Then and Now
My book did the rounds of family (well, my brother, and a handful of cousins). One cousin gave it to his fantasy-loving friend who declared it one of the best fantasy books he’d ever read. I don’t know if he was humouring my cousin, if he was clueless, or if the praise was genuine (most writers I know often doubt praise), but it encouraged me to get back into writing. The other reason was I was just empty without it. And purposeless. After terrifying anxiety, the dread I might be losing my mind (thanks, Dr. Fuckwit), and a general feeling of inadequacy, the world was too scary to confront. But…
Why Write
Why do I write? That’s something the psychiatrist asked. And I was stumped. There’s a love of world-building – like JRR Tolkien, creating Middle-Earth, replete with its races, their languages, their dwellings, the history and how everything had come to be, Sauron and the One Ring, and the way the little people, the Hobbits, could play such an instrumental part in the greatest conflict of them all. I enjoyed that – building something where nothing had previously existed, knowing that I breathed life into these characters, that I painstakingly constructed the world they inhabited, that I devised their rules of magic and law and society, that I could set characters…