When I was approximately nine or ten years old, I was sat in the kitchen at the house of one of my closest friends. I was on one of those spinning breakfast chairs, holding a coco-pop straw and dipping it in a bowl of milk. It was about the time we had started exploring hobbies together. One included making comedic movies on a video camera during the summers when school was out, or while holidaying together in Three Cliffs Bay off the coast of the Gower. We had dubbed ourselves JJTA (the initials were the first letters of our names) and also established a newsletter that we would attempt to (and fail to) bring out monthly. Our parents indulged us - even going as far as to sit patiently for a screening of our second movie in the living room (me cringing in the background as I watched myself act the fool).
But it was in that kitchen when I told my friends that I wanted to write a novel. I remember vividly outlining a story about four siblings discovering their parents were aliens from a distant planet and were being chased by their long forgotten enemy who had become emaciated due to experiments with time. I asked my best friend point blank what he think I should call it. He immediately answered with "Skeleton Doom".
The title stuck, and some four grueling years later - during which I found an extreme passion for science and physics in particular - I had written a manuscript. Over two-hundred pages long! It was childish, naive and bursting with imagination - just what you'd expect from a fourteen-year old trying to make sense of the world around them by projecting thought and emotions onto a blank piece of paper. I still have it, kept almost pristine in a cardboard box. But, despite being my first foray into writing, I struggle to read it. And as I get older, I find myself being far more judgemental of past attempts, which I suppose is the natural progression for any aspiring writer. I'm always trying to improve.
Skeleton Doom may never know the light of day, but its legacy most definitely lives on. Through composing that first one, it taught me so much about perseverance, the characters that I adore writing about, and also my love of mixing genres. It was fantasy embedded in science-fiction; politics mingling with warfare; familial ties threatened by revenge. The blend didn't always work, but as a sandbox for writing progression, it worked wonders. And, for one thing, it birthed a pseudonym that I use to this day; Cyruptsaram, the name given to that villain hell bent on revenge.
It was four years later, after finishing school and heading for university to study physics with astronomy, that I began what would be the novel that I dreamed of writing. Something that was unmistakably me, but now formed of contemporary ideas and influenced by contemporary events. Since 2014, so much has happened in this world, and so much has changed. As a young person, it was easy to feel disillusioned by everything. To combat this, I wrote. It was an escape to a different realm that I could control and somewhere I could vent about injustices, because in the real world I felt powerless to help stop them.
Ten years later, I achieved the goal that my ten-year old self most wanted. I completed a novel. It was messy, convoluted and bloody bonkers. There's a whole saga of "near misses" and "almost giving up" in between that could very much have ended in failure. But I muscled through and created something that had a lot of potential. But what one person sees can not always be what everyone else sees. Trying my luck, I sent it to a number of publishers in the hope someone else might think it too. Miraculously, someone has, and I am forever grateful to them for believing in me.
So here I am, in that utterly surreal situation where I get to say: my debut novel is coming out in a year. The Immortality Paradox, Volume I of the Cosmogenesis Hexad, published by Barnard Publishing, will be released into the world for anyone with an interest in Human politics set in the backdrop of a futuristic universe of war, unrest and immortal aliens.
Obviously, I'd be very grateful if you considered purchasing it. With this new blog, I hope to make you all very excited!
T. L. Firth
