One answer (for me) is that my books grew out of the childish and largely unfinished or uncompleted stories, drawings, and games that I developed untidily and undirectedly from the time that I was quite young. At some point my constructions becomes more consciously about storytelling, and then more consciously about a single fantastic world. At some point well after that I began to start working deliberately on plot lines that could be turned into the form of writing that we recognize as a novel. So--the novels came about a long time after my world had begun to be formed.

These experiences primed me to believe that reading, writing, and fantasy don't necessarily have the direct link that we currently assign them. I value my reading--but it was my experiences pushing an extended dynasty of plastic animal toys around among block-built towers and castles and outdoor games--and much later gaming--that were the early triggers of my imagination--not rows of sentences printed on a page.

The more I learn about the canon of fantasy--those writers whose works endure over time and continue to be read--the more I am struck by the wealth of material they produced--often related to their constructed world--that wasn't writing. T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone was produced with original drawings that White had done himself, J.R.R. Tolkien produced his own maps, illustrations and covers--the list goes on. Even today, writers like Terry Pratchett and Robert Jordan clearly delight in collaborating on maps and heraldic designs and even small gamers' figurines that further flesh out their worlds. It isn't just about franchising. It's about an impulse to give their imagined world depth. Once you start building a world for yourself, it can't all be fitted onto a printed page. The imagination simply keeps coming up with stuff that doesn't fit into this post-Guttenberg format.

Whatever one thinks of Tolkien's writing, this glimpse into the integrated world that he built for himself is fascinating and imaginatively inspiring. Whether one wants to look at Tolkien's beautifully drawn trench-maps and overlay them on his later maps of Middle Earth--I'm not sure that I do--or just see how wonderfully ACTIVE and inventive Tolkien was when he was thinking about his world, it's a rewarding and really quite wonderful book.

When I was a child, I read with envy of novelists who wrote their first complete story at age nine, or thirteen, or eighteen, and wondered if I would ever produce something complete and finished that I would be able to show to other people. The things (pieces of writing and drawing) that I produced all seemed ephemeral and unfinished. It was thrilling and exciting when I finally got the bug to produce a big, finished piece of writing (see my books page). After years of wondering if I would ever find the focus to complete any big writing project, the focus finally came.

The following images show something of the lead up to this success. The earliest shown here are images generated from my time spent as a Gamemaster (c.1985-87). This is not because I wasn't producing fantasy artwork before I became a Gamemaster--it's because I didn't do any particularly 'finished' fantasy artwork prior to this.

So--I've been mucking about in my own fantasy world for years now. My 'world map' has a large number of small countries ranged around an inland (somewhat Mediterranean-like) sea. In the past I tended to work up a single country in detail, then I would move down the coast to work up a new country when I came to realize that I'd outgrown the impulse that led me to develop a country in the first place (there are a couple of countries that I worked on as a sentimental 15 year old that are somewaht embarrassing to revisit now--I had what might be called a 'highly derivative sense of romance & adventure' at that age).