Sad or Bad?

This week’s short story offering is called Jack. I wrote this story as part of my creative writing course in 2009. The brief, if I remember rightly, was to write a story about an unsympathetic character from their point of view.

The inspiration for Jack is based on somebody I knew. In reality he was a bit of a rogue, although his heart was in the right place. When I was writing this story I had to work hard to tone down the pleasant parts of his character and emphasis the worst bits.

It’s quite tricky writing about someone you don’t particularly like, and I spent a long time trying to get the balance right. In the end I think he’s a sad and disillusioned man, rather than a bad one.

So even if you don’t end up liking Jack, I hope I’ve managed to portray some humanity in him, leavened with a bit of humour. Let me know what you think.

Other than editing Jack this week, I’ve been planning how to go about structuring the family history/book project. I want to try to go back at least eight generations, there’s three generations worth of us still alive today, and another five will get us safely back to the late eighteenth century. If we can research ten generations we could get back to the 1700’s which would be even better.

If we manage to unearth all the family records and limit the people we write about to the immediate family ten generations would take in at least 270 people. If we add siblings of people in the direct line, who knows.

I think there’ll be some adventures on the way, and I hope something worth writing about on this blog.

Next week’s post is a photo essay of the legendary steam engine, The Flying Scotsman. I was luck enough to see it return to York in February last year after a multimillion pound refit, and I got some good photographs.

Regards

Dave