My story.

I work in an office, like so many other people, but my office is my own, my studio at home, my personal space, and I love it. Here I can put on my music and escape into whatever it is that I am escaping into today. Now, for example, I am escaping into writing about myself, something that I don’t find comfortable, but not everything in life is comfortable.

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At this point I am supposed to tell you about where I live, who I live with, about my pets and my hobbies. Well, I have just finished reading quite a few of those, looking for inspiration about what an author generally says about himself, so that I can conform and do likewise. To be honest, they bored me, and I simply didn’t believe half of them, so I am not going to do that.

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What you want to know is the person behind the written words, and that isn’t the person with the nice day job, the nice house, and the nice pets, it is the person inside my head when I am writing. Where do the words come from? To tell that story, a standard biography of no more than 300 somewhat banal words isn’t going to work, so instead I will tell my story, and I will keep going until I feel that the story is told.

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I have always liked reading, at least since the age of about ten or eleven when I read my first book for pleasure, rather than something that had been put in front of me, or a book designed to teach children to read. I chose it myself. The Hobbit, now better known as a film that goes on for far too long (I have never seen it but have been told), but in those days was a large and impressive hardback book by the splendidly named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

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I certainly did not like writing then, possibly because I am left-handed, yet was made to write with my right hand until the age of about eight, because that apparently is the correct way to write. As a result, I found writing difficult and painful, because I had not developed the necessary muscle control and coordination in my left hand that you learn during the early years. My writing was also hideous, a spiky mess, like a cardiogram of somebody in distress. I was embarrassed about my scribblings.

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I have only taught myself to write neatly by hand fairly recently, and when I am in a creative mood, I now prefer to use pencil on paper. The advent of creative writing using a keyboard, rather than mechanical writing using a typewriter, opened up a whole new world for me, and I have enjoyed writing of any sort ever since. I have written short stories for many years, mainly humorous nonsense for websites, but I have also written articles for magazines on a wide variety of subjects.

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I had thought, like many people have, that one day I would like to try my hand, or keyboard, at writing a proper book, whatever that may mean. To actually start doing so required some sort of motivation that I simply did not have, until I was faced with the prospect of filling one day a week with something, something that was definitely not work, and something good for my state of mind. I have no intention of opening up my personal life for examination here, it is after all, personal, but to put it mildly, about twenty years ago, my life encountered a few problems.

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My home life had already imploded, and then my work life, both of which I had dealt with remarkably well, demonstrating a resolve that I didn’t know I was capable of. It was only when everything started to go well again that I fell apart. I was like the proverbial swan, gliding through life, with all sorts of commotion hidden beneath the surface. I went to see my doctor for help with getting to sleep at nights without using alcohol. He of course was not interested in helping me get to sleep at nights, not initially anyway, he was interested in finding out why it had become a problem.

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He was a remarkable man, and I will forever thank him for making me look at life differently. He recognised that what I needed was time out of the ring, away from the circus of life, but for me that would have made things even worse. Taking time off work was simply not an option. Taking some time off work, however, was exactly what I needed to do. He talked me into deciding for myself, that what I needed was to take every Wednesday off work, leave them to manage without me, and spend some time doing anything, anything, that was not connected with work, or with any of my euphemistic issues.

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I made jam on my first Wednesday, because I had nothing better to do. Because I had no idea what I wanted to do. It was autumn, there were fruits to be found, so I made jam, even though I do not eat jam. While picking blackberries on the next Wednesday, a fine autumn day in a quiet place, to make more jam that I would end up giving away, my mind was free to wander, and I decided on impulse that I would finally have a go at writing that book.

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My first book idea never even made it onto paper. I have forgotten the story that I had built up in my mind, but it loosely hung on the concept of one day in the life of a man in his later years, recalling his life as he went about his mundane daily routine. It would have been a rather sad book, and I am glad that I never wrote it. I mentioned it to a friend of mine, and he said that it sounded boring, and he was right. It was time to start again.

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The subconscious is a wonderful thing, and I think we overlook the value of our idle thoughts. Without any deliberate effort, probably because at the time I was too busy, too pre-occupied, I slowly built the picture of a boy, not too young for rational thought, nor old enough for too much rational thought, imagining that he could talk to a boy of his own age, with a similar life, who had lived in his house, around a hundred years ago. This story developed in my head over the next week or so, until I was finally ready to put it into words on a Wednesday morning, alone, with the house quiet, and no other demands on my time. The first two words that I wrote down were those of the title, and it retains that title to this day:

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Oliver’s Voice.

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The story has changed almost beyond recognition from that first draft. I had no plan whatsoever, having never attempted a novel before. I just sat myself down, and I typed. Characters developed in my head, and they became so complex that I had to start writing down their biographies. When I had finished it, and had rewritten it so many times that I simply had to stop, I needed to start another, not to fill my time with something else, but because my subconscious had already set me on that path.

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The principal character who had emerged in that first story was David Hammond, and he simply didn’t work with Oliver’s Voice as the first book. That meant writing a prequel, in which case Oliver’s Voice wasn’t going to work at all, and would need to be rewritten yet again, to be the second book. The story that came together would eventually be called The Gate in the Shadows. I then wanted to know what would become of David Hammond, so I wrote the next episode in his life, and that of Janet, his wife and soulmate. What emerged during the writing of Destruction of Faith didn’t quite fit with the first two books, so they were both rewritten yet again.

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And that is about the point at which my entire life went Bang! In spectacular fashion.

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As I have already mentioned, I intend to keep my personal life personal, so I will not go into details. I am still in the process of finding out that it is not unusual for men in what is called late middle age, because it sounds better than saying growing old, to suffer a reaction to events that happened early in life, particularly childhood abuse. If you are reading this, and you recognise yourself in this story, then I urge you to tell somebody about what it is that you have kept hidden for so long. I, like most men, did not, convinced that I had to deal with it on my own. The shame, hurt, and guilt, was buried as deep as I could bury it, and there it would stay. To put it mildly, that was a mistake.

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One way of dealing with it was to throw myself into my writing as I had never done before. My escape was into the world of David and Janet, and my escape from their world was into the life of Harold Godwinson, as I began a fact-based novel about the remarkable story of the events that led to him becoming the King of England for a short time before he ran out of luck in 1066 (spoiler alert – not with an arrow through his eye). Over a period of more than ten years, the lives of David and Janet, running from 2006 until 2023, came together as one coherent story. With well over a million words written into eight books, it was time to take a break from writing and put some thought into publishing.

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So that is the story of me. If you want to read the story of David and Janet, click on the link above. If you want to read the full story of David and Janet, read from the beginning in The Gate in the Shadows, and as I write this, I am starting work on publishing Oliver’s Voice, and then will work my way through the rest of the books in this series, so please bear with me. They are all written, up to 2023 anyway, but that is only part of the job. I will work on the publishing for a while, then I may finish Harold Godwinson’s story, or I may write the next episode of David’s story which I have in my head, itching to get onto paper.