Authors Electric

In 1966, the Beatles famously sang about wanting to be a paperback writer. I was only four at the time so just starting to read and write, but I must have thought it sounded like a good idea because a few years later I started typing out my first science fiction 'novel' on blue and yellow paper. It was just about long enough to count as a novella, but I never sent it anywhere because the year I finished it I got a place at university to study mathematics. Probably just as well. By 1987, I was programming computers (think huge mainframes filling whole rooms with massive tape reels you had to change halfway through running a program) and writing fiction secretly in my spare time. I completed another novel - a much longer one that became a fantasy trilogy. I sent it off to a publisher, and the now legendary editor John Jarrold wrote back with a personal note explaining why it was not quite right for them. I forgot about writing for a while, escaped computers at the end of the 8...