Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

Last year I took part and completed successfully the Wordpress post-a-week challenge which saw me write 52 blog posts over each week of the year. In 2012, as we cross over into the second half of the year I've found myself lapsing back into 'lazy blogger' mode, posting sporadically and with time growing ever more distant between posts. That’s not to say that I’ve been idle, far from it - I made a promise and I’m trying my damndest to keep it. The promise, made via this blog towards the end of May, was that I would finally find my way back into a project that I also started last year. A project in which I attempted to write a novel, which was inspired by a photograph of a man I took; a man who sat gazing out to sea at Riverside Country Park – a place right on the end of the causeway there known mysteriously as ‘Horrid Hill’. What was he thinking as he gazed out at beyond? Only God will ever know. But I took a wildly fictitious guess - which subsequently grew into a my...

Towards the end of last year I entered a writing competition. The subject was 'life-writing' which for me is what this blog is all about, however uninteresting it appears to anyone from the outside looking in. Unfortunately, I didn't make the final long-list, but in celebrating my 200th post last week I thought that now would be as good a time to share it as any. The following "story" for me, encapsulates everything I've learned about myself in the previous two hundred posts. Premature Perfection Gravesend 1980. July the 26th if I am going to be exact. I don’t remember it. Of course I am not expected to, nobody does. It was the date of my birth. Nothing remarkable about that. People are born every minute, every hour of every day. It’s life. Like mine; nothing really remarkable about that either. I am married now, I have a child. Have another one due next month. Married for just over a year to the women I started dating thirteen years ago. I have a semi-su...

Time seems to have very elastic properties right now. The past two weeks have flown by in a blur of babies and excitement and yet, life as we knew it seems so distant and long ago. November has been a monumental month in the grand scheme of things, not only did I witness the safe arrival of my daughter Phoebe, I was published for the very first time. ' Things that go bump in the night ' is an anthology of Ghost Stories written by students and collated by tutors of The Write Place , a creative writing school in Dartford that I have been attending this year as a part of a work sponsored initiative. The “Me, Me, Me” fund allows each staff member £200 to learn something new and being published as part of the anthology is the unexpected but delightful climax of a year where I have learnt a huge amount. The book itself is available from Amazon at a bargain price of £3.16 in e-book format, which makes it compatible with their Kindle e-book reader, or any associated Kindle softwa...

At the end of June, I disclosed through the pages of this blog that I was at the beginning of a project. Under the working title of “ The Bicycle Man ” I’d began writing something that I termed as “substantial” without actually going as far as saying that it was an attempt to write a novel. At the time, I’d barely written over a thousand words - tonight, just two months later, that word count stands at a catchphrase under 30,000. Does it mean therefore that I have to enough to start calling it something else? In writing this blog, purely for my own benefit as a way of encouragement to myself. A way of measuring a milestone and saying “this is what you have done so far, keep going”. In two months I have gone from having an empty word document with a photograph (seen in the banner above) of a man  I’d never spoken to and an introductory few paragraphs that sparked a set of questions with answers that I needed to deliver. And now, I have some substance, of who the man wa...