Good evening, one and all, and welcome to my first entry on a brand new blog.
My name is Kevin G. Bufton and I'm a thirty year old husband and father-of-one from Birkenhead on the Wirral. I am currently working as a legal assistant for a local law firm but, in my heart of hearts, I know that it is just a way for to me to pay the bills. For as long as I can remember (certainly as far back as primary school) I have only ever had one dream job – a full-time, professional, published author.
Of course, primary school was a long time ago, which rather begs the question: "why has it taken over two decades to get this far?"
I could list any number of reasons for not achieving my dream – school and work commitments, friends and family, the birth of my son – but they would be excuses and nothing more. I know the real reason why I'm still an office worker and not an author and it's simply this...I'm too easily distracted by things outside of my writing.
That being said, I have managed to build up a small body of work over the years. I finished six short stories (all unpublished, regretfully); I wrote music reviews for the Leicester Ripple and the short-lived Insomnia e-zine; and, more significantly, I spent 18 months writing professional wrestling columns for a number of different websites.
However, the last of those columns was posted in December 2005, and I have written nothing of note since. I have had better reasons than usual for this lack of productivity – I moved house twice, changed jobs four times and welcomed my beautiful son into the world.
As I entered 2009, I decided that enough was enough. I had just turned thirty and, after a tumultuous couple of years, things are more stable than they have ever been. I've been trying to turn my dream into a reality for twenty years without much to show for it and I feel that, if I don't make a serious go of it now when everything in my life is so settled, then I probably never will.
And so, for the record, my writing career started on the 5th of January this year when I wrote my first story – a piece of flash fiction called 'In the Darkness'. I got that published in the Micro 100 e-zine, which was a huge thrill. Seriously there are few things in this world as awesome as seeing your name in print (albeit online) and it really gave me that extra kick to do some more.
Since then, I've had two more pieces of flash fiction published and I've also gone back to my roots, so to speak, and been a guest columnist for 411mania's weekly 'Fact or Fiction' column, which was great fun and, again, a personal high for me as 411mania was one of the sites that I always wanted to write a column for, but one that I never made it to.
And so here I sit, finishing the first entry to this blog. I've had a couple of stories published, which is a start and, more than that, I am pumped up and ready to move on to more demanding pieces of fiction. Will I succeed, or will I add another failed attempt at starting my writing career to the list?
There’s only one way to find out...
Wish me luck.
