Magic in Everyone

I was born in Wales, land of myth and magic. I believe magic dwells deep in everyone, but someone or something must draw it out.

Welsh Magic

The Welsh were Celts and the magical root of Welsh culture was their priests, the druids, the most famous being the legendary Merlin. The druids were suppressed by the Romans, but the magic lived on through the warmth of the Welsh people, their rhythmic poetry like Dylan Thomas, the Welsh love of song like Tom Jones and Welsh male voice choirs, and through story. Roald Dahl was born in Wales, JK Rowling went to school there and JRR Tolkien based his fictional language Elvish on Welsh (and Icelandic).

My grandparents lived in an idyllic Welsh Valley 10 minutes from England. The border was a small stream and crossing the bridge was like passing through an invisible veil, the reserved politeness of the Anglo-Saxons (English) contrasting with the magical throb of the Welsh.

Council Estate

When I was 5 years old, my parents moved into a house on a large, new council estate, which was not magical.

The Devil’s Leap

I spent my holidays at my grandparents’ house, overlooked by a mountain which was perfectly framed by the half-glass of my grandparents’ kitchen door. The mountain had a distinct piece missing and was known as The Devil’s Leap. My grandmother told me that one day Jack the Giant Killer was chased by the Devil and the missing piece was where the Devil’s foot landed.

Folk Tales

Both Jack and the Devil featured in a book of folk tales that rested on my grandparents' old, wooden bookshelf. I reread that book often. Jack went around slaying arrogant giants whose pride caused them to crash to earth. The Devil would approach people at night in disguise to try to trick them, but they would somehow manage to get the better of him. It was lovely, mythical, eerie, stuff, full of trickery and suspense. From a young age, I determined that I was going to be an author.

Dropout

At the age of 11, I effectively escaped the council estate for several years when I passed an exam to go to boarding school. There the teachers made a concerted attempt to bore me to death and assassinate my imagination. They were not teaching me anything useful, so aged 15, I rebelled, literally slipping out through the back door on ultra-boring Speech Day and achieved my highest qualification – School Dropout.

Dreams Dashed

After leaving school, I pursued my ambition of becoming an author, unaware at the time that school had failed to arm me with sufficient language skills and vocabulary, and that I lacked the life experience to know what to write about. In spite of that, driven by demonic passion, I slaved over a typewriter, sending out my ‘masterpieces’ to London agents and publishers. My only reward was cold, clinical, rejection letters enclosed with my returned manuscripts that slid regularly through the letterbox and landed on the hall floor with a dispiriting thud. I did get one warm rejection letter, but that was from a Welsh publisher!

Dead End Jobs

Lacking qualifications or a career, I drifted into dead end jobs in construction and hospitality. Later, I would realize these were invaluable experiences for my true calling when it finally came. If I had followed the conventional route that school mapped out for me of exams and college, I would not have experienced how the real workaday world works and how people struggle through it.

Whose life is it anyway?

I knew that to learn and grow, I had to get out of my bubble and travel. After grape picking in the South of France and visiting New York, I ended up in England, where I fell into construction because it was easy to get into and creative, but over the years I grew to hate it. One day I sat down and thought, “Whose life is it anyway?” That’s when I recalled my childhood goal to become an author.

Escaping the Trap

I knew I needed knowledge to get out of my trap. I went to the local library and found a book that showed me how to get published as a writer and managed to secure a commission from a magazine. They assigned me a photographer who tried to steal the job off me, but I got assigned a new photographer and got my first work published, a story about a haunted house.

To the End of the World

I found it difficult to follow up that breakthrough to make a career and under financial pressure to provide for my young family, my new dream was dying. I decided to take drastic action, sold my tools, burned my bridges and emigrated to the end of the world – New Zealand. There, I hawked around the one magazine article I had published as a ‘sample’ of my work and got my first commissions. However, there was an unexpected problem.

