Where did I begin? The Origin story.

Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.

Don’t forget to click the purple button to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.

Do you have an ‘origin’ story for any of your stories? Where do your ideas come from?

When I was much younger, my working day was spent transporting all sorts of stuff around the world, as a cargo ship’s navigating officer. And I loved every minute of that life.

Back in those days, long before globalisation and the internet, the places that I visited were all so different to my home, as were the people that I met and worked with, both onboard and ashore.

Naturally, I saw, heard about and did things that stuck in my mind and although I didn’t realise at the time, I was storing them up, ready to use them in my writing.

One day, long after I had stopped my worldwide travels and was happily piloting ships up and down the River Thames, I woke from a dream. In it, I was back on a ship, carrying cargo again. Only this time, I wasn’t crossing the oceans.

In my dream, my name was Dave Travise and I was voyaging between planets.

Dave had a scruffy interplanetary cargo ship, a dubious reputation and more issues than a five-standard-year subscription to Galactographic!© magazine.

He also had a sidekick/conscience, a talking computer called Myra.

As far as Dave was concerned, any job was a good job, as long as there was a profit in it. Risks and danger were all part of the fun.

Because I didn’t know what else to do with it, I wrote my dream down.

And that’s how it all began.

Many of my real-life exploits (and quite a few that I had only heard of) were modified to fit into Dave’s world. It turned out that once I started documenting his life, it all seemed so much more exciting than mine had been. I felt quite jealous of Dave, for a while.

Dave has had three volumes of his adventures published so far. He has also spawned several spin-off tales set in the universe I created for him. Click the picture to find out more.  

You can read more about the spin-off stories by clicking here.

Once I started writing, I discovered that I couldn’t stop.

Before I knew it, I had left Dave behind for other stories, based on more of the places and people I’d encountered, other things I’d heard and seen. I had realised that all of them could be taken and moulded into tales set on other worlds, the ones that only exist in my head.

In the last ten years, I’ve written over twenty novels, set in several different universes. I’ve created a plethora of characters and adventures, with no sign that I’m running out of ideas.

All from a dream.

How about you? What’s your origin story? Please comment below, then head on over to see what the other contributors to this bloghop have to say on the subject.

Until next time.

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