Bear Faced Bloggery

Sound the trumpets! Hoist the flags! Pop the champagne! My second novel is finished! (Or as finished as it can be, given that the lot of the writer is constantly to edit, tweak, substitute words, rearrange sentences, cut bits and add bits... for goodness sake, why can't we just let it go?) I am well aware, of course, that my first novel is still doing the rounds, trying to find a publisher, but we can't let a little thing like that stop us from forging ahead with other projects, now can we? To give it its due, this current manuscript should rightly be referred to as the first, as the early part of it was written a good many years before its younger sibling, but way back then it was, at 45,000 words, novella length. I sent it to an agent who liked it, but asked for substantial rewrites which I felt I simply did not have the time to do, what with trying to forge a career in the theatre and everything. So it got shelved, something that now, of course, I bitterly regret, as had ...

Welcome to this, my first attempt at Blogging! To those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself... my name is Kevin Burke. I have lived with that name all my life, through good and bad, thick and thin. At school it did me no favours,  (though there was also a Pratt in my class, so I'll leave you to ponder on who got the most ribbing) but this inevitably led me to mount a fierce defence of the name whenever it came under fire. There have been several times in my life when I had the chance to ditch the name, but perhaps because of the struggle I'd had with it throughout my formative years, I have always stuck with it. When I fulfilled my ambition of becoming an actor I had the great good fortune to be able to keep my name, even though had there already been a Kevin Burke registered with Equity, the actor's union, I would have been forced to change it. Then, when I moved into the world of entertainment, I passed up the opportunity to take a stage name o...