Welcome to my blog, my website, and my writing world. Thank you for taking the time to check out what I have to say on writing, and on my writing.
I will be clear up front: I declare myself far from an expert on this subject and indeed on any subject for that matter, so please do not take offence if I sound a little over eager at times because I can say for certain that this is indeed my passion.
Passion and expertise rarely go hand-in-hand and I have a long journey ahead of me there. I do have age on my side, however, and many decades studying Theoretical Physics, Cosmology, Particle Physics, among a raft of subject that I found my curiosity drawn to after higher education ended. They say then it is only after school that you really start to learn, when so many school-leavers just stop at that point. Fortunately, after just managing to squeeze out an honours degree in Maths with Computing, I did just that. Of course, as a Gen-X, I started with popular science books to help me take my earlier choice of Maths With Physics to new levels, only to discover I was living in the middle of the most radical period of change in human history, leading to ever more digestible and readily available opinion, eventually in the accelerated form of YouTube videos.
Perhaps many of you have grown up hearing that science was almost complete only to discover that hubris to be utterly unfounded? Indeed, the realisations of the power of Chaos Theory, the failure of String Theory(ies), the expanding questions brought by ever more powerful telescopes, the reinterpretations of Relativity, and the mind-blowing hypotheses regarding Black Holes all served to remind us of how little we did know after all.
So much for the acquisition of knowledge to support the “Hard Science” part of “Hard Science Fiction”. What on Earth do I think I have to offer on the subject of story telling?
As a middle-aged man, I have read a great many classic Science Fiction novels, and I could say I am almost exclusively dedicated to the genre – oh dear, that does make me sound like a narrow reader, which I cannot deny. My other, arguably greater, passion had been for film and TV. My hero on the matter was always the late, great Barry Norman, with his incomparable knowledge of everything to do with film-making. I loved the show he created as his vehicle – an amusingly difficult series to name since it was always called “Film” followed by the current year e.g. “Film 1990”. He was a huge influence on the way I appreciated story-telling, as if it were a great wine: how this compared to that, how great performances worked, why a story with all the right ingredients worked so well yet a cheap and doomed flick would be so praiseworthy. He also loved risky, indie ventures that brought something new for him to talk about, and despite their obvious shortcomings he would still advise you to watch it and find out for yourself. There was always something interesting to find in a bad movie, well that was almost true, anyway.
I watched tens of thousands of movies, was known to regularly acquire three video cassettes from a Video Rental store to watch in one evening after work, and soon exhausted the store by watching everything, even the bad C-class movies – this was where the real conversations could be had, discussing why they were bad and what actual good they had in them.
As a software engineer, needing to explain something that doesn’t really exist and which has only a passing resemblance to anything metaphorical, was paramount for my professional success. So, I leaned on my love of story and learned to tell stories, a skill I am praised for regularly at work.
With these odd credentials, I can safely say that I am no literary writer, however, I do believe I have a good grasp of story. It took me thirty years, wandering the writing desert, before returning to the art having learned to drop my linguistic pretensions, and finally to write authentically and simply. Only then did I not struggle. Only then did I even like what I had written. And only now do I feel even slightly worthy to publish and share it.
This late voyage into blogging, marketing and engagement, and my resistance and delay in doing so, is proof that I still maintain a healthy doubt in my abilities.
We can all only progress by doing, being critical and willing to listen to healthy criticism. So, dear readers, I ask you humbly to engage with me as I sail this sea of adventure and discovery.