Nick Thiwerspoon
Author, editor, blogger

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Wilde Oats


What am I?  

Well, to my surprise, I am a writer, among other things.  How good I am, you will have to judge for yourself.   You can read some of my stories if you click on the links below or on the left.  I've always enjoyed holding forth.   And now I can!

When I was a lightie, I escaped from the world by reading.  We lived in the bush, so there was  no TV, no radio.  Our games were all to do with imagination.  A broken wheelbarrow base was the gondola of a balloon, or the hull of a spaceship.   I made small towns out of mud and cardboard, and imagined them filled with people.  I  made up languages and worlds.   We had few props, but we had our minds.  

But the best was the weekly Thursday visit to the library.  These days it doesn't seem like much.  I've been in much more impressive and larger libraries.  But for me it was a world of magic.   We were allowed to take out just two books, and I'd usually read both by Saturday arvie.   Then I read them again.  And again.  I read all those books that are supposed to bad for you -- Enid Blyton for example -- and all the Biggles books.  I read science fiction, fairy tales, young adult thrillers  (though  that was a genre only just developing), the Hardy boys, books for boys, books for girls, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie.  In fact anything I could get my hands on, even the backs of corn-flakes boxes.

I first saw TV when we went to England in 61.  My dad was doing a year's study of languages spoken in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland at a university in London.  He seems to have concentrated on Chinyanja, the language spoken in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and a lingua franca through much of the region.  I can still speak a few words.  

Because I was lonely, I had to entertain myself, and I never had a problem with that.  I grew fascinated with maps, with languages, with history, with economics and the markets.  Each of these things, in a way, is about growth and change, about how things came to be how they are now.  And naturally, as an avid reader, I was also a writer.

I really started to experiment with writing in high school.  One day, for the school exam, I wrote an essay in the style of J.D. Salinger -- I had been much taken with Catcher in the Rye -- and my English teacher humiliated me in front of the whole class when he handed the papers back.    I decided then that I wouldn't do English at varsity, and that I would never write.  And I didn't, for 30 years, at least not fiction.  I never forgave that teacher for what he did, and yet he also gave me a love for better writing than Capt W E Johns, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie.  He taught me to love Shakespeare, and poetry, and Jane Austen.  So I know good writing when I see it.  Alas, mine is far from the sublime perfection achieved by the inimitable Jane.  No matter.  I couldn't stop writing anyway.

So how did I get back into writing?  Well, one day my lady and I were sitting discussing the Harry Potter books and their author.  And how she has become the richest woman in England, richer than the Queen.  That annoyed both of us (my lady is a writer, too, as is my son and my father-in-law), because we knew how much of her stuff is shamelessly borrowed from Enid Blyton (what kind of a name is that?) and Roald Dahl.   But she can tell a rattling good yarn.  So both of us decided to try to write a novel, and I started what came to be ElvenSword.   She wrote a children's book and a thriller (Black & Deep Desires) set in the village in Norfolk where we lived for a couple of years.  A very good and very thrilling thriller it is too. It amazes me that such a satisfying book should remain unpublished.    You can read it in  the novels section.

I'm married, and love my wife very deeply.  She is my other half, my soul mate.  Before I met her, I lived with a man for a while.  People often ask how I can love my wife and consider myself gay.  All I can say is I do, and just as I know straight guys who grow to love guys, I know it can work the other way.  Does it mean I don't enjoy looking at a handsome bloke?  No.  But that's as far as it goes.  My writing celebrates love between men and their men and love between men and their women.   But above all, it celebrates love, expressed with the body, the heart, the mind and the soul.  Mum was right -- it really does make the world go round.

Novels

I have 12 novels ranging from complete through half written to a couple which are not much more than an initial chapter with a brief plot outline.  You can access them here. 
Short Stories
Short stories and novellas published in Forbidden Fruit, Wilde Oats, on my blog and here.  
Rants & Reviews
 Book and film reviews, rants about the strange ways of the world, and musings on why we are how we are.









My Wilde Oats page