I THOUGHT I had made it. The letter I had opened informed me that the short story I had submitted would be published in a hardback collection.
The paper I worked on in Skipton thought my achievement worthy of a feature and the photographer took me down to the subway leading to Skipton railway station - "try to look like a heroin addict".
The bookshop the newspaper owned stocked copies and I waited for Paper Clips Yorkshire: Short Stories by Writers in Yorkshire to take off. Then I waited some more.
My effort, Mirrors of Apathy, was a pretentious take on what I envisaged a pointless life to be. I won't expand too much on that here as it could upset some people. Indeed, my dad's brother was furious.
It was written in 1992 and just a year or so later Irvine Welsh stole my glory with Trainspotting. That's not exactly true. He wrote a novel and I didn't. He got published and I didn't. It turns out you actually have to finish something, not just talk about it.
The ensuing feature in the Craven Herald & Pioneer featured myself carping on about my inspiration for the story and how I had a novel in the pipeline. The Druzhba pipeline - the world's longest oil pipeline - in Eastern European Russia looks like a bungalow drain pipe compared to mine.
I've still got the original story I typed out and I have about 60 pages of A4 filled with the words of my attempt to expand it into a novel. I've often picked it up and wondered if I could have made anything of it, but it's not really me now.
I looked up Paper Clips Yorkshire: Short Stories by Writers in Yorkshire and found one used copy for sale on Amazon at $45.86. Bit pricey, I thought. Maybe I should put my copy up for sale.
I briefly wondered what had happened to the hopes and aspirations of all the other writers featured in that not much sought after collection. Had they made it? Did they think, like I did, that they were on the verge of stardom when they had their story published and it was only a matter of time before a major publisher called to offer them a deal to pen a series of novels? Did they suffer crushing disappointments? Did they make a career of their writing? Are they still trying?
Unless you are Irvine Welsh or, God forbid, say Dan Brown or JK Rowling, and your writing captures the zeitgeist, then there's probably not a lot of money to be made from being an author, but at least your work is there - I'm not sure where there is - somewhere, for posterity.
* For the full text of Mirrors of Apathy see newsletter: Nasty and Spiteful - My First Published Work Of Fiction 30 Years Ago - But I was So Proud.
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