A writer…reborn!

I often get asked how I became a writer. Read on, oh intrepid one… Lol!

For those that have been with me throughout the eight years that I’ve been writing and publishing my weekly blog you’ll know that it all started with me deciding to document my preparation for my hike across Papua New Guinea way back in 2011.

My dad passed away on Valentine’s day of that same year. Toward the end of dad’s illness my best mate Craig had taken a no “if’s, and’s or but’s” approach when he suggested we hike the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea in November of that year.

Given the arduous nature of the hike there was a significant amount of training involved as well as a full medical assessment.

As the date drew nearer to our hike I decided that it would be a great opportunity to raise money for Cancer Research in dad’s memory, and give something back especially after everything the hospital had done for dad during his illness in Australia.

And so I embarked upon a fundraising campaign with the help of the Canadian Cancer Society and Princess Margaret’s hospital here in Toronto.

With the kind and generous help of many of my friends, family, acquaintances and even strangers I was able to raise a whopping $17,500! Which is pretty amazing right?

So why did I decide to put pen to paper, so to speak…or finger to keyboard?

The impetus grew out of these generous donations and so decided that I should keep everyone abreast of my rigorous training regime in prep for the hike. This kept me focused on my training as well as brought everyone along for the ride so to speak.

Bold move, especially considering that I’d never written a word for others since my University days, and even then it was only middling at best. 🙂

However, once I got started writing it became obvious that I also had another, equally important task to perform.

You see, during dad’s illness I also realized that I knew little about him, and with limited time remaining was only able to glean a handful of stories from him about his life.

As I reflected on the parallels between my father and his relationship and me, and me and my two I realized that my writing could be a great vehicle to document the stories of my life for Zach and Sam and their kids so that if anything happened to me they’d have a fair grasp of who I was and some of the stories of my life.

Now deciding on where to keep these stories was a little tricky. If I saved them on a laptop or PC then over time these would be lost as this type of hardware has a technology shelf life.

So figured that if I saved them to a blog site then there would be a much better chance that they would be around for sometime potentially.

Over the ensuing years I’ve written three different blog series.

Blog Name	Year Published	Episodes
Kokoda Preparation	2011	17
Indelible Adventures	2012 – Present	384
Disheveled Musings	2014	41
Total	2011 – Present	442

As you can see I’m a consistent writer and publish my blog every week (Friday night to be exact). The Kokoda Preparation series got me hooked, before embarking upon my other two series over the ensuing years.

Indelible adventures has been by far the most popular series with over 575,000 readers, whereas the other two have collectively have just over 50,000 readers.

Not too shabby for someone who is not a natural writer, but has found a love for it. 🙂

All this is well and good, but I’ve had so much encouragement to write and continue writing and telling my weekly stories especially from Zach and Sam, not to mention all of my regulars. Yes, you know who you are!

I could never have guessed that writing would have become such an important part of my life. Especially given that I’ve also had the opportunity to publish two books.

The first book – Indelible Adventures is a collection of stories about my life growing up in rural Australia and published in 2014.

The second published in 2018 is a coupling of my two passions – writing and photography. Una Storia d’Amore is a collection of essays and photographs from my many trips to Italy in the form of a coffee table book.

If you’re interested you can purchase these books from any good bookseller worldwide. Here in Canada (Indigo-Chapters), in the USA (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, FriesenPress, and Worldwide (Ingram Wholesale). They’re also available on iTunes bookstore, Kindle bookstore and Google Books.

Yes, I know a shameless plug! 🙂

The most important thing is that always look forward to writing, and do so almost every day in one form or another. Strangely, I never seem to be short of a story to tell…

Until next week.

Ciao!