William Meikle's Web Site

I'm a technical author by day and a fiction author by night. I've sold more than 150 short stories in SF, fantasy, and horror magazines and e-zines; and I have a story collection, The Johnson Amulet and Other Scottish Terrors, available at Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. My first novel, a Scottish horror is out in October 2001 from Barclay Books. I'm currently working on a vampire trilogy set in Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 (see sample), the first two books of which have been sold to Barclay Books for publication in 2002, and I recently became contributing editor at WritingNow.com

I've written as long as I can remember. Back in my teen-age years it was song lyrics more than fiction. I wanted to be a rock star. Who didn't? But I lacked one thing -- talent. I can't remember when I got hooked on genre fiction. I do remember being a voracious reader of comic books in my pre-teen years, and I was addicted to Hammer horror movies. Then I went through a phase of reading macho thrillers especially Alistair MacLean and Ian Fleming. About the age of 12, I discovered Tolkien, then Michael Moorcock. I also discovered Led Zeppelin and Hawkwind, who used many genre motifs in their songs. From then on I was hooked.

As a youth, I read a lot of "Pulp" fiction -- Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, H. Rider Haggard, and Sax Rohmer. The first true science fiction I remember reading was Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of 2001 A Space Odyssey, and in my early teens I read everything else he wrote, and everything by Asimov. Then I discovered, about the age of 15, the so-called New-Wave writers. Since then I've followed the careers of Ursula Le Guin, Harlan Ellison and, until he passed on, Roger Zelazny. I've found recently that I'm cycling back to more epic themes. I'm greatly enamored with a new series by George R.R. Martin, "The Song of Ice and Fire", which is shaping up to be the biggest, and probably the best, fantasy work ever. And on the horror side, I still read Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice but not quite as voraciously.

All my work starts with an image, like a photograph. It arrives in my head, then starts to run like a movie, and the story builds from there. Sometimes the image is from the end of a story, and I have to run it backwards, but everything is done visually at the start. The most recent example was a lighthouse on an island. The lighthouse had a neolithic burial ground at its base. I lined up the shot to have standing stones in the foreground and the lighthouse in the background. Then I started to wonder who would live in the lighthouse and what was under the standing stones, and a story began to run. That turned into my novel, "Island Life" and, as a bonus, the publisher agreed to my picture of the lighthouse being used on the cover, so it has come full circle.

I find story ideas coming at me at any time, anywhere, as if someone is e-mailing pictures straight into my brain. I write them all down in a notebook that never leaves my side, and sometimes one of them gathers a bit more depth, and I get a clearer image. At this stage I find myself thinking about it almost constantly, until a plot, or an ending, clarifies itself. Once I've written down where the story should be going it quietens down a bit. Then, if I find myself still thinking about it a couple of days later, I'll probably start writing the actual story. At any given time I have about 20 ideas waiting for clarity, two or three of which might end up as finished works.

I'm lucky in that I've found I can write just about anywhere. I don't need quiet, or even solitude. Often I write with the television on, and I've perfected the art of holding a conversation with my wife while continuing to write. I think it comes from having spent a lot of time working in a busy software development department where I learned quickly when to multi-task and when to focus. Plus I'm motivated by the desire to reach a large readership. When I realized I wanted to write full-time, I switched career from software development into technical authoring. I now write for a living, and the next dream is to make a living from my fiction. And I'd love to see one of my works turned into a movie someday.

William Meikle Books at Amazon