A new direction of writing for me

What have I been up to?

I’ve noticed that it’s been nearly five years since I last posted on my blog. Since then, we’ve had that Covid clown show, declining economies, and a few crazy politicians with small penises trying to nuke us into the next galaxy.

I stopped doing any wildlife photography and leaned into urban photography in a big way, travelling around Europe and the US to grow my portfolio. I created four photography courses for one-to-one tuition in London and Brighton and kept myself busy by supporting my local cider hangouts while also paying penance for that at the local gym each week. I’ve written two photography how-to books covering the Basics of Photography and a Travel Photography book. Oh, and we got an awesome little dog (named Diesel) to bring more crazy to the household because there clearly wasn’t enough of that.

 

Running while standing still

My journey into writing started out like so many other authors –  doing a tonne of reading.

As this website reaches 120,000 words, I look back with so much gratitude at all the success and support I’ve had from you all. Historically, I’ve written a few pages about what it’s like to have a full-time writing life, but mostly, I’ve simply published fiction. I’ve had so much fun writing the Kyle Gibbs and Hudson Drake series, and while I’ve one more book for each series, I haven’t had the energy or drive to finish them. This lack of drive was due to a few key factors.

Like any man who has hit the half-century mark and then carried on driving through it, I found myself running out of steam a little for this thing called life. I have no clue when it started because it crept up on me like a ninja in marshmallow shoes.

Those who know me know I am not the sort of navel-gazer who feels sorry for himself or suffers from any of the self-induced victimhoods on social media today. I wrote off the lethargy to laziness and old age and decided to simply walk it off by working harder.

This didn’t work, of course, and I found myself getting angry at the small things and bored with pretty much everything else. I was too focused on my macro research from my desk, solving the world’s problems —a task I thoroughly enjoyed, of course. This continued for a few years as I watched other men moan about how nothing was the same since Covid, blah blah, blah.

I noticed other men like myself also struggling out there and realised that it wasn’t some external factor driving it. I have tried a few small things since leaving the IT Consulting career and the Wildlife Photography, all with mediocre success. There was something else at play here, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I kept blaming things like my introversion for my lethargy and apathy. It felt like I was just coasting, and I could not understand why, let alone force myself to feel good. I felt like the old rusty truck that belched white smoke when it started up in the morning and was creaking under the most menial of loads. A trade-in seemed like the only option, but I had no real option on how to help myself because I’d never been here before.

 

Journey from the Dark

One night, I stumbled upon an old music video on YouTube while exploring the nostalgia of being a teenager growing up in the 1980s. I was on the couch with the headphones on, finishing off a lot of tall cans of beer, when Bob Seger’s Like a Rock popped up, and I listened with glistening eyes. Epic artist. Epic song – about a man looking back at his eighteen-year-old self with admiration and grief.

It was all so bloody obvious. I had lost all hunger for life. Yes, I was busy producing a lot of good content, both in writing and photography. But I was going through the motions because I kept comparing myself to the much younger and wilder version of myself.

I had fallen into the trap most men over fifty fall into. We compare ourselves to our younger versions and reflect on the failed or aborted ambitions squandered back then. We look at all that early potential and then project forward to where we believe we should have been by now. The energy drains out of us the more we reflect on the past. We look back with a type of grief at the life behind us and then accompany that with trepidation at the life ahead. The future is a place where we won’t have time to do things we want because of time and [insert your own excuses here.]

I have kept a Bucket list and a Success list since I was eighteen. Don’t get me wrong; things were being moved from the bucket list to the success list, just very slowly. But nothing new had been added to the Bucket list during the last ten years. BAM. Another moment of clarity.

I’d had enough of this Sad Sack shit, so I looked around for something to help me with my state of mind. I stumbled upon Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset” and discovered that I had drifted from a growth mindset to a fixed mindset – and as it turns out, this was not the direction I wanted to be heading.

Then, by pure happenstance, a frequent occurrence in my life, the universe threw the pass that I simply had to catch. I saw that Tony Robbins was hosting a four-day, three-hour-per-day free webinar. I committed the time to working through what he had to offer, and it was so worth the effort. Within a few hours of completing it, I felt a reconnection with my drive and hunger. It was that simple.

Since then, I’ve been working hard on a new career in writing and producing content that I felt I could have used a long time ago. I have discovered a great deal about my short journey on this planet and have acquired a few tools that I could apply to myself to redirect my purpose and drive. The new goal is to help other men who are also stuck.

And that is the word to describe it, isn’t it? Stuck. I want to help men who are stuck between the unfulfilled life behind them and the perceived short time ahead, where they tell themselves they have no real place in the world of the young.

 

New direction

I’m working on a lot of content and mini-courses aimed at helping men like me. These will be in the form of articles, tips and tricks to help refocus the mind on the path ahead, where they are driven by a compelling future as they look for new experiences and interests. I became a Midlife Resilience Architect who wants to give men over fifty a set of blueprints. Something to kickstart a new phase that is just as exciting as their previous phase of life

 

Where to find me

Like a bad smell, I am pretty much everywhere: My two websites, most social media and a lot of book-selling sites that will have both short-form posts as well as long-form articles,

I’ll be writing on Medium a lot with free articles and also long-form articles, and also starting a Substack service for paid content that offers more detailed solutions with longer-form writing,

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