About Me, Part Two

I wrote a lot in high school. In my first year there I happened to meet a kid that I instantly hit it off with - we seemed to have a lot in common - we were both into computers (such as they were back then), superheroes, reading just about anything that we could get our hands on, and Dr Who. We wrote a bunch of Dr Who-style fanfic back then - most of it involving Time Lords other than the Doctor. It helped that we had an English teacher that gave us one class a week to write in, but we were filling notebooks with stories, regardless. We also worked on a comic together, some simple superhero stuff that was rather quite derivative in retrospect (we were 13 at the time, so cut us a little slack) as far as the type of heroes and villains and powers that they had, but the stories were always something new . He was the more artistic of the two, so by default got to do the artwork, and we both worked on the stories. It was good fun. It was also when I was introduced to RPGs. I had a lot going on in those days, I guess.


Between writing fiction, writing and playing RPGs, working on comics, and reading anything and everything that came my way, I became more and more convinced that this was something that I wanted to do one day. Of course, it's not that simple, and school careers counselors will try to do the right thing and point you towards a good university and a career. Somehow I picked an Arts degree, and decided on Philosophy - so much for that plan, eh?


When I finished high school I bought a Smith Corona Word Processor. Thinking back, that was a stupid move. For the $1,000 I spent on that, I could have got myself an older PC, which would have kept my computer skills up, and given me something other than a glorified typewriter. Of course, I could have studied Law or Engineering or Journalism, as well, so there's not really much point dwelling on the past, I suppose.


I met a lot of interesting people during my university days, wrote a bit, submitted some of my stuff to the university magazine, played some music, and wrote a bunch of songs (all of which were lost when the cassettes that they were recorded on were melted). I wrote lots of everything, I suppose - fiction, plays, poetry - across as many genres as I could. Some of it wasn't bad stuff. Some of it definitely deserved to end in a pyre. Some of it was pretty good, and I wish I still had copies of.


Since then, I've kept writing, and I suppose that's the important part. I've met a bunch of people that tell me they'd love to write (but don't), or have tried writing (but stopped), or wish they had the time (who play a lot of games and watch a lot of movies). At the end of the day, if you want to be a writer, you write. If you want to do something else, you do something else.


So, that's me, I guess. Well, the parts I'm going to talk about, at least. I've got to keep a little mystery to myself, right?

An Experiment

I decided to try something different this week, an experiment, as it were, with Eria. I decided to give it away for two days. Part of me wanted to see if people grab a copy if it was free. Part of me wanted more people to see it, and, hopefully, read it.

It went well. Copies flew out the virtual door. As I expected, most of them flew off the virtual shelves at the regular Amazon site. 10% of those numbers went from the UK site. There was even some interest from the German and French site (which was nice). No action from the Spanish or Italian site, however. I don't know whether that is because fewer people use those Amazon sites, or whether it is more of a niche thing. As my novel is in English, I feel that if it moves on the English-speaking sites, then that's a good thing.

Now that it's had a little more exposure, I'm interested to see what happens from here. Will sales pick up? Will I get more reviews? Obviously I hope the answer to both is a resounding Yes!, but we'll just have to see, really. I'd like more reviews, honestly. That would mean (to me at least) that people were reading it, and enjoying it enough (or being otherwise moved) to write something about it.

And I'm aware that it's Wednesday, and that I normally do a Monday and Friday blog update. We can blame the lack of Monday post to a technology error, or, more specifically, a user of technology error. Once I find what happened to my "About Me, Part 2" post, or rewrite it, it'll be up on Friday.

About Me, Part One

I started writing when I was about 10. Not the "you must write this for school, for homework" sort of writing, but actually writing for fun. Taking time from playing with toys and playing sport to actually writing.

I used to use my grandparents clunky old typewriter to start with, a heavy thing that had no "1" on it, rather an exclamation mark instead in its place. That always struck me as odd. Even though the typewriter had the Upper/Lower Case button, and the other numbers were all fine, and all had symbols as well, the "1" wasn't there.

