Interview with Author Mike Singleton

Today, I'm excited to feature one of the most beloved members of our Vocal community: Mike Singleton.

Mike is a creator, analyst, lover of books, music and people, as well as a proud grandfather. He has been a blogger for 16 years and on Vocal for more than two.

Cendrine Marrouat: Hello, Mike! How did you get started as a writer? Any particular story?

Mike Singleton: Like many people I had always wanted to write a book, but when I first tried it was with a typewriter, then came computers, but I have always failed in that particular area. There are many book crashes in my past.

With the Internet, I started doing web sites, and was on Myspace and the like, and then a friend started a blog. He published two excellent articles and then stopped. Almost all my blogger friends started and then stopped, even the writers.

I created a site called Song of the Salesman featuring Music in Adverts and that was quite lucrative, but was essentially to demonstrate that I could create sites using certain technologies to help me get back into work. It did die off due to Shazam and the changing methods on how people listen to music.

I then started Seven Days In, which I saw as a travel blog but became a sort of online diary, and I wrote on that most days for about fifteen years. It is still going at the moment but is mostly notes on the books that I am reading, and for some reason is getting over 3K visits a day (robots from Singapore) at the moment. When Vocal came along, that kicked off my writing that people see now.

Until Vocal I had done little fiction and poetry, but the prompts from the challenges and the encouragement of friends that I met on Vocal have given me the confidence to write.

I never thought that it would happen but I have five self published anthologies on Amazon, so Vocal has enabled a dream of mine.

There is still no novel… yet.

CM: How does creativity speak to you? And how do you approach your writing process, especially as a poet?

MS: I really cannot explain this but I can say what happens. I have a Muse and speak to them every day. That just seems to release things for me. I will then see or hear something and a story or poem will come.

Before Vocal, I didn’t write much poetry. Then there was a Summer Sonnet Challenge, so I took the format and wrote something that fitted. I like the challenge of fitting into a defined format, although most of the top Story poems on Vocal are fairly freeform.

I love the Sonnet and Villanelle forms and have learned to adapt them with other forms.

The feedback I get tells me that I am doing the right thing, so much so that I once made a poem from comments that people had left on my work.

I sometimes write freeform but feel that I am being a bit lazy when I do that. However if I think the end product is good then I will share it.

CM: How would you define your style? Is there one piece you wrote that sums up who you are as a writer? Why?

I think one of the reasons Vocal doesn’t see me as a serious creator (that is Vocal as opposed to my Audience, Friends and Me) is because every piece can be on something totally different. Images you subscribe to in a magazine, one week it’s about birds, the next it’s on Formula One, the next it’s on Trawler Etiquette, which makes it difficult for people to get a handle on me. They like to put others in boxes and I think I am unboxable.

Many other creators have defined styles but I feel that I am like a box of random fireworks that someone threw a couple of lit matches into.

The piece I am probably most proud of is “Another Raven” because, while it was based on another person’s work, it showed that I can be disciplined to get things right.

I do write a lot about myself, which must make it difficult to interview me, because people do want to learn something new.

Maybe this by Melissa Ingoldsby says something about me.

I am a Top Contributor in Vocal Confessions so maybe that will contain something too. This was the last one.

CM: You are the author of several books, including The Ha'Penny Dreadful: A Collection of Unusually Worrying Stories, A Book Of Poems For The Twenty First Century, and The Girl With The Sun And Moon. Would you tell us the stories behind those titles?

MS: The first one was a complete accident, I was testing out self-publication for a close friend and then this happened.

The second one was a test run for the third one, which was a collection of poems for my muse, and the title was taken from her favourite poem, which I had written for her at the time.

They are all collections of Vocal stories and poems. The Girl With The Sun And The Moon is a wooden statue in Pannett Park in Whitby, a place I love to visit for a few days.

CM: What has been your most challenging book project so far? And which release has been the most successful? Why do you think that is?

MS: Every new book project is more challenging than the last because I want to make everything better than the last. My most successful one is my first release just because of the time it has been available.

I am only putting them out because I finally have the ability to collect my work in print, and if anyone else wants to pick up on that, then I will be happy, but I don’t really market them.

CM: What is one of your writing quirks that you feel makes you unique among your peers?

MS: I am probably the only writer who will not now how the story is going to unfold when I start. Sometimes I don't even know the ending. I remember seeing an episode of Hamish MacBeth, where three gangsters standing on a moor have just buried their fourth member, and his mobile phone goes off. I think that Danny Boyle thought of that ending and then wrote the episode around it. I sometimes do that too.

I feel I am quite unstructured and undisciplined but I am always confident that the end product will be excellent, and usually I am right.

CM: What do you want people to learn from your work?

MS: I often leave stories open ended hoping people will work out the finale for themselves.

I do a lot of pieces on how to do things and I hope that people learn something from them that makes their creative life better.

I also want people to feel encouraged by my work and show them that it is fine to step outside the mainstream.

CM: What is your most important piece of advice to other writers?

MS: Be Yourself, that is something that no one else can do. Only You.

CM: Anything else people should know?

MS: I am thinking of expanding "The Sandman and the Seagirl" into a book, but there are only five Vocal stories, about four thousand words so far.

I intend to create an anthology for the Plagiaristic Poetry series.

Also to keep writing and keep entertaining people.

Support Mike Singleton’s work!

• The Plagiarist Poetry Series: https://vocal.media/fyi/the-plagiarist-poetry-series
• The Sandman and The Sea Girl: https://vocal.media/fiction/the-sandman-and-the-sea-girl
• It's Only A Dollar: https://vocal.media/confessions/it-s-only-a-dollar

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Cendrine Marrouat is a writer, photographer, podcaster, blogger, anthology editor, and the co-founder of Auroras & Blossoms and A Warm Cup of Cozy. She has authored and co-authored more than 40 books, including The Train: A Short Story (2023), In Her Own Words: A Collection of Short Stories & Flashku (2022), After the Fires of Day: Haiku Inspired by Kahlil Gibran & Alphonse de Lamartine (2021), Rhythm Flourishing: A Collection of Kindku and Sixku (2020), Walks: A Collection of Haiku (2019-2020), and In the Silence of Words: A Three-Act Play (2018).

Cendrine's work has appeared in many publications. She is the creator of the Sixku, Flashku, Sepigram, and Reminigram; as well as the co-creator of the Kindku, Pareiku, Vardhaku, and Hemingku.