While I�m new to journalling and blogging, and even new to any type of diary writing, I have been writing fiction of one sort or another for as long as I can remember.

I honestly don�t know how old I was when I started writing stories. It must have been primary school when I started writing them down though I suspect I was making them up in my head before that. I�m sure - I hope - all kids make up stories in their heads: the leap is writing them down. I wrote longhand a bit, but mainly I typed. Maybe that was to give the air of being a proper writer.

My grandmother had a portable Olivetti typewriter that came with a zip-up blue case which she gave me and fitted perfectly on the desk in my bedroom. Dad had built a combination book shelf/chest-of-drawers/desk into my room. Boofhead had a mirror image of it in his room next door. The desk section had a cork notice board on the wall above it, and a large piece of glass covering a map of the world on the actual desk bit. So I would put my typewriter on top of the glass and type away at far-fetched and fanciful stories while looking at the multicoloured map of the world.

These two things continue to be linked in my writing world. Now I have a portable computer instead of a typewriter, but there�s always my old school Atlas close to hand. Currently its lying by my bed next to the stack of books I�m reading, and it never seems to make it back to the book shelf.

A lot of my early writing was really what would now fall into the realms of fan fiction. I would be �inspired� by something I�d seen on television, at the movies, or read in a book and I would change the character names and either continue on the story, or rewrite it the way I wanted it to be. Often with romance winning the day. And often with spies playing a large part in the story. (From the heyday of Robert and Anna Scorpio on General Hospital to my current Alias obsession, some tastes really don�t change!)

While I got great pleasure from actually churning out these stories, eventually I came to have far less pleasure in reading them. They rapidly seemed like what they were - unoriginal stories badly written. As I have never really thrown anything I�ve written away, I can still go and dig out some of those stories and be truly appalled if the mood strikes me. But that made me get more creative and put more care into both the original content and the execution of the stories.

Throughout high school I learnt to type properly and graduated from the Olivetti to my mother�s �big� typewriter (still manual though), to the electric ones at school and finally to computers. And the quality of the stories I was writing developed with the instruments they were being written on. Of course, the ability to make corrections without having to retype the whole page had a not insignificant impact on that quality.

I never really did any public writing during this period. I had neither the confidence in what I was writing, nor any real desire, to put my stories out into the public domain. Or even the family domain. The closest I got to public writing during high school was devising comedy or drama sketches to songs for drama class and end of year reviews. And these were always pretty successful, I might add. The rewriting of ABBA�s �Nina, Pretty Ballerina� to �Sheena, Pretty Ballerina� in honour of our final year homeroom teacher, complete with an appropriate revision of all the lyrics, was a particular hit. Especially given that it was performed on our final day of school with everyone in tutus and braids.

It wasn�t until I reached university that I started properly working on writing novels. I�ve never mastered the short story, I prefer longer narrative fiction for some reason (to write, not to read, I love reading both short and long fiction), and from late in high school to this very day I have always had at least four or five long-form fiction pieces on the go. Still, there wasn�t a creative writing program at my home university, so I was still mainly writing for myself.

When I went to the US for my junior college year, there was a creative writing program within the English department, and after a quarter�s hesitation, I applied. And I got in, which was somewhat startling as it was a difficult class to get into. The way the class worked was that once you got in you could keep taking the class quarter after quarter provided you did well enough. I was able to stay in the class until I finished my year there, and was thrilled to do so even though it was the only class that didn�t credit towards my degree because there was no equivalent at home.

I submitted work, chapters of one of my novels, on a deadline and for criticism and marking. This was a huge leap forward. I�d made the leap from making up stories in my head to writing them down more than ten years before. Making the next step to putting things out there, even in a very nurturing environment, took a long time but was very gratifying in the end.

Over the last ten years since the end of that class I have continued to write, to revise drafts, to come up with new ideas, in fits and starts, but I have been more focused first on studying and then on establishing my �proper� career than on putting my writing out there. And I don�t consider that a bad thing.

When I came back from the US and was finishing my English degree, I considered trying to write mainly full-time and work at some random job or jobs to support myself. But that didn�t feel quite like me, so I went on to graduate school and towards getting a professional career, and kept writing on the side the entire time. When I finished grad school I wasn�t particularly wedded to my chosen career, but I was fortunate to fall into a fantastic job which I still have to this day and which feels like it fosters my writing because I work with a lot of creative people.

The most important reason why I feel like I made the right decision in pursuing something other than full-time writing all those years ago is that I was so young then, and frankly had no idea about life. I have recently started working again on the novel that I was writing during my time in the US, the one I was submitting for class. I am pleased to discover that while some of the writing had some pretentious overtones - characters occasionally quoted Shakespeare (can you tell I was at university when I wrote the first draft?) - most of it is readable. What I also realise though, is that while the writing, the words, are not half bad, and neither is the overall story, some the things that the characters do and say are so unrealistic. I had no idea about life when I was 19, its clear. But I can return to what is a story that I have a lot of faith in at the age of 31 and eliminate the Shakespeare quotes and the strange notions of the world, and hopefully produce something that I�m proud enough of to make public.

And as its set in two countries, I have an excuse to keep my map of the world close to my portable computer while I�m writing and be pleasantly reminded of my history of writing at my white desk in my pink room on the Olivetti.

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