Author — Merry Hell

Stuart Cornewall

What?… Oh, you want to know a little bit about me. Get under my skin as it were. Alright, if you must.

Right, for starters, I’m human. That seems as good a place as any to start. Yep, defiantly human. None of your mask wearing lizard people here. I grew up, if you can call it that, in the south of England… that’s on the planet Earth… in the Milky Way Galaxy. You know the place… Yes, that one. Anyway, where was I? Right, me. Well, I’ve always considered myself to have the mental age of fourteen but by standard count I’m in my very late forties. I like a little of this and a little bit of that and seem to get along alright. I could do with a little less grey in my beard and a little more hair on my head but apart from that I can’t complain. I stand 5ft 10 in my striped socks and I’m left handed.

What?… you want more! Let me see… hmmm? Well, I’ve been into fantasy and science fiction for as long as I can remember. A glib sentence if ever there was one. In fact, I can remember exactly when I got into fantasy. Age 7. A teacher read to the class ‘The Hobbit’ and I really didn’t look back from then. Unfortunately my aspiring yearnings to put pen to paper and coin stories of halflings and elves were muted by my inability to read and write. I, like so many other people, suffer from dyslexia. It was not until the advent of the digital age with spell checkers and the internet that I could type with any confidence.

So what did I do in the intervening time while waiting for my stories in my head to be unlocked. Well, quite a lot actually. In no particular order, I had a go at being a trainee video editor (read tea maker extraordinaire), a waiter (I still seemed to make a lot of tea), a very poor soldier (Yep you guessed it, brewing up copious amount of tea), a diamond sorter (yes really and this time less tea), a lab rat (no tea, it wasn’t allowed), an engineering undergrad ( I seemed to live on nothing but tea), post office minion (no tea, just boredom and long nights), a cameraman (copious amount of tea), a broadcast technical director (finally someone else was making the tea), photographer and digital artist (back to making tea again). The last one, digital artist, should perhaps be commented on further. If you were unaware, all the art work for the book and website was produced by yours truly. It’s my hobby. What do they say about idle hands?… I forget.

What about my writing influences? You may ask. Basically I like comedies, science fiction, old war stories, tales of high adventure, heists and siding with the under dog. Coupled together with my love of films, a mildly sarcastic and juvenile nature and you end up with stories like mine. You see, I think in film scenes. Everything I write, I imagine inside my skull as a series of movie scenes. On occasion, I will realise an idea for a scene as a piece of digital art work. That seems to lock the story into place. It’s only much, much later that I sit down in an attempt to write down what I first imagined.

And where do I get my ideas from? Absolutely anywhere and at anytime. I just let my mind wander and try to keep up. It can unfortunately, be a total nightmare. I can wake up in the middle of the night or be driving down the M3 and suddenly an idea for a scene will pop into my head. I have lots of notebooks scattered around the house for just such occasions. But the car is the real problem. When you’re doing 70 mph in the outside lane you can’t just pull over to write something into a notebook. I find I have to keep re-telling the idea to myself over and over again in the hope the idea will ‘stick’. I might add, this hardly ever works. The M3 has destroyed more ideas than any other place. Then again, I imagine a lot of people can say the same.

So, hopefully, you feel somewhat satiated, knowing a little bit more about what makes me tick. Oh and where am I right now, as I type this? I’m in Ealing Studios, sat in a small dark room with umpteen monitors bolted to the wall and about a million buttons (rough estimate). And if I’m really, really lucky someone might just make me a cup of tea.

The Author 15th. Feb. 2018