In preparation for creating the audiobook versions of the Visionary Collection, I was reading through Heaven dot com, and I realised that I hadn’t heard the song I mentioned in it – Anyway, Angel – for over ten years. The band who wrote the song, etcha, who are also mentioned in the book, was a band my brother played bass guitar in.

As a teenager I was basically their groupie, and I used to go to their practices and of course sit front row at all of their gigs, and even, on one occasion, sang the female parts of Pretty Fly for a White Guy on stage…

I have no idea why I am confessing these very embarrassing teenage stories here, I suppose I just started thinking about the times surrounding the writing of Heaven dot com. Part of me cannot believe it was fourteen years ago, and yet another part of me feels like it was a completely different lifetime.

The interesting thing is, that it was during my teenage years that I began channelling stories and poetry, even though at the time, I didn’t understand that was what I was doing. Years later I would find pages filled with words in my scrawl that I had no recollection of writing. I would find beginnings of stories I never finished and I would have no idea where the story had been heading or even what had inspired it. I also remember a story I started writing, that I think I may still have somewhere, about ghosts, and though I was doing well with it at first, I suddenly got a clear vision of how the story was going to end, and so I wrote the last chapter. What I learnt from that, is that I am very much a sequential writer – because though I loved the story, I had basically spoiled the ending for myself and now had no interest in writing the middle.

These days, if an idea for the ending comes up, I make notes, but I do not let myself write the ending, for fear that I will not write the middle. It has worked for me so far! It’s interesting how writing habits are developed, and the reasons why creative people do things in a certain way.

Enough reminiscing! If you want to hear the song, you can hear it below 🙂