I
look nothing like I did when this picture was taken in 1984. In the grand tradition of author photographs, I
look nothing like I did when this picture was taken in 1984.
Way back then, I was 17 and about to leave home for university. I played lead guitar in a rock band high on enthusiasm and low on quality. I wrote songs which we never performed live (partly lack of courage, partly recognition that they weren't really the kind of thing we played). I did a lot of drawing and photography and spent whatever spare time I had trekking along the local sea-wall, birdwatching and day-dreaming.
Seventeen was an important age for me (and for most of us, I suppose). About to leave home, a rough-edged version of the person I've become, with far more passion and anger and far less understanding of the world I was entering.
About the time this picture was taken, I started to become a writer.
As I grew up I went through phases of reading avidly, and then not at all. John Christopher's Tripods books made a huge impression, as did the Heinlein juveniles and before that, Watership Down, The Hobbit, and all kinds of trash...
But at 17 I spent a very wet holiday in Yorkshire. The village shop had a twirl-around rack of cheap paperbacks and I worked my way through all the horror I could find. Returning home, I explored the library with a vengeance. And I started to make notes: What if the author had done it like this? But what if that had never happened? What if... what if... what if...
I went to the University of East Anglia to study ecology and pretty soon decided that was too narrow a field. I switched to environmental sciences, a subject that allowed me to tackle everything from hard science (biology, geology, meteorology) through to social sciences (economics, environmental politics, anthropology). A perfect degree for a budding SF author.
Not long after the picture was taken, not long after I went to university, I met the art history student who would, in three years time, become my wife of twenty years, Alison.
Yes, everything changed around the time this picture was taken.
~
I had the strange idea in my head that, as most authors didn't get published until at least their mid-twenties, it wasn't worth trying before then. I saw all those potential years as an unpublished author as a waste, and not as the training ground that it is.
But I couldn't hold off that long. In my second year at university I bought a typewriter and then I just had to write. My first story, 'The Fifth Freedom', sold to the small press magazine Dream (which also published early work by Stephen Baxter and Peter F Hamilton); my third story sold there, too.
On the strength of these two small press sales I allowed Alison to persuade me to take a year out after university to write a novel. The responsibility of taking such a big step (Alison and I were living with next to no money - I just had to make it work!) seemed to have a big effect on my writing. As soon as I finished the first story I wrote in that time I knew it was way better than anything I'd written before: 'Adrenotropic Man' sold quickly to Interzone, although it was 18 months before it finally appeared.
I wrote Keepers of the Peace and when my year was up I decided to give myself another six months.
As the end of that six months approached, I sold another story, and gave myself some more time.
~
I managed to stretch my 'year out' to something like eight years in all, but eventually pressures of mortgage and family responsibilities meant I had to look for a more reliable source of income.
These days I run the University of Essex web and learning technology teams; as if that wasn't enough, in 2010 I completed a PhD, and I also lecture in creative writing and science fiction, and write and edit in my spare time. For ten years I lived with Alison in the old part of Brightlingsea, a lovely little seaside town in Essex. Our children, George, Molly, Ed and Daisy, are growing up far too fast, all teenagers now, with George away in London at university.
Now I live just upriver from my old home in the village of Wivenhoe with my partner Debbie; we're surrounded by good friends and I still spend plenty of time with the kids.