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, 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 I saw all those potential years as an unpublished author as a waste, and not as the training ground that it is.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 website, and write and edit in my spare time. Alison and I live in the old part of Brightlingsea, a lovely little seaside town in Essex. Our children, George, Molly, Ed and Daisy, attend local schools and are growing up far too fast. All in all, life's pretty good, although in a perfect world I'd be writing full-time again and would have more time for my family and, simply, to be not working.
I'm heading in the right direction, though. In March 2005 I cut my hours at the University, working part-time there and allowing myself more time to write and, well, to have a life again. With two books out this year, and a movie project making slow progress, things are looking pretty exciting.