How it was that I came to be a writer
I had wanted to be a writer my whole life but it wasn’t until I had completed the first draft of Flesh for Sale – at the time my most mature work – that I realised I was a writer.
I had wanted to “be” a writer since I was twelve, making a conscious choice between writing or being an artist. But my drawing wasn’t very good as I’d never been taught and I didn’t know how to look.
Neither did I know how to “look” as a writer: the short stories I wrote as a teenager were based on the horrific nightmares I suffered and the first novel I completed – at nineteen – was set in a South Africa that didn’t exist. The next novel set in SA was picked up by an agent in London who thought filling your house with fresh flowers was more important than eating. Starving in a bedsit at the time, I found this “advice” hard to appreciate. As my hopes of early fame began to wane, I met another agent through a lovely little old lady who used to draw me as a Greek goddess when I worked as an artist’s model. This agent promptly lost my manuscript, a tragedy never apologised for and a disaster in a pre-home computer world.
I’d always wanted to be a science fiction writer so decided to drop my odd South African novels and set about writing rather derivative short stories, my intention being that I would at last learn my craft – each short story had to be better than the previous one. One of these intrigued me so much that I turned it into a novel. A publisher feigned interest and I was convinced my time had come: I was now a Real Writer. I was by then divorced, angry, working in a bookshop and still trying to find myself. That rejection slip proved one too many: it was time to return to my first dream, the one I’d had when I was fourteen and since abandoned because an evil high school teacher destroyed my maths. I was going to be an astrophysicist.
I started the degree through UNISA and studied for my first exam with my three month old on my lap, explaining to her huge complex formulae as if I was reading fairy tales. I got 93% for that exam and my daughter’s favourite subjects are maths and science: something must have paid off somewhere. A life crisis (and there had been a few) struck at this point: I couldn’t study long-distance maths as the email assistance was so poor, nor could I get any help as a single parent. I was exhausted and desperate. The end of a dream, like a road, had been reached. I was way too old to be a child star; it was going to be too difficult to get a fancy degree with no child care, support or teaching; no aliens were going to rescue me on the eve of the Millennium.
So Fate (or someone/thing similar) stepped in and I had a eureka moment in the bath instead: I wanted to WRITE again. I wanted to CREATE. This was my TRUE calling.
As a new venture, I taught myself to write screenplays, using a wonderful book aptly titled “Teach Yourself Screenwriting.” I was laughably bad at it but learnt how to develop a story all the way to the end, how to structure it, how to pace it, how to work the formula. I also learnt to retain a whole novel in my head (along with several thousand index cards.) I turned several old short stories into screenplays, one of which was about a mindwalker called Gomenzi...
Except that it was just crying out to be a novel. My back stories and character descriptions were novels in themselves – all lost on the potential screen. I wanted the detail. I wanted the prose. I wanted the freedom of a novel, a freedom I don’t think I would have learned if I hadn’t tried to restrain myself with screenplays.
And suddenly I was a writer. I wasn’t dreaming it or pretending – I was living it. I was writing. The creativity exploded out of me. My long-dreamed of Fleet Quintet began to take shape. I wrote six novels one after the other without taking a break and for years was lost in Fleet space – alter-space – in what has so far been the most intensively creative period of my life. My adventures in supra-natural sci-fi lead me finally to the discovery of Ultra (ultimately the title of my first published novel), not a place but a state of grace that we can only aspire to, yet never attain, and mourn, because we can never return again.
I write the type of sci-fi that I want to read though I have yet to find for it a suitable sub-genre. I write about immortality because that’s all I know. I’m not aware of any influences and my own desires are my inspiration. If I could meet someone from the past it would be Merlin. If I could go somewhere else it would not be here. If I could be someone else it would be me.
I had wanted to be a writer my whole life but it wasn’t until I had completed the first draft of Flesh for Sale – at the time my most mature work – that I realised I was a writer.
I had wanted to “be” a writer since I was twelve, making a conscious choice between writing or being an artist. But my drawing wasn’t very good as I’d never been taught and I didn’t know how to look.
Neither did I know how to “look” as a writer: the short stories I wrote as a teenager were based on the horrific nightmares I suffered and the first novel I completed – at nineteen – was set in a South Africa that didn’t exist. The next novel set in SA was picked up by an agent in London who thought filling your house with fresh flowers was more important than eating. Starving in a bedsit at the time, I found this “advice” hard to appreciate. As my hopes of early fame began to wane, I met another agent through a lovely little old lady who used to draw me as a Greek goddess when I worked as an artist’s model. This agent promptly lost my manuscript, a tragedy never apologised for and a disaster in a pre-home computer world.
I’d always wanted to be a science fiction writer so decided to drop my odd South African novels and set about writing rather derivative short stories, my intention being that I would at last learn my craft – each short story had to be better than the previous one. One of these intrigued me so much that I turned it into a novel. A publisher feigned interest and I was convinced my time had come: I was now a Real Writer. I was by then divorced, angry, working in a bookshop and still trying to find myself. That rejection slip proved one too many: it was time to return to my first dream, the one I’d had when I was fourteen and since abandoned because an evil high school teacher destroyed my maths. I was going to be an astrophysicist.
I started the degree through UNISA and studied for my first exam with my three month old on my lap, explaining to her huge complex formulae as if I was reading fairy tales. I got 93% for that exam and my daughter’s favourite subjects are maths and science: something must have paid off somewhere. A life crisis (and there had been a few) struck at this point: I couldn’t study long-distance maths as the email assistance was so poor, nor could I get any help as a single parent. I was exhausted and desperate. The end of a dream, like a road, had been reached. I was way too old to be a child star; it was going to be too difficult to get a fancy degree with no child care, support or teaching; no aliens were going to rescue me on the eve of the Millennium.
So Fate (or someone/thing similar) stepped in and I had a eureka moment in the bath instead: I wanted to WRITE again. I wanted to CREATE. This was my TRUE calling.
As a new venture, I taught myself to write screenplays, using a wonderful book aptly titled “Teach Yourself Screenwriting.” I was laughably bad at it but learnt how to develop a story all the way to the end, how to structure it, how to pace it, how to work the formula. I also learnt to retain a whole novel in my head (along with several thousand index cards.) I turned several old short stories into screenplays, one of which was about a mindwalker called Gomenzi...
Except that it was just crying out to be a novel. My back stories and character descriptions were novels in themselves – all lost on the potential screen. I wanted the detail. I wanted the prose. I wanted the freedom of a novel, a freedom I don’t think I would have learned if I hadn’t tried to restrain myself with screenplays.
And suddenly I was a writer. I wasn’t dreaming it or pretending – I was living it. I was writing. The creativity exploded out of me. My long-dreamed of Fleet Quintet began to take shape. I wrote six novels one after the other without taking a break and for years was lost in Fleet space – alter-space – in what has so far been the most intensively creative period of my life. My adventures in supra-natural sci-fi lead me finally to the discovery of Ultra (ultimately the title of my first published novel), not a place but a state of grace that we can only aspire to, yet never attain, and mourn, because we can never return again.
I write the type of sci-fi that I want to read though I have yet to find for it a suitable sub-genre. I write about immortality because that’s all I know. I’m not aware of any influences and my own desires are my inspiration. If I could meet someone from the past it would be Merlin. If I could go somewhere else it would not be here. If I could be someone else it would be me.
