A Hello From Me.

Hello, I’m Paul and I ‘m the author of ‘Frost Patterns’. It’s a book that has been six years in the making from when I had the first ideas, that developed somehow as a plan, Writing can be a long business! But writing is so interesting.

I’ve written education books before and I plied my trade in a classroom - a long way from the coal face in a colliery. That’s simply an accident of birth. If my mother had met a miner and not a clerk, who knows where I might have been now! I may have started as a miner, though of course I wouldn’t be now. The collieries have closed and there are good and very bad things about that - which I’ll explore in my sequel to ‘Frost Patterns’.

Then A book about my past came to mind, but I didn’t want to write non-fiction, or some kind of autobiography. Instead, I wanted to try what I believed for so long that I wasn’t capable of doing.

I’ve read widely and there are few classics that I haven’t devoured. There’s maybe a thousand novels that I’ve digested, but like many of us, I was cowed by the people I’ve read, thinking ‘I could never do that. And I couldn’t. I can’t write ‘War and Peace’, or ‘Ulysses’, or ‘100 years of Solitude’, my three favourite books; I’m not Leo Tolstoy, or James Joyce, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez! But I’m from a family that contained miners and I grew up on a coalfield, in Pontefract, in Yorkshire and my life has been shaped by my past and my experiences, as have all our lives.

As a result, a story arrived in my mind. A story into which I could weave some of my experiences and the experiences of my friends and family. ‘Coal’ was the result and ‘Coal’ morphed into ‘Frost Patterns’. The story became my first novel and I’ve done what I thought I couldn’t. It is said that there is a novel in everyone. Well, amazingly, there was in me and I hope you’ll like what I’ve written.

The fun for my friends and family and hopefully, for my readers, is figuring out the actual from the fiction! My life is not Terry, or Jim, or any of their friends, but parts of my life are in this book. I’ve woven my experiences to give you a flavour of what life on the Yorkshire coalfield was like, especially in the sixties, but the sequel will take you through the seventies and to the miner’s strike in the eighties and beyond.

Happy reading!

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