MY DREAM from the age of about twelve. I’ve always really liked writing – but only on a keyboard. Ask me to write with a pen and I’ll explain that I’m left-handed and I hate my ugly handwriting. But I love lines of neat black type and when my muse permits I can bash out hundreds at a time. I started writing short stories as a youngster on the school library typewriter, courtesy of an understanding English teacher (many blessings upon you, Mr. Davies) and graduated to rustling up the beginnings of longer works in my teens. By my mid-twenties I was seriously convinced I could write a novel of some kind and I remain so to this day. But few opportunities have given me time enough to write continuously without distraction.

The eternal conflict between style and substance has always been another problem. My style has always been heavily influenced by the authors I’ve been into when the opportunity to write has arisen. Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Stephen King, Samuel R. Delany – the six most influential fiction authors in my life in chronological order (though of course I’ve read many more). A mash-up of sci-fi, fantasy and horror. I feel happiest writing in any of those genres. But being able to emulate a compelling narrative style does not an author make. There’s also the question of substance.

Rather than starting with believeable characters and a convincing storyline already mapped out, I tend to be set off by something like a song title – let’s say Midnight At The Oasis – and I’ll see a little vignette in my head: a group of arabs ranged around a camp fire, their shemaghs warding off the cool evening breeze that ripples the moonlight’s reflection on the nearby water and sways the silhouetted palms against the outrageously beautiful Milky Way. Beyond the fire’s light, the dark desert stretches in all directions. They might be living in the ancient past, or the distant future – on another planet, even. Then it starts to go all Dune on me as Herbert’s classic rumbles threateningly somewhere on the horizon like a sandworm hunting spice. I could work that scene out to a good few thousand words. But who are these guys? What’s their story?

Don’t ask me. The scene is familiar, but I’m a stranger here myself.

It was the same with the others. Something wicked this way came – orcs patrolled the roads while clowns waited in the sewers to wound the autumnal city. They spawned beginnings with no ends, scenes with no context.

I did once complete a longish story, a pulp sci-fi one which borrowed heavily from the ‘Doc’ in that it was a pacy space adventure full of made-up technical jargon. At least it had a beginning, a middle and an end and was long enough, I felt, to qualify as a novella.

None of my fiction has ever been published. But it’s not as though I’ve never been published.

In the late 80s I developed and self-published a crop circle magazine called The Circular which enjoyed some success amongst its small but enthusiastic readership. I included articles from other crop circle researchers and contributed a number of my own, one of which – a highly speculative piece which talked about a possible crop circle reference I found in the Dead Sea Scrolls – was spotted some years later by a US New Age publisher. They asked me to sub it down for inclusion in one of their crop circle calendars, a commission which earned me the princely sum of $50 – my only earnings from ‘proper’ writing to date.

Lately – thankfully – more spare time has opened up for me. My muse, after being silent for so long, is whispering in my ear once again, urging me to start a new project: it’s a tale set in the early 1600s in which our hero flees a terrible natural disaster, undergoes a perilous ocean voyage and is forced to survive in a strange and hostile land. In order to stretch myself, you’ll note it’s not sci-fi (though I can’t promise that some elements of fantasy and horror won’t seep in somehow). The background research has been fun, informative and absorbing – and has, for the first time I think, provided me with enough substance to overcome any stylistic influences that may threaten to overwhelm me along the way.

Now in my early 50s, I feel I’ll never have a better – or, indeed, another – chance to make a go of this unfulfilled ambition.

It’s time to live the dream.

( This entry also published on my blog: http://www.bobkingsley.co.uk/blog/?p=8 )