I only began writing in later life, around ten years ago, quite by accident.
Back in '85, I was detached to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands for four months. I was a Royal Air Force propulsion engineer. In my spare time, I wrote poetry that was inspired by my surroundings. Back then, there were no personal computers as we have now, and all those poems were handwritten in a notebook.
Sometime after my return, my other half and I had a blazing row and the notebook was destroyed in a fit of rage. The poems were lost forever. I was so angry that I swore no one would do that to me again, and I wrote no more.
Fast-forward to 2013. I 'met' someone online whom I began to converse with. My emails were like micro stories and she liked them so much that she said I should publish them.
That got me thinking, and I found a now-defunct website and began to write short stories there. Those stories were erotic stories but I soon found that it wasn't the 'naughtiness' I enjoyed but the pleasure of writing the background stories. Maybe I could write a real story, I thought. The result was 'The Nurses and the Surgeon', a short story of 5000 words.
Again, it was well received and the bug had well and truly bitten me. It wasn't enough. There had to be more to that story, and so, it became an epic tale of some 390.000 words!
In those ten years, I have written three other novels, a novella, and many short stories and poems, all of which are backed up in so many places and devices that they will never be lost... and one, as you all know, is now published. 😉