The Writer and The Ride

What do you remember about the first stories you read and loved when you were, maybe, eleven or twelve years old?

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently as I’ve come to a creative crossroads. The last one I reached was in 2006 when I decided to move on from pursuing a music career to a writing one – and, judging by the signs over the last eighteen months, I made the right decision back then. But there is another decision I have made this year, that being to move on from the horror genre. And the root-cause of that decision comes back to the question I ask above.

Do you remember discovering your childhood favourites for the first time and how it felt reading those stories? Without analysis, without searching for subtext, when we were simply sitting back and enjoying the Ride. There was exhilaration and excitement in those books, the words were magic, the characters were our best friends and we never wanted the story to come to an end. I think that’s something we forget sometimes as we grow older and become too concerned with ‘being taken seriously’.

I’ve been looking at my bookshelves recently and realising the books that took me on that Ride aren’t there so much anymore. There’s a lot of literature there but there aren’t many books. By this, I mean to say there is literature there that I admire and love but the pleasure I take in it is not the same as it was when books were books and the point and purpose of a book was just to take me on that Ride.

And I have come to realise that I miss the Ride. I really do.

I miss it because it is what makes a great story and, to my mind, always has been. It’s not something that can be dissected and analysed by a literary critic. It’s just there, in the story, and it makes you hungry to turn the pages and to come back for more. And I have been feeling like the Ride has gotten away from me, or that I disembarked at some point without realising it.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote “I’m farther from doing what I want to do than I was twenty years ago” in 1936 and whilst the span of time that has passed for me has not been as great as twenty years, I feel a great deal of empathy with this statement at the moment. This is not to say I am not proud of my work to date or the achievements I’ve made. I certainly am and I look forward to releasing The Thing Behind the Door, This Darkness Mine and Night Residue later this year for my readers’ enjoyment. In these three titles, I believe is some of my best writing to date.

But this has not changed the fact that for me, as this year has gone on and grown old, I have felt a growing sense that there is something missing, that I wish to recapture when I sit down to write, and I can come up with no better name for it than the Ride. It has made me realise that I need to do something different which is why, after experimenting with a couple of genres, I will be moving onto the Fantasy genre and have been developing the character, Khale the Wanderer. Right now, as I plot and plan the series that this character will feature in, I feel like I’m back on board the Ride after standing still for far too long.

I hope you will join me in 2013 because that is when the Ride begins anew.

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