19,288
I’m starting immediately with the lie: last week I wrote, I can live with rejection. I can’t – not really. I get on with it, because that’s what you need to do. If I’ve sent a short story or article out and it’s been rejected, I might give it another read when it returns, then send it out elsewhere. A book obviously is too big to treat like that, but if it’s been rejected from a number of places, I might earmark it as something to revise when I have time. But, as much as it’s a reality of writing, rejection hurts. I write, I invest myself in this project,…
1972
Fantasy – namely The Lord of the Rings – inspired my love of storytelling. I read LotR over one Christmas break, way back in about 1982. Then I devoured other fantasy novels. Swords, magic, heroic quests – everything that would appeal to an imaginative kid. In 1985, I wrote my first book – part one of an intended five-book fantasy epic – when I was 15, hand-writing it in two A5 exercise books over the space of eighteen months. I gave no thought to planning it. I just wrote, my mythology changing as I went. Often, I would sit up late at night (and sometimes through until morning) working on…