Learning the Craft

I had always thought of myself as The Great Writer, but I discovered to my horror that I did not know how to write. I was still tied up with the mythology of writing but NZ is a practical culture and I realized there is a craft to writing. At first, I would go through the material numerous times, chopping and changing it, like a blind sculptor carving out of a hunk of granite with a blunt chisel, until gradually a story began to take shape. I placed a large cardboard box under my desk. Every time I made a breakthrough of the craft of story, I hastily scribbled my startling discovery down on a piece of scrap paper, tossed it into the box and carried on before I lost the thread of what I was writing. I also studied what other writers had written about writing, like Raymond Chandler, “You have done enough research when you’ve done too much.” In this way, by book and chisel, I carved out the craft of writing.

The Wildest Boy in the Universe

My real ambition was to be an author. I wrote to local publishers asking what they needed. The children’s publisher Scholastic replied, “The new Roald Dahl”. So, I came up with a humorous story about an alien boy who goes to school on Earth. They liked it but wanted changes. I made them, but they wanted more. I made those and a few weeks later found another thick package from the publishers waiting in my post office box. More dratted changes! Another rejected story! I opened the package while waiting in line at the post office counter and found to my surprise, they’d accepted what became Fizz the Wildest Boy in the Universe. As I was in such a public place, I missed out on letting out a triumphant shriek of pure joy. 

Non-Fiction

When I was a child, I had dreamed of becoming an international best-selling fiction author. I never once thought of writing non-fiction. However, in the real world, I discovered publishers paid advances for non-fiction. This was extremely useful because I needed money to feed hungry young mouths. I wrote a lot of rugby books because NZ is mad about rugby. Some of those books were written with world-class, international rugby coaches and I learned a lot from them. One publisher wanted me to write true-crime books and through them, I learned a lot about building suspense. Over the years, I wrote a variety of books for traditional publishers in many styles and genres to become a Master Author.

Mastering the Language

When I was a child, I had enjoyed reading a children’s version of Great Expectations. As an adult, I tried to read Dickens’ original, but I found I did not have the vocabulary. I realized that to become The Great Author, I had to master the English language. I trawled endlessly through dictionaries and studied grammar to acquire a vocabulary of perhaps 100,000 words and know how to use them. And I got to appreciate and enjoy Great Expectations!

Odyssey into Education

Fizz the Wildest Boy in the Universe got me invited to visit schools. At the third one, a small country school, I encountered free-range, barefoot, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed little Huckleberry Finns and had an earth-shattering realization about what education is meant to be. I became a spy (LOL) and delivered author talks to over 700 schools the length and breadth of NZ, sometimes a drive down a dusty, gravel track or a plane or boat ride to an island, giving me a bird’s eye view of childhood and ‘education’.

Throwing the Bay out with the Bathwater

It was clear to me that there is no education ‘system’. Each teacher is making it up as they go along. I met one veteran teacher of 50 years experience who told me, “They changed the system about 4 times and each time they threw the baby out with the bath water!” Not only was education broken, but it had been for a long time. The private boarding school I attended as child in Wales, told me we were in the top 1% of the country. If so, I dread to think what sort of education the other 99% were getting.

True Education

True education is not stuffing impressionable young minds with mostly, useless facts to be regurgitated in exams. Or to never even be grasped in the first place by the many who sit in a daze in the classroom wishing they understood what the teacher is prattling on about. As one manual worker put it to me, “I didn’t go too flash at school.” Such poor souls leave long before the final exams, saddled with inadequate vocabularies, “hating math” and with only enough ‘education’ to do manual labor, dead end jobs, or worse to join gangs or slide into drugs. True education is the opposite, as defined by the word itself: Latin e out, ducere to lead or draw – to lead or draw out the individual. To draw out their magic.

Empowering people

One day, I was doing an author interview with a young radio host, who suddenly interrupted me with great excitement, ‘I know what you do! You arm people with knowledge!’ He was right. I like to empower people and draw out their magic.

