In one form or another, I've been creating stories as far back as I can remember. As a child I used to make up rhymes and short tales to pass the time during car journeys, and stories to amuse my friends. I always liked writing classes in school, and usually got high marks.

However, the event that triggered my transition into writing as an important part of my life came about a decade ago...

I'd been having a fairly strange time at work, with some major events causing even more choas than usual, which culminated in a particularly odd day. When I got home, I had an irresistable urge to write it down, straight away. I even forgot to eat!

And here, for historical purposes, is that very first story: Fire Wall : Episode IV - A New Hope Lost

About a week later, I had another bizarre day involving a seemingly possessed lift (elevator). Again, when I got home I decided to write it down. And that, as they say, was that!

From then on, anything that happened to me that I thought would amuse others got written down and shared with my friends, which turned out to be an incredibly positive experience.

All of a sudden, things going wrong weren't an annoyance, they were material! Missing my train, dealing with obnoxious people, getting myself stuck in a cabinet, the building flooding!, all of them suddenly had a bright side. I went from getting annoyed to thinking 'This is great, everyone will love hearing about this!'

Yup. I started out with things that happened to me in real life (and they were many and varied, I seem to attract the bizarre!), but pretty soon everything I did or saw became source material.

A major element at the time was MMOs. I played quite a few of them over the years, and things go wrong in there just as often as out here. So I wrote about those, or really anything that struck me as having a humorous side in the game, and posted them for the Guild to read.

My Callia and Co stories from Lord of the Rings Online are actually still up on the web, if you're interested in reading them. You won't understand the references if you've never played (it's well worth playing btw!), but might still enjoy the humour.

Well, partly because those are my favourite genres to read, but mostly because I woke up one morning with the framework to The Aeithar Series in my head.

I sat down and started making notes, which I fleshed out over the next week or so, and then started writing.

Since then, the characters and stories have been dancing round in my head every day, demanding that I commit them to paper (or e-paper), and who am I to refuse?

Actually, yes! One night, for example, I woke up at 3am with the first two chapters of a three-volume crime series poking me in the frontal lobe, so I got up and wrote those down.

And various other things have popped into my head at random times too, and again I wrote them down. Who knows what'll become useful down the road?

Some ideas stand alone (such as the crime series), while others get incorporated into existing works.

No, I'm concentrating almost entirely on The Aeithar Series, it's by far the most important to me.

Occasionally I'll add something to one of the things on the back burners, particularly if something I really like pops into my head, but everything else is very much in the background.

I do have them collected and formatted with later publication in mind, but again for now that's still only a background item. The Aeithar Series is my primary task.