A Literary Life

I mentioned in Saturday’s post – Origins of a Novel – that there was another completed novel that I wasn’t sure what to do with.   I have actually been rewriting that novel, transforming it from an American-set thriller to a British one.   I’m going slow, finding that things an American setting allowed me work not so well on British soil, and so I’m having to find new ways of expressing them. Beautiful Vermont vs. Here’s the thing.   American landscape is epic, vast, and in places untamed.   It is conceivable that in that vast wilderness there might be a secret laboratory unknown to the rest of the world.   Try and put an unknown lab in the British landscape – we’ve pretty much tarmacked over it all, there is nowhere for it to be – so I’ve had to retcon certain aspects of the beginning of the work.   Such work has meant that later material won’t work either, so I’ll have to reconsider that as well.   This means I’ll end up with a novel ...

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can recall.  I wrote my first story aged five, about a battle between lions and tigers in the forests of Borneo.  I even drew pictures. My first proper audience were the kids who came to see the nurse in my boarding school where my worked was pinned to the walls.  I had drawn an epic thirty page ‘graphic novel’ about a man seeking treasure on a desert island whilst being hunted by a stranger.  I was ten.    To the right is how the island looked – and I stretched out a hunt and chase over 30 panels. The viewpoint not once changing.  The nurse told me how often the kids laughed it hurt their sides, following this story.  When I last spoke to a teacher from that school, ten years after I left, those panels were still on the nurse’s wall.  I think I’m probably owned a mass of royalties by now. The scope I have now as a writer is huge.  I can do literally anything in a script – go an...