1. Getting Started

Getting Started – And missing my first deadline in fine writer’s tradition: It might’ve been bubbling away in me for a while without me really noticing but the most definitive beginning I can point to is around 2004. A BBC writing competition invited submission for a 264-word description of planet Earth for the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to replace the previous entry – ‘Mostly Harmless’. I wasn’t a writer but loved the HGTTG radio series and this was too tempting to resist. I wrote my entry, enjoyed myself so much I wrote a second, then couldn’t decide between the two and missed the deadline. I’ve no idea how either might have fared but I still feel a bit of a twit. Nonetheless, the seed was sown. How it grew is harder to explain. A character, an idea for a conversation, a scene, just sort of got written down, then another and another. Most went nowhere, a page or two, a few thousand words, twenty thousand, but petered out. Then one kept going and going until it became obvious I was writing an actual story, with actual characters, and that I was doing this when I should be doing other things, like sleeping. I never decided to write and sat down to do so; the compulsion to write crept up on me and took over. So if you find yourself bleary-eyed at work because you’ve been tapping away at your laptop till the early hours, certain only that you don’t want to stop just yet, then I don’t have to tell you to give in to the urge – it’s already too late.