Body of Work

I was recently asked to send an editor a CV of all my writing work to date. Over the years, I’ve prepared many versions of my Curriculum Vitae, when applying for teaching posts, but I have never actually produced one detailing everything I’ve ever been paid to write.

To be honest, it made a nice change to big up the writing work which has normally been sidelined to a single sentence at the end of a concluding paragraph. However, I didn’t realise what a mammoth task it was going to be. Obviously the body of work I’ve produced is nothing like that of many authors, but once I started to catalogue every short story I’d ever written and annotated which anthology it had been reprinted in, suddenly 15 years of regular writing work began to fill up page after page of my brand new shiny writing CV.

Along the way I even re-discovered some work I had previously forgotten about(!) and after nearly three hours my latest magnum opus was complete. So I can now categorically inform you that I have had over 25 short stories published, 7 comic strips, 8 magazine articles, 7 adventure gamebooks, 7 novels and 1 non-fiction book. Oh, and I have had my work translated into six different languages (that I'm aware of).

But that’s not the end of it. As I type I am currently halfway through my eighth novel (with a ninth already commissioned) and I’m looking forward to working on at least another three books on top of that over the next six months. Suddenly the decision to give up full-time work and spend more time at my computer keyboard doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.