Confessions of my Past, Present and Future
by
William Meikle
The Past
I was a voracious reader as a kid - everything I could
get my hands on from DC and Marvel comics, very British ones like "The Hotspur", "The Victor" and "The Valiant", all of the children's classics, and most of our
local library's genre section which included everything I could find from
Verne, Wells, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Tolkien, Arthur C Clarke and Edgar
Rice Burroughs. At the same time I was making my way through my granddad's
paperbacks - the "Pan Books of Horror", Dennis Wheatley, Alistair MacLean, Agatha
Christie, Louis L'Amour, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and Ed McBain all figuring
large
I found Wyndham, Lovecraft and Moorcock round about 1970
at the age of twelve and things were getting set pretty much for the rest of my
lifetime's reading preferences by the time Stephen King and James Herbert came
along a few years later.
But there's another constant. My granddad was also a big
Bogart fan, and I'd already been introduced to "The Big Sleep" on the telly when
I found the paperback in our local shop in '71. I took it home and read it on
one sitting, completely lost in Raymond Chandler's California - a far cry from
our wee steel working town in the west of Scotland, but somehow Chandler's
voice spoke straight to me - laconic hard-edged cynicism with an underlying
deep seated romanticism fuelled by snappy one liners. I was hooked.
It took me a wee while after that to find all the books -
my home town wasn't exactly brimming with choice, and I was too young to be
allowed up to Glasgow on the hunt for reading material on my own. It was around
'75 before I finally got all the paperbacks, but they started a love affair
that's continued to this day. Even the titles are enough to evoke the memory - "The Big Sleep", "Farewell My Lovely", "The Long Goodbye", "The Little Sister" and
more... each perfectly perfect in its own way, each soaked in gin, bourbon,
cigarette smoke and regret. I love them deeply.
The paperbacks have long since fallen to bits but I have
nice sturdy hardbacks now, courtesy of my lovely wife, who bought me the "Folio Society" boxed set which is a thing of beauty in its own right.
I read them all again about once a year, and still get
lost in Chandler's world every time. There's few other writers who can stand up
to multiple reads like that, and they're all great ones.
When I started to write for myself, one of the first
things I did was create my detective Derek Adams, a character who has shown
enough resilience to still be with me these twenty five years later. Derek may be a Scot
in Glasgow, but his soul, like mine, is in '40s and '50s California, drinking
gimlets in smoky bars with Marlowe and listening to tales of woe from fast
broads and cheap crooks.
The Present
I don't read nearly as much as I used to - a combination
of the old eyes fading badly and the needs of my own writing taking precedence.
That said, a day without a book is a day wasted.
As I mentioned above, I reread old favorites as well as
trying, in vain, to keep up with new stuff. For example, I'm currently on a
reread of T.H. White's "The Once and Future King", another book I've loved since
childhood, and the last in a bit of an Arthurian spell where I've read Bernard
Cornwell's "Arthur trilogy", Mary Stewart's "Merlin Cycle", and a slew of David
Gemmell fantasies that allude to the undead King. I think all of this is
leading up to me writing a big sprawling fantasy epic of my own... someday.
But to return to the actual present. Of the current crop
of horror, I mostly seem to be reading short story collections, and I'm very
impressed by Laird Barron, Simon Kurt Unsworth and Gary McMahon to name but
three.
The one that really got my attention is Nathan
Ballingrud's "North American Lake Monsters" collection. It's as close to a
perfect collection as I've read in many a year, reminding me of the best of
Weird Tales from the early 20th Century but with a modern sensibility. I won't
spoil the experience by delving deeply here, I'll just tell you to get it and
read it. You can thank me later.
The Future
I'll be eighty seven in 2045 if I'm still around and I'll be happy
just to be above ground, never mind getting any writing done.
It's one of my biggest regrets that I didn't start
writing until I was in my mid-thirties. Since then it's felt like I've
continually been trying to catch up to where I want to be with it, and now that
I'm fifty seven I can feel the pressure build as time gets ever shorter and age starts
to wither both my attention span and my eyesight.
Hopefully both will hold out as I've got an ideas list as
long as your arm to work my way through that includes more Carnacki stories, a
handful of Derek Adams novels, and some themed supernatural story collections.
In the longer term, before I pop off, I mentioned upstream
about a sprawling fantasy epic. I had a go with one of those in the "Watchers" trilogy back almost fifteen years ago now, and I keep meaning to do another,
but something else always seems to come up and makes me put the epic on the
back burner. I have a three book deal with DarkFuse to complete, and more
Carnacki to write for Dark Renaissance, and just today I was approached about a
new project, which will be like a themed ghost story anthology, but I'll write
all the stories myself, in different voices. Which will be interesting.
So the fantasy epic lies dormant, as it has been, in the
background, whispering away, for years now. I hope, in thirty more years, I'll
have got round to it. George RR Martin stole my thunder a bit in that what I had in mind
was very like "Game of Thrones" in concept if not in execution, but there'll be
more magic in mine, more barbarians hacking about with big axes, and fewer
dwarfs in brothels. I have a basic plot worked out - mirror magic, seafaring
pirate whale worshippers, cursed weaponry and children abducted to grow up
strangers in a strange land as slave workers in vast mines. I can see it all
laid out in my head, and the plot covers years of this place's history. It's
just a matter of writing the bugger.
If you ever see me at a con or in a bar, ask me about it
- talking about it might be just the kick in the arse it needs to get going
properly.
You can see more of Willie at his website.
Willie’s author page can be found here.
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