I was exhorted to write an ‘author story’ by various Author-Branding Gurus I’ve encountered online and elsewhere.  ‘Tell your readers why you write!,’ they said.   ‘Be your Authentic Self,’ they advised.  ‘Engage with people on a personal level!’.  And so on.

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I really did try.  I wrote something so honest and heartfelt that anyone reading it would be more likely to send me the number of a highly qualified therapist than engage with my work.  Then I wrote something in the guise of a story that was so overblown and embarrassing that even I cringed when I read it.  Then I went and ate two salted caramel mini-Magnums in a row and despaired…

 

I come from a family of storytellers.  My parents loved to read, to travel, to watch films and TV.  Us kids spent a lot of our childhood visiting unconventional places, learning about people, history, mythology.  We liked to tell jokes and make up funny stories; best of all we liked to make each other laugh.  I grew up in the 70s and 80s and was exposed to weirdness like Children of the Stones and Blake’s 7, listening to John Peel on the radio, playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading books I borrowed without asking from my parents’ collection of sci-fi and supernatural horror, some of which were definitely not suitable for children.

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As soon as I was able to write, I started writing stories.  I still have an exercise book from junior school where my teacher has commented in red, ’Your stories are very strange, unrealistic and rather gruesome,’ exactly like that, with the ‘gruesome’ underlined.  Not ‘well-written,’ ‘imaginative’, or even ‘good’.  Clearly Mrs Leggett wasn’t a Hammer Horror fan.  In fact throughout my education most of my teachers, it turned out, were also not fans of science-fiction, fantasy, or humour.  Especially not if all those things were mixed together, with a heavy dose of what we’d now call Magical Realism thrown in.  But those are the stories I like to write.  They are strange and not exactly realistic and yes, sometimes even a bit gruesome.  In a light-hearted way.

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Why do I write? – Because I can’t help but see the magic that lies beneath the Ordinary and the Everyday, and observe so much that is bizarre and hilarious and wonderful in the world.  And I know now that for all the Mrs Leggetts who exist, there are equally as many folks who enjoy seeing the world in a different way and love to hear its stories. 

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Strange, unrealistic people like us, who want to know we’re not alone.