A good days work

Today I roughed out the covers for my trilogy of books that I have been working on. Autobiographical/lessons learned/philosophical in nature - I have nearly finished the first one. Hopefully it will be finished in a month or so from now, with the others following by mid next year. I am fairly excited about this project and have had quite a bit of encouragement from the few people who knew about it. If there is interest, I may drop a few excerpts into this blog every now and then.
I will self-publish a small first run for students and friends before I offer it to a mainstream publisher. Most likely it will be for sale on this site. Geoff Thompson (for those in the know) has offered to write the forward to it. I am pumped.
Best wishes,
JBW

Here's a small excerpt from Book One - chapter Five:

'Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people, the universe, it seems, has a sense of humour. We shouldn’t be upset by this – because wherever you are is exactly where you need to be. That place, that event, that trauma or that success will have something important to teach you. Stuff happens, it is how we deal with it and learn from it that can define us as human beings.

Ambushed

A few months before my schooling was to finish I had a real setback. There was a big party at a close friends place, and I was moping around in the front yard by myself whilst most of the party was happening inside or around the back of the house. A friend of mine had just suicided and I was trying to sort out my feelings about it when four big guys walked through the front gate.
I should have figured out that something was wrong as this group were all four or five years older than most of the people at the party; but at this time of my life I was not all that street-smart. They came up and asked if they could join the party – I told them that it wasn’t my party and I would have to ask the host, I turned my back on them and began to walk toward the house – bam!
If you have ever been hit across the back of the head with a length of water-pipe, you’ll know what I mean when say ‘ouch’! I didn’t see the pipe coming at the time, though it was found in the front yard later on. Certainly, it accounted for the split in my skull, that kept me in bed for a week afterward.
I don’t remember much about what happened in the moments that followed. My memory begins with me sitting astride one of the bastards doing the concrete jackhammer routine. I did have the presence of mind though, to momentarily cease my pounding and lay one into the window that was just within reach; knowing that the sound of breaking glass would attract attention from inside the house. It worked, because within seconds it seemed, the whole house had emptied and the fight was being broken up. Then things became rather surreal.
A heaving circle had now formed with two combatants standing in the middle; me with a cracked skull that no-one knew about, and my leather-jacketed assailant standing opposite me. His other three mates had faded into the masses and so I guess it must have looked like a fair go between a teenager and a biker. The adult in charge, father of my friend, gives the guy an ultimatum ‘leave now or I am going to let John loose at you!’ My brain did a 360 inside my skull. My friends father was insane. Couldn’t he see that I had just been pounded by four guys? Didn’t he realize that I had my skull split with a length of pipe? Can’t he work out that I would really rather lie down and take a nap? Apparently not. The guy told him to ‘fuck off’; and so the next words out of my friends fathers mouth just topped the night right off – “Get him John!’
Engine on. Away again. I shot in for a double leg and slammed him down hard. Mounting on top of such a big heap of crap was difficult; my knees hardly hit the ground. I began pounding his head for the second time that evening; and the last thing I remember, was trying to get the blood that was pouring out of my skull to drip down into this bastards eyes. That’ll really fix him I thought.'