Quite Mad..

When I was about 13, I used to go to my friend Richards house to watch horror films. At the time, we both wanted to be horror writers and we were hugely into Stephen King. We would write on this old typewriter, taking it in turns to write parts of our stories. They were rubbish, of course. I tried to copy the spirit and tone of 'Misery' (my favourite book at the time) and, being 13 and not really capable of being scary, it was a mess. I can't even remember what it was about but it did feature passages IN BLOCK CAPITALS, trying to make things more interesting. So interesting that I forgot anything to do with the story. Richard's little opus was a series about a haunted ottoman, called 'The Ottoman'. There were three books in this ghastly (in every sense of the word) trilogy and it was far less pretentious than mine. (How bad is it that I recall writing loads of my story, the tone and style but NOTHING about the actual story? It's like my adult brain has blocked it out.)
I do remember a story about robot dinosaurs escaping from a theme park and killing people. This was 1993. You can guess what influenced that slapdash slash, can't you?

I loved creative writing at school. I loved it so much that I would literally ignore other subjects and just write stories; long, long stories (with sequels) even if the teachers didn't ask me to. It was mostly because I liked escaping into fantasy worlds and also a handy way to get out of maths. You see, if you hadn't finished something, and they wanted to move onto another subject, you could ask to finish, taking time off the boring stuff to focus on the lessons you loved. This ruse did not work in secondary school because of time tables and having to go to different rooms for lessons (and *shudder* outside for sports).
I got through a lot of books in English, 4 in one term. I just wrote lots of stories, usually horror and fantasy. There were terrible pictures, spin off stories, you name it. There was one story, a trilogy about a woman who was, get this, BEING STALKED BY A CAR CRASH. I'm not even sure where that came from but the task was to write something about road safety. Kind of an odd leap but then, I did also write a story about a man who, after getting out of the wrong side of bed, was transported to a fantasy world that featured Volcano women, foot-faced barbarians and a talking parrot called 'Pervert'. My teacher at the time, a youngish man (Well, younger than the other teachers) wrote: "You are quite mad". I loved that. It was certainly better than being yelled at for not catching/kicking/dodging balls in PE.

I have no idea what started this off. I guess somethings never change.