Life... With No Breaks (A laugh-out-loud comedy memoir)
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Authors: Nick Spalding
Life… With No Breaks
Nick Spalding tried to write a book in 24 hours. Turns out that’s impossible... it took 30!
Life… With No Breaks is a unique, hilarious and heartfelt look at the modern world we live in today, told by a master story-teller with much to say and only a weekend to say it in.
You’ll laugh out loud reading Nick’s odyssey of non-stop writing in a collection of anecdotes, asides and stories - all dredged up from an over-stimulated brain functioning on caffeine, nicotine and the occasional chocolate biscuit.
The book is a conversation with
you,
and with Nick you'll venture into the thorny topics of love, life, sex, horribly timed bowel movements and a deathly fear of sponges (among many other things).
After you've read Life... With No Breaks, you may never look at the world the same way again!
By Nick Spalding:
Life… With No Breaks
Life… On A High
Love… From Both Sides
The Cornerstone
Spalding’s Scary Shorts
Love… And Sleepless Nights
Buy Nick’s books:
Copyright © Nick Spalding 2010
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Racket Publishing
Revised four times
This Kindle edition published 2011 by Racket Publishing
The rights of Nick Spalding to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Life… With No Breaks
Nick Spalding
Racket Publishing
Chapters
6.00pm
0 Words
Getting started.
Some would tell you it’s the hardest part of writing a book.
They’re wrong, though. Starting is a piece of cake. Keeping it going is the difficult bit.
Like having sex when you’re over seventy, I’d imagine.
I have no clue how the idea for a book like this came to me. It’s not something I'd planned to do. It just popped into my head this morning while I lay in bed.
I had a massive erection as well, but I’m pretty sure the two weren’t connected.
Inspiration is a funny thing. There you are, merrily stumbling your way through the day, thinking about nothing more important than fixing the damn guttering before the weather caves in - when
bam
! …inspiration hits you between the eyes, sending you into a whirlwind of creativity.
The urge to write is something I’ve been short on of late and my fledgling career as a professional writer - one good enough to make a few quid and sound interesting at dinner parties - has stalled somewhat.
I thought I faced the legendary writer’s block, which involves much bemoaning of lots and imbibing of intoxicating spirits.
Happily, I avoided all of this when I woke up thinking:
What if I just sat at the computer and started to write, without a plot or story and no idea where the thing was going? How would it turn out? What would I write? And most importantly… would I end up regretting it?
What you’re about to read is the result.
I’m sat at my desk in the study upstairs, the laptop open in front of me - it’s a Dell Inspiron 1525 dual core processor with 2gb of RAM, if you’re interested in that kind of detail… and if you are, please try to get out more, the sun will do you good. I’m in a fairly comfortable office chair that makes a mournful sighing noise when you lower it and the heating is on because it’s been chilly today and I don’t want to get blue toes.
A large flask of coffee stands beside me and I will continue to drink from it even when the contents inside get cold and bitter. I also have various snacks to keep my stomach from rumbling - none of them the low-fat variety, which isn’t going to help the spare tyre one bit - and the fridge is full, so I can raid it when I need to.
A row of new cigarette packets - replete with enormous health warnings - stand to attention like soldiers, waiting to mount another assault on my delicate lung tissue. They’re accompanied by an ashtray stolen from the local watering hole, big enough to contain all the butts I’ll crush into it as I try to massage the brain cells into creating a coherent narrative.
Here I am, at nine minutes past six on a drizzly Saturday evening, with every intention of writing a book in one sitting.
No breaks, no brainstorming sessions to sketch out the next plot development on The Simpsons notepad I’ve got on the desk, and no time set aside to sit back and digest the quality of my prose.
Just me, my keyboard and good intentions.
It’s seat of the pants stuff, I can tell you.
I will not stop until I am done!
Unless there’s a power cut.
I may have to get up every once in a while to get rid of the coffee in the little boy’s room, but you’ll forgive me that won’t you?
I haven’t a clue how long I’ll last… no concept of how long my brain and fingers can keep up the pace without going on strike due to physical fatigue or mental breakdown.
Ten pages?
A hundred?
A thousand?
How many hours can I sit here with my arse gradually numbing and the ashtray forming a small mountain of cancerous by-product?
Two?
Twenty?
A hundred?
I’m hoping to get to a decent length for a book.
The kind that's long enough to get your teeth into, but isn't a daunting read. I’ll leave the doorstops to the Stephen Kings and Tom Clancys of this world. They’re far better at it than I could ever be.
As for subject matter, that’s as unknown to me now as I sit here typing, as it is to you at some point in the future, reading this on your e-book reader (or if I get very lucky one day - in hardback).
I can see you in my mind’s eye…
There you are… a few weeks, months or years down the road, maybe in your favourite armchair with the dog dribbling gently onto the new cushions… or in bed with your partner snoring gently beside you as the rain patters off the window, making you glad you’re at home in the warm.
You might be asking yourself:
Where the hell is he going with this?
And perhaps more importantly:
Will there be a point? Will it have purpose? In short… have I just wasted my hard earned money on a book I could have bought some chocolate with?
And there’s got to be a point to a book hasn’t there? Even one written totally off the cuff like this is.
As I sit here tapping away on the keyboard, I’ve decided to make it a conversation with
you
, the person kind enough to download Life…With No Breaks and dedicate their valuable time to reading the thing.
It’ll be a one-sided conversation admittedly - with me doing all the talking and you occasionally nodding, smiling and agreeing with me when my views happen to coincide with your own.
If you’re in public, try not to nod or smile too much, unless you like having a personal exclusion zone of ten metres around you and being thought of as ‘the weird one standing on platform two’.
I want us to be friends, of a sort.
Call it a secret friendship, caught in the pages of this book. The kind you don’t tell people about for fear of sounding a little strange.
A friendship across time if you will, with me sitting here in a slightly threadbare grey t-shirt, a Marlboro Light hanging from my mouth - and you, wherever you may be, blocking out the world around you in that magical bubble we create when we’ve got our noses in a good book.
To make this process easier, you can imagine you’re here with me if you like - if that’s not too weird a proposition.
I’ve got another chair in the room. It’s also quite comfortable, but a little harder than the one I’m in.
Sorry about that: writer’s prerogative.
Feel free to take a snack. The cookies are particularly good.
I hope you like lukewarm coffee with one sugar, because that’s all I can offer.
If the smoking bothers you, feel free to crack a window.
I’ve got a menu for the kebab place down the road. They do deliveries, but I tend not to order from there much these days, ever since the guy over-charged me a quid for a chicken kebab with extra cholesterol.