The intro and the outro

A few years ago my novel All My Own Work was named a winner of The Leonard Sankey Awards for New Talent in Fiction. Billed at the time as one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the UK, it promised a cheque for £10,000, a place on a top-quality writing course and the guidance of a professional editor. However, as well reported in the media at the time, I was controversially stripped of the award and All My Own Work was never published. The Sankey awards also seemed to be placed on indefinite hold following the fracas, but that's another story.

In dire need of money in the months that followed, I decided to write my side of the story - i.e. not the story originally told in All My Own Work but the true story of how I came to write the book, win and then lose the Sankey prize, and the parts played in all of this by various people including my estranged Thai wife Fon and my friends Vince, Eric, Alastair and George. However, my attempts to write the book were frustrated by a severe case of writer's block, so I enlisted the help of an old writer “friend”, who shall remain nameless, to write the book with me.

All went swimmingly for several months, and by early 2004 we had a finished manuscript called Me and My Big Ideas. However, to add irony to injury, my so-called writer so-called friend then tried to pass off our manuscript of my memoir as his own novel, which he retitled, somewhat confusingly, All My Own Work. By some legal miracle he managed to control the rights to the book for the best part of a year, during which time he entered it into the Publish And Be Damned / UKA Press 'Search for a Great Read' competition, the first prize for which was publication by the small press people of “his” “novel”. The book was one of six shortlisted for the prize, but I now find myself in the increasingly ironic position of saying it was fortunate that All My Own Work did not win.

Now, after extensive assertion of my moral rights, I have gained control of the book, subject to certain conditions, namely that while my “writer” “friend” does not own my story, he retains the rights to the actual text he wrote, so I am now having to rewrite the book in order not to breach his copyright - his copyright in my life!

Anyway, these ludicrous wranglings are immaterial in the grand scheme of things. My top priority now is to finally give voice to my side of the story of All My Own Work and the Sankey competition. However, having lost a lot of faith in the publishing industry as a result of this entire palaver, I’ve decided my best course of action is to post my manuscript to the web chapter by chapter as I revise it. I’m just finishing off the first chapters now and these should be ready in the next few days. After that, if my present rate of work is anything to go by, I should be able to post two or three chapters every week. Ultimately this will build into a complete book, and if it's the last thing I do, it really will be all my own work!