Who the hell are you and what’s all this about?

A rambling biography and rough idea of what the hell I’m going to be writing on here

In primary school, I was asked to write a story. I’m sure I’d written others before, but I remember this one. The reason I remember it was the reaction.

The story was about a young boy in the distant future who stole a time machine from a museum and used it to travel into the past. I hadn’t even seen Dr Who at this point. It was about 100 words and was barely English, but my teachers’ reaction was bafflement. They had no idea how react to a story that wasn’t about meeting a dog or going to the park.

In secondary school, I was asked to write a story about something personal. I wrote an account of a childhood bullying incident. My hugely-ineffective teacher maintained that she had no way to assess what I’d written as it was “too personal” and refused to mark it.

Infuriated, I decided to write my own novel — some odd hybrid of Robocop, Independence Day, Top Gun, Wing Commander and the cover art of a fighting game I never got to play. It would take me over two years and the plot would change completely as I went along, but I made little effort to alter what I’d already written. Nonetheless, when I began lending the finished copy out to friends at school, it became a minor sensation.

When it came time to apply to university, my career advisor suggested I study literature, but I had been put off the subject by a string of teachers who didn’t seem to actually like children and conversely fascinated by philosophy because of a teacher who insisted on treating his students like thoughtful adults instead of monkeys to be trained. Generally, the careers advisor was incompetent, which prevented me from realising he was right.

I enrolled in philosophy and found it briefly stimulating, but ultimately rhetorical. Instead, I spent all of my optional modules on my university’s unique science fiction studies course. I once wrote an essay in response to the question “if a character is shot on the holodeck, could they really be said to be dead?”. I started by explaining how Star Trek holo-technology worked (from memory) and how it would either not be an issue or be no different to reality depending on the holodeck safety systems. I then hypothesised what the philosophical ramifications were if things were different. I got a first with the comment “you’ve clearly put more thought into answering this than I did in posing the question”. Alas, I only got a 2:1 in actual philosophy.

What I’m getting at here is that I was a writer before I knew what the term meant. Still, it was daunting. How did you make money out of being a writer without being Stephen King? So, instead, I did a philosophy master’s degree… for a week before deciding to sod it all and try to be a writer.

I spoke to a reporter at a local newspaper, who said the GCSE-level NCTJ qualification was beneath me. Instead, I spent the same amount my Ma would have cost on a three-month NUJ course, along with daily travel to London, which was fun...

As I applied for jobs after, the reaction was “where’s your NCTJ?”…

It took a few years, a horrific call centre job and a lot of debt before I was finally employed as section editor of a pharmaceutical B2B in London. Mainly as I was willing to work for less than anyone else.

Two years later, the publisher went bankrupt and I found myself in a worse call centre verging on a nervous breakdown. Only one thing kept me sane: my blog. I started blogging on MySpace about whatever I felt like, but quickly evolved to Blogger, running The Day Hollywood Stood Still, an utterly-irreverent blog about how much fun crap movies were in the style of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (apparently. I’ve still never seen it).

While my career languished, my blog was a success. Half a million hits and competitions for Argos and Stella Artois led to an offer of an interview with Tim Roth. I said no. I didn’t want to interview Tim Roth while pretending to be a wacky robot…

Eventually, my blog managed to land me a job as a junior copywriter for a local firm and I threw myself into it; I finally had the chance to write for a stable living and I wanted to succeed. To my surprise, I also found the combination of writing, salesmanship and psychology stimulating. I immediately started following copywriting blogs and magazines, read books about marketing and downloaded all the series of Mad Men (I almost finished it…).

As a result, my writing got better and better, my proofing developed and I started making my way up the ladder. I’m now editorial manager with a team of copywriters under me. This, unfortunately, leaves very little time for me to blog and I had to accept that DayHWStoodStill was done.

Still, I missed it. I missed the outlet for my writing. I missed being able to write about things that interested me in my own house style, rather than someone else’s. I missed writing for fun.

I’ve made various attempts to start up again, and this is my latest. With Medium, I figure I can write the kind of stuff I was writing — reviews of crappy movies — but also episode guides to the TV shows I’m watching, posts about marketing, life stuff — whatever I want, whenever I want; without being limited to a blog’s particular format.

I hope you enjoy reading it all.