imagination as a child is allowed to run free and develop, unrestricted or weighed down by the pressures of life. Thoughts about words surfaced in poems and song lyrics for a band that was to be created. The fact that none of the band members could play any instruments well did not matter. In fact, the young boy could not play an instrument at all, hence his decision to become chief songwriter.

Well, the band never came to fruition, but the boy continued to scribble thoughts and ideas down in notebooks.

Then what happened? Well, life got in the way.

Oh, the scribblings still went on, but they were sporadic at best. And when a few stories and poems were submitted for publication, it was not with one eye on the bigger picture, but rather done in a half-hearted manner.

There were a few successes which were never built on. Damn, I hear you say! Why did he not push himself and put more of his work out there?

And, as we all now, life goes on. The writing could be done another day for there were would be plenty more. It was all too easy to put that story to the side and do something else.

Then, something happened which started the whole exciting writing game again. But, it took more than a kick up the backside for it to begin: it took a horrendous accident and a realization that life is fragile and most definitely not forever.

The young boy had long turned into a man. And was sailing through life. Writing on and off, but never achieving much.

Then came the accident: a 60ft fall, which resulted in major trauma including many broken bones, pins and screws inserted into the body, a stay in hospital and intensive physiotherapy.

Life goes on, but any ideas of invincibility have flown out the window. The recovery period provided the man with time to think, and inevitably his thoughts turned to writing again.

So, the man looked through the notebooks, plucked an idea from within and turned it into a story (it’s probably worth noting here that he never stopped writing sentences, paragraphs, ideas and fragments in them): that was 5 years ago and the man is still writing now.

When a person becomes aware of time and what it means, the understanding that life does not go on forever is a wake-up call.

And, when the man fully realized that his life could have ended on a balmy August evening in 2006, he decided that enough time had passed. The man decided that he wouldn’t play at arranging all the words and ideas, but would form them into something coherent.

And that man wants you, dear reader, to walk the roads he has travelled in his mind. That man wants you to check out his fiction, which is available at www.neilcolquhoun.com

Follow events in the world of Frank the bounty hunter, listen to the diary excerpts of Walter the undead hitman and listen to the collected tales which make up “Tales from the Vault”.

But most of all, stay alive and catch the new podcast novel, Jimmy and the Black Wind, beginning on Nov 6th 2011.

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