Welcome - and a confession

Before we go much further I think I'd better introduce myself.

Hello.

I'm Dave. Once upon a time, when I was a wee lad, an older person, as older persons sometimes do, asked me,
"And what do you want to do when you grow up ? "
I thought for a moment or two. Well, even when you're nine or ten , its a big question, isn't it ? After giving it due consideration I replied,
"I want to win Mastermind."
When this didn't provoke a response other than a raising of the eyebrows I thought I'd better add something,
"Oh, and I want to be a writer as well. "

The best part of 40 years later, and I've achieved the first of those. Yes, I won Mastermind back in 2008. I'm not going to go on about that - well, I'll try not to, anyway. But it is part of the story. You see, the urge to write is something which was there at a very young age, and has never gone away. John Lennon once said
"Life is what happens while you're making other plans."
It happened to me, certainly, and don't think for one minute that I'm complaining about it either. Still the demands of going through university, becoming a teacher, getting married and raising a young family did mean that writing became something which I stole time for, since it is , at best, rather a solitary pleasure.

So, lets fast forward to 2008, a few months after the broadcasting of my Mastermind final. I can't say exactly what it was that made me decide to create a blog. But I had the idea of making a blog devoted to my interest in quizzing, and my experiences in quizzing, and so on. For someone with pretensions as a writer its something of a matter of shame that I'd never before managed to maintain any sort of journal for more than a few weeks. But I created it anyway. Its called Life After Mastermind. I figured that the title might just intrigue a few people enough to make them read a bit. but I certainly wouldn't have been surprised if nobody had ever read it, and I'd given it all up in 6 months.

Well, three years, and hundreds of posts later, Life After Mastermind - LAM for short - is still going strong. I'm not going to bore you with statistics, and we're not talking about millions of visitors , but for what is essentially a specialist interest blog, the visitor numbers are very healthy.

If I never expected anyone to read it, I certainly never expected people to leave comments, or even to email me and tell me how much they enjoyed reading it. Now, if you write yourself, then my next comment will not come as a shock to you. But the fact is this - writing something , and having somone else a) read it without being asked to , and b) take the time and trouble to tell you that they enjoyed it, is one of the biggest thrills you can get.

Emboldened, then, by the positive feedback, I have kept up the blog, but also written other things besides. Hence the reason for this blog. Allow me to explain.

After a year or so, once the regular readership of LAM had reached significant numbers, I kept getting people leaving comments with links to commercial websites. I'd also get people emailing me and asking for a plug on the blog as well. My response has always been that LAM is not a commercial opportunity for anyone - me included.

This blog, on the other hand - I make no such claims about.

This blog is about the books that I have already written, which are commercially available to you, but also about the whole process I have undergone in writing them, and to keep you updated on the latest things which I'm working on.

Obviously I'm hoping that people reading about the books might be tempted to give them a try. But also I hope that you'll feel you want to share your own writing experiences as well.