Hey again.
Father’s Day. That time of year when we all run out and buy the old feller a random card with some amusing comment about age or being cool on the front, and then struggle to work out what present to get, because you’re either a bit vague on what he likes or he’s got everything anyway (I always settled for getting him a set of whiskies to sample, which on reflection was encourage to consume liquids he really shouldn’t).
This one will be the second since my dad passed away (mum went the year after, been a bit rough). It lands one day before he went, so I suspect that it would be fairly easy to let oneself slide down a dark path that day. Instead, I want to look at things a little differently.
I got to thinking about what both of my parents brought to my half-arsed writing career. My parents split when I was very young – I spent most of my time with Mum – so they both had different influences (Mum bought me a ton of books, gave me my first library card, put up with the majority of my weirdness, but I suppose I should cover that on Mother’s Day).
I didn’t see so much of Dad when I visited – he worked a lot of night shifts – but there’s still an influence. You see, we all name our favourite author when asked ‘Who was your biggest influence as a writer?’ But who made the tools available?
The current WIP.
There's pirates. That's all I'm saying for now.
Dad would always nick a ton of paper and pens and ring binders from his work, and what kid wouldn’t use such an almost unlimited supply to create every last thing in his imagination? I’m not kidding, there was piles of the stuff, and I can’t think of anything better to get those creative gremlins riled up. Pictures initially, usually battle scenes from Star Wars (my own further adventures of). These looked a bit static, so I moved onto my own mini comics. Space battles, ninjas, anything remotely exciting. It was so much fun, I can still feel it resonating down all these years (decades! Aaaagh!)
There was an incident, think I was about 8 or 9, Transformers were doing the rounds. I was big on story cassettes this point, loved listening to them (I would eventually figure out a way to set up a mic and record my own when I ran out of tapes to listen to). Both my parents got me loads of tapes – I seriously could never get enough stories. I was up mega early one morning to listen to my new Transformer one, I’m talking around six a.m. Stuck the headphones into the hi-fi, popped the tape on. Couldn’t hear it very well. The sound was muffled. I turned up the volume, turned it up more. And more. And more. Until suddenly the headphones were snatched off my ears, and I could finally hear just how loud the theme tune was booming from the speakers. Dad wasn’t too impressed. Don’t think anyone in the house that day ever forgot the song – ‘More than meets the eyes….’
Then there was the typewriter! Oh, the typewriter. Bought for me during my A-levels. Electronic, with a little LCD screen, upon which you would type three lines of text before it would hammer out all the words in a blitz of insane drumming, the whole machine bouncing around on the table like it was bursting to get the story out. Yeah, I typed out my revision notes on it, but this is where the first couple of (now lost, thankfully) short stories were bashed out. What a time. The noise must have driven him loopy. Every minute and a half – badda badda badda badda badda badda bang!
Look at this beautiful thing.
The 386 PC followed a couple of years later, running Windows 3.1. Woo! The power! The only game it could run was minesweeper. Although I suppose it managed Solitaire, but freaked out when you completed the game and it was meant to spew the cards all over the screen in celebration. Always crashed then. This machine saw the incredibly tentative birth of my first attempt at a novel. What a thing that was – a standard fantasy novel (sort of like Dragonlance) crossed with a zombie invasion, saved on 3.5 inch floppy disks. It’s all lost now… except this early stories are never truly lost, are they? They’re still in us, cheering the other stories on.
So much else too. The way he’d photocopy the instructions and backstories from all of the Commodore 64 games and file them in big binders, it gave the stories to these games a magical feel, like they were special. The way he ripped all the plots of every 80’s action and horror flick to pieces, taught me to be damn careful about filling in them holes. But it’s the paper, mostly. And the pens. And that big mad typewriter.
These things help us along, don’t they? The gifts, the encouragements, the acceptance, the day-to-day living. Every small action has an effect. We should try to remember that as parents, and try to recall it as daughters and sons.
I miss Dad. I miss Mum. I hope they see how hard I’ve chased my dream, and that they were a part of it.
Go get the old man some whiskey. Not too much though. He’s got to look after himself.
I would love to hear how your own parents affected your writing career. Anyway, as is customary at the end of the post, a few book recommendations for dads or even yourself, with mine tacked on the end coz I’m cheeky like that.
The Alaskan Chronicles by John Hunt
When a solar storm throws the world into chaos, teenager Jim is forced to step up to survive in the wilds of Alaska.
The Last Stop, by Michael Burnham
An alien race on Jupiter’s moon Europa has traveled the galaxy and achieved immortality by downloading themselves into an inorganic form, but needs the help of a teenage boy on Earth to save both worlds.
Click HERE to buy
Time Sphere, by M C Morison
When a teenage priestess in Ancient Egypt connects with schoolboy Rhory, both are endangered as they search for Time's Key.
No comments:
Post a Comment