Positive thinking...

My late father, a man of few words and even less money, would often mutter ‘hang ‘em’ under his breath while watching the news on the telly. It didn’t much matter who they were, or what they did, if they made it onto the news they were guilty and therefore ripe for the drop. Actually, I am being unfair to him. For minor crimes, such as being young, he would advocate the return of National Service.

So I wonder what he would have made of the man splashed across the front page of my local paper who was caught driving whilst disqualified on his way to doing some unpaid community work. The community work, together with a driving ban was the result of a previous conviction for dangerous driving.

On the basis that he only got in his car because his lift let him down his (free) defence lawyer successfully argued that he had ‘poor problem solving skills,’ happily ignoring the fact that he, within seconds of being stopped, made a decision to solve the problem of inevitable police custody by jumping over a barbed wire fence and legging it across a field.

The enlightened magistrate sent the man on an ‘enhanced thinking course.’

This is an interesting concept, and I’m thinking about what minor misdemeanour I might undertake in an effort to enhance my own thinking, which, it has to be said, is prone to the odd meander. But in my game that can often work to your advantage.

It’s true to say that my writing work is progressing nicely. I’m getting a reasonable amount of commissions from editors, in fact recently an editor contacted me to write a feature. This is a rare event in the world of freelance writing and a first of many, I hope. I was recently appointed to the writing roster of Tiger Tales, the in flight magazine of Tiger Airways (based in Singapore) and Lonely Planet are considering me as a contributor for the next edition of their Thai guidebook.

Still, sadly, little progress on my book, but I’m pestering agents and one day one of them is going to give in…

At current levels of activity I could happily make a living entirely from feature writing - providing I go and live under a bridge and live off bulrushes.

As I find bridges a little draughty I have always supplemented my income with commercial writing – you know the stuff, websites, press releases, that sort of thing. It’s a challenging form of writing because of the constraints of language and format that are often imposed by clients. Sometimes you have to get the whole ethos of what the company does into one sentence – I like that sort of challenge.

In fact I like it so much I’ve collaborated with some other like-minded souls and set up a company to develop this side. You can go and visit www.wedothewords.com if you want to read more about what I’m prattling on about.

It might just enhance your thinking…