Stuff that influenced me...
My earliest memory is from when I was three years old. I was taken to A&E by my mother because I was falsely accused of having eaten the ball bearing from the base of my toy Dalek. It was nonsense, of course; even at the age of three I knew that a human could not defeat a Dalek by attempting to eat it. Nonetheless, I'm happy that my first memory involves Dr Who.
I'm not sure how old I was at the time, but the next significant milestone I can recall is the first Fantasy novel I read: The Wizard of Boland by "B.B.".
This children's Fantasy tale about the events surrounding a somewhat unpleasant wizard definitely left an impression on me. This was the kind of world I wanted to be part of. I still have my original dog-eared copy of this book on my shelves to this day.
By the time I was at High School I was an avid reader of Fantasy and Science Fiction, having discovered the likes of Tolkien, Asimov, Frank Herbert, etc, in my early teens.
Another significant milestone in the Fantasy journey was being introduced to "Dungeons and Dragons" by a classmate. We didn't have access to the actual rules when we started playing, but had made up our own improvised system based on what we'd read about the game.
By my late teens I was contemplating the idea of starting to write, but other things in life conspired to get in the way of that for quite a while.
When the aspiration finally took hold, I decided to study an MA in Creative Writing with the Open University. My undergraduate degree had been in Philosophy, and this had a significant influence on my writing.
