books

Walk, don’t run!

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Every journey starts with the first step:  

Write a book – done.

Beta read/revise tall tale – done.

Hand script over to an editor – In process

Create book art – pending.

Publish book – pending!

2026 is the year and March the month I intend to release the initial adventures of Miss Amy Grace onto the world.

Her tale is worth reading.  It has highs, it has lows, it has drama, adventure and so much more.

She is coming, and I hope you are as excited as I am.

Whatever your plans are for 2026 I wish you all the absolute best of successes.

Stay safe, remain sane, and hug those you love. 

Short Stories and Shorter Attention Spans

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

It’s a truth, that some writers, like steam trains, take more than a few yards to really get going.

I’ve tried my hand at short stories, tales under 10,000 words, and failed at EVERY attempt.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – this was my best attempt at a short story.  I got a beginning middle and end down all under the magic number. 

The story ended because we’d killed the characters – it was tragic, it was also beautiful.  And then I thought to myself ‘what happens next,’ ‘what if the end is only the beginning,’ and again what was once so promising is now somewhere in its early thirties…

Not that all is indeed lost, I have once (yes just once) managed the keep the word count under 2,000 to describe A Working Man (a door-to-door psycho killer) – the joy that is Flash Fiction. 

However, one swallow does not a summer make. 

Point of all this?

Word counts aren’t an attempt to dumb down books for the scrolling social media generation, but they are something I struggle with.

I blether.

I add colour.

I love telling the tale, telling all of it in wonderful 4KHD, but in doing so I fall too far outside the accepted norms.

Speculative Fiction/Fantasy is the most forgiving genre – you’re allowed to pad it out to ‘world build,’ but even then, the hard stop is 120,000.

That wouldn’t be too bad if I were writing such, but I’m not.

Thrillers/Commercial Fiction, these bad boys have a limit of 90,000 with a strong preference towards 80,000.

By any estimate I’m quite possibly some 40,000 words over the limit.

It’s not an edit, it’s a cull, a murder of the innocents, a blood letting on a truly barbarous scale that is required – and I’m not the man do to do it.

Some skills I have, some I do not.

What will the editor do?

I don’t know.

He’s been employed; coin has been given.

I’ve had a colourful life thus far, but the nervous tension I feel while my work is away being edited is something new and most definitely unpleasant.

This is my first foray, and they say you always remember your first – learn a lot too.

Our timeline has the next milestone mid-January 2026 – we must wait, we must be patient and we must endure.  Here we stand, we can do no other…

Stay safe, remain sane, hug those you love, tell them too. 

Atychiphobia – Fear of Failure

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

We all to a greater or lesser degree indulge in a version of this phobia – and why wouldn’t we, it keeps us safe. 

We don’t jump from tall buildings, wrestle giants, or speak our mind in public because of this phobia. 

Okay not the best or most relevant examples, but a fear of falling short, of being beaten in public or sounding stupid halts a great many of us from trying – and it shouldn’t (sensible caveats notwithstanding).

We hold back, and then because we’ve lived so long with our passion on hold, we tend to mutter something along the lines of ‘our time has passed’ or ‘oh, well possibly not for us’. 

Life just being itself gets the blame for many a timid soul.

Now I may fail, I may indeed fall with all the grace of a middle-aged man tumbling down the side of a mountain (I tend to do that), or indeed maybe I won’t.

Option B can never come to fruition unless I give it a go

Nobody knows me, I am an anonymous soul in the ether of the web, and any shortcomings will pass without as much of a ripple of acknowledgement – I have no public to please.

So, any embarrassment will only ever be mine to publicise. 

To say I have no fear would be a lie, I do.  But I’m willing to live with it to see just what happens now that I’ve jumped off the diving board. 

In October 2017 I wrote this –

You climb to the top, drag your body up the millions of vertigo inducing steps, to stand looking down at the tiny chlorine filled puddle of water – now what? 

You want to jump, you really do. 

Yet, fear of so many things keeps you firmly away from the edge. 

You swing your arms back and forth, rocking from left foot to right, trying to create momentum to take you forward to the concrete edge, past it, and into the abyss of the known unknown.  

But, despite all the deep breathing, arm swinging, foot swapping, you are as far from the edge as you’ve ever been. 

Friends, confidants, little sayings on calendars, they all tell you to do it, that you’ll be okay – that you should jump.

Ignoring your passion is slow suicide!

Burying your talents in a field for fear of failure – you can recall a parable about that; you are sure you can…

Swinging arms, hopping feet, deep breathing…

You ask for signs, look for totems of assurances from the gods, from karma, the cosmos; then you seek second opinions, validation of the first sign, and the second – maybe you should just make sure, to be sure, after all what if you are wrong, what if you fail?!?! 

