Pick six to eight questions to answer, they said. As if narrowing down a lifelong love of words is so easy. What if I pick the wrong ones? What if the ones I don’t pick haunt my dreams? It’s crowded enough in there!
Ever the poster child for “I’m grown! I’ll do what I want!” I chose…uhm…more.
Stop doubting yourself and just try. Seriously, I found a notebook in my attic that I didn’t realise I’d kept. It’s twenty-years old and has scribbles and ramblings detailing many ideas I’ve actually used since without knowing. Some of these concepts had lived in my head for decades, but I never thought I could do it, so I never tried. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been suited when I was younger, but the Gods love a trier, right?
The idea for The Rise of the Great Old One came about one afternoon – my kids and I had been listening to the recordings of unexplained sounds from the depths of the ocean (check it out – there are some really creepy ones!). We then began to talk about Cthulhu and what if the creatures Lovecraft wrote about in his stories actually exist here and now; and that he saw them and knew we were going to be wiped out, but he couldn’t say outright “hey guys, don’t want to alarm you but have you seen these monsters?
What’s your most favourite under-appreciated novel? I’m going to say A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. It has its fans, we’re in FB group together, but I had never heard about it till I came across it in a bookstore.
What is a little-known fact about you? – I love danger. Anything that’s exciting, and physically dangerous, or mentally taxing, I want to try!
Paul Warmerdam is a Dutch-American with decades of experience writing stories, who only recently decided to start submitting them. He lives in the Netherlands, where there’s plenty of rainy hours shut indoors with a story in mind.
So, somebody finally asked me to pull up a chair and find out just what it is that makes me tick. Cheers guys, I really appreciate this. As for what’s inside the noggin’, well let’s find out shall we, because I don’t have a clue what’s going to come out, and to be honest, in the words of my daughter meeting up with her favourite Disney Princess… it’s a wee bit scary.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk in-depth about my writing. I guess all writers start out on a similar path to some degree and have to overcome self-doubt, especially when it comes to dealing with knock backs and rejections. In the beginning I didn’t plan on becoming a writer, in fact my first love had always been art.