• Main
  • Fiction
    • Going Back
      • One Hour Before
      • One week before
      • June 1978 – an extract from Going Back
    • Shore Leave
      • Shore Leave – an extract
    • A Little Bird Told Me
    • The Tip Run
    • Damnation’s Cellar
    • Tender Blue
    • The Flyer
    • Middletown Dreams
    • Morningside Crescent – an extract
  • Non Fiction
    • Dear Friends
    • 50 Musical Memories
    • Rediscovering Rush Intro
      • Rediscovering Rush
    • Left-handed under the Iron Curtain
    • Let’s do the show right here…
    • Home away from home – Alba
  • About
  • Blog
  • The 60at60 index
  • Mastodon
Richard Watt

About

Richard Watt, writer of fiction and non-fiction

Richard Watt was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1962. He has a degree in Linguistics from Edinburgh University, and has spent much of his working life in sales and IT. Richard’s writing career took off when he became a regular contributor to the Prince George Citizen newspaper with his Dear Friends columns, written during the process of moving to the northern BC city in 2006. Since moving to Canada, Richard has had flash fiction accepted by 365 Tomorrows, and published his first full-length novel, Going Back, in June 2013.

Richard is also a qualified soccer coach, and has spent a considerable amount of time squinting into a low sun, shouting at teenagers.

Readers of the Dear Friends letters will know that Richard has been married to Zoë since 1986. They have two sons and a large elderly cat.

The ‘Getting To Back’ blog:

‘Getting To Back’ was a series of blog posts related to the process of completing and publishing ‘Going Back’.  It has now been incorporated into Richard’s general blog.  This is the description of ‘Getting To Back’ as it stood when the book was published in 2013:

This blog is designed as a kind of portable writer’s desk – I’m working (slowly) on a novel tentatively entitled Going Back, and I wanted a place where I can keep records, potentially post useful links and so on when I’m not at my desk, and generally meander on about random elements while I’m supposed to be working.

The Story So Far…

Once upon a time, I went to Germany on a bus.  Nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened (aside from the things you imagine happened), but what if it had?  What if, during this trip, some of us had our lives changed permanently or temporarily; what if there were still repercussions 25 years later?  What if someone’s life wasn’t what he thought it was?  What if the lives of those he met were darker and more complex than he could have imagined at the time?  What if he had suppressed large parts of what happened and accidentally found them trying to find out who he had been?

What if he met the one person who could unlock his past and help him get to the bottom of the secrets he didn’t know he was keeping?

And then what if I wrote a story about it?

Well, that was the general idea.  a short story about someone going back to revisit the place he dimly remembered from his school trip.  Except, it turned out that the story was a little bigger than I realised.  Characters and situations kept emerging and demanding to be heard.  The mildly diverting short story grew to be a vast monster, some 150,000 words long, and still growing.

And then…

In the summer of 2009, I had something I was happy to let people see, read, and criticize.  I knew it was flawed, particularly in the structure of the second part.  I had too many voices telling the same story, and I needed to cut large chunks of it just to make the story work.  However, several things happened to me that year, and the end result has been 2 years of hiatus.  Now, I want to get back to my story; to read and engage with it again, to see if I have overdone the coincidences, or underdone some of the characters; to see if the sense of time and place I thought I had a handle on is still there, or whether I need to rewrite even more drastically.

And I’m going to make that process somewhat visible.  I’m not fooling myself; no-one outside my family and friends has heard of me, and the audience for this book is – right now – vanishingly small.  Maybe having bits and pieces online will change that; probably it won’t.  But I will finish this book, and I want to be proud of it, not fed up with it.  So if there’s anyone out there who feels like helping, commenting, supporting, whatever – feel free.

I will put chunks of it up on here (or link to chunks if appropriate) as I go along; some of them will act as a kind of progress chart; some of them will form a kind of museum of discarded remnants.  I’ll rant about how life gets in the way of writing; I’ll post odd things which occur to me along the way.  But mostly, I’ll remind myself that this is worth doing, and I’ll make myself do it.

 

2 Comments

2 thoughts on “About”

  1. Gilian rowland says:
    September 11, 2018 at 1:42 am

    I hope this email will reach Richard as I can’t find a contact you page! Please will you email me and note spelling my Christian name ie only one L in gilian! I am doing some family tree work and see that you have info on Alfred Thomson Webster who my Aunt married. Just out of interest would like to find info and in particular his family in America. His Obit mentions a son and daughter.

    I have been working on another side of the family from Wales which hasn’t been easy with the repetition of not only surnames but Christian names and so many of them went to America and then settled in Canada – interesting social history. with thanks Jill

  2. Craig Cavanagh says:
    May 25, 2022 at 12:32 pm

    Now then Mr PG Don. Delighted to have stumbled across this a mere 17 years late. Looking forward to delving deeper into your suggestions. It is beginning to happen slowly with Rush and BOC down to you! Kind regards

    Cachonding Hispalis

    https://hganavac.wordpress.com/vinyl-ritchlie/

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Richard Watt

  • About
  • Home page

Archives

  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • December 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2016
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • December 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • March 2009
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005

Categories

  • 50 Musical Memories
  • 60at60
  • Beatles
  • Book Reviews
  • Dear Friends
  • Music
  • Pink Floyd
  • Rediscovering Rush
  • Shore Leave
  • Tangents
  • Work in Progress
  • Writing

Categories

CyberChimps WordPress Themes

© Richard Watt