Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, old black and white horror movies starring Christopher Lee and Vincent Price; anthologies of ghost stories published by Pan and edited by Rosemary Timperley; the chilling stories of Edgar Allan Poe and especially his poem 'The Raven' and the film version of his short story 'The Masque of the Red Death' starring Vincent Price as the evil Prince Prospero in medieval Italy, where Death in a red hood and cloak is the uninvited midnight guest (an iconic moment in horror creation, for me) ... as a child the above were an important part of my reading, and viewing, material.
Little wonder that the first short story I wrote, at age eleven, was a ghost story - called 'The Haunted Bedroom', it was published in my secondary school magazine 'Voice' in Autumn 1975, and was well-received by teachers and classmates! I followed it up over my years of secondary school with several other stories in a similar ghostly or macabre vein - 'The Strange Secret of Moor Castle', 'Last Confession', 'Josephine' and a story whose title escapes me about a 'black widow' living it up on the French Riviera having bumped off no fewer than ten wealthy husbands and (obviously) gotten her evil hands on their fortunes - in retrospect, this story was embarrassingly camp, cheesy ... while the ghost stories of my eleven year-old self were probably quite stereotypical and not hugely original (yet the English was good and English was - with French - my favourite subject in secondary school).
Going to work as a Clerical Officer at age eighteen in Irish local government and thereby following in my father's footsteps, managed to stifle whatever literary creativity and imagination, and inspiration, I might have possessed in my childhood and teens. Nothing like a permanent and pensionable pen-pushing post to stultify one's creative impulse.
Nevertheless, I did pen a play at age twenty called 'Not Dead But Sleeping'. Not a ghost story as the title might lead one to think - but an aspiring Tale of the Unexpected based on the TV programme of Roald Dahl.
Followed by a novel at age twenty-two - a children's novel based on actual children I knew at the time. I wrote it for those kids, now adults with children of their own (just as Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for a real girl, but with more success). My own children's novel, begun in the summer of 1985 on a week off work and completed a year later, was entitled Danger by the Sea.
Written long before the personal computer and Microsoft Word, I wrote it - as I had written all my previous oeuvre - in longhand, with much enjoyment it has to be said, but a friend typed it for me on an electric typewriter and I presented it to the children on whom it was based (real people in a fictional adventure, inspired by Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven which I'd read in my primary schooldays).
I toyed with the idea of trying to get it published but that notion has long been abandoned.
I sometimes wonder if it would have been accepted by a publisher.
However, at age thirty-five I left local government on career break, to study languages and marketing as a mature student. Suddenly I was back to my youthful love of language, study and writing. After a long absence, I was studying literary works in French, writing essays - and the creative juices were flowing once more.
Finally, after my PhD graduation in 2010, I published my thesis as a monograph, so at last I had an actual ISBN publication. At the same time, I began translating French literature (Jules Verne and Michel Verne) into English for the North American Jules Verne Society, and publishing those translations with accompanying critical material and notes I'd written, so I now have several books to my name - not actual self-authored fiction, but an academic work, literary translations, essays, and some academic articles and book reviews.
What got me writing this blog post on my creative writing of many years ago, was my current research into literary translation as a form of creative rewriting.
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