Patrick Ryder // My Story from Singularity50 is Regression

Favourite quote: ’Cos it’ll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night. Mostly.'

- Aliens

I have loved writing ever since I could write. My favourite lessons at primary school were the ones in which the teacher gave us a title and simply asked us to write a story. While doing my A' Levels, this jumped to a new level when I wondered if I could write anything as long as a novel. I bought a 200-page pad from WHSmith, sat down at the table when I got home, and simply wrote 'Chapter 1, Page 1' . I finished the novel but it was not of a professional standard. I keep it today as a reminder of how much I have learnt. Obviously, it was rejected when I naively tried to sell it, but it didn’t matter. Writing had me hooked.

I have learned a lot since. I continue to learn, and never more so than during my involvement with Create50. I have never before encountered a group of people so generous with constructive criticism. Everyone is so friendly, too. The whole project really does seem to have an atmosphere of pulling each other up to greater heights.

I am a software engineer, which has to be one of the most time-consuming careers ever devised, but I continue to fit writing around it. I have so far self-published one novel, ‘Crossed Shadows’, and one horror anthology, ‘Spiders in Your Mind’. I am now at work on my second novel, ‘Destroyed’, which is a real departure for me. It is no big secret but I can't say more until I can answer the scariest question you can ask any writer: 'What is it about?'

I live just outside York, in the beautiful Howardian Hills, with my lovely wife Jillian and our telepathic dog, Odie.

My Links: Website // Facebook / Crossed Shadows / Spiders In Your Mind // Twitter // Amazon // Smashwords