Son of My Father - A Story in Twenty Chapter Headings

The memories of a sixties' child.  Everyone has a story to tell. Here's mine in twenty chapter headings. 

Chapter One — Just a Small Funeral. 

Chapter Two — The Mysterious Cyprus Album. 

Chapter Three —  Mam and Dad.

Chapter Four — Life at Number Thirteen.

Chapter Five — Tina.

Chapter Six — Little School.

Chapter Seven — The Little Old Lady Next Door.

Chapter Eight — The Divorce.

Chapter Nine — Son of My Father.

Chapter Ten — Big School.

Chapter Eleven — Related to a Film Star?

Chapter Twelve — The Family From Hell.

Chapter Thirteen — The Girl With Beautiful Eyes.

Chapter Fourteen — A Face From The Past.

Chapter Fifteen — Holidays In The Sun.

Chapter Sixteen — The End of Big School.

Chapter Seventeen — Making Plans For…

Chapter Eighteen — Exit Door.

Chapter Nineteen — Whatever Happened To…

Chapter Twenty — Frank.

Available on Amazon as an e-book, or if you are a member, it is "free" to read on Kindle Unlimited.

Son of My Father 

Charity shop book haul...another five for a pound haul.

Last Friday, I got another five for a pound haul of books from the charity shop that keeps on giving.

Let's see what I got this time.

All the ratings are from the Goodreads website.

1) QI Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. 3.91 average review rating. This is one of those factual books that you can dive in and out of as and when it suits. Originally published in 2010 it has hundreds of individual bits of trivia like what did Cornish wreckers do, and what is a brass monkey? Like the BBC TV series, many of the answers are not so obvious.

 

2) First Man In by Ant Middleton. 4.02 average review rating and 705 GR reviews (as of writing). The memoir of a Special Boat Services sniper and a No.1 bestseller, which you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a man's book, yet quite a few of the reviews on Goodreads were from women. Maybe because it is about the secretive world of conflict and war, I assumed it would be a “man” thing. GQ describe it as “fist biting fun”, I suspect that at the time it wasn't always fun for the writer.

Why Are Biographies So Popular? Are They?

I came across an article in The Guardian online that posed the question, “why are biographies so popular?”  I could ask, are they?  

I like to read biographies. Actually, I prefer the “auto” biography or memoir.  I do read biographies, but I am more inclined to go for the account actually written by the individual telling their own story. 

I feel that sometimes biography is used as a catch-all word that includes autobiography, biography, and memoir.  I quite like the Wikipedia definition of memoir.

Son of My Father: A Further Extract — The Bully and My Aston Martin

I had a friend at school by the name of Colin. Although we were the same age, he was quite tall and a lot bigger than me. I suspect that because of his size no one picked on him at school. We would often play football in the street opposite Number Thirteen. There were several garages with pull down sliding doors which we used as a goal. I'm sure the residents were overjoyed with the noise every time the ball hit the garage door.

Colin seemed a decent lad, but as the saying goes, appearances can be deceptive, as I was about to find out.

One day I invited him over to my house while mam and dad were out, and we ended up playing with my toy car collection made up of Matchbox, Dinky, and Corgi cars. Pride of place was a new car that Dad had just bought me, a James Bond 007 Aston Martin. A quick check on the internet tells me that back in 1966 this cost all of 3 old pennies. I think I was about seven or eight at the time, so I would have got mine in 1967 or 68.

As we were playing, Colin took a liking to my new car. At one point he said to me, “do you want this?” I thought he was joking and just laughed. There were loads of cars in my toy box, but Colin only seemed to be interested in my new James Bond car. When I asked for it, he just said no and carried on playing with it. He seemed to especially like the passenger ejector seat, which shot out of the roof. He wouldn't give me the car. I asked for it again and his reply took me by surprise.

The conversation went as follows…

Spared

2023 has started with a bang in the world of books.  Spare is a memoir written by the British Royal who chose to step back from his role, Prince Harry (ghost-written by novelist J. R. Moehringer.) Released on the 10th January 2023, it has caused a stir, and not just in Royal circles.  

This is my first blog post, and it is not my intention to review or write about Harry's book, as I have not read it.  Instead, I write about it in the context of my own memoir writing experience, which coincidentally meant that my first book, Son of My Father, was more or less published at the same time.  

Actually, my book was published as an e-book on Amazon the week before Christmas, 2022.

Now, the first big difference between my book and Spare is that mine was self-published with no fanfare. Self-publishing used to be called vanity publishing and not encouraged.  The traditional route, if the book is any good, is to go through a publisher.  That can be a lot of hard work.  Many a good author has had their work rejected only to eventually find success. Self-publishing was the easy option for me, and Amazon (and others) do make it reasonably easy to do that.

There is one big drawback to self-publishing.  Your new book is one of thousands. How do you get it noticed?  I did not publicize it at all.  It sat there in the Amazon store waiting for someone to take notice and buy it.  Compare that with the 400,000 copies Spare sold on the first day.  No surprise in that given all the publicity it received and the fact that this was a book spilling the beans on Royal life. The BBC report that it has become the UK's fastest selling nonfiction book since records began.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64226729

I would have been happy with forty copies sold on the first day.  Over the moon.

I will have more to write about Son of My Father in due course, but for now here is the Amazon link.

Son of My Father