How I became who I am

I was born in Abergavenny, in Wales, which is a land of myth and magic. Perfectly framed by the half-glass door in my grandparents’ kitchen was a mountain with a piece missing, known as The Devil’s Leap (photo at top of this page). According to local legend, when Jack the Giant Killer was being chased by the Devil, the missing piece was where the Devil’s foot landed.

Both Jack and the Devil featured in a book of folk tales that rested on my grandparents' old, wooden bookshelf, which I reread often. Jack went around slaying giants, and the Devil would approach people at night in disguise to try to trick them. It was lovely, mythical, eerie, stuff, full of trickery and suspense.

           Wales has a magic that fills the soul. The Welsh say: to be born Welsh is to be privileged, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but poetry in your blood and music in your soul. Wales is the land of Merlin, where Roald Dahl was born, JK Rowling went to high school and JRR Tolkien part-based his fictional language of Elvish on Welsh – the other ingredient was Icelandic. Wales first drew out the magic in me. Magic exists deep in everyone.

            I was raised on a council estate but at 11 passed an exam to go to boarding school. At that age, I believed that all knowledge was known and would be passed on to me, but I found the school was not really teaching me anything and stifling my imagination, so against universal opposition, I dropped out age 15.

            I tried to achieve my goal of becoming an author but failed miserably as my education had not provided me with sufficient tools of language and as I later realized, I needed more life experience to know what to write about.

            Moving to England, I fell into construction work and long years of rejected stories. Finally, I made a breakthrough and sold an interview with a business celebrity, Peter de Savary, to Hello magazine. But I found it difficult to follow that up with a career and so I took drastic action, burned my bridges and emigrated to the other side of the world to New Zealand.

            With its breathtaking scenery and straightforward people, NZ is in many ways the perfect bookend to magical Wales because it is essentially a down-to-earth, practical culture. I shopped around my one published article as a ‘sample’ of my work and elbowed my way into getting writing work, often for business and trade publications. There was one problem. I discovered to my horror that I did not know how to write. I would interview a subject, transcribe the interview and then sit in a funk, thinking, ‘How the heck do I make a story out of this?’

            I would go through the interview material numerous times, chopping and changing it, like a blind sculptor carving out of a hunk of granite with a blunt chisel, until gradually a story began to take shape. Under my desk was a cardboard box. Every time I made a breakthrough of the craft of story, I hastily wrote my startling discovery down on a piece of scrap paper, tossed it in the box and carried on before I lost the thread of the writing. In this way, over the years, it was in practical NZ that I learned the practicalities (craft) of writing to go with my magical imagination.

            My ambition was still to be an author. I wrote to local publishers asking what they needed. The children’s publisher Scholastic replied, “the new Roald Dahl”. So, I came up with a story about an alien boy who goes to school on Earth. They liked it but wanted changes. I made them, but they wanted more. I made those and a few weeks later found another thick package from the publishers waiting in my post office box. More dratted changes! I opened the package while waiting in line at the post office counter and found to my surprise, they’d accepted what became Fizz the Wildest Boy in the Universe. As I was in such a public place, I missed out on releasing a shriek of pure joy.

            I started writing non-fiction because I discovered that publishers paid advances for non-fiction and I needed money because I had young mouths to feed. I wrote a lot of rugby books because NZ is mad about rugby. Some of those books were written with world class rugby coaches and I learned a lot from them. One publisher wanted me to write true-crime books and I learned a lot about building suspense. Over the years I wrote a variety of books in many styles and genres, to master the craft of writing.

            When I wrote Fizz, the Wildest Boy in the Universe, that got me invited to visit schools.  At the third one, a small country school, I encountered free-range, barefoot, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed little Huckleberry Finns, and had an earth-shattering realization about what education is meant to be.

I became a spy (LOL) and delivered author talks to over 700 schools the length and breadth of NZ, sometimes a drive down a dusty, gravel track or a plane or boat ride to an island, introducing about 70,000 kids to study tech and giving me a bird’s eye view of ‘education’. At one school, a veteran teacher told me ‘They changed the system about 4 times and each time they threw the baby out with the bathwater!”

I realized I had been given a privileged opportunity because of:

·         what I learned in my odyssey around the schools

·         dissatisfaction with my own education

·         insatiable curiosity

·         love of knowledge and learning

·         my highly refined author skills.

All these put me in the unique position of being able to redesign education. I studied the lives of hundreds of successful people, researched education back to its roots, and discovered The Path to Greatness. Now, I am completely reviving and redesigning education to what’s it’s supposed to be – an exhilarating adventure of learning and growth.

            To fund my research into the education system, I kept my expenses low, staying with friends and relatives, and house sitting, which is staying in people’s houses while they are away on holiday, usually looking after their pets which included: dogs, cats, horses, fish, rabbits, hens, calves, sheep, goats (have you ever tried freeing a goat that has got its horns stuck in a fence?).  

Other animals that have kept me company have been spiders quietly weaving their webs in the corner while I quietly weave my stories, birds flying or strutting close to my window as if trying to take a peek at what I’m writing. At one time, I was writing out of an office in the back of a friend’s garage and the birds used to entertain me by tap dancing across the tin roof. A cicada once parked on the wall right outside the door and I had to politely ask it to move because I couldn’t think through its shrill, one-note opera. To write and to live you have to be able to appreciate and find the magic in things.

My goal is to make the world a more magical place by non-fiction that empowers people with knowledge and fiction that thrills, and ennobles the human spirit.

Thank you for reading.

             I remain as ever your humble author.