My ceaseless passion to tell stories and use images, myths and legends to excite and inspire, came online at an early age, thanks mostly to my mother. Though mum only much later published one book -her awesome memoirs of life in India, Africa and mid-revolutionary Cyprus- while a widow in a nursing home, she’d always been a gifted storyteller, the person who taught me to speak, draw, read and write.

By the age of three, I was a precocious (but creative) little monster.

One of the pictures accompanying this piece(right) shows me on the migrant ship bound for Australia, three years old, concentrating intensely on my first (illustrated) novel, which  mum later told me was a reboot, superhero style, of the legend of Robin Hood. In my version, Robin had weird powers, made animals help him fight the rich bad guys, and if cut with swords or shot with arrows, he could come back to life nine times, like a cat.

Apparently, a very dignified English fellow passenger, older fellow, quizzed me about my work, then commented, ‘Not the true story of Robin Hood, young chap.’ Mum, at age ninety in the nursing home, told me I leaned towards her and whispered, ‘He’s a bloody fool.’ To be honest, I still don’t always take criticism of my work that well. 🙂

 

When I was ten, by then a big comic/graphic novel fan, I went to hospital to have my tonsils out. While there, I wrote and illustrated my own unlicensed Marvel comic epic, ‘The Hulk Takes Asgard’ in which Thor’s brother Loki kidnaps Doctor Bruce Banner and unleashes him, brainwashed, as the spearhead of a coup to put himself on the throne. I remember being outraged when I came back from the toilet and caught three nurses sitting on my bed, hunched over my comic, reading intently. I’m fortunately a lot less precious about such things these days. I even like the fan fiction based on my stuff. 🙂

 

At twelve I entered an international poetry competition coordinated by the Women’s Weekly. One had to write a poem about Jose Feliciano, the blind guitarist (BTW he says ‘I’m blind’ so please, no silly PC ‘vision impaired’ lectures, thanks). The finalists were read to Jose, and the top ten global winners received autographed sets of his albums AND publication in the Women’s Weekly. Yeah, my first published work! Bagged with a poem, that in part, went like this:

 

A man alone, a famous star.

A man alone with his guitar.

He has no sight, yet he can see,

in a way that stuns and puzzles me

 

Anyhow, the important bit was that this made me a star at school for about twenty minutes, until our cricket team defeated our hated rival, and the fickle crowd forgot my greatness. Hosanna! Not for long. 🙂

 

Flash forward beyond several careers that I sometimes describe as ‘lives.’ Marketing manager, police officer, private investigator and so on. In my maturity I turned to writing full time and out tumbled the same obsessions. I trained in martial arts. No bows and arrows like Robin, but swords and unarmed combat. Several kinds.

 

I spent a lot of time in Asia, where I now live, in fact, and penned a bestseller called Moonshadow about a ninja who controlled animals, whose ally was a cat. The kind of beast that would have nine lives. Sound vaguely familiar? 🙂

 

I just saw my thirteenth novel published, DarkSpear, my first Visual Novel, text-centred but image, music and sound effects enhanced, an exciting, evolving medium. Seems I am still that same little boy storyteller; my DarkSpear heroine, living in the near future, has special powers, and is caught up in a conspiracy of the One World Government (the new rich bad guys).

 

What do I make of this? Put simply, I was born and this is what I am. The hiatus in between the early years and professional creativity was destined input time. I grabbed life experience, reading, other forms of learning, which informed my later, somewhat more refined work.

 

At the core, I remained that imagining, legend-rebooting, cartooning kid.

 

If people don’t get my stuff, they’re bloody fools.  🙂           

 

www.simonhiggins.net