Swinging arms, hopping feet, deep breathing…

You know it’s not the critic that counts, that it is all about the doer of the deeds, you love that Roosevelt ‘Man in the Arena’ quote, yet…

If you never jump…  well, you know how that plays out. 

Swinging arms, hopping feet, deep breathing…

You are currently living the foot hopping life – you’ve always been living the left right foot hop. 

So, why do you want to jump, what is it you are looking for, what are you trying to achieve?

It can’t be fame or fortune, they are transient whims so easily lost, if you are to gamble what is it you are trying to win? 

And, despite your lifelong love of words you cannot dig from your lexicon words to articulate the hunger, the need, the primal desire to jump. 

Yet fear is easy to describe, swinging arms, hopping feet, deep breathing…

And then…

You fall forward, legs almost buckling under your weight, the concrete disappears, and the air rushes past your body as you plummet downwards.

But you are not falling, you are flying.  Flying down towards your fear, towards your dream.

Chlorine smells strong, the water warm, the splash painful, the joy exhilarating, the euphoria of jumping intoxicating.

You are climbing before the water has fallen from your body, jumping again and again, the thrill never diminishing, never changing from one jump to the next.

You don’t need validation, witnesses, scores held on cards above heads – your glory is personal, maybe shared with friends, but held next to a pumping heart, not a cold and timid soul who knows neither victory or defeat!

Love the ones you are with – stay safe and sane!

ALEA IACTA EST

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Indeed, it is.

We have put our money where our heart is.

Some will see it as an act of complete folly, some as pandering to the ego, and some, a small group will see it with through compassionate eyes as the act of a man allowing his heart to truly beat.

Money – the love of such a thing, well we all know how that phrase goes.  It is many things, but it is indeed the lubricant that allows a life to exist in a modicum of comfort – and I’ve just taken a whole chunk of it to follow a dream.

“Happy talk, keep talkin’ happy talk, talk about things you’d like to do.  You gotta have a dream; If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?” – Rodgers & Hammerstein take a bow.

Will I fall flat on my face, has my money gone to a complex and intricate scam artist?

I don’t know.

I can control what I can control – nothing more.

I NEED to publish, and this I am now going to do.

Life is the poorer for a lack of risk.

So, successful top ten paperback or not, my dream is in process.

Love those you can, tell them often that you do, and stay as safe and sane as life will allow.

Put Up – Or Shut Up!

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Or back yourself or back down or… and so it goes on, we all know the premise being discussed.

At some point the music stops and you MUST act.

For me such a time is now.

Is it the ultimate and expensive folly – or a justified exercise in creative expression?

Both, neither?

Only time and participation in the process will tell.

I know the statistics, the possibility of my book, my debut novel, making me untold millions are somewhere in the range between slim to nil.

I get that, I do.

So, I’ve engaged an editor – splashed the cash.

My first foray will be Amy Grace: Payne – a book I started writing in 2017, and now a tale that sits in four volumes and some 500,000 words.

Book one is a standalone tale – it has a beginning, middle and a definite ending. 

It introduces the world to the red-haired wonder that is all 5’2” of Miss Amy Grace of County Leitrim in Ireland.

We take the reader into the world of Celtic mysticism and the warrior priestess that is Babd – we take that same reader on an emotional roller coaster of pain suffering and the struggle to recover from trauma.

We offer up a genuinely bad man (Thomas Payne), but we also allow our nemesis to have depth, to grow, to find true love and to evolve…

We anchor our story around a Cairo brothel – The Dove House, and we spin it around the Anglo centric man’s world of 1884. 

We have the failed relief of Khartoum, fighting in isolated forts in the Noth West Frontier and we end with Cowboy’s in Missoula in Montanna USA.    

Is the world ready, am I?

Never met the editor (IRL) and now I’m trusting him with all those hours of my blood sweat and tears.

Terrified I indeed am.

But the die has been cast- so we must follow through.

Hug those you love – stay sane, and if you can say a little prayer for me.

Of Mice and Men…

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Yes, it’s a reference to book by the writer of my favourite book of all time “The Grapes of Wrath” but it’s also a nod to that all important missive about counting chickens before they’re hatched.

It was the best of plans; it was simplicity personified – virtually no moving parts or interdependent actions.

And still it failed.

Of mice and men take a bow…

I wanted to publish my book, I want to publish my book, and I need to publish my book – a demon needs to be exorcised.

