Homequest liberation

Author profile

Race: English
Age: 43
Rank: author
Appearance: medium height, multi-coloured hair (I sometimes experiment), green eyes
Relationship: single
Character: imaginative, kind, witty, determined, sometimes stubborn, adventurous
Worst habits: impatience, self-doubt, inability to relax easily
Hobbies: writing, martial arts, scuba diving, travel, nature, art
Favourite food: chocolate, chicken korma, lasagne
Favourite colour: blue
Extra fact: I do, on occasion, hug trees :-)

I had always heard that an author doesn't write a novel but that a novel writes itself. I never understood what that truly meant until I embarked on my own journey to create the Tales of Roumanhi series. I just sat down and wrote, waiting to see what happened. I must admit I didn't do things the easy way, or the correct way - if there is such a thing. My idea was very sketchy and I didn't start at the beginning of the story. I just needed to write about the scene I had imagined all those years ago as I sat on a hillside in Wiltshire.

I started in Greece in 1992, when I was working as an English language teacher in a small town called Drama on mainland Macedonia. Apart from a year away at school in Tacoma WA, USA, on an English Speaking Union Scholarship, and three years studying drama at Aberystwyth University, I had never been away from home for long. Now I was alone in a foreign country where I couldn't always communicate and where customs etc were different, and I needed something creative to do. T'skya's lonely journey was a reflection of my own relative isolation at the time. (The original hand written manuscripts are photographed on the left)

I set to work writing by hand what is now Homequest: Liberation. I always intended to write a long novel; I loved Lord of the Rings, and I wanted to create something you could sink your teeth into and spend weeks reading instead of a few hours.

I didn't really have a plot at first, just a few ideas and I set about seeing what my brain came up with as I sat on the floor writing on a note pad. Characters developed and said and did things I wasn't consciously expecting. Some characters demanded my attention becoming more important to me than those I had intended to feature. They also got themselves into unexpected scrapes I then had to find solutions to. That wasn't always easy.

One of the hardest issues to deal with was sorting out the war with the Saxscotnaks. That took three months of strategising and planning before I set pen to paper. You should have seen me playing with matchboxes and sticky paper as I worked out who went where and when. Names and places just came into my head - my love of nature and desire to create an environment that reflected this is evident in most of the names. Other names were created from sounds or words I had heard and liked or whatever just popped into my head.

Each chapter I completed I gave to my friend, student and eventual employer, Despina to read. She was so enthusiastic it encouraged me to write more and more. Eventually, however, the story had to end, and 250,000 words later I completed the immense novel. I still have the original sitting at home and it's interesting to compare my way I wrote then, to the way I write now. I have definitely improved.

In 1996 I returned to England, bringing my notebooks with me, although I somehow misplaced the book containing all my work on the Roumanhi language. I then typed it all out. That took months on my new word processor that showed all of three words at a time in the tiny display screen.

Once completed, I sent the wad of work away to an agent for comment. It came back covered in red pen. It was too long by far and needed editing, but the storyline and character development was well received. But delete all those hours of work? It was my baby and he was recommending I slaughter it. Of course he was right. I realised that I had very carefully described everything every character was thinking and feeling in such detail that I left nothing to the reader's imagination! Terrible writing! I had also forced the beginning. The first three chapters were long and laboured, written after I had already produced the middle of the tale; they had to go. All the descriptions of the Mothership, T'skya's crash landing and journey through the desert were erased. I started where the novel still does; with T'skya waking up in the forest of Roumanhi.

By now my dad had bought a computer with a scanner and very kindly scanned the whole novel in - only it didn't work very well and I had to spend hours reformatting and editing it. He lived about 15 miles away from me, so I would journey to his place when I had time and spend hours tapping away at the slow keys, teaching myself how to use a PC. And then it sat there on floppy discs and on his C drive - for a very long time. Life got in the way of writing very often. Several years passed before I looked at it again - this time on my own PC. But then life got in the way again and what was then called Homequest 4 sat for five years unloved and untouched.

Eventually things changed and I suddenly got the urge to return to my story. A lot had happened in my life: jobs, people, experiences; I was more mature and my novel needed more work. I promptly fell in love with it again and began a long editing process to improve the text, reinvent the language of Roumanhi and polish it.

Wanting some opinions, I nervously gave a draft to a my friend Nat to read. To my delight she absolutely loved the work and wanted more. Even her mum loved it. This encouragement and enthusiasm, as well as my own rekindled love for my characters, compelled me to write a sequel; darker and more intense. Again she loved it and I wrote a third and I am now slowly working on the fourth book in the series. I also want to know what happens to the characters I created. I want them to live on because they have become a huge part of my life, even inspiring me and giving me courage - how corny and weird is that?

Nat and others said I had to get Liberation published, but we all know how hard it is for an unknown to break into the market. I therefore decided to make my own dream come true and self-publish, despite the cost and risks involved. But my novel was not cost effective - it was still too big. I therefore spent a few months erasing unnecessary words and scenes until I had reduced the novel to 132,200 words - still too large to be keep production costs down, hence the price tag, but cutting more would have spoiled the flow and characterisation, and I wasn't prepared to compromise those. I must also apologise that one or two small typing errors exist (which my eyes failed to pick up) but they do not spoil the enjoyment of the book, so I hope you can forgive me.

It took seven months to get the book released and the rest is history.

I thank you for taking the time to look at my website. I hope that, if you enjoy reading Liberation as much as I have enjoyed writing it, you will spread the word; it's what keeps T'skya, Cail and Hollam alive.