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FINDING GOLDEN NUGGETS


My name is Michael Dawes and this blog is about the books I have published and am about to publish.


To start: I always thought I wanted to write a book. Perhaps you have too. The one thing I needed to work out is what to write about. That sounds obvious, but it is not easy. In my case I knew I wanted to write fiction, because I knew I would enjoy creating characters and watch them have a life of their own on the page. Then there was the question of subject matter itself, the time and the location.
I went to a writing class in London. I found that the tutor, probably quite rightly, spent a lot of her time encouraging us to think about our own experiences and jot down some “golden nuggets”, as she termed them, which could inspire us to go further and develop a story. My own golden nugget was the recollection of some wrinkled, faded, old black and white photographs of a blacksmith's shop in Bristol, taken in the early years of the last century. It was a business that had been in my father’s family and I thought it would be an ideal springboard for a novel.

I decided that the 1920s would be the perfect backdrop. And so “A Manner of Walking” was born. This was published in 2018.
A follow-up novel, "Not Quite Behaving", was published in 2020.






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