People often ask me how and why I started writing and it’s
one of the questions writers get asked more often than any other. Some of us know from childhood that we have
to write, some of us want to but don’t know how until years later and others
have slightly quirkier tales. I am a
combination of all three; I always knew I was good at writing and I wanted to
write a book since I was a young teenager but I had neither the grammatical
knowledge nor the sophisticated vocabulary with which to achieve this dream. The few times I allowed my mother read my
early attempts to get my imaginings down onto paper met with gales of laughter
at my poor spelling and grammar and not a word about the plot or basic idea,
which crushed any sense of being worthy of achieving such a dream so I gave up
trying.
Now fast forward thirty five years to June 2011 and there
was I, a devoted fan of a very well known science fiction movie character and
the famous actor who portrays him. I
found his official facebook page and joined in with all the other adoring
female fans. Back in those days facebook
pages had discussion boards and us gals spent hours on this actor’s page and
the threads on his discussion board were many and varied. He’s famous for playing several well known
characters but my favourite was the science fiction character. Fictional characters are always very real to
me and I guess it’s because of my autism that I connect with them more easily
than I do with real people. This
character quickly became my best friend.
One of the threads on the discussion board was from one gal
who suggested we all try to write a brand new scene for this science fiction
character. It could be anything we
wanted, so long as he was the main guy.
A few of the gals had a go and it was fun reading their scenes. Most of them were pretty awful and were just
their own personal lightly veiled erotic fantasies concerning this guy but it
was fun to read them. For ages it never
occurred to me to try writing a scene; I’d been writing poetry for years and
I’d done many poems inspired by this character and I always believed that’s all
I could do.
Then one night, mid June 2011 as I sat reading a
particularly bad scene by one gal, a thought leapt into my mind.
“I can do at least as good as this trash, if not
better. Dammit I’m gonna have a go.”
It was early evening by then and so I sat at the computer
and began to write my extra scene for my favourite character. I finally forced myself away from the
computer at 4am after 5000
words and I knew I had only just scraped the surface of the story; it had miles
to run yet. A few days later, when it
reached 20,000 words I sat back and sighed as I realised that this could run
and run. Another thought then trickled
through my mind.
“This could be a book.
I’ve only just started and look how long it is, this could be long
enough for a book.”
I then had a dilemma.
This character had already been invented; he was a trademark, he was
copyrighted and I knew that if I wrote a book about an adventure with him and
tried to publish it, I’d be some serious brown stuff. I don’t have the money to risk being sued by
a multi millionaire Hollywood movie director
so I made a decision that changed my life.
I would start at the beginning again and take the story far away from
anything to do with this already famous character. The plot could remain the same and the
peripheral characters could stay as they were, but my protagonist had to
change.
And so Vincent was born and his story was told. That first novel is dedicated to that
fictional character who is still a great friend to me. I owe him everything for it was my affection
for him that helped me open the door to my destiny as a writer. Eighteen months later, the fourth volume of
the series was published and brought his story to a close.
I now have a new series beginning, the first volume of which
will be out in February 2013 and I still look back in amazement at how the
universe arranges things to make sure we follow our destined path. It seems like such a tenuous chain of
circumstances that encouraged me to write and how easily things might have been
different. Some might say luck or
coincidence but I say no it’s not luck and there’s no such thing as
coincidence. The universe wanted me to
be a writer and they used a fictional character to get me to do it; someone I
loved and trusted and admired. Who
better?
Author Bio:
Merita King has loved the science fiction and fantasy genre
in both books and movies since she was a young child. She has been greatly inspired by years of
watching movies and reading books and has wanted to make a contribution to this
genre for many years. Her stories all
contain a strong spiritual thread as she
believes that spirituality is universal and crosses all boundaries. She believes that the creative process is
largely intuitive and can be very effectively blocked by too much
pre-planning. “Plot lines, characters
and events all come to me intuitively,” she says, “and this makes the act of
writing a constant pleasure.” She is a
psychic medium and lives alone in Hampshire,
UK.
Website - http://www.meritaking.
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/
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