What Scares Author Tim C Taylor

Summary: What Scares Authors series #14, learn in his own words what scares author Tim C. Taylor.



My son scares me the most. I guess my wife does too, but mostly my son, and he's only five.



I blame Rudyard Kipling.



When I was very young, I used to love Kipling's Just So Stories; these old-fashioned and rather silly parables about animals delighted me, and intrigued me with the way the author addresses the reader as 'dearly beloved'. Years later, when my wife was pregnant, I watched a TV documentary about Kipling and rediscovered that sense of delight when I learned that Kipling wrote 'dearly beloved' to address his daughter, Josephine. He made up the Just So Stories as bedtime tales for her; she would quietly hold his hand as he wrote them down to sell to periodicals.



Then, having built this picture of blissful family life, the documentary shattered it because Josephine died very suddenly of pneumonia when still a little girl. Kipling was devastated. A few years later, in 1915, his only son was killed at the Battle of Loos.



Thanks, BBC, for screening that, just as I was about to become a dad.



So what scares me most is the thought of my son being damaged. Falling off a cliff, bird flu, mugger, Martin invasion: in my darkest moments I've imagined all of them (except the last one). Wife and son in a car crash: 100 points, game over!



I don't let it show; I don't let him know. Most of the time I don't worry about him but always lurking in the back of my mind...



Maybe I'm just soppy, maybe I'm just a dad, maybe it was all those dad hormones when I watched that TV program -- I don't know. What I am sure about is that the thing that scares me most is my son.



I wrote a science fiction story about those fears. It's a short story called No More than Human after the Theodore Sturgeon classic More than Human. In it, the future for unmodified people, as we largely are today, looks very bleak indeed. Something cracks when the main character watches his wife brutalized (I couldn't bring myself to portray a child damaged so). In the end he deliberately endangers his children and the generations to come after, but in doing so he buys hope.



Where To Buy No More Than Human

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Smashwords (multiple e-formats) | Barnes & Noble (NOOK) | iTunes US | iTunes UK



About the Author

Tim writes science fiction, though latterly people are calling his work steampunk or fantasy. When he lost his job in February 2011, his co-workers gave him a Kindle as a leaving present. A few weeks later he had set up Greyhart Press and begun to publish other authors of horror, science fiction, and fantasy.



Tim's blog: www.timctaylor.com On Twitter: @TimCTaylor






Thanks Tim!

- Todd



Read what scares the last 10 authors in the What Scares Authors series:



LeAnna Shields
Sarah Woodbury
Jeannie Walker
Joshua Mays
Athanasios
Steven R. Drennon
Heather Marie Adkins
Sue Owen
Laura Yirak
Arshad Ahsanuddin