Ahead of Its Time [antikvár]

TIME BOMBS A short history of the Clocktower Press By the autumn of 1990, I had been janitor of the village hall in South Queensferry, about ten miles west of Edinburgh, for two and a half years. During that time, I'd been trying to write fiction. For the first year or so my writing was dead on the page, but I persevered, trying different approaches, different angles of attack. Eventually I found a voice for the narrative - my voice, I suppose - and the stories came flooding out. I wasn't sure if they were any good or not, but I knew that they felt alive to me: scenes and characters fought their way off the page and into my mind. (Out of my mind and onto the page, surely? you say. Well, it didn't feel like that at the time: once I'd found the voice, the stories more or less told themselves. I just sat back and waited to see what these unpredictable, charged-up characters would say and do next.) I wanted to share the stories with other folk: with readers. At the time, my friend James Meek (reporter for The Scotsman in those days) was about the only person interested in what I was trying to do. We'd meet up and swap typescripts, ideas and criticism. We'd even read our stories out loud to each other. But an audience of one wasn't enough for either of us. Here's the crux: when James and I sent out our new stories to magazines across the land, they weren't all rejected out of hand. No, sometimes we got back constructive rejection slips. Very occasionally we even got letters of acceptance, firom Edinburgh Review, Iron, West Coast Magazine. That was where the problems really came to a head. I mean, every writer expects rejection.