Where to Start?

Alright, so. If you’re here you’ve maybe stumbled over my social media or maybe you’ve read my first book. Either way, welcome.

This blog is more than an attempt to increase my online presence it’s also a way for me to share my journey as a writer and some of the things I’ve discovered along the way. It’s also a way for me to give you a little insight into why I write what I write and what it means to me.

So, as my bio states I grew up in a golden age of Saturday morning cartoons. Titles like He-Man, She-Ra, Brave Starr, the Centurions and so-on. This was the era of the Transformers, things like the Street Sharks and Biker Mice from Mars where a couple of years away. The days of a whole four channels on the T.V. (here in the UK at least) and I remember waking up early on weekdays to watch the cartoons the morning shows would broadcast before I left for school and getting up even earlier on weekends to watch the whole slew of Saturday morning programmes aimed at my age group.

This was my start, a world of white hat good guys, black hat, moustache twirling villains. High morals and improbable plans for world domination, doomed to fail. Try as they might the bad guys couldn’t kill the good guys and though the bad guys kept coming back with more and more intricate plans the heroes never even considered putting an end to the villains.

With this as a starting line I made my way deeper into the myriad worlds of fiction surrounding me. Books, films and T.V. shows where my past times of choice. After a time I was introduced to Table-top Roleplay, Dungeons and Dragons, the World of Darkness and others of that ilk. I dabbled in miniatures and the worlds surrounding them, deep settings with rich histories and even threw myself into Live Roleplay, costumes and characters.

It was in 2003 when there was a trend going around for free-form online Roleplay. The GM (or Games Master) would email a setting and a situation out to the players and they would email back how their characters would react or respond. I’d long been a fan of the legends of Camelot and Arthur, Excalibur and Guinevere (I’d seen Arthur and the Knights of Justice, Excalibur, Prince Valiant and other sources) but I was also deeply interested in Science Fiction, futurism and the like. I’d never seen a property that asked ‘What would’ve happened if Camelot never fell?’ so, at the heady age of 22 I put together a group and we started exploring that question.

It didn’t last too long. As with many things it waned quite quickly but, I still had a good chunk of material and, from time to time, over the years I’d go back to it and add a bit here and there. It was during this time that I met my good friend MJ Bridger and, since we shared similar interests, I showed him the assembled pages and he couldn’t have been keener to see where the story went. Years went by, work an family took prominence and the pages stayed in a file, occasionally added to, largely ignored but, I never forgot them. I kept revisiting them and, as my dissatisfaction with my day jobs and the corporate climate increased I started putting more effort into them until, low and behold, I had a full novel and a few close friends clamouring for the next one.