Pride must come before the fall, but if I don’t try then I’ll never know – and the not knowing is eating me up inside.

My work may fall flat on its face, it may come across as stilted, contrived cliché driven trope heavy nonsense – or indeed it may not.

The pudding only has one proof and that’s in its eating.

I think it has merit – I truly do.

I’m not that naïve as to think garlands will be thrown at my feet and accolades gifted from on high – but I do honestly think that once read my tale of Amy and her woes will be enjoyed.

She has a journey to take the reader on, some ups, some deep downs, some redemption, and some disappointing failure that will challenge.  Some of it will deliver a wry smile, some of it genuine tears of sadness, but each page will be willingly turned to find out what happened next…

That is my dream, that is my goal.

I had a plan.

It was a simple plan.

All it needed was the due backpay to arrive, the money would then pay for an editor, the editor would help me polish my work and then the absolute best version of Amy Grace: Thomas Payne would be released onto the world.

The editor – his time was booked.

It was all going so well.

And then pride tripped, we fell.

The money isn’t there.

What every year had been a (literal) bankable constant this year is still in stasis.

It will arrive, but no one knows when.

The frustration mounts.

By October I’d hoped to be in the final draft/discussing the artwork phase, and I’m not.

A Christmas stocking filler my work will not be.

It’s annoying.

I’m angry.

I’m barking at the moon – but I’m also helpless.

I cannot influence things; I can only stand in the sidelines as some sort of impassive spectator.

Patience will be my virtue, but frustration at this delay will cut deeply.

The project IS delayed, but NOT cancelled.

I have belief, and I hope you share this faith.

She is worth the wait – she truly is.

Amy IS coming.

Stay strong and hug those you love!

Paused, nothing more.

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

You can hear the tears as they fall, they fall, and they scream their accusations as they do so.

Abandonment is cruel.

They did no wrong, and still you walked away.

Nobody made you do it, you did it because it was the easy option, it was easier than perseverance, so you took the easy way out.

Characters abandoned, their stories, their trials and tribulations cast asunder for the option of zero effort. 

Innocence for them, guilt, immeasurable and indisputable guilt at your feet.

You knew all this would come to pass, and still you did it, you gave in.

It’s easier to walk away than to fall, but it is an easy option, a thieving option that forever takes away your chance to ever stand.

Perseverance and self-belief abandoned.

The monkey of doubt given fall reign, your pride a sulking drunk in the shadows complaining of what he could have been, what almost was…

Some throw coppers, most look away.

It is painful for them to see what they too could so easily be.

Fear of contagion averts many an eye.

How did we come to wallow in this mire?

What cut was too deep?

One thousand cuts, a million stings from bees, no single event terminal, but a culmination of all beyond debilitating.

And that was it.

Too many, too often and you drowned.

But it never happened, they’re just words, just musings, just thoughts typed out on a screen about what may have been…

A subliminal waning – maybe.

It was never going to be easy, the path broken and steep, the trips slips and falls multiple.

They’re not alive, but they are.

If you cut them, they bleed.

They are just not known and that’s not the same.

You can fix the latter, you must fix the latter, this is your quest.

Routes are changed, direction altered, destination forever true.

Preferences are luxuries nothing more.

The key is to be read, and that hasn’t changed.

To be judged on my works I must first offer up such – and this we will do.

Call it a detour, call it what you will, but never belittle it.

The strategy has adapted; it has evolved.

The passion still burns bright; the desire is still there.

It’s only a delay, a deferral nothing more.

Amy is coming.

You will get the chance to read her adventures and to share her journey – you will.

Pausing for breath, but definitely not stopping!

Stay safe – remain sane and as ever remind those you love that indeed you do.

Push Push Struggle Struggle aka The Indifference Engine.

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

And so, it goes ever onwards.

You write the book, clap yourself on the back, and then instead of cherubs scattering rose petals at your feet and heavenly hosts singing your praises, it all kinda goes pear shaped…

It turns out that all they warned you about is true, they weren’t ghost stories, they are cold hard facts that have zero consideration for your artistic sensibilities – your feelings be dammed!

It’s hard, its cold, and it is indeed true – the cosmos doesn’t care how much blood sweat and tears you’ve invested in your scribbles – not a flicker is recorded.

And those who backslapped and cheered by your side as you wrote your opus – conspicuous by their absence indeed they all are for the next stage.

Its lonely.   

What so dominates your life isn’t even a mere ripple in theirs.

Get used to it.

The cliché it seems isn’t one.

