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being john trevillian
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Of course I wasn't born Trevillian. Trevillian is someone that I have become. A kind of reinvention. He's not who I was, or even who I will end up, but he's who I am right now. I have been him from the time I wrote my very first word, but it took a while to get all the elements together to really know who he really was, and I'll be him until all the words are done. For when I have finally finished writing everything I can possibly think of to write, everything I have ever wanted to write Ð and rather than repeat any of it – I will simply pack him up and move on.
I was born in London, England in 1965, the first son of Jean and Ronald. My childhood was spent with a Smith-Corona Calypso typewriter and a wild imagination, both of which I still own, in an unremarkable house in an unremarkable street on the inner fringes of Essex. Now I live in Talliston, which exists as a waystation somewhere else; again in an unremarkable street, but this time a remarkable house. A work in progress. Most of my earliest recollections centre around devising stories and games with my brother and of typing and drawing my own versions of the children's books I devoured. At secondary school I began to write in earnest, my school books a testament to a rapt and somewhat barbaric mind's eye. Here I won my first competition with a rather abstract blank verse entitled Fantasy.
Here also I began to plot my first book, the Stephen Donaldson inspired fantasy, The Mortal And His God, which was eventually finished over twenty years later. A lover of medieval stories, world myths and faerie tales, I used these elements to create and design AEs (pronounced 'ay-us'), the award-winning interactive writing game. Winner of Best New Game and Best Gamesmaster in the UK, plus the finalist for Best Game in 1987, this interactive story grew into the AEs Society, an international group of shared-world authors and writers. Covering the fantasy, horror and dark future genres, the society ran from 1989 until 2000, developing into over a million words of collaborative fiction. The near future story The A-Men started as an eleven-thousand short story, expanded after the main characters needled their way into my consciousness and demanded more adventures. From this gritty nucleus grew into the trilogy, The A-Men, The A-Men Return and Forever A-Men.
In between these projects I wrote Cutter's Wood which began as a novella detailing my family holidays in Cornwall. Beginning when I was four and continuing for eleven years, the woods and beaches around St Austell became a background to many of my first abortive stories, growing to become the background for the work-in-progress Occultus Earth modern-day horror novels. Each of these novels are covered herein, giving a flavour of the way I approach literature, creating collections of multimedia elements to bring each story world to life.
I have spent many years trying to formulate a life plan, a way of making sense of how everything works, of the simplicity of things and how to make best use of the days that are given to us. As an habitual journal writer, I have spent many hours trying to comprehend where and why I fit into the universe, and what it all means. Not born an intellectual, I have only my common sense to guide me. While my poetry, songs and stories include a lot of these thoughts, I have also compiled these beliefs into an imprecise philosophy.
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