Well, it comes to us all.  What are the first signs of a natural end?  Now approaching my ninth decade it seems a promising idea to write a novel which takes the grumpy old man’s view and trace his eccentricities from his viewing platform on the edge of the end of his life.  This will be fiction so the canvass is without limit.

The first tenet I should hold on to is to avoid the autobiographical.  This is more difficult than it sounds.  Do I make the story of a wimp or a hero, a genius or a disenfranchised, poor or rich?  Above all will the story be happy or sad and what point am I trying to make to the reader?

Do stories have to have a point?  Literary fiction is sometimes more of a linear tale, mysteries are usually solved, though in ‘The Accidental Spy’ they were not. Horror novels frighten and some make us laugh.  Then, of course, there’s the vexed question of gender, can I write a book that is not too blokeish and that will appeal to both sexes and nowadays anything in between.

Bearing in mind the age of the author I had better be quick about it, so head down and off I go.  A new beginning towards just another end.