author introduction
What
better way to put all my angst into short stories. Born in a commuter
belt city called Reading and like many a middle or upper class child of
such times I was shunted off to an all-male boarding school aged eight,
away from my parents for periods of up to twelve weeks at a time. In
such an institutions, where I was to rest until my seventeenth year,
there was no getting away from the cruel jibes hurled at me from
taunting tormentors. My refuge was the arts room, where I started to
find some kind of redemption from the stark Dickensian surroundings,
whose aim was nurture the army officers, businessmen, and gentry that
dominate the class ridden world I was born into. The seeds were sown, I
was an outsider, Happier times were to follow, I went to art school,
where I attempted to exorcize my time spent at school. At eighteen I
turned my back on a parentally enforced weekly visit to church and my
head was filled with a range of nonconformist ideas. While at my first
Art college through a friend I met a writer called Rupert Thomson, who
was at the time in the process of writing his first book “Dreams of
leaving”. He was a bit older than myself, me being fresh out of school,
but his personality and wit resonated and despite losing contact with
him, I always read his latest published books with not only great
expectation and unabashed admiration, but also a fascination for a
person I had really looked up to, his sentences always tight, shooting
arrows that always hit the mark. My yearning to be creative stayed
strong and diversified, from my twenties through to my thirties and
forties I made electronic music, doing concerts, in front ecstasy
infused crowds, at a point I was making videos and short films. When the
age of the internet arrived I was really able translate my creative
endeavors into something really tangible. To earn a living I have worked
as a teacher. I moved to Austria where upon I thought I would try
writing. It is sure that my writing at that time was rough and rugged
and without direction. I dived into a story about immortality, the story
remains vegetating on some dusty floppy disk. Then tried short stories
for children with illustrations to go with them. It wasn’t until I was
in my mid-forties that my writing took shape. I was at this point living
in Paris, France. I spotted an advert for short stories. The magazine
happened to be called Rat Mort (dead rat) I sent off a short story, in
the hope it would match the seemingly dark world the magazine seemed to
embroiled in. I got no answer. Not put off I sent two more stories.
Finally I got an answer. It seemed the magazine editor was a busy man, a
man prone to travelling. It seemed my first story really hit the right
note with him. His name was Alan Clark. He had a flat in the Montmartre
area of Paris, where he seemed known to all, especially those who
frequented his favorite drinking haunts. He offered me many words of
encouragement. I was writing stories that were coming into my head at
regular intervals, as if a monster had suddenly awakened. I was writing
them on scraps of paper, less I would forget them, while I travelled on
the Paris metro, going about my teaching work with staid business types.
I had found a format for writing that worked, as well as a hunger to
write about the demons of my past that still haunted me. Moving closer
to present times, the desire to put together an anthology seemed to
resonate in my mind. The Flight of Destiny evolved slowly. Many
trans-Atlantic exchanges between myself and two editors seemingly far
away. This evolution took my writing to a new level and the stories more
depth and resonance.
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