I've
always wanted to write, and many years ago I started on a typewriter, remember
those? and I tried to write science fiction; that is a hard genre to write in!
It’s really easy to write about spaceships, monsters and lasers, or tyrannical
leaders in a dystopian near future, but to come up with a genuinely original
sci-fi idea is difficult. Hats off to anyone who can do it. (In my humble
opinion, ‘dystopian’ is a vastly over-used word and it's time for something
new).
But life gets in the way doesn’t it; there’s work,
marriage, buying a house, starting a family, and bringing up a child; all these
things take up time. But the urge didn’t go away with me, it just hibernated,
and some of the ideas from my first failed attempt stayed floating around in my
head, and to use a modern expression, they got ‘repurposed’ or maybe even
‘up-cycled’ into my current writing.
Speaking of work, I’ve done a few things. I
started out working in laboratories that analysed metals. I actually hated that
job and did it for far too long, but that was where I met my wife, so it wasn’t
all bad. After a couple of changes, I ended up in an electronics laboratory
just at the start of the internet age, and I had no idea what the internet was;
back then, if you didn’t know something, you had to buy a book! Anyway, all the
engineers were talking about this thing call broadband and how it was going to
change the world. I didn’t even have a computer then.
At this point I have to say that all the while
this was happening, I was actually going to be the greatest guitarist in the
world. That didn’t happen.
What did happen is that the electronics company
closed, and everyone got made redundant. There was huge downturn in the
economy, and I was told that my chances of getting a full-time job were zero,
which was a major bummer. But this turned out to be the best thing that
happened, as a casual conversation with an acquaintance led to me starting work
in the live music industry, an industry that I then worked in for over
twenty-five years and loved, only reluctantly retiring early to look after my
ailing mother.
I was driving home after work one day, thinking
about a terrible book that I had just read that was filled
with wholly unlikely scenarios. Now I know that the reader is supposed to
suspend their disbelief, but some of the plot lines were simply not believable
with terrible dialogue and the same phrases repeated over
and over again, and I thought to myself ‘I could write a better story than
that’, and my next thought was ‘well I’d better try then.’
My drive home was quite long and over the next few
weeks I got the germ of an idea. I’d had the name Astrid Peterman as a
character name in my head for years and I guess that meant I would eventually
end up writing something, so I just sat down and started writing about her.
A few weeks after I started, I bumped into my old
English teacher and told him that I had started writing and how I wish I’d paid
more attention in his class. He gave me some great advice, he said, ‘just write something every
day’ and that is what I do now.
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