Knowledge lasts

As a child, when I had only thought about writing fiction, I had wanted to be an author for entirely selfish reasons of admiration, fame, glory and wealth. I was humbled by my failures after leaving school and by later realizing I had to knuckle down and learn the writing craft properly. As I matured, I came to realize that it’s not about me at all. It’s about what I can deliver to others that is valuable and will improve their lives. For a while, with my speaking, I was pursuing doing stand-up comedy, but I did not find it fulfilling. I am funny and can make people laugh, but amusement only lasts so long before it evaporates like morning mist. Knowledge lasts forever.

Excalibur of Education

I knew now that school education had become like a stone rock, as rigid and stupid as the governments that set and enforce the curriculum. Someone needed to draw the sword of knowledge out of the stone. I realized that everything in my life – even working dead end jobs – had led to this point of my grasping the Excalibur of Education. The original Welsh name for ‘Excalibur’ was Caledfwlch which meant ‘hard cleft’. In other words, a sword hard enough to cut through armor, the same way that knowledge cuts through ignorance.

Preparing for Life

When I was a teenager getting my first jobs, I liked to talk to my older colleagues to find out what knowledge they had. It struck me how often they would say, “I wish I knew that when I was younger.” True education prepares our youth for real life –

articulate, numerate, financially literate, with a good set of values and the spirit and imagination to deal with all the shocks and setbacks that life inevitably throws at you.

Getting Goats out of Fences

To fund my research and write the beginning books, I kept my expenses low, staying with friends and relatives, occasionally couch surfing or sleeping on the floor on a mattress or air bed. I travelled around house sitting, which is staying in people’s houses while they are away on holiday, usually looking after their pets which included: dogs, cats, horses, fish, rabbits, hens, calves, sheep, alpacas, birds, goats. Have you ever had the difficult challenge of freeing a goat that has got its head and horns stuck through a narrow, wire fence?

Discovery

I studied the lives of hundreds of successful people to learn how their childhoods made them who they became. I researched education back to its roots. One day, I was travelling to another school and I suddenly thought, “Childhood is such a rocket ride of learning for 21 years, from a dependent baby to an independent adult, why should it ever stop?” I asked myself what are the learning goals of an adult? Over time, I found 2, to become a Master and to become Great. That’s when I devised The Path to Greatness.

The Path to Greatness

0. Born 

1. Baby

2. Walker

3. Talker

4. Reader

5. Vocabulary

6. Knowledge

7. Competence

8. Expression

9. Vocation

10. Opportunity

11. Apprenticeship

12. Craft

13. Master

14. Leader

15. Greatness

16. Legend

A Great Life

I simply want to get as many people as possible as high as possible on The Path to Greatness, so they can live a great life. Unfortunately, many don’t get very far along it. It’s said that more than 50% of people hate their jobs, so they never even get half way along it to Step 9 Vocation (the job you love). That puts greatness and true happiness out of reach. The world has many problems. Only knowledge can solve them. The first books I am about to publish give people the knowledge to deal with basics of education and life:

·         Language

·         Numbers

·         Money

And that’s just the beginning…

Lashed to the mainmast

I am lashed to my own mainmast, the rudder locked, the sails set on an inexorable course to create the true education system that is the birthright of every child.

Fantastic Fiction

I will still write exciting fiction to raise people up and give them dreams, and also as the fluttering flags to guide people to my non-fiction, which will give them true knowledge and change their lives.

Hobbies

One of my most asked questions at schools is, ‘What are your hobbies?’

            The kids are quite shocked when I reply, ‘None!’

            My work is my hobby. I try to work all day every day. I don’t take breaks, except for social duties such birthdays and Xmas. I don’t take holidays. I find leisure too slow and boring. My only releases are reading books, regular exercise and I love to go dancing, where others copy my moves and say things like, “You’re a party in yourself.”

I live a nomadic lifestyle, working remotely from wherever I am, pursuing my goals to share knowledge and magic, and make the world a more magical place.

 Thank you for reading. All power to you friend

             I remain as ever your humble author.