Far off days. I recall feeding on a never-ending stream of fiction and non-fiction, the latter always huddled under the troublesome category of 'Earth Mysteries.' Fond recollections of reading the classic Armada Ghost Books and Pan horror collections. I'm grateful for a childhood blessed by Bradbury, Blackwood, Timperley, Danby, Tapp, Bloch and many others.
These formative reading experiences came to bear on my early work. I'd eagerly eat through one creative writing jotter after another. Secret military experiments? Rampaging Egyptian mummies? Random monsters picking my classmates off one by one?
Every class has their strange kid. I like to think I was stranger than most. Glorious.
More challenging fiction and non-fiction followed. My interest in paranormal subjects and magick deepened. I turned in, seeking new insights through homemade runes, the tarot, dowsing... It was clear - and still is - our world is far richer than we can grasp.
Reading tastes varied. Years passed in the company of Lethbridge and Fortune on one side, Gogol, Kafka, James Herbert and Guy Smith on the other. Luckily, my secondary schooling fed me with Orwell, Steinbeck and Solzhenitsyn which I am extremely grateful for. Thinking back we were an unruly lot in class, but I still remember reading 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and experiencing a chilling flash of 'this is it.'
Around this time I also cast the net into photography, film and music, developing eclectic tastes. Raw cinema has always been a huge love. The controversial across the ages still excites and inspires me to write.
From early adulthood onwards, I played the submissions game. Obsessing over the most minute detail prior to pushing my latest fiction or non-fiction piece. I had some success with my non-fiction, several articles appearing in the great British occult magazine Prediction, now sadly no-longer with us. But overall? Lean times. A lot of effort. A lot of frustration.
I have no expectations other than to just go ahead and publish on my own terms, for good or bad. I'll dip my hand in the river and take a drink for the hell of it. Let's see what happens.
From 'The Mysterious Heroism of Archibald Crane'
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