About Roy

I like a good story. It all started with The Borrowers by Mary Norton, which got my attention as a young boy in the 1960s. That’ll give you an idea of how old I am. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the start of my fantasy fiction journey.

TV programs like Stingray, Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons got me interested in sci-fi. There was also Dr Who, Land of the Giants, The Tomorrow People and Star Trek. One day a friend of the family gave me a battered old copy of the Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, and I was blown away by it, I almost ran to my local library to see if there were any more. There were no easily accessible resources like the World Wide Web in those days.

To my utter delight, I found out about The Lord of the Rings. Then, to my severe frustration, the only copy of The Fellowship of the Ring had already been borrowed, and I had to wait a painful couple of weeks before it was returned. I made do with Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major, but they weren’t anything like the draw the Hobbit had been.

For most people of my era and unfortunate pocket money circumstances, the local library was the only means of getting hold of books. The only books I owned were second hand and given as presents. By the time I did get to the last few chapters of The Return of the King, I stopped reading it for three or four days, not wanting the adventure to end.

With adulthood, I discovered a whole host of authors and films that had a real impact on me. A busy home life with children and work limited my reading time for a while, but it settled into some sort of balance. The Old Jack tales emerged in the late 1990s as little stories for my children, often while on family holidays. They’re all grown up now, so I updated and expanded the stories with a sci-fi theme.

Now I’ve been pushed into early retirement by annoying medical issues. Having an incurable but well managed chronic liver disease does have some challenges, the worst being totally unpredictable energy levels. Autoimmune Hepatitis (AIH) is a rare disease, there are only about 10,000 of us with it in the UK and only a third are male.

For me, it was caught early, and I feel lucky that it hasn’t progressed to cirrhosis. With medication the outlook is good, and I can expect a normal lifespan, whatever that may be. Others are not so lucky, struggling daily with severe and often debilitating symptoms.

Liver disease, you say? Cirrhosis eh? Hepatitis? All scary words. You might think I’m a raging alcoholic or contagious with horrible viruses, but no, the word most people don’t hear when you tell them is ‘Autoimmune’. Autoimmunity is where your own immune system starts to attack you, like Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ulcerative Colitis or Coeliac Disease.

My liver is being attacked by my own immune system, it’s not self-inflicted through alcohol, I haven’t caught it from somewhere or someone. There is an unhelpful stigma around terms like Cirrhosis and Hepatitis. But Hepatitis literally means inflammation of the liver, and I’m quite happy to update people’s lack of understanding when the situation arises.

It turns out that I’m genetically susceptible to this rare disease and a trigger like a toxin, a herbal remedy, certain medicines or indeed a virus like the one that causes glandular fever may have brought it on. No one knows, though, not even the clever Hepatologist that looks after me.

It almost sounds like something from a scary sci-fi novel, but anyway, my time is now spent between a version of dad’s DIY repair shop, walking the beautiful Northumberland coastline and scribbling down stories.

~ Roy ~

If you would like to know more about AIH, there is very good information on the following sites:
AIH Support, LIVErNORTH and the British Liver Trust

If you are unlucky enough to have AIH, I can thoroughly recomend the private AIH Support Facebook group. The admins are excellent, very friendly, and knowledgeable.