My background
Like many people my age, I was brought up on the magic of Rudyard Kipling, Roald Dahl & CS Lewis. Stories were entertaining and fantastic but also contained a moral message, a right and a wrong, good and evil, a trial followed by a triumph. I loved these books then and have never really lost the belief that a fantasy book should always leave you feeling like you played some part in vanquishing the darkness, because you were there with the heroes every step of the way.
At the age of fourteen I was writing essays for school every week with my fountain pen and scoring highly in spite of the comments about my awful handwriting, but my English teacher was a demobbed Grenadier Guard Sargent-Major who taught us by writing copious amounts of text on the blackboard for us to copy (and presumably learn later?), each time he reached the bottom of the board he would simply return to the top and wipe it off to start again. I can honestly say that I write gobbledygook very fast indeed because falling behind would earn me a visit to the Headmaster’s study for corrective discipline.
I started to take an interest in creative writing at my senior school when a Canadian transfer teacher with a genuine love of literature and poetry exposed me to a far wider world of books. It was at this time that I was unofficially diagnosed with Dyslexia. Not a label that would have benefitted me in any way, so I locked it away and never mentioned it again for a quarter of a century.
I studied Biological Science at Plymouth University which led me to some of the most remote places on the planet; I’ve spent two arctic winters alone in the dark, taking ice-core samples with a suitcase full of books for company; I’ve dived in the open ocean while thousands of migrating hammerhead sharks pass by overhead; and I’ve conducted autopsies on beached dolphins to determine the causes of extinction events. But all this worthy research comes at a price, and I couldn’t earn a living doing it, so I put on a suit and took a desk job that became a career.
By the age of fifty I craved a more creative lifestyle, so when my partner suggested a partial retirement I jumped on board with gusto. We fell in love with a crumbling manor house set in a few acres of uncared-for gardens in North East Scotland and set about repairing and polishing it with our own hands, opening up one side of the house as a B&B.
Now the interesting thing about working for yourself is that it doesn’t get easier and you don’t have more time than you did when you worked for someone else, but you do get to be in charge, and this gives me the opportunity to read more than I have in decades, and what I’ve noticed is that I still have that little boy inside me who yearns to travel through fantasy worlds and defeat evil and save the kingdom.
About my writing
I have a keen interest in fantasy, mythology and magic. I was a dungeon master in my teens and world-building is a very happy place for me, so it should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I would write in the Fantasy genre.
On this website I’ve started putting together sets of short stories. The first to be drafted is the ‘Modern Myths’ set of twelve short stories which are set in Moray, NE Scotland, which is where I now live and a place of immense natural wonder, so it suits these stories very well. Each of these stories is based on 14th/15th century Scottish myths, but brought into the world we know, which I believe was the original intent. Many of these stories warn us about taking the natural world for granted, and while they are not generally moralistic, they clearly suggest that there is a right and a wrong way to behave. A message that has not lost its relevance today.
I’m currently also working on a High-Fantasy novel which is intended to be the first book of a trilogy. I’m about to finish my first-draft, by which I mean that it is currently over 120,000 words and will need some culling before anyone reads it. I’m hoping that the community that develops on the website may introduce a few Beta-Readers to me, I would especially be interested in anyone who writes themselves, but really you just need to love reading fantasy.
Thank you for your interest and for reading this far. Don’t forget to sign-up. It will always be free, you’ll be able to comment on the blog, and it allows me to give you access to my writing if you’re interested.
- N.B.Kimber