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Having recently decided to join an online writing community to help him develop his craft, Trevor now felt the time was right to unleash his genius upon an unsuspecting public. He’d spent a whole two hours reading the work of others and was so unimpressed with what he saw he knew it was his destiny to enlighten the world as to what was possible using nothing but words that soon became sentences, grew quickly to paragraphs and fully matured into stories. Stories that would change the world.

He shuffled in his faux leather chair salvaged from the local recycling depot and prepared to press the Publish Story button on his chosen site: XYZstories. Having worked on his latest masterpiece for all of ten minutes, instead of the usual five, he knew, with the absolute certainty of a fool, it wouldn’t be long before countless plaudits and awards littered his mantelpiece along with the unpaid bills. His index finger hovered over the mouse, doing little circles, as if choosing the exact spot to press, or picking the perfect moment, would somehow add to the overall majesty and post-modernism of his piece. Suddenly, he lifted that finger and paused, like a python ready to strike venom into the hearts and minds of the same unsuspecting public as the first paragraph, and wondered.

Why was he sharing this jewel at all? Perhaps it would be best if he kept it to himself. What good could possibly come of others knowing what was literally possible in the little world of words and literature?

He sat back in his chair, keeping his finger poised to strike, but flexing it slightly in case his arthritis started playing up. This was no time for feeble physical restraints shackling the parameters of freedom of imagination and the call of fate. The cursor on his screen flashed at him, as if mocking his indecision, his arthritic hand and his manhood.

But Trevor was nothing if not patient. He’d learned during the long winters of the miners’ strike that overtime would come once the good weather returned and the pickets started travelling to away games again. To be fair, he wasn’t the only policeman of his day to create a nest egg and property portfolio from the pockets of good union men who’d been involved in actually producing something. Producing something? He laughed. It sounded such an old fashioned concept now. Not that it bothered his conscience, or his wife, with her little boutique in Kensington. He’d also been lucky enough to fall in with a handful of journalists prepared to pay for a little information now and again.

He removed his hand from the mouse and for the first time thought about what sort of audience would appreciate his latest work. Obviously, masters of the craft would fully understand, eventually, and before he was dead his work would be held in the same esteem as the Shakespeares, Dickenses and Dan Browns of the world. But what of the great unwashed? Those who made up the majority of the modern day reading public. The proles. Peasants, public service workers and teenage vampire lovers. What would they make of his work?

Laughing off his indecision and temporary fears, he grabbed the mouse again and raised that same finger like an executioner raises his axe when there’s a fresh neck staring up at him. But again, he stopped.

What if some peasant says something about his piece that he doesn’t agree with? Obviously, he knows, and they know, and they know he knows, that they’re not qualified to comment on a literary piece such as his, which floats over their head like the smoke rings from their Mayfairs.

He decided to sit back again and began thinking of who would be qualified to comment on his work. Nobel Prize for Literature winners were first on his list, but only those from the English speaking world, followed by a selection of Booker Prize winners. Orange Prize winners were eliminated mainly due to concerns he had of upsetting the pope. Although he hadn’t attended mass since his first communion he still carried around an unhealthy fear of God and priests. He thought of other prizes from further afield, like the Pulitzer, after all, Hemingway was one of his favourite authors. But he remembered Hemingway had blown his head off and wasn't in any fit state to comment. And anyway, Hemingway also drank too much and would demand a wee dram of his finest malt. No, Pulitzers weren't going to make first base, not in this game.

Anyone with a PhD in English Literature would be considered, but only after they’d forwarded their thesis for detailed examination and forensic analysis. He considered, briefly, to include all published writers, but such was the blurring of the line between real publishing and self-publishing he opted for striking them from the list. A glance at the Sunday Times and New York Times best seller lists confirmed his fears of accepting popular authors, and pushed him towards finally deleting all Americans from his own list. Amazon’s best seller list was dismissed at a glance, which was much more attention than he gave to Kindle’s, who he doesn’t count as being real.

Surprised at finishing his list so fast, being a thorough man, he decided to begin a list of those who he would hunt down if they dared comment on his work. First up against the wall were the poets. He’d always had, what he liked to call, a natural distrust of poets. As far as he was concerned they could get away with saying anything, and none of it ever made any sense. But when he pointed that simple fact out to them he was belittled like an eczema sufferer in a leper colony and made to feel like a…like a…like an illiterate leper.

Literary critics were next up. They were too hung-up on character development, plots and themes. Such details bored Trevor, as did spelling and punctuation. Agents and publishers were only interested in what would sell to the peasants, so that got their names on the list.

Fellow writers at least got a second thought from him, but were soon added to the list when he thought they’d only be interested in stealing his ideas and plagiarising his masterpiece for their own profit. No, they couldn’t be trusted. His fears had been confirmed when he met a few writers at a festival once. Constantly scribbling into their little notebooks, they’d made him more suspicious of them than he’d been of fellow officers filling report forms back in the day when he was still compiling data on his fellow officers.

Content that both lists were now complete, he reconsidered his options. The only way his work would be fully appreciated would be to mail it directly to his target audience in person. He hated using such marketing terms, thinking it vulgar, but it was a price worth paying to ensure his masterpiece was received by the correct demographic and read by readers with the correct level of expertise, thus ensuring any feedback, which he was sure would be positive, and any comments, as great as they would be, and any criticism, of which there would be none, of course, would ultimately enhance his reputation, albeit only in his own head, and raise his status to dizzyingly new heights, even though he stays in a tower block after his missus divorced him and took everything.

He released his grip on the mouse and smiled with the knowledge that being a pioneer at the forefront of a paradigm shift in the world of literature, both Melvyn Bragg and Alan Yentob would be trying to get him on the phone any second now, competing for that first ground breaking interview and two hour documentary, and Germaine Greer would be wanting to sweep him off his feet to a romantic break in Paris, so he switched off the computer, unplugged the modem from the wall and plugged his telephone back in, before remembering he’d forgot to press Save.