My Books ~ A Helpful Note

Journal

Volume 2 : December 3, 2021

Some titles are available either in print or kindle and are self-published works. Otherwise, they are published exclusively on this website. Books 1 - 3 are three anthologies of poetry and prose.

1 Idle Thoughts (2009)

2 Meanderings (2011)

3 BGBBW (2013)

4 Short Stories (2013)

5 Bluitt & Bodgitt - short story in kindle (2014)

6 Windsor Street Days - serialised on this website (2020-2021 ongoing)

7 Death’s Angel (2022) serialised on this site

8 The Four Seasons - The Four Winds (2021) - serialised

Forthcoming

9 On the Liverpool Waterfront - From City Boy to Shire Lad

On the Liverpool Waterfront ~ From City Boy to Shire Lad is a collection of, originally, 114 poems with a Foreward by Sally Anne Tapia-Bowes of Liverpool. The original draft is now a decade old, and I am reworking many of the original 114 poems, as well as adding poems to the compendium during the last ten years. I have not set myself a deadline.

Author Note

I

Book 3 was never intended.

It came about when people, mostly fundamentalist christians, took exception. I gathered up those pieces written within a strait-jacketed life of more than forty years.

I’m reminded today of the pressure placed upon the clergy who have entered into civil partnerships, but on condition that they remain celibate. That is like me saying to a member of the clergy, ‘Oh, by the way, in view of your being ordained, I take it your wife will now be abstaining. I really do hope so, for if you and your wife are not, if you are having sex beyond the object of producing offspring, then I might feel a quite uncomfortable, unwell even! You must understand. Procreation is the only reason for sexual activity. Anything outside that parameter is, naturally, lusts of the flesh.

I jest of course.

But this is the twenty-first century.

And the good church-work by many is undermined or even laid waste by those who see life as following one of two routes ~ narrow path or wide road.

I prefer a scientific approach to life. This, in way, undermines my faith, but enhances it, at the same time shining a very bright, almost blinding, searchlight beam onto ‘religion’. I thereby gain perspective and continue to find richness and jewels when revisiting biblical texts.

As BGBBW explains, I had written Shoah - a poem about the Holocaust - and when it was published by Spiderwize in 2009, the Lesbian and Gay Foundation, Manchester (now the LGBTQ Foundation) telephoned me. Would I ‘write a similar poem to Shoah, also about the Holocaust but from the LGBT angle, and could you have it ready to read on the January 27, 2012 as part of the International Holocaust Memorial commemoration in Manchester?’

14 days notice!

They Came in the Night was the result.

That poem, in turn, gave me the courage to write:

They Are Coming Down the Street Now

Sniper

A man named 'john' : A Coward

the last two about the brutality and genocide of Daesh.

II

Being old-school, I write long poems. This is a challenge, a door-slam for publishers, and turn-off for society that lives a 24/7 frenzied social media lifestyle, tick-tocking and instagramming their way through every hour. I want gratification and I want it now!

Poems, these days, are usually two or three stanzas at most, 12-15 lines. The days of the ‘epic poems’ that I grew up on, learned at school, and presumed to be the norm, have long gone. Or have they?

I’ve learned not to take myself seriously, so I write for me. If, along the way, pieces find favour, well, that's a bonus. Allied to this ‘do not take myself seriously’ is this :

“‘Remember, you may think you have written well, but look afresh and you’ll find you have a very great deal to learn on the subject of writing, let alone, composing poetry. You are, let us say, a very long way down the boarding pass line.’”

— Kenneth Thomas Webb

III

If you have the gift of writing, or suspect that there is something there but you aren't confident enough to write, write it anyway.

It’s a double-edged sword. You have created a manuscript. It lives and breathes. Editing suggestions are never welcomed, and the outcome by the writer towards the editor can be hostile, viscious even. This usually arises when the writer has failed to realise that copy-editor and proofreader are two separate disciplines. The term ‘copy’ is more accurately ‘manuscript’ or ‘script’. The scales fall from the eyes! To edit means to make changes, to amend, to delete, to, god-forbid, rewrite!

The proofreader merely looks for typographical errors, and incorrect punctuation, and occasional accidental contradition.

In my time as a copy-editor, authors and I worked well together. I recall also those states of impasse. Nothing could persuade the author to approve a suggested amendment. The book is published, and months or even years later, I receive ‘the puzzled e-mail’, as to why the book is not a bestseller, or perhaps not even selling at all. eBooks are filled with scripts that their writers later say to me words like ‘how on earth did I do that? I’m so embarrassed’.

Do not always write direct to screen.

That is not the same as writing on an old-fashioned Imperial typewriter - the Ian Fleming way. Operating one of those was very much akin to the fountain pen.

My hint?

Buy yourself a fountain pen. After writing with fountain pens for over 57 years, nothing compares with it. When writing a manuscript I use a pencil, simply because pencil-writing is far faster than any pen! A vast collection of pencils is always to hand. Or even go one better. Invest in a reMarkable 2 Tablet. Mine is in constant use. I write with a pen on screen and send the text to my email, copy and paste it to a document and I’m straight into editing mode. The reM 2 as I call it, is not unlike having my secretary again. We dictate our work and the next day it appears on the desk for sign-off or amendment. I’m often inspired to write, and then the next day I have the feeling … oh no; now I’ve got to transcribe it. And I suddenly find something else to do. The reM 2 overcomes that. It’s there on screen, converted in milliseconds from handwriting to typescript, and I’m now at that point described above where transcribed work has arrived on the desk! Brilliant!

I was so impressed, that several younger members of the family now have their own reM 2s. The outlay has been worth it.

Kenneth Thomas Webb
Liverpool and Gloucestershire

December 3, 2021
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© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022

One of the Fifteen Founding Members of the Leaders Lodge

First Written May 5, 2021