I Was An Intimate Sort Of Child

Shall There Be Womanly Times? Or Shall We Die?

There Was, In My View, An Unwritten Contract With The Reader That The Writer Must Honour. No Single Element Of An Imagined World Or Any Of Its Characters Should Be Allowed To Dissolve On An Authorial Whim. The Invented Had To Be As Solid And As Self-consistent As The Actual. This Was A Contract Founded On Mutual Trust.

A Twenty-one-year-old Writer Is Likely To Be Inhibited By A Lack Of Usable Experience. Childhood And Adolescence Were Something I Knew.

These Were Everyday Sounds Magnified By Darkness. And Darkness Was Nothing - It Was Not A Substance, It Was Not A Presence, It Was No More Than An Absence Of Light.

Looking After Children Is One Of The Ways Of Looking After Yourself.