Scribble, write, scribble, chuck away

I’ve always been a writer.  I remember when I was about eight years old deciding to write ‘Alice in Wonderland’.  I wasn’t all that bothered by the somewhat monumental fact that this book had already been written.  I dutifully made my own notebook (by folding over pieces of A4 plain paper, cutting them in half and stapling the concoction together – the pages were all wonderfully skew-iff) and wrote the book on the basis of the Walt Disney film, which I knew off by heart.  I wish I still had that book.  I can’t remember much of it now, 21 years later, except that it was probably dialogue orientated, with minimal description and (how Alice would abhor) no pictures!  What is the use of a book without any pictures?  My teenage self would have undoubtedly agreed with her sentiments.

At 13, I wrote another book – or at least, I started to.  I wanted to write a book about a girl who found a pet poodle and went on adventures with it, until my dad pointed out that stray dogs were unlikely to be poodles, due to their pedigree.  Simple, I thought.  Poodles being French dogs (are they?) would enrage some sort of anti-French moron, who would then evict their pet, allowing my protagonist to find it.  The novel was abandoned in its early stages.  Really all I wanted was a dog.

At 14 or 15 I wrote my first full length book – A Blaze in the Night.  This I actually completed and spent long months researching.  It was about a family of foxes and their lives in a Devonshire wood.  These foxes were rather forward thinking canines, adopting a badger cub and an orphaned vixen cub to add to their already improbably large brood of six cubs.  In the early stages I was inventing characters purely so I could use all of the lovely names I had created.  The protagonists were Redblaze (dog fox) and Willow (vixen).  Their cubs were: Scamper, Hawthorn, Moondancer, Velvetpaws, Brightdawn and Bracken.  Bracken died a horribly sentimental and painful death, the like of which literature has not seen since Little Nell.  The orphaned vixen was Fala (no officer, I was not simply adapting the name Nala from ‘The Lion King’) and the badger cub was Grey.  As the book progressed, many of the characters external to the main family (excluding Bracken) died nasty deaths.  There was a gassing, a severe storm, and a skulk of evil foxes who lived on the edge of Exmoor.  In the sequel there was a plague, killing off as many of the surviving characters from the first book as was seemly.  Before long I was actually inventing characters with the express purpose of killing them off tragically.  A cast of thousands, with very few survivors.  Neither hunting or illness has ever posed such a severe threat to the foxes of Devon than I did.

In my early 20’s I wrote another book which I, again, completed.  This time foxes were out, rats were in and the Plague remained a consistent theme.  This was ‘The Plague Girl’ and can be read on-line.  I still like it, although it is very badly written.  They say every first novel is a placement novel – where the author is writing for themselves, with little consideration for an audience and the protagonist is a perfect version of themselves.

Yep.

Now I am concentrating on ‘That Fat Rat’s a Brat’, the first book in the Rodent Rebels series.  I also have a teenage fiction book in the planning about Victorian freakshows and my magnificent octopus, ‘Far above the Tide’, a proper novel.  I am also writing an compiling a collection of short stories and poems, which serve as a welcome break.  And that’s where you find me now.

Posted: January 31st, 2010 under Uncategorized - No Comments. Tags: , , , , , ,