I Never Thought I'd Get Here.
I didn’t start writing until I was 44. Since my divorce, I’ve struggled to find things to do on the few weekends that I don’t have the kids. They’re with me full time, and they go to their mums every other weekend. Finding things to do during that time they are away was always a challenge. The urge to just collapse in a heap is always very strong.
The turning point was Fantasycon in 2018, I don’t even recall how I found out about it. It must have been promoted on Facebook, but it was in Chester, where I work and a quick bus ride from where I live. It was fantastic. The very first Pannel was on non-western Magic systems, and it had a debut author named Tasha Suri who was a couple of months off publishing Empire of Sand. I remember preordering it on my phone while I was sitting on the Panel.
I resolved to keep going to conventions where I could, starting with World con in Dublin in 2019. Of course the Pandemic interrupted everything. It was 2023 before I started to attend Cons again, starting with Eastercon. I made a resolution that year, that I would make a serious attempt at writing for the first time. I joined the BFS at the con, and then I went up stairs and started writing ‘Lost Talent.’ Attending that conventions was so important to my development as a writer. Just spending time in the same room as other writers and normalising the idea of writing to myself was so important to getting to the stage of putting pen to paper.
Prior to that, I had only ever dreamed of being a writer. My hard drive is littered with scraps of stories, barely ever started. A short story about a Magical Tattooist from 2022 that I couldn’t get to work. A group of scientists trapped in an underground Lab with an invasive biological monstrosity of their own creation from 2021. The beginning of a story about a teenager with black magic from 2018. A YA story from 2016 about a girl in a wheelchair and an amnesiac young man fighting monsters on the astral plane. A comic book script about superheroic group of first responders who try to use their powers to rescue people in disaster areas from 2012. So maybe I first became a writer in 2012? But none of that counted. None of them ever went on for longer than a page after all.
Of course, Over the years I put much of my creative energy into homebrewed RPGs. A group of smugglers and outcasts trying to sell Jabba the Hutt’s diary to the highest bidder. A high school filled with supernatural teenagers slowly discovering the nefarious plans of their parents. Adventurers seeking to reclaim a lost world hundreds of years after an apocalyptic battle between the gods. A group of young people roaming Krynn after being tricked into freeing a powerful lich and struck with a terrible curse. Vampires pulled into a battle for dominance in London, before discovering the terrible demonic powers exploiting the chaos for their own ends. But none of that counted as writing, you know?
Even the short story that I wrote when I was in Uni in the 90s, about my LRP character coming to terms with his death and resurrection, didn’t count. I only ever showed it to two people after all. The play that I wrote for my creative writing module on my degree didn’t count either. Despite the grade I got for it, I never even tried to get it performed, or tried writing a play again after it was finished.
Was there anything before that? I don’t honestly remember. My history in school is of struggling with anything relating to the written word. Teachers told me that there was something wrong with my English ability. I took multiple dyslexia tests, but my reading ability was always too high. We didn’t have the language for Neurodivergence or a better understanding of the Autistic Spectrum back then. If we did I wonder if things would have come different, and I might not have come away with a feeling that my lack of skill would forever block me from becoming a writer. I don’t think I ever voiced that ambition to anyone while I was at school. I just seemed like an impossibility.
I felt pretty foolish when I didn’t see how much my story was reflected in Mina and Heidi’s journey in Lost Talent. It is, at it’s heart, a story about how the wrong words from a teacher or an adult at the wrong time can change the course of a young person’s life.
That story is available tomorrow. The internal voices that tell me that I haven’t got it in me to do this, will finally be proven wrong. I’m sure that my imposter syndrome will manifest in all sorts of interesting new ways, but it will always be there. I wrote a book. I Put it out there. I sold… some copies? Hopefully? That is the least important bit really. I’m sure I’ll see all the flaws in it in a couple of years, but hopefully there will be more steps on this journey. At the very least, maybe I can accept the fact that I have always been a writer.
