Greetings Readers!

Unfortunately it’s been a while since Eroberung’s last article, but rest assured, whilst site has remained silent, behind the scenes work has been progressing a-pace on Memoirs and the impromptu hiatus gives us the perfect opportunity to discuss something that most writers don’t readily like to talk about: Distractions.

Obviously, there exist in life those happy and privileged few for whom writing is not just a passion and past time, but also a profession, those lucky bastards whose days are filled with naught but the insane panic to meet their publisher’s deadline. However, for the vast majority of us, writing is not actually what pays the bills and occupies our day-to-day lives. In my limited experience, a writer is not the one-dimensional caricature build out of unkempt hair, black leather jackets and an antique type writer that popular imagery would have us believe (unless you’re Neil Gaiman, then you’ve got that aspect of it locked down tight #jealous). Writers are people, and people have real lives which have the unfortunate and all-too-common habit of getting in the way.

The need to eat, and to have access to copious amounts of filter coffee and Earl Grey tea with which to fuel any literary excursion, necessitates earning a wage: For me, this is teaching. About a decade and half ago, I studied and trained to become a primary school teacher, and have been diligently toiling away in my chosen field ever since. Now, anyone who is a teacher, lives with one, or has one erratically orbiting their social circle will tell you teachers are a universally over-worked, over-stressed and under-appreciated breed, whose weekly workload is shocking in its complexity and volume. For those unfamiliar with education policy in England under the coalition government, this has been made worse in the last four or five years by the effective suspension of all previous education policy, which saw Teachers occupying a curious limbo, where increasingly belligerent rhetoric from central government demanded the profession ‘drive up standards’ without any clarity on what ‘driving up standards’actually looks like or how it should be implemented, especially when central budget cuts have chronically slashed the money available to schools, led to a dismantling of national pay and conditions to avoid central government responsibility for pay cuts, and introduced systems of school management and governance that could at best be described as ‘dodgy’ and at worst amount to a tacit selling-off of the education sector to dubious interests whose agendas are by no means transparent, and who vehemently dislike (if not outright hate) professional people who ask questions. Especially if they happen to be staff.

Between fighting for survival in an increasingly hostile professional environment, picking your way through the bomb site of current government policy and clinging desperately to professional unity in the hopes of weathering the current storm together, there is more than enough to distract anyone, let alone the aspiring writer.

But that’s just work.

There is also the business of attempting to have a functioning relationship against this backdrop of professional pandemonium: I am quite fortunate in that regard, as I have managed in the last two years to not only navigate my way (albeit haphazardly) through the aforementioned professional woes, but found and convinced another human being to share their life with me, moved house to accommodate our copious amounts of miscellaneous ephemera, proposed, been accepted, and found myself in the midst of helping to organise our impending nuptials. All of which, whilst making me ecstatically happy, has not really been conducive to sitting down and actually writing.

…and then there’s the real distractions.

Oh, you consider the above real distractions? No, no, no my friend, that’s were you’re wrong. You see, those aren’t really distractions because they can all be considered legitimate pressures and responsibilities. No, real distractions are the things that aren’t so easy to justify. For instance; I like to read. I read voraciously and extensively which, whilst good for my vocabulary and intellectual development (and great for scavenging writing ideas), is terrible for actually getting anything done. Especially if you’re one of those people who will drop everything to spend the entire day reading that exciting new novel you’ve just bought, or gets easily sucked into link-surfacing on Wikipedia (which should be considered a class A drug in my opinion).

I also suffer from a similar issue with Science-Fiction and Fantasy on the small and silver screen: I will, if finding myself with free time, happily spend the whole day (and most of the evening) watching Science-Fiction series in a back-to-back orgy of rapt viewing or working my way through a set of films whilst shovelling unconscionable amounts of sugary or salty snacks into my yawning maw. It’s definitely not pretty, and doubtless appalling for my health, but I console myself with the platitude that at least I’m honest about it.

I’m also a child of my generation, and having grown up alongside the Internet in its infancy and PC gaming in its first golden age, am (like most of my peers) addicted to my computer, be it for social interaction or entertainment. I belong to several online communities whose members I consider as close as family, and have a range of confidants whose irksome habit of living in other hemispheres makes Facebook and Skype de rigeur. I also have a subscription to Good Old Games  to relive the nostalgia of my youth and, like any fully-fledged member of the PC master race, have a healthy Steam library to keep me up-to-date with the current rash of must-have digital diversions. This is not helped by having a partner from the continent, whose main method of keeping up with her brother and their friends, is to head onto Skype in the evenings and then play Guild Wars together.

Now by this point, you’re probably wondering how things could get any worse and, being such an indolent wastrel, how I manage to get anything done, let alone writing, but I do have one, final, shameful vice to share…

As sad as it is to admit for a man in his mid-thirties, I like to play with toy soldiers. I have done since the age of 10 when, growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, I was sucked into that boyhood staple of the geek fraternity: Warhammer 40,000. Personally I blame my parents, who got me started with Airfix kits and Castle Lego, the gateway drugs to full war gaming addiction, and seeds which found fertile ground in the mind of a young boy who’d grown up with a Science-Fiction and Fantasy enamoured father. Flick forward two-and-a-half decades, and more often than not, when free time presents itself, I can be found at my desk, old episodes of Dr Who playing on my PC, the work surface littered with power-armoured arms and legs, steampunk ships and zeppelins, exotic weapons, paintpots, and pin drills, busily constructing or painting my latest, diabolic war machine.  My study is filled to bursting with miniatures from Games Workshop‘s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, as well as Spartan Games‘s Dystopian Wars and Dystopian Legions, and I have to fight the urge on a weekly basis not to buy into half-a-dozen new systems. This is made especially difficult by the current (Internet-induced) renaissance being enjoyed by tabletop gaming, the plethora of new technologies churning out ever-more beautiful figures, and Kickstarter which makes it all too easy for talented people, with marvellous ideas, to attempt to part me from my money.

So, next time you’re shaking your head, and marvelling at how it can take one man so long, to write a simple book, spare a thought for the above: It’s not my fault, honest…