Lynne Clark

 

Stop the Press!
I've moved home!
If you have managed to find this site, well done you! Wix has made it so hard to find that I've moved to my own website, under my pen name Jocelyn Sordoni.

Please come and see me there - lots of brand new stories, lots of news about what Shayne is up to... and you can sign up to my newsletter so you don't miss anything. See you there!

josordoni.co.uk

 

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Lynne Clark talks about her writing life and how she meets her characters.

 

I’m late to writing a novel, although I’ve been telling stories in some form all my life. My best friend Wendy and I would write a serial story on pieces of paper passed under the desk at school. We would phone each other after school, just to carry on the story. Yes, of course, we would talk about other things, about music and fashion. We were teenagers, after all. But the urge to tell the story would be too great. “And anyway…” one of us would say, and the story would carry on where it left off.

 

There is no life I can imagine without story in it.

 

I was an early reader; I was 3 when I learnt to read from cornflake packets and the adverts on the sides of buses. I walked around the house from then on accompanied by a book. I read on the bus going to school. I read at the dinner table. I read in the bath (I still do, paperbacks live their lives with cockled pages in my house). I stopped in the middle of tidying my room to sit on the floor and read the books I was supposed to be putting away.

 

I don’t remember the first books I read, but I remember the first ones I loved to distraction. From when I was 7, my godmother would give me a fat, hard-backed book each Christmas. I relished the paper, the smell of the binding, and the worlds so far away from my own. Enid Blyton’s The Twins at Saint Clare’s, The Faraway Tree, started me off. Then Little Women, What Katy Did, Pollyanna, I adored them.

 

When I was 10, I discovered Narnia. I read the entire series from cover to cover. Then I read them again. My father was a science fiction lover, so I started on his collection: Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Wyndham, Philip K Dick. By now, I was scouring the library for anything that would stretch my burgeoning love of the fantastic.

 

I was 15 when I found The Lord of The Rings, fell in love with Aragorn and slid into the world of fantasy. And I’ve never left it. In the late 1970s, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy hit the airwaves, Terry Pratchett landed on the shelves, and I discovered fantasy could be funny as well as heroic. Would it ever end?

 

It had to. I read so fast; I was devouring new SF and Fantasy books faster than they arrived in Foyles. But wait! My brother introduced me to Stephen Donaldson and Frank Herbert, I found Charles de Lint for myself (I am still in love with the Crow Girls to this day…), J K Rowling gave me Harry Potter and Robin Hobb’s Fitz and the inimitable Fool came to save me from a death unread. Amazing heroines like Lyra Belacqua, Tiffany Aching and Hermione Granger led me to discover exciting, complicated characters who have been alive all this time, but hiding in my mind.

 

So now, it is my turn to join my writing heroes and put some money where my mouth is.

 

 

I look forward to sharing snippets and excerpts with you and hearing your thoughts and comments.  Thank you, and welcome to my writing world.