Writing was indeed the easy bit – so if you cried doing that bit, strap yourself in the rest of the ride is wilder than a wild thing and it follows no rules, has no constricting factors, it goes where it pleases, and what pleases it is mostly your pain. 

It’s not that your book is or indeed isn’t well written – again the cosmos doesn’t care – utter tripe will sell by the hundred weight, and literary genius will die in obscurity – it isn’t fair, but it is how it works – accept or die frustratedly and futilely screaming into the void that will never answer back.

The game is rigged against you, the dice most assuredly are loaded in favour of the house, and unless you are a media accredited celebrity you are indeed going to have to put in the hard yards.

Acceptance of this reality isn’t a complaint; it is just a realisation of the uphill struggle that is now.

The deposit on the castle in Scotland hasn’t happened just yet – we’ve a few more hurdles to go before we become the living embodiment of a Halmark film. 

We reserve the right to occasionally feel somewhat down, to at times scream our frustration into the afore mentioned uncaring void – we must vent, for if we don’t, we will explode with all the pressure.

Fall seven, stand eight.

Resilience is lubricated by tears.

Ever onwards, chin into the wind.

Stay safe, hug those you love – remind them whenever you can and do you very best to stay sane!

Polite Society.

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Things you do, things indeed you don’t do, and discussing politics it seems is one of those things.

I think we are the poorer for it, especially writers.

Stories are the near obvious vehicle for commentary, for exploring narratives, and yet it seems that this is now a taboo.  Sexuality and relationships are fine – violence never in question, but the ‘P’ word – nope, never never never. 

Where have all the angry young men, those Young Turks, the social commentators, the satirists, and holders of mirrors to society faults failures and darker traits gone? 

What has become of those writers of dystopian social commentary?   

Does the burning of information, the destruction of yesterday’s knowledge in ‘Fahrenheit 451’ still resonate – do we still grimace at the thought of those ‘Firemen’?

Can we see the alienation and inherent loneliness of perpetual self-indulgence in ‘A Brave New World’?  

Is ‘1984’, still the clarion call for freedom and the warning of the abuse of power, is it still read as a horror story and warning to us all – or is it just no longer read, instead reduced to a glib reference?

I’m NOT saying that you must discuss the human condition through a prism of political debate in your writing, but it would be nice if a few more did.

I just feel somewhat adrift from a world that seems to see political discourse as the only social taboo worth obeying.

Is it the fault/failing of social media, is it the fear of a pile on and cancel culture if you mock, deride or merely allow daylight to fall onto modern absurdities?

My woe is for the self-censoring of an art form, an expressive outlet for which any creative restriction is the very antithesis of telling compelling/challenging/interesting stories.

While I weep, while I weep…

Maybe I should tubthump a manifesto novel – maybe I should, maybe I will.

Side profile picture to the world, chin up, hand on lapel, distant and determined look in my eyes…

Hug those you love, stay safe, and try your best to remain sane!  

Echo Chambers + Purity Tests.

/ Neil Bowers / Leave a comment

Do we want to read to be entertained, and if so, then surly ONLY the story being told counts?

Naïve – seemingly.

Full Disclosure – I’m a bit of a long-term fan of Stephen King.  IT, The Green Mile, Misery – these are books that I have loved since the first creak of the spine, the receipt of that new book smell, and the joyous anticipation as the first page was read all the way to the immense satisfaction as the last one ended the tale. 

His political views have never been a consideration, nor should they ever be.

Be entertained – enjoy it in good faith and move on with your life.

If I found out a writer was a fan of Eugenics, or a devout Christian, I may find this information interesting when thinking about any themes in their work – but nothing more.

This I thought was a near universal mantras, yet it seems I’m wrong.

Purity tests now seem permissive in their prevalence – and unflinching in their dogma.  Yet this dogma flickers in the wind like a proverbial weathervane, and it must be exhausting keeping up to date.

Have we always been at war with Oceania – I’m not too sure… 

Many on social media (yes, I know it’s not real life – but it is a snapshot) routinely declare that they won’t follow such and such because of an opinion that they hold (or often are thought to hold or accused of holding) and when I see this I am at a complete and utter loss.

I sit bereft, truly bereft at it all. 

How can you live your life like this?

Would these people genuinely burn the books that brought them such joy because of an opinion that is different to theirs?

We aren’t talking about people who have raped or murdered, we are talking about folk who just see society from a different perspective and therefore have solutions, from their point of view, that may be at odds with our preferred option. 

The near automatic assumption of malicious intent on those who challenge or differ from our world view is madness – it truly is.

That’s it, that’s my rant.

Open your mind and your heart will follow!

Hug those you love and stay safe and sane.