I left school at sixteen and became a cadet with the Shell Tanker Company. In all, I spent 12 years as a ship’s officer in the British Merchant navy. That is where my Tales from the Sea posted on www.theoldun.blogspot.com came from. Actually I used to put what happened while I was at sea in some sort of literary context while walking up and down the bridge of ships in the middle of the night. Though it can sound exciting travelling the world’s oceans, at times it can be very boring spending four hours staring at the sea. I never wrote these stories down at the time just composed them in my head.
After leaving the sea, I graduated and became a university lecturer in Transport management. I had my first taste of writing seriously when I published a text-book entitled Managing transport operations. While lecturing, if my students appeared to get bored with what I was teaching them, I kept them awake by relating my experiences while at sea! It was these students who encouraged me to write the stories down and post them on the web. over a number of years I wrote a novel entitled Running after Maria loosely based on a period in my life. In this novel I explored the effect of great loss and heartbreak and how the kindness of others can lead to redemption. As a first novel I could not find a publisher though I am thinking of publishing this as an e-book.
Since retiring four years ago, I have signed up for Creative Writing classes at the local college. The Tutor is a poet and makes me write very bad poetry as well as short prose pieces. She has encouraged us to send our writing off to publishers. One of my short stories has been published as the runner-up in a competition in an anthology “ islands in mind”.
I have written or am in the process of writing a fantasy novel called The Return of the Exiles. I can remember exactly when the ideas for this started. It was 1972 and my wife had gone to look after her terminally ill mother. She left me with a copy of Lord of the Rings and an Album Rambling Boy by Tom Paxton. I read Lord of the Rings in a very short time. It occurred to me that this was a genre in which certain ideas could be explored. Over the years I thought about this, made notes and wrote isolated incidents in the story. Since starting Creative writing classes the other participants and I have read some of these incidents to the class. They encouraged me to write the whole novel the result of which is The Return of the Exiles which looks as though it is now growing into two books.
On my other web site: www.eddiegubbins.blogspot.com I am posting my fantasy novel The Return Of The Exiles a chapter a week.
I have published under a grant scheme two novels An Ordinary Life and A Ceremony of innocence. I have for a long time been interested in how people see themselves and justify their actions. An Ordinary Life explores this concept in that the hero thinks he always acts for the best of motives. A Ceremony of Innocence explores the 1980’s and how many people grabbed what they could and hang the consequences. They did not consider how their actions impacted on other people.
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