The Consolidation

It was late on a Wednesday evening and the writer’s day was done, except it wasn’t. He felt compelled to write an additional piece while his iPad appeared to have no objection.

His mug of coffee sat cooling on the desk next to him. He stared out of the window into the darkness of the evening. The realisation arrived in a dramatic swoop. There comes a time in any writer’s life when it is necessary to admit a simple, yet powerful truth. The writer sat upright in his chair, rattled by the thought, yet also intrigued by it.

He began to type, trying to catch the essence of what he’d just realised. One word rose to the top of his thinking: Consolidation.

The writer noted that he’d been running two blogs: andyhawthorne.uk and unreasonablelogic.uk for quite some time. One blog represented the columnist, while the other represented the storyteller. He stopped typing for a moment and drained his tepid coffee.

He started to type again. What had become increasingly apparent to him was that he wasn’t two things. He was one. A storyteller.

That left him in the precarious position of asking readers to read him in two places. And on reflection, that now seemed to be the wrong way to do things.

He paused again and thought about making more coffee. But the late hour suggested getting on with the writing would be a better idea, so he did.

The desire to write a column had tended to mean he wrote a story. Then, for Unreasonable Logic, a work of fiction would materialise, so he’d write that. The common denominator was there. He nodded. Storytelling.

He reread what he’d written. And worried. Did it sound a little pretentious? Calling himself a storyteller? A moment of staring out at the lights of Ryde Quay gave him the answer. No. Not at all. He wrote stories, ergo, he was a storyteller.

The writer nodded and muttered: “Yes, I must consolidate,” to nobody in particular. No more would he split his writing efforts. They would all appear in one place.

The writer looked at what he’d written. It seemed reasonable enough. So, from Friday, all his writing would appear at andyhawthorne.uk. Stories, columns, essays, radio scripts. The lot.

He nodded. A sensible decision. It had taken him two websites to arrive at it.