Scott De Buitléir

2017 was a fantastic year for me as a writer, as I finally got around to publishing a collection of my poetry in Fás | Growth. I was also lucky to read some of my poetry at a literary night in Dublin, hopefully marking a return to the literary scene in Ireland.

2018, thankfully, already looks busy. I’m in the final stages of working on The Irish Outlander, and plans are underway at the moment to launch the new book in Dublin (and possibly London?) in March. I’ve also recently signed up to writing.ie as an Emerging Writer, and look forward to the opportunities that will come out of that.

I’ve also been very lucky recently. When I was in my early twenties, I started writing a novel about a young man who moved from rural Galway to Dublin for college, to learn more about himself than any lecture hall could teach him. It was a story that I loved writing, until I got about half way into my story. I had completed the beginning, and done some of the middle. I knew roughly how I wanted to finish the story, but I didn’t know how I would get to the finale.

Frustrated at my writer’s block, I left the story to one side, despite the efforts I had made to get that far. Then, life took over, and I forgot about it almost entirely. When I would be asked what happened to it, I would say it was either lost, or just in some dusty corner of my laptop, and I didn’t want to disturb it. At one point, I thought I had stored it on a memory stick for convenience, but then forgot where I put it.

A few weeks ago, though, I was lucky enough to find everything I wrote. Over 16,000 words, untouched for years, and waiting to be revived. Thankfully, I’m now ready to work on it again, as I’ve had enough time to meditate on where the story will go.

Once The Irish Outlander is released this coming spring, my next project is finishing and publishing my first novel, Gaytacht. Despite it’s Gaelic-looking title, the novel will be in English, and I intend to release it in the autumn. I’ll give more details away as I get closer to it’s release date, but for now, I’m delighted that I have renewed energy to work on a novel almost ten years in the making.

Happy New Year to you all! I hope to have you reading a lot in 2018.

 

Scott