I started young. I was the irritating kid that came to play but always disappeared, only to eventually be found reading a comic in some quiet corner. My favourite outdoor game was to build a town in the dust so I could make up stories about the people in the dinky cars zooming around on dirt roads.
A story addiction is a funfair rollercoaster with no climbing off. You just keep going again and again and get high as a coot on the trip. Every book, every comic, every film, only satisfies the craving temporarily, until the next fix. My attention finds potential for story the same way other people’s eyes stray to icecream sundae or flashing diamonds. I’m hooked on story. It’s better than chocolate for depression, isn’t dangerous to one’s health, and if there is any mind-bending involved it’s not of the vicious short-term variety. The only thing that beats the feeling induced by a good story is the satisfaction, an almost spiritual joy, of writing.
This blog chronicles some random musings on living and dying from a writer’s perspective. A fiction author’s head is full of mysterious notions, subteranean visions, random recollections, bits of overheard conversations, stolen glimpses and a cornucopia of facts. Add some brazen silvery leaps of the imagination and before you know it you have a stew bubbling away merrily, promising to turn into a full-blown hitherto-untold brand new story.
All that enjoyment felt sinful and lazy when I was younger (my catholic upbringing) so I opted for an adrenalin-charged gender-equal high-earnings career in information technology. Years later I realised that if I kept ignoring the voices in my head I might go insane. I’ve been a committed writer for eight years now and its been a fearsome helter-skelter ride. My first novel THE GOOD CEMETERY GUIDE is out there, my second novel is finally going to get published next year. Watch this space…
In-between family stuff and writing I grow things, play relaxed tennis, ski once a year and am crazy about animals. Pablo and Paloma are our Great Danes, Schnapps is our little rescue friend (called an Abyssinian Rabbit Dog by some), Charlie is our African Grey parrot and Tiggie is a very cool cat.
They say every serious writer has at least one novel about sex and another about death in them. In my first novel the protagonist, Anthony Loxton, a funeral director who plays accoustic guitar in music clubs at night, stepped out of the mist and hijacked me as we were driving through Kalk Bay late one night. Life hasn’t been the same since. Because of Anthony Loxton and his unorthodox lifestyle I started delving into how funeral parlours work and found myself musing on foreign concepts like burials and mourning and survivors. Big surprise to find out that philosophising about death isn’t considered good etiquette at the dinner table! I had to channel all the novel thoughts somewhere so I started a website. If you are also interested in death and how we handle it as a society then you might be interested in my website www.goodcemeteryguide.com
