It’s funny how life sometimes has other ideas for you, despite you thinking you’re generally in charge. My ‘career’ to date (I still don’t feel old or responsible enough to consider that I actually have one) has primarily been in digital design and user experience; basically, designing websites and mobile apps. To be honest, I never actually made any decisions about that either, I just sort of fell into it, but it’s what I’ve consistently used to pay the bills for 20-odd years.
However, things have changed a bit recently, and I don’t really feel that life consulted me much in the decision-making process.
It all started about nine years when I met my partner, so it’s essentially all her fault. Once we’d decided we were in it for the long term, I moved out of my London flat and into her house in rural Suffolk, in the process becoming step-dad to her two kids, then 10 and 3. The younger one, a little girl named Libby, was just starting what has now blossomed into a fully-grown obsession with horses and riding.
It started innocently enough; spending time stroking the horses in the stable yard behind our house and badgering the lady who ran it for riding lessons. Fast forward to today and she’s now a 12-year-old dressage rider who lives and breathes horses. Apparently, she’s very good. School is merely a distraction that she has to do on the way to the stables, and all other non-equine activities (homework, chores, eating, drinking, sleeping, speaking to us) are merely tiresome fillers in her day when she’d much rather be riding or cleaning up horse faeces.
For those of you who aren’t particularly horse-aware, dressage is the one where they walk around in circles in front of judges to try and win rosettes. It’s incredibly dull. I have no understanding of any of it, and no particular desire to get any. I’m just the fool that pays for it all and drives them around.
While waiting around at a dressage competition in late 2017, hiding from the incessant rain and being bored to tears, I set up a Facebook account under the name of Skint Dressage Daddy, and started moaning into the ether about how miserable it all was. I wasn’t really expecting anyone to bother reading it, but a few people did. From time to time after that I posted more stuff, generally just moaning about the ridiculous expense of it all and how I’d rather be somewhere else. Anywhere really; at home, at work, prison.
To my complete bafflement, more and more people started reading my rants, and within about six months I had 14,000 followers. No idea why. The internet is a funny place. More strangely, they weren’t even other dads who I assumed would be the only people to find it relevantly amusing, but almost exclusively the other horse riders themselves, almost all women and mostly adults who recognised themselves in our nag-addicted little girl.
This led rapidly to a magazine column, t-shirts, mugs and then requests for a book. I say requests, but they were more demands, really. ‘When’s the book coming out?’ they all asked, ‘Will it have nice pictures in it?’
Eventually I caved and wrote the damned thing. I have to admit that I’d initially thought I could get away with just taking all my previous rants, cutting them into little pieces and stitching them back together into chapters and calling it a book, but I ended up just sitting down and writing most of it from scratch. I even wrote a load of poems for it and hired a professional (and excellent) artist to illustrate it.
I went down the modern route by not bothering with an agent or even a publisher and doing it all myself. That was actually incredibly satisfying, but did require an immense amount of reading and learning. How to lay out a book, how to buy ISBN numbers, how to get it printed, which paper weight to choose, how to take orders on my website and send these to the Post Office’s site to print the labels, etc etc. I feel I could genuinely write another book now on how to write a book.
But, to my usual astonishment, it sold well. It was actually an Amazon bestseller both here and in Australia where they seem to share our sense of humour and make up a sizeable chunk of my readers, but has also sold in countries all over the world. Being self-published, this has meant spending some time every morning before work, packaging up the day’s sales and dropping them off at the post office. It’s been a few months now, and the build-up to Christmas is behind us so it’s usually only a few a day now, but before Christmas I was often carting several sacks of packages to the post office once or twice a day.
And so, without meaning to at all, I’ve ended up writing an entire book about how much I don’t like horses. It’s niche, I grant you. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d one day write a book, I’d have said ‘Cool! What will be about?’ And if you’d answered, ‘All about horses, what they wear, how much it costs to run one and how you don’t really like them much,’ I’d have looked very confused indeed and told you how I don’t know anything about horses. And I still don’t.
So if you’re into nags yourself and enjoy reading about them, or are considering letting a child of yours get addicted to them and want to know how much it’s going to cost you, then it could be the book for you. As long as you don’t mind reading a lot of ranting. And swearing, there’s quite a lot of swearing.
From Nags to Numbnuts by Daniel Skinner, available in paperback and Kindle.
Search on Amazon, or buy direct from www.skintdressagedaddy.com.
www.facebook.com/skintdressagedaddy