Unless I pull my act together, and soon, I need to stop calling myself a writer. Compared to what I did, and could and should do, I'm a writer in the same way that fishermen are swimmers. I'm paddling. Standing at the edges, maybe dipping a rod in and hoping for a nibble, but....no, I lost the image. Sorry.

But here's the thing. The past week, I've been going through some soul searching. Once I found it, battered and slightly soiled under a box full of Japanese sushi serving sets I've used twice, I took a decent look at it. And it's a crappy thing to do after a couple of years, when you think it's all progressing and everything's going well, but then you find out that it's not, and it's definitely not.

I decided I was going to be a writer in 2009. Or rather, I found it again. I realized I enjoyed it, I'm not terrible at it, and it's much cheaper and more satisfyingly frustrating than therapy. 'I'm going to be a writer" was my declaration to the world that year.

And I was going to be. Hammered out the first draft of a novel in six and a bit months. Got three quarters of the way through the second book in a series of three within a year, while I was waiting for someone who is almost family and almost a professional editor get back to me about the first book.

It wasn't her fault I stopped. It was Ira Glass's. Or rather, He does a great speech about why people give up. I read my own shit, and just wasn't happy with it. It wasn't what I wanted it to be, wasn't as good, had holes I didn't know or want to bother filling. So I moved on, put it in a folder on a hard drive and pretended that it was exactly where I wanted it to be.

But then this week, I've had an itch under my skin that's impossible to scratch. A feeling. An uncomfortableness with where I am. Because doing some spring cleaning of my hard drive, I found the folder, and the files, each chapter labelled and ready to be edited. And the last time I even opened any of them was in Two Thousand and Fucking Ten. Three damned years ago.

Now, it's not like I've done nothing in the intervening time. Three screenplays, five shorts (one of which we actually filmed and is so close to being done), an In Memoriam (one of the worst things I've had to write), stage play, and countless work emails and crappy blog posts.

None of it was the trilogy though. And finding them shook me.

(Can you really find something that isn't lost? I mean, in the back of my mind I always knew I had this folder with these documents with these character and events and emotions and actions and all, but I was ignoring their existence. But I digress).

Two Thousand and Fucking Ten. Seeing that in the last opened, and actually reading what I wrote distant years ago, shook me. There were all these people, people I'd created, and cared about, and rewarded or treated like shit depending on what sort of day I'd had or booze I'd drunk, and they were waiting for me. Here's the thing though. They're only waiting for me if I finish. If I continue the stories, the threads of their lives, then they've been waiting. But I don't finish them, take them to where they're headed (I still remember what's going to happen to them all), then what have I done?

They're not waiting; they're dead. And If they're dead, I murdered them. Created these characters, these people, and led them on a twisted dance, and abandoned them mid-dosey doe. And I don't know if it's worse to murder someone, or to make them dance a dose doe. So in the interests of doing neither, I'm going to try and get back into it. Reacquaint myself with these buggers that took on lives of their own, and filled my life for a good year or so. Watch this space for updates, word counts, and all other sorts of boring things that I need to do to remind myself that I'm progressing.

Not that anyone's actually going to read this. I've noticed the best time to post, for optimum views, is around 1030am, right when everyone takes a break at work. So being 1030pm, I'm assuming you're all responsible and in bed. Good for you. You're not Tomar, working towards the second mission, or Brokes, trying to hold the first mission together while light years from home.

But then if you were, I'm about to do some horrible things to you.