Turning Fifty

I woke up early this morning on my 50th birthday. It was as bright outside as it would ever be at 5am due to it being the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight time. From here on, the nights get longer.

Sitting in bed with a cup of tea I started to think about some of the first stories I wrote, and a few memories came back to me.

The first thing I remember writing was in my penultimate year in primary school, so we're talking 1983-4. Successfully combining two major phobias of mine, it was called "Tarantursnake" and took up a whopping four pages of my English workbook. I remember getting a decent mark for it, but the only thing I could remember from the story itself was a man hanging on for dear life to a pole suspended over a pit of tarantursnakes. In fact, that may have been the whole thing. I'm not so sure it followed any conventional rules of narrative.

Later, in 1987, in high school, a collection of us smuggled copies of the newly published paperback of Stephen King's IT into lessons. All of us were at various points in the thousand-page book, and we would hold our copies open under our desks, reading while lessons progressed. Our love for horror riding high, my school friend Nick and I decided to collaborate on a story which I don't think ever got a title. We alternated writing the chapters, combining our handwritten A4 sheets into a single mammoth copy. We never finished it, but on reflection I think it was more heavily influenced by Salems Lot than Pennywise. Set in the town of Weston (near Knighton on the Welsh borders, a place neither Nick or I had ever been to, but found by sticking a pin in a map) it centred around the mysterious Duarte family, who lived in a remote house on a nearby hill. They wore dinner suits all the time, and would decend into the small town at night to kill the local residents. We never finished it. Maybe because of looming exams, but also I had a growing love for writing music at the time.

However, the writing itch seemed to always need scratching and in 1998, using my trusty Atari 520ST and a dot-matrix printer, I wrote a short story collection called "The Cruise", with a front cover drawn by the very same Nick, and glued down one side to create a binding for the A4 sheets. I can't remember all of the stories but one of them featured a couple who snuck onto the upper deck to go for a night-time swim after the pool was closed, only to be devoured by a killer squid that had somehow found its way in there. Another story featured a down-at-heel professional clown who longed for applause, and created a computer program to power a pair of (real!) hands to clap for him whenever he performed a magic trick in his cabin. The Cruise found its way into the hands of a young Lucy Speed, who had been acting in a show in Wimbledon with my mother at the time, and, over a cast and crew dinner we went to at the local curry house, proceeded to rave about it to another young actress, Keeley Hawes. "Cruise II" followed. I wish I still had those pieces of writing, however amateurish they were.

I remember researching and writing Spireclaw on my daily commutes from Kingston upon Thames to Waterloo in 2003, making the most of the downtime that train journeys provided. The whole first draft was written with a stylus on a Sony Clie (basically like a Palm Pilot), often when there was standing room only and someone looking at the screen over my shoulder while I tapped frantically away, trying to keep up with my thoughts. The second piece I wrote on the Clie was Flyers (part of the collection on The Train Set) in 2005. The story was originally called The Fourdrinier Operator. I had managed to spill out 16,000 words in two weeks only to later fall foul of the document sync on my computer. Somehow I'd managed to sync a blank copy of the file over the one I had written on the Clie, and lost all of the work. I was so distraught that I was unable to begin writing it again for another six years. Ever since then I always save a new version of the file I'm working on with a new date every time, despite the wonders of Version History.

As for the future, I'm fully hoping that the sequel to The Tolworth Beacon will see the light of day before I'm 51. At least I know I won't lose any of it to the dreaded document sync!