Be Proud of Your Writing This Year by Dan Holloway

I'm incredibly proud of this book (available, incidentally, for Kindle UK here, other areas here, and as a paperback here). It's still hard saying things like that. I feel like Richard Gere in that scene in Pretty Woman where he says "It's taken me $10,000 of therapy to say 'I am angry with my father'". Only in my case it's taken 5 or 6 years of self-publishing to say, without a whole shockwave of trepidation "I am proud of this book."

I have mostly been one of those writers who, when asked about there books, will mumble something non-committal before quickly deflecting back to "and what do you do?" At one poetry night, the wonderful poet, raconteur, and performance artist Tina Sederholm, introducing the night in question, said "poets should stop apologising for their poems before they read them" and eyeballed straight at me as she spoke. In part, this has to do with all sorts of deep-seated inadequacies that are far too dull to go into here.

For the most part, though, the reluctance to stand up and be fully counted for my work, to say "here you go, this is what I've got, I'm really proud of it," comes from a very poor writerly habit, one I've devoted the whole of "Self-publish With Integrity" to helping people to overcome:

tailoring what you write to what other people tell you you should write. 

Now those other people could be editors, readers, your mate down the pub, beta readers or your perception of what "the market", "agents", or "the current publishing climate" requires. Bu the fact remains that every time you tweak your writing to any of their requirements, a tiny piece of your creative integrity dies. Not consciously - at the time you may well feel your creative spirit soar, feel you have hit a target, accomplished an accomplishment, achieved an achievement. And sales and reviews may bolster that feeling in a general upward spiral.

But somewhere, at some time, when someone asks you about your work, your subconsciously sliced up creative soul will stir in its lair, and you will feel the beginnings of an "erm" form in your voicebox.And that's when the whole thing is in danger of crumbling.

The one way that you will always be able to be proud, in the deepest sense, of what you do is if you never compromise what your writing means to you. Yes, you may get embarrassed explaining the, er, ins and outs of the new monster porn/cowboy romance mash-up that's been your calling since you were a teenager. Yes, you may have a very small readership for your retellings of Slovak myths in the voice of Raymond Chandler. And people may regret having asked you when you explain the inner workings of a world populated entirely by imaginary numbers that take on the form of lesser known rutabagas. But the point is that YOU wouldn't regret it. And there are so many moments I look back on in my writing life and think "if only I'd stuck to my guns." There are punches I pulled, narratives I linearised, characters I made more likeable, less likeable, themes I did and didn't develop.

So, having learned to be proud of my writing, I am delighted to present the second in my series of erotic novelettes with a social conscience set in Oxford University. They follow the journey of Kayla Dyson from North London estate to social entrepreneur and role model.

It's currently free (today only) if you pop along here.