How I Got Started

    The long bus journey back from visiting my grandmother always started with a game of I Spy. But before long my brother and I would become restless. The storybooks my mother had read to us on the journey there, had now been read cover to cover. The threat of tearful tantrums loomed.

    In an effort to keep us amused, she would point to the sky and draw our attention to the various clouds that are prevalent in Scotland. The large, angry looking ones, took on the role of fierce monsters, the villains of the peace. The soft, fluffy ones, became the victims and were much in need of rescue. They had to be saved, from the fiends that chased and threatened them.

     But then the wind changed direction, the shapes of the clouds altered; some vanished, some merged, and victims suddenly became pursuers. She developed stories befitting the characters she had available to her.

    So when Santa presented me with my first typewriter,  I couldn't wait to write stories that I could literally pluck from the sky.

    This is how I got started, how about you?




P.S. My head is no longer in the clouds.