I have been writing creatively, in one form or another, since I was old enough to write. I can vaguely recall short stories that I wrote in first and second grade about planes and rugby league games.
One piece that I definitely remember writing (and still have it somewhere) was a poem called The Sounds of the City which I wrote in third grade. This one sticks out because I turned into some sort of artwork, with cars, roads and buildings bordering it. From then on, I wrote a lot. Obligatory short stories throughout primary and high school, and poetry and song lyrics which I wrote in my spare time. During high school I was even writing music to accompany the song lyrics (yes, there was an adolescent dream to start a band), and can still hear the songs in my head. I even wrote music for other people's lyrics.
Writing song lyrics continued throughout my initial uni year of 1988. I think I spent more time writing them than spent on doing uni work. I believe it was my way of coping with being in a strange place, fending for myself for the first time. Academically wise, the year was almost a total failure, but at least I made one good friend whom I still know today.
My early attempts at novel writing were very amateurish. There was no planning, just writing. (I rarely do that these days. I have learnt that one needs a good, and detailed chapter by chapter synopsis, before embarking on the lengthy task of writing a novel.) I borrowed settings from things that I was quite into at the time, like the world of Judge Dredd, and the animated TV series Star Blazers. The stories were only a first draft, never edited, so I don't really count them as 'completed'. I can only recall entering two story writing competitions during the nineties and making one submission to 2000AD. None of them were successful.
What definitely has been completed, and published, are two novels (books one and two in my Feudball series) and three collections of song lyrics and poetry entitled You don't need my love, Suppose I'll just sing the blues and Cool evening breeze. Two pieces featured in the first volume have received awards, one is Âme perdue, which won the consumer section of the Schizophrenia Fellowship's poetry competition in 2015 and the other is Two Contenders for your Crown, which finished in the top ten of the lyrics section of the 2000 Australian Songwriters Association competition. Others have been submitted to VoiceNet.com, with some being featured in their quarterly anthologies.
The Feudball series though was started in collaboration with Stephen Babbage (aka Babs in the Blood Bowl community) with Feudball: Feudal Football. We had both discovered, the hard way, that the best way to get something published is to do it yourself. We posted chapters online for people to download, we got editors to proofread the book for nothing, we even got a local artist to do the cover and space filling illustrations, and found a printer who gave us a good rate. At the Eucalyptus Bowl tournament of 2010, we launched it, and sold quite a few copies. (I still have a few in a cupboard somewhere if anybody's interested.) In March 2017, a revised e-book edition was uploaded to Amazon Kindle. It was followed by Feudball 2: Super League. The first draft was completed in July 2015, and, after completing and uploading a full revision of the first book, I set about finishing off the second part of the series. It was submitted in June 2018. The third volume, Feudball: On the road, has been started, but it's currently on hold at the moment. Both volumes of the series have also been made available at Drive Through Fiction.
There is an unpublished one that bears the name of my domain is Blutmunth: Trial by Combat. I call it urban steampunk fantasy, seeing it's set in a world much like the one we live in now, but with some notable alterations. This first effort went through a number of re-writes, even graced the desk of an Australian freelance editor (who quite liked it), but unfortunately nobody wanted to publish it. I had originally planned to create a long series, with two other novels in the series with three-quarter finished first drafts and a large collection of files with notes about the world, characters, creatures and the rest of the series, but I haven't returned to it in quite a while.
I have even tried my hand at writing scripts for TV shows, movies even plays. (I have even started a movie script for the first Feudball book.) Unfortunately, due to my nature, the creative process, like a fire, burns hard and fast initially then runs out of feul. My hard drive (and various notebooks) contain dozens (if not hundreds) of ideas, from half a page of scribbled lines, to completed synopses and chapters.
Two things though which are irregularly maintained, are my blogs, The Dwarven One, and The Dwarven One's Blood Bowl and Role-Playing Blog, which have each been running for over fifteen years. I started the second one because people who were reading my first one were complaining about it being filled with too much gaming related material. During my time at UTS (2006-2008), I dabbled with interactive fiction. My final assignment for the associated subject was a large auto-biographical piece entitled Scars, which was a web of stories, poetry and images based around injuries that I have sustained over the years. It could easily double in size considering the injuries I've sustained whilst playing soccer for North Rocks.
23 August 2019