Ya gotta learn to walk before Ya can run!

How many times have you heard that statement?

Surprisingly it wasn’t a statement I heard very often growing up, or at least I don’t remember it much. As a teenager, things changed dramatically as I moved out into the wider world.

I was the quiet kid, the one nobody really noticed, at least not at first, then when they did, it wasn’t always good.

The school bully wanted to make a name for himself, so guess who was the target?

There was just one problem, see I grew up in a coal yard, from the age of about ten I was out on Saturdays filling sacks of coal ready for delivery.

112 lbs or 50 kgs (we were just switching over to metric). One filled and stacked every minute or so, ready for when Dad got back with the truck so we could load up for the Monday.

I wasn’t planning to confront a bully, I just wanted some pocket money, and Dad wanted to teach me the value of working for what you get (he told me he couldn’t afford pocket money, but he’d pay me to help him)

Learning ‘to walk’ with money before I ‘could run with it.

Back to the school bully.

I hadn’t planned on confronting him that day, or any other day for that matter! I’d just had enough.

If someone hits you, then hit them back, but harder!

MY Dad God bless him, best advice he could give me (and totally illegal today)

That’s what my Dad told me, probably a few days before.

But I didn’t go to school that day intending to have a fight with a bully, I’d just had enough, I wasn’t going to take it anymore. There was no anger on my part, least not that I remember. It’s just that I’d had enough, and it was time to make a stand.

I never realized it, but I’d done the ‘hard yards’ in getting ready. I’d been learning to ‘walk’ without even realizing it, and now it was time to ‘run’ with it, not run from it!

By the way, I never had to fight another bully in all my five more years at school, once was enough to send them the message. But the strange thing was this wasn’t even the thing that Dad was wanting to prepare me for! It was an ‘unintended consequence’ of ‘learning the value of work’

I wish I could say that Dad’s work in preparing me to be ‘financially savvy’ paid off, and I’ve never had to struggle money wise, that’s not the case. But one thing that did happen with learning the lesson (besides beating the bully up) was I always knew what rewards hard work, and some of the working ‘smarter not harder’ (you try filling a 40 Kg sack as a ten year old! It’s not easy even for a fully grown adult) has value.

But I had to learn how. and that meant learning to ‘walk’ before I could run and get up to the speed that I wanted to (I could bag two tons per hour) and that took practice.

The last few weeks in writing I’ve re-discovered those truths, I thought I was a writer producing good quality books, and they are, but thinking that it ends when the last word is penned is a big mistake nowadays, in many ways it’s just the beginning.

Today things are different, especially when you’re publishing independently, and even more so if you’re using Amazon. Today the writer wears multiple hats, and that takes some learning.

So I’m back to learning how to walk, and there’s so much to learn, but if we take the time, then just like when I enjoyed the freedom from stopping the bully, maybe when I learn what I need to know there’s going to be some ‘unintended (but good) consequences too.

Speaking of which, I have a favour to ask anyone who’s interested. The last few months I’ve been working on a story that I started quite a while ago but shelved because it was ‘too hard’.

I started back on it just after publishing ‘Scorpion’s Vengeance’ (the book above) and have been slowly plodding through, but not getting anywhere, then the other day I had a ‘light-bulb’ day. It suddenly dawned the story shouldn’t be a book, but two!

When I put them out on Hub Pages the stories were known by the title “Coyote” But I’ve changed the working title to “Refuge” as they deal with what happens to people who need to flee their country, but don’t meet the UN criteria (yes there is a Criteria for these people) of the Refugee, who do they turn to?

Book one is almost ready, but I’m hoping to find a couple of beta readers who’ll read through the story and give me feedback. Anyone interested?

If you are, then leave me a comment here saying “Yes please” or something similar. If you do then I’ll be in touch and hopefully you won’t mind going on a Mailing list for any other books I write.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks for your time with this’

Lawrence