I didn\u2019t exactly \u2018get into\u2019 writing. For me it was never something I just took up, in the way one might decide to take up golf or macrame or yoga. I\u2019ve always been \u2018in\u2019 writing. At school, I loved those free-for-all creative writing exercises. Not the \u2018what I did on my holidays\u2019 dullathons, but the \u2018imagine you\u2019re a fairy\u2019 stuff. Not that there was much of that after primary school. Secondary school was far too serious for such frivolities. So I turned to writing my own comic strips, and (later) extremely bad fan fiction, although I didn\u2019t know then what it was.<\/p>\n
A few years later, when I lived abroad and couldn\u2019t work, I bought a manual typewriter and bashed out most of a Regency romance. Why Regency? Because that\u2019s what I was reading at the time, trawling methodically through the entire Georgette Heyer catalogue.<\/p>\n
For a few years, the stories stayed in my head, but then I had a dream. I mean that literally, an actual being-asleep dream, with grim-faced men in black with swords. There were several dreams of that type, and gradually waking-me began to mull over the stories being tossed out by sleeping-me and make some sense of them. And eventually the characters came alive and tapped the inside of my skull. \u201cLook,\u201d they said, \u201cthis stuff\u2019s getting complicated and you\u2019re going to forget things and then what will happen to us? You need to write it down.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a writer,\u201d I protested.<\/p>\n
But they insisted, and I started writing and I just never stopped. I didn\u2019t have a name for the sort of stuff I was writing, but I discovered later that it was fantasy. So really, you could say that fantasy selected me, not the other way round. Or rather, my characters selected me. More recently, I came full circle and returned to my original genre, Regency romance.<\/p>\n
Footnote: Authors Answer is the brainchild of blogger Jay Dee Archer, of I Read Encyclopedias For Fun. You can read the answers to this question by his eclectic bunch of authors here<\/a>. More recently, Erica Dakin, of the Theft And Sorcery blog, has been answering the questions independently. You can read her answer to this question here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I didn\u2019t exactly \u2018get into\u2019 writing. For me it was never something I just took up, in the way one might decide to take up golf or macrame or yoga. I\u2019ve always been \u2018in\u2019 writing. At school, I loved those free-for-all creative writing exercises. Not the \u2018what I did on my holidays\u2019 dullathons, but the \u2018imagine you\u2019re a fairy\u2019 stuff. Not that there was much of that after primary school. Secondary school was far too serious for such frivolities. So I turned to writing my own comic strips, and (later) extremely bad fan fiction, although I didn\u2019t know then what it was. A few years later, when I lived abroad and couldn\u2019t work, I bought a manual typewriter and bashed out most of a Regency romance. Why Regency? Because that\u2019s what I was reading at the time, trawling methodically through the entire Georgette Heyer catalogue. For a few years, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[164,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2793"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2795,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2793\/revisions\/2795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}