From Perdition to Salvation Step By Step

Back on track on a journey that started a long time ago.

In 1984 I came out of university and I took a wrong turn. I went right instead of left. I fell for the seductive allure of filthy lucre and sold my heart and my soul to the devil himself. Having said that, I have no regrets. It’s not a bad idea to learn how Beelzebub operates. The seventh Prince of Hell pays good money and at that time I needed the muddied pay dirt from Hades that was being offered.

I knew what I wanted, but that wasn’t what was on offer. So I took what was being offered and the rest, as they say, is history.

What I wanted was to be a writer. And a writer is what I became. A copywriter working for advertising agencies and newspapers is what I was and a well paid one at that. However, this type of work didn’t fill my soul as it did my ever bulging bank account. And so on it went for many years. Years of economic prosperity, growth and property acquisition. Years of spiritual degradation and emotional torture. I was lost in an economic theme park and I didn’t know the way out. It didn’t matter as it all came crashing down of its own free will anyway.

The bad times in our lives are the uninvited guests who come gatecrashing into our life party and turn the whole fiesta base over apex. And it is at times like these that we find out who left the party early, running as fast as lightning, and who was still standing, covering our back when all that was left was a long, slow painful wait for the fat lady to begin her legendary aria.

Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, so-called friends bailed out and left me stranded on the muddy sandbanks of what had once been a green, verdant land. I ended up just one step from skid row, not a penny to my name.

That was the time when I had nothing left to lose, the time that I really should have got back onto my original track and be the writer I had always wanted to be. However, I yearned for the good times, even if it meant doing the fandango with Lucifer himself. Eventually, I did manage to make a good recovery, but I hadn’t reckoned on Satan sending me some voluptuous sex siren he had primed and waiting to meet a gullible fool like me. I got bitten by the same snake twice.

She did his bidding and made him proud in fleecing me of all that I had managed to salvage from my first fall from grace. Even worse this perverse narcissist set out to destroy the golden goose that she thought that I was and didn’t let up for the best part of a decade. Eventually, like Prometheus with Zeus, she grew tired of tearing out my liver every single day only to see me grow a new one overnight. She headed for the hills that have eyes with the treasure that was our son and hath not been seen since.

Then lo and behold along came a true Princess with a hard-earned dowry and a heart as big as a bucket. She came in the nick of time to save my life and set me on the road to recovery and renewed prosperity Only this time, it is prosperity of spiritual and emotional enlightenment and fulfilment.

And so here I am, the writer I had always yearned to be with pockets full of twenty-four-carat literary gold and a silk quill to dig it out with. Life doesn’t get any better than at last finding yourself on the right road.

And with me on that road is an angel guarding over me every single step of the way, all the way to the Elysian Fields. I feel like Endymion being watched over by his lover, the moon goddess Selene.

Or to put it another way, " Amazing grace, once I was lost, but now I am found." I believe that I am now producing some of my better work. The best is yet to come. And I look forward with rapture to a long and enduring career and life as a writer of some merit here on Illumination..