Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I grew up in Alberton, Guateng, in South Africa, in the 1980s and 1990s. The year I turned six, I went to Alberton Primary School, where my mom was a teacher, and I ended up in her Grade 1 class. From a very early age, she instilled in me a love of reading and speaking, and so by the end of my first year of schooling, I was reading a year ahead of other kids my age. Throughout Primary School I participated in various reading competitions, and graduated to public speaking and debating in High School. I believe that this helped to foster a strong and vivid imagination, and I've always yearned to tell the stories that were in my head because of it.
When did you first start writing?
When I was eleven, I think, I was very into game books, and my favourites were the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever. I wrote a short game book on the family's first ever computer, about a secret agent. All I remember from it is a scene where the main character had to follow a trail of cigarette butts ("stompies", I called them in the story) to find someone. I would love to read it again, but unfortunately we never knew about backups back then, and the only place it now exists is in my hazy memory.
I was also a romantic at heart, and throughout High School I wrote letters. They were really bad, really soppy letters, to girls I liked, people I didn't like, my parents, and myself. I also used to blog on my little Bulletin Board System, before it was called blogging, and even wrote a couple of articles for a friend of mine's electronic Christian magazine, back in the day.
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