When I finally took the plunge it was as a journalist. I was writing whenever I could find the time, and in my teens I’d joined with friends to publish fanzines devoted to sf, fantasy and horror, but I became increasingly aware that to make a life as a writer I’d have to focus on it exclusively. But this was all a diversion I really wanted to write, and only got into bookselling to be near books and authors, hoping perhaps that I’d absorb the skill through some kind of osmosis. Then I managed a series of specialist bookshops, including Dark They Were & Golden Eyed and Forbidden Planet. When I left school I worked in a book exporting company that incorporated the London office of the Library of Congress, which was fascinating. This “novel” was about a bunch of feisty kids who start off seeing a flying saucer and end up foiling an alien invasion. I knew that novels were divided into things called chapters, but I didn’t know how long they were supposed to be. I wrote it in coloured felt-tip in a cheap reporter’s notebook. When I was nine or ten years old I wrote what I inaccurately, and hilariously, referred to as a novel.
There wasn’t much money for luxuries like reading material in our house, but I managed to get my hands on a steady stream of novels, magazines and comicbooks. Despite being the last boy in my year at school who learned to read, once I knew how, I took to it. I was a cuckoo in the nest of the poor, not particularly bookish family I grew up in.
Making yourself a sort of entertainment asset was a good way of keeping your teeth. In the school I attended, a glib tongue proved a useful alternative to fight or flight when you weren’t very competent at those activities. The first manifestation of that was probably in the playground, where I inadvertently discovered the Thousand and One Nights principle. But from a fairly early age I didn’t just want to consume fantastical stories, I wanted to tell them myself. I’ve likened a passion for science fiction and fantasy to malaria if you’re bitten young the fever tends to rage life-long. I suppose you could say I got started as a child, when I first became interested in these subjects. Over the course of your career you have written many science fiction and fantasy novels.
0 kommentar(er)
