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…
The Novel Dream
I wanted to write a novel. I wanted to create my own fantasy epic. But I was only 15 and had no idea what I was doing, so all my planning consisted of was buying an A5 exercise book. (I was at my parents’ last week and scrounging around in the garage looking for something else entirely, and actually found the exercise book – right.) I’d stay up nights, pumping myself full of cups of tea and cigarettes, scribbling away while one of the midnight music shows of the time, like Rage, played in the background. The exercise book (and its successor) even accompanied me when my parents took me…