Introduction (no it's not a catchy title)

When I was ten I wrote my first book. I still have it in the back of a drawer, ‘The Adventures of George and His Friends’, written in my own best handwriting in a hard-backed notebook. It was also illustrated by me, using a particularly wide selection of felt-tipped pens that I had received as a birthday present. The book was well received at the time, in the small circle of my family and friends, describing the adventures of an anthropomorphic duck and his pals as they journeyed to the lost city of Karmanatum. When I plucked this book from the back of a drawer, recently, I was struck by the consistency with which I have pursued this path over rather more than five decades. As a child I created dream worlds and peopled them with characters. As an adult in my sixth decade I continue to follow this path. Over time my writing has advanced in fits and starts. My eighteenth birthday present was an electric typewriter, a technological marvel, but it was 2002 before I produced a fully realised manuscript that I considered ready to launch upon the world. How wrong I was! There began years of writing to agents, years of thumbing the pages of the The Writer’ And Artists’ Yearbook in search of a literary agency not recently importuned by me. Naturally, I accumulated a bulging folder of rejection slips. Was I downcast and dispirited by this? Well, yes, I was, and sometimes years went by as I pursued other life goals. However, I continued to write, continued to build worlds of the imagination and tell stories set within them. It was always my ambition to write a book that was wholly original in terms of its underlying concept. With ‘A Moment in Time’, the first in my Alex Trueman Chronicles I believed that I had. I have always been fascinated by the notion of time-travel and my world of Intersticia was to emerge from this. Alex Trueman and his friends were to be the distant descendants of my first childish musings. At last, after fifty years or so of unpublished writing, my approach to Jane Murray of Provoco Publishing proved successful. She liked my book and offered me a contract together with lots of subsequent support and encouragement. For this I will be eternally grateful. It was always my wildest dream to be a published author and Provoco have given me the opportunity to share with world my ‘wildest dreams’.