So there you have it, after working for a long time as a graphic artist before suddenly finding myself with rather a lot of time on my hands in my mid-fifties, I've been pottering around writing stuff, drawing stuff, and recording stuff, for the past couple of years, mostly because I happen to be lucky enough to share my life with someone rather wonderful who has been very supportive of what I still think of as my silly creative nonsenses.
One long, bitter afternoon, back in November 2019, I'd had a thought that I might investigate what it took to put "A. Book." together, and went onto the self-publishing site Lulu to see if I could possibly work out how to do it.
Two years passed, in which I continued making contributions to the ROUND THE ARCHIVES podcast, carried on working with ANDY PRIESTNER on the "AN A TO Z OF UK TV DRAMA" podcast and "SPACE SOLDIERS: A FLASH GORDON COMMENTARY PODCAST," as well as producing and presenting VISION ON SOUND for FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL (a digital radio station based in Manchester), and I continued scribbling in my sketchbooks and, more rarely, writing my poems, and this idea of creating "A. Book." of some sort had never really gone away.
So I sat down in front of my keyboard and wrote a 32 stanza poem which I thought might work quite well as the basis for this new project, and sat down with my pens and started scribbling and, after a few days, was able to put together a couple of pages and began to see that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to bring something together that, if I did it properly, might just be the master document I could use to return to that website and see whether I could finally figure out how to actually stagger across the finishing line and hit "publish" because, basically, it's a lot easier to figure out the details if you've actually got something tangible to upload to the site.
At this point I didn't ever expect to ever ACTUALLY publish it. The whole thing was just an exercise in teaching myself how to do something new.
Two months passed and, eventually, the artwork part was - I thought - finished, and a first draft had been put together and, after several frustrating attempts, I managed to chip away at the necessary tolerances, and found myself with an acceptably formatted file, an ISBN number, and the possibility of ordering up a test print, because I still had no idea just how well a fully illustrated book might actually print using their processes.
I hit "print" and figured that would be the end of it.
After all, the entire point of the exercise had been accomplished; I had created and prepared something resembling "A. Book." and sent it to print.
Then, overnight, I had a thought. One of the design concepts I'd had whilst creating the first draft had been to make the whole story look like a "Family Album" with the kind of borders you might find in those old Victorian photograph albums but, having hit "print" I suddenly hated that idea (which had taken a whole day to add to every page after I'd found the previous "ragged edge" style looked far too messy) and went back to the computer "just to see" how it looked with clean white margins instead.
Dammit. I thought it looked far better without.
Anyway, with that little hiccup out of the way, the test print arrived and I thought that it looked okay, and I shared a picture of it with TwitWorld, and nobody was saying it looked awful, or that it was a truly dreadful idea. There were, however, a few minor issues that I decided I really ought to deal with because, well, wouldn't it be nice if I actually made use of that ISBN number and maybe, just maybe, I could actually make my silly bit of nonsense available on the Lulu Bookstore...?
And whilst I tinkered, and procrastinated, and worried about the fact that I'm not really a "real" writer, I was reminded with a hearty "Well, what's the worst that can happen?" (Answer - I'm so humiliated that I crawl back under my rock and vow never to approach a keyboard, or a sketchbook, ever again) that I might as well hit "publish" - and so I did.
Of course I got something the wrong way around, and I still had to order myself that proof copy that Lulu insist upon for approval before allowing "World Distribution" (Yikes!) but, over the course of that terrifying Sunday, several very kind people decided to order it "sight unseen" as it were, because they were being supportive of me and my efforts, and so a tricky week followed in which I hadn't seen the finished product, and I still fully expected the ones which arrived at those people's homes to be greeted with hoots of derision of the "How dare he think that THIS was book-worthy?!" kind.
Anyway, on Friday the 25th of February, 2022, as the world was unravelling around us, that proof copy arrived, as did the dozen or so copies which had been ordered by those various households.
And they were all very kind and told me that they liked my work, which is always something of a relief. It’s difficult to explain how much it means when, as somebody who doesn’t think of themselves as a “real” writer, I put something (a poem I wrote and illustrated) “out there” for public scrutiny, and (so far anyway), people have not poured scorn or found it truly awful.
To be honest, the purpose of the exercise has been fulfilled. I have, as the saying goes, achieved all of the goals that I set myself. I never expected that there'd be any demand for many more than the twenty or so copies that I thought it might run to, and, to be honest, at least a dozen of those have been bought by the very same people I would probably have gifted them to if I'd had an actual income to afford to print that many for myself.
But NOSFERATUTU THE DANCYR, my silly bittersweet little story about loneliness and dancing, has made it out from the confines of my imagination into the real world, and I hope, at least, that some people enjoy it.
Martin A W Holmes, February 26th, 2022
NOSFERATUTU THE DANCYR is available via the Lulu Bookstore
ISBN 978-1-6780-3662-1
