Why I started writing.
I started writing novels when I was a teenager. Here I am with my sweet cat Saar.
Many years ago when I was a teenager, I wrote a poem called ‘Song for the Night.’
‘Night, when all the Shadow selves,
suppressed throughout the day,
rise up in awakening souls,
to strip our masks away.’
Back then, I often wondered: are we more authentic at night? Day meant school and living by other people’s rules, playing out the roles we each got slotted into. Mine was geek, in a time when being a geek wasn’t ‘cool.’
At night I was different. Looking out on a sky shot with stars, I felt more alive. All these years later, I still feel that way about darkness. It’s the time when I slip into my other life as a storyteller: a writer of Fantasy Romance.
My first memory of weaving tales springs from junior school years. We had to be in bed by 7pm, regardless of whether we were sleepy or not. To us kids, it was terribly unfair. Who can fall asleep on demand? Lying in bed was just boring.
My sister and I solved this by sitting up telling our own stories. She’d tell the first bit, and then I’d take up the narrative, each of us concentrating on the characters we’d created. My sister had all the ‘goodies,’ whilst mine were the ‘baddies,’ and one of these was a man called Tira. He wasn’t quite as he is now (in EMPRESS OF STARS AND SHADOWS the first novel I wrote, which I’m planning to revisit) but the basic character traits (charisma, daring and ambiguity) were there.
We progressed to making our own ‘comics,’ passed around the classroom during lunch breaks. Magic handbags, vampire bats driving cars (heaven help us!), terror horses with fangs (who weren’t very scary really) all featured in these picture-story ‘magazines.’ The other children enjoyed them, asking what was going to happen next (especially when the bat drove the car off a cliff). We always ended with something dramatic, though the ‘comics’ suffered a fiery death when Mum threw our ‘childish rubbish’ on the bonfire.
That experience prepared me for rejection, a vital skill for any writer.
My first completed story was SILK PAWS, though really it was mostly drawings with a few lines of dialogue. I think I was about 7 and I was so obsessed by the idea of it that I was constantly drawing pictures of Silk Paws. Not that there was much of a story. It was about a cat the size of a house who went around hunting people like they were mice until it was eventually killed by a knight in shining armour (we used to play knights versus dragons, racing up and down the garden with plastic swords). I was too young to have seen any monsters on the rampage movies, but something about this huge cat caught my imagination. Anyone unfortunate enough to come in the room was forced to read SILK PAWS and look at the terrible drawings.
By the time I was 15, I’d written my first ‘book’: TIME TRAP. It was born from my obsession with ancient Egypt, merged with Dark Age Britain, since I’d just read ‘The Lantern Bearers’ by Rosemary Sutcliff. My favourite character was grey-eyed Ambrosius Aurelianus, a canny strategist dedicated to serving and protecting his people. Ambrosius was a real historical person, although little is known of him beyond his name. I was angry when Rosemary killed him off in ‘Sword at Sunset’ to make way for his nephew, King Arthur. I decided to do something about it, bringing him back to life in my ‘book.’
TIME TRAP featured Charmian, Queen Cleopatra’s handmaiden, brought back to life by the ancient Egyptian cat Goddess Bast. Charmian travels through time, hunting down the servants of evil and eventually meets Ambrosius, who becomes her warrior blood-brother and follows her spirit into the underworld after she’s killed in battle. Overcoming a series of trials, he wins her a new chance at life, and they continue fighting evil together. I had great fun writing TIME TRAP, complete with bad illustrations.
I continued to tell stories for my own amusement, and gradually they got longer. Publication wasn’t something I ever considered. Dreams coming true felt like something that only happened to other people. I wasn’t a rebellious teen: my mother suffered from mental illness and much of the time I looked after her around school/college work. That continued into my early twenties when she got cancer. Storytelling was my refuge from harsh reality, something just for me.
After Mum died, I couldn’t write. It was six years before I came back to writing, as part of my need to rediscover who I was and put myself back together. I splashed out on a laptop and sat there terrified, wondering if I could do this.
Dreams were still something that happened to other people. Yet dreams were to lead me to my next story, to the Shadow Realms of THE SOUL SIREN. And writing eventually led me to WITCHLAND, but more on that later.