After me bugging my grandparents day in and day out to get the typewriter out and lift it onto the table for me (I was a small kid, and it was a damned heavy thing), they finally decided to leave it on the table, because they knew I was going to keep hammering away at it all through my Summer Vacation. And I did.

I wrote my first few stories on that thing. A series of short stories about a bunch of erasers that fought crime, and solved mysteries called The Rubber Police. I can't remember much at all about those stories, except that I seemed to spend forever typing them out, when writing them long hand would have been much faster. I still remember how sore my fingers used to get hitting those old keys, how hard it was to use the Upper/Lower Case button, and how unforgiving the typewriter was if I missed a key and my finger went between them.

I suppose someone must have been paying attention (more than the usual "look what little Andrew has been doing today") because I got a typewriter for my next birthday/Xmas (the joys of having a birthday in December - the combined present). It wasn't quite as heavy, so I could lug it around by myself, it actually had a "1", and it was a little bit more forgiving on the fingers (although it still hurt when you missed a key). And I kept using it (on and off) for the next eight years.

That's not to say I didn't use other things to write with. When I was about 13 I got a Commodore 64 computer, and a few years later I decided to get a printer for it, and some software for it. The printer and software were a dodgy fit, so half the time I spent writing, I was actually coding in BASIC so I could get the thing to print in a fashion that was actually readable to the unaided human eye. I wrote a couple of fantasy-parody short stories with titles like The Kind Woodcutter and the Nasty Troll, and The Good Prince and the Evil Dragon. Fun little pieces that I probably still have floating around in hard copy somewhere, unless the print has faded off the old dot matrix pages by now.

I remember at high school kids were asked what they wanted to Do or Be (which to me still seem like very different questions, but that's neither here nor there) when they left school, and I said I wanted to be a writer. Most kids were going to join the Army, or become Nurses, tradesmen or other things like that. I don't know whether the person asking the question understood what I meant, or was just an idiot, but, for some reason, my choice was the only one that was classified as a Non-Traditional Gender Role Career. Which, of course, made me the target of some interesting taunts for a while, and made me wonder why it was that I'd never actually read anything by women writers or seen many women journalists at the time. Thankfully, it didn't phase me.

Krullus - A Short (?) Story

Firstly, there were no blog updates last week, but you probably noticed that - I could pretend that it was due to a lot of things - I was busy at work, I was writing, I was changing my ISP, my netbook crashed - but the real reason is that I went away for a few days to visit with family, and my netbook was left sitting at the end of the bed, all ready to go into the bag that it never went into.

With that out of the way, on with the topic at hand!

I started writing a short story the other day about one of the characters that is mentioned, albeit briefly, in Eria - Krullus. The only thing that anyone who has read Eria knows about Krullus is from the one line in the novel:

'Surely you recognize the Sword of Kings,' Bædyr said. 'The weapon wielded by my father, Zandor, and his father before him, bestowed by the ancient Kings of Eria, handed down to the first King, Krullus, by Pael himself!"

 It's not a lot to go on.

I know who Krullus is, and I thought I might write something so that everyone else could find out a bit more about him. So, I started writing a short story. And, as happens, Real Life reared its ugly head, and I had to put it on the shelf for a few days. At which point my subconscious decided that the story really needed another character added to it. I thought about it, and it made sense, so I thought about the implications of the re-write and what it'd do to the story, and it seemed okay, so I did what I normally do, and slept on it. The next day my subconscious decided that, instead of the one additional character, it really needed two. I thought about it some more, and realized that this was actually an even better idea. We'll see how it pans out, I suppose.

I love the way my subconscious does that - contributes to the writing process while I'm asleep. It keeps things fresh and flowing for me, even if it does result in several re-writes along the way.

So, the plan is for a short story, at the moment. I put it that way, because these things have a way of escalating - like going for "one beer" after work on a Friday sometimes results in you sneaking in at 6am on Saturday morning.

As to what to do with the short story, I'll throw it out onto Amazon for 99 cents, and see what happens. But I'll talk about that more on Friday!