About me

Maybe it was my mother who did it. She bought this set of LPs designed to teach children to read using phonics, and played them repeatedly when I was a toddler. I know it came as a shock, during my first year of school, to realise that other children were just beginning to get to grips with language. But I suppose there was something more, some hunger for the words. I might have decided to produce my own because it was the only way to get enough. Certainly writing followed from reading pretty quickly. I was publishing books, made from folded and trimmed loose leaf paper, when I was seven or eight.

Trouble was I let myself get diverted. If I ever had doubts or concerns about being a writer, it was in knowing exactly what to write. Genres, I suppose, are necessary things, but I think they can make a writer too conscious about 'fitting in'. For years I couldn't finish anything I started; there was always some irreparable flaw. Once I overcame that self-destructiveness, I wrote fiction with scientific elements that wasn't quite science fiction, or books set in imagined worlds with fantastic characters that somehow weren't like any published fantasy novels I could find. So while I may have produced a lot of writing in my life, in hindsight much of it feels like it shouldn't count, because it was more an exercise in finding a place to be.

Then I had success placing short stories in the small press, and one by one they began to show me what kind of writer I was. Now my ambition is to create a novel that mimics what I've already achieved with short fiction.

My other ambitions include being known as something other than a socially backward accounting technician, being able to buy more than a bag of chips with money earned from prose, and for God's sake not giving up. I throw that in so I can say I've managed one out of four, at least!

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Cartoon: Debbie Ridpath Ohi of Inkygirl