The Birth of Birth (Part 1)

 

(Also published on my substack page here)

"Birth" my debut novel has taken twice as long as my longest poetry book to write 'From the Diabetic Ward' to complete.

'Birth' like ‘From the Diabetic Ward,’ is a book which went through all kinds of drafts over a lengthy period to write and finally complete and started as a short story before taking a life of its own.

The book itself of course is not an autobiography for example when I was 17 or 18 I didn’t have the confidence to front a 5-piece band and I didn’t meet my first girlfriend until I was 21 but instead is total fiction.

Well, fiction in the sense of the story is fictional but the area Chorlton Cum Hardy where it is set is, of course, a real-life area in South Manchester, where I grew up during my childhood and teenage years is true and the memories of the area are set around the same time in the early 1990s is true which I hope takes it away from being just another book of a young person becoming a writer and how their writing increases in volume and quantity where something pushes it like an emotional trigger.

Despite the fact I have been writing since I was 10 or so in one way or the other and had a brief burst at university I didn’t really start writing regularly until 2007 and 2008 when I started reading my work out to people regularly and when that happened my poetry exploded over-night.

I can remember for example going to a writing workshop in 2010 one afternoon when on a half day from the day job and I wrote 8 poems in 2 hours, most of which were certainly worthy of reading and some also submitting (2 of which got published), which two years before would have took months to write now got wrote in a few hours.

In hindsight, most of these poems were ill-thought-out and were what they were, but the point behind entering the local poetry world unlocked a trigger in my head which hasn’t gone away since

And that is the point behind Birth.

The book can be found at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Birth-Andy-N/dp/B0CM62VJVQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1S1P4F5PO6OB9&keywords=andy+n+birth&qid=1699223157&sprefix=andy+n+birth%2Caps%2C589&sr=8-1