Not many people know this, but I like to write. I've been writing since... I don't even know when. I think I took my first steps in the writing world when I was about eight or nine. It was a short story for a class assignment, and nostalgia and the teacher's remarks would have me believe that it wasn't too shabby. Obviously it didn't amount to anything - the market for fiction written by eight-year-old boys will most likely remain untapped forever, and with good reason - but ever since then I've always thought of myself as an aspiring writer.
When I was eleven and moving up to the Big Kid School, some genius decided it would be a good idea to give me a laptop computer. Not a proper laptop, of course. This was back in 2001, before people started getting silly about giving their children loads of expensive gadgets to play with. No, it was a simple word processor intended to let kids who couldn't write very fast (like me), or who had lousy handwriting (like mine), churn out the enormous quantities of text that eleven-year-olds were apparently expected to write on a daily basis. It was pretty terrible; the screen only showed about four lines of text at a time, there was no spellcheck, the spacebar kept getting stuck, and applying any kind of force to certain areas of it (the bits where one's hands rest while typing, for example) would nudge one of the three AA batteries out of skew and switch it off. But it had a pretty ridiculous memory capacity for a glorified calculator, and the tiny screen made it physically impossible to see what I was writing. There were eight different "documents" on the machine, each capable of holding something like five pages of solid text, so I quickly worked out a handy filing system; document one was for English class, document two was for science, document three was for geography, history and Modern Studies, and everything else was for creative writing. Whenever the files started to get full, I'd just upload everything onto my parents' PC at home, save it to one of the many floppy disks I'd obtained for just such a purpose, clear the machine's memory and be ready to go without anybody being any the wiser. This continued for a few years and nothing really worthwhile ever came of it, but it was bloody good fun and it passed the time in class quite nicely. When I went into fifth year at school, I returned the faithful machine and got on with the rest of my life as a sensible and hard-working pupil... no, I'm joking. That was the year I discovered the Internet.
It came as a bit of a surprise to me, to learn that I wasn't the only person in the world who spent their free time writing. Suddenly there was a whole world of aspiring writers out there, proudly displaying their work and sharing tips and reviews as if they'd been doing it all their lives. It was all very strange to me; I'd never even told anybody I was a writer before, let alone shown them my work, so the challenge of having these more experienced writers reading and commenting on what I'd written was too great to resist. So I uploaded some of my work to the great wide yonder of the Internet, and was shocked to discover that it was actually pretty bad. I didn't let that dissuade me, though; quite the contrary, I strove to improve by any means necessary, in the hope that I would someday produce something I could proudly hold up to the heavens while shouting "I wrote this!". The years went by, and though the quality of my writing improved considerably, I started to lose track of the objective behind the whole thing. My focus was always somewhere else: first on my schoolwork, then on my studies at University, and never on actually doing anything with my ever-increasing catalogue of written work. All until I met a girl and showed some of it to her, and she said: "This is really good. You should get this published."
That was three years ago. Where am I going with this? Watch this space.
