Writing Bio – M. David Frost
My
writing career started back in the days of the hot-metal press, when
typewritten words were transformed into print by big clanking
Linotype machines. The operator typed lines of words which the
machine spewed out as slugs of metal. These were manually laid out to
produce each page of a newspaper by trial and error.
I
served my wordsmith apprenticeship as a junior reporter on an
evening paper in the north of England,
hammering away against the clock on a mechanical typewriter. Then I
became a junior sub-editor, learning how to cut, rewrite and check
grammar and spelling, and searching for factual errors. In those
pre-Internet days my research resources were limited to well-thumbed
copies of reference books such as Burke's
Peerage
and Crockford's
Clerical Directory.
In
the 1980s I was an early convert to word processors. My
first computer
had no hard-drive memory at all – if you switched it off without
saving everything to a floppy disk, your work was gone forever. One
publication that I wrote for, a lifestyle and listings magazine
published by a forward-looking workers' co-op, accepted articles on
disks.
Then
the features editor of a newspaper that I was contributing articles
to suggested that I should link myself to their computer system by
phone. By then the Internet did exist, but only as a semi-private
network used by the military and academics in major universities, so
the solution was a little modem, plugged into my computer and the
phone line. It took three minutes to send a 1,000-word article.
Over
the years I've written as a freelance on subjects as diverse as art,
picture framing, textiles, computers, Spain, Islam, Arabic affairs,
pubs, canals, politics, business, tax havens, jazz and and even
soccer, despite the fact that I've no interest at all in any sport
(except politics, although now only as a spectator sport).
However,
one of the three editors of the workers' co-op – an over-democratic
organization – asked me to write an
article on a soccer school for kids. I really didn't want to do it,
but I went, and straightaway found an angle which aroused my
interest. A kid called Leslie in Alaska had once applied for a place
at the school, and everyone had assumed that the application was from
a boy. But Leslie was a girl. They couldn't send her back to Alaska,
and had to make arrangements to train her, the first girl ever on the
course. So I had my story, which concentrated on the big proportion
of girls by then taking part in the training sessions.
For
years I was a writing mercenary; anything for money as long as it
wasn't racist, sexist or homophobic. I even edited a newsletter for a
rightish libertarian readership, despite my own leftish politics.
But
now I have the urge to write something more lasting.
Below
is a list of some of what I've had published. It's incomplete because
I've excluded some items which were unpaid or for low-circulation
publications, or simply because I can't remember the details, or
others I've no doubt forgotten about. But I'm still an unpublished
novelist and unperformed playwright. Also I've written two travel
books about Spain which have yet to interest a publisher or even an
agent, even though I've sent out more than twenty query letters so
far (mostly by email – it is possible these days). At present I'm
working on a radio play. The
BBC still broadcasts more than 300 radio
plays
a year, although many of them now come from independent production
companies.
Published
Work
Articles:
Articles:
- Shields Gazette, South Shields, England. Many articles and news stories, every day when employed full-time as a reporter.
- Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. (Absolutely nothing to do with Scientology.) Op-ed, nothing religious.
- North West Times, Manchester, England. Three or four features a week, usually with a photo.
- City Life, a lifestyle and listings magazine published by the Manchester Evening News, the UK's biggest regional newspaper outside London. An article in every issue, always with a photo.
- Artful Reporter, an arts magazine in Manchester, England. Articles about art.
- Textile News, Picture Framing World and other trade magazines in London and Manchester, England. Specialist articles, usually technical.
- Sur in English, a weekly newspaper in Málaga, Spain. Op-ed.
- Freedom, Wealth and Privacy, a newsletter for expatriates published by Night Sky Ltd, St Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. Articles about offshore tax havens, second passports, etc. Also edited the newsletter for several years.
- Gulf Business News, Gulf Financial Insider and Bahrain Confidential, published by Arabian Magazines, Manama, Bahrain. Mainly business articles, under my own name and various Arabic pseudonyms.
- Rough Guides, London, England, and Lonely Planet Publications, Melbourne, Australia. Factual contributions to travel guides.
Books:
- Travel guides to London and the UK for Capital Guides Arabia, Manama, Bahrain.
- About thirty full-length non-fiction books for a mail-order publisher, Casuti Ltd, St Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. I sold the copyright outright – no royalties.
- Ghosted for private publication.
Internet:
- Edited and designed a website – Teach English in Saudi Arabia – for Al Rajhi Company, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with my own photographs and including a section about my experiences in Saudi Arabia.
- And of course I wrote and designed this website myself.