The Llysygarn Series By Thorne Moore – Silver Dagger Book Tours

How I came to write.

I suppose it began with books. Then there were stories my father told me, at bedtime, with a glass of hot milk (disgusting) – stories about a little man called Flapperjack who lived in a tree. You can summon him with a special secret rap: knock-knock, knock-knock-knock, knock-knock.  No idea what happened after he was summoned, but it was the fantasy that mattered. Fiction. There were books my mother read to me until I’d grasped enough to tackle them myself. The very first book I can remember tackling on my own was a picture book about a kitten. No idea what actually occurred in the kitten story, but the kitten was enough. I was, am and always will be a cat woman. But I didn’t stick solely with cats. When I decided to tackle a book, I wasn’t concerned with recommended age prescriptions. I was tackling the sequel to The Three Musketeers when I could read maybe one word in five. I picked that partly because it had a few pictures scattered through it and partly because it featured a king having his head cut off, which was strangely intriguing.

These were all means of showing me there could be imaginary worlds of drama and adventure (and decapitation) that I could enter. Then came the Sunday afternoon drives. It was a ritual. We all piled into the Morris 8 (starting handle, running board and little fingers that stuck out to indicate turning), and my father took us for a ride in the country, before returning to bath and boiled egg and soldiers, ready for school the next day. I did look out and observe as we drove along, and I do have clear memories of many curiosities scattered in the surrounding countryside, but mostly I drifted in the back of the car, gazing up at the clouds, lost in imaginary worlds with imaginary characters of my own creation. I think it took quite a few years before it occurred to me to write my stories down, but the need grew, until I realised that writing was something I really wanted to do. In  fact, the only thing I wanted to do. In my final year at school, my principal told me I should study law (I was argumentative). He even sent me to Oxford for a weekend introduction to the subject to see if I fancied it. We were addressed by several members of the legal professions, and the main thing I took away from it was that law was very well paid. I could be a lawyer and be rich. Or I could be a writer, very poor, probably living on dry crusts in an attic, wearing mittens to keep my fingers warm enough to hold a pen.

I chose the attic.

Some things don’t change. I no longer go for Sunday drives but I do go for walks, and it’s while I’m walking that my stories get written, in my head – all the problems are solved, the dialogue emerges, plots are tangled as I stroll alone. When I get home from my walk, the scene or chapter merely has to be transferred to the page. On a laptop. I gave up on the idea of a pen, with or without mittens, because I can no longer read my own writing, and because a laptop has the greatest invention known to Man: the delete button. Where would we be without it?