I’m afraid that my scanner isn’t working at the moment, so I had to photograph this. I’ll go one slightly better than Sam, as I was six when I wrote this masterpiece. At the end of this same story book (I was seven by then) came my first epic – Arthur the Strongest Ant in the World. It was twenty two pages long. Sadly, I’ve lost the ending, because it spanned through two exercise books and the other one has long since been lost. I’d become a little more adept with language by then, though the story was no where near as intense as Sam’s. I’ll bet he got better marks in school for English than I did.

It was the story of Arthur that set the chapter lengths in my first novel – The Forging of the Sword. I reasoned that if I could write twenty two pages as a seven-year-old, then I could do it as an adult. Twentyish pages in my handwriting is about 5500 words, which is the rough word count per chapter in my first seven books. Just goes to show how early work can affect you many years later.

In case you can’t read it, what I think I meant to write was this:

One day, Fred the crocodile said ‘Why doesn’t anyone like me?’
He came to squirrel’s house, but squirrel ran inside and hid, as he thought the crocodile was going to eat him. But then a snake came slithering along. The snake did want to eat the squirrel, so the crocodile killed him and from then on all the animals liked Fred.

Snakes were often the bad guys in my early stories. As anyone who knows me will be aware – I’m not big on snakes even now.

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