The Ink that made me

Every hero (and writer) has an origin story, here is mine…

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I tell people that my aspirations for becoming a writer began when I heard my teacher read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis to the class. That story got me into reading and wanting to write. It makes for a good story, but my writerly origins are older than that.

My paternal grandfather was a farmer, land-owner and kind of the mayor of the village. But he was also a storyteller. I have heard stories about how he would travel to near by villages and tell stories to whoever wanted to listen. Story writing is in my blood. My grandfather’s name was Noor and his village is called Jahangir.

My father came to Britain in the 60s as a teenager and found work in the cotton mills of Lancashire. He returned to Pakistan some years later and married my mother. I was born several years later after my mother also migrated to be with my father. I think about how she must have struggled to adapt to a brand new culture, not knowing the language or the social norms. Despite her difficulties, she was determined that her children would be educated and would do well for themselves. As such, she would take us to the library from a very young age and sit and listen to us read. This was the true origin of my interest in books. My teacher, Mrs. Bracewell, just acted as a catalyst by introducing me to fantasy fiction.

The first piece of writing that I was proud of came about a year later when I wrote a review of a children’s show based on a 1941 novel Paddle to the Sea, by American author Holling Clancy Holling. The piece was so good that my teacher hung it up in the school hall. I recall it was up there for a few years. In the meantime, I was a regular at the local library, working my way through Tintin, Asterisk, Choose Your Own Adventures, Fighting Fantasy, and anything fantasy or science fiction related, including books by Andre Norton and Isaac Asimov.

My final year in primary school was also a highlight. Our teacher, Mr. Hodgkinson, was a fan of horror and I would write him the most gruesome stories I could think up. I recall a story about a werewolf and zombies (probably inspired by the Thriller music video that he had shown us).

The following year, I joined my brother at an Islamic boarding school. At age 11, I wrote a story about a ninja assassin who had been despatched to kill a celebrity in his impregnable mansion. My teacher took my work to the lead English teacher. When I got summoned I thought I was in big trouble. Instead, he congratulated me and told his GCSE students that they would need to write as well as me if they wanted to get a good grade. I was terrified when those same students cornered me to ask how I’d written the story.

Three years later, my brother, a mutual friend and I thought it would be fun to write a story together. They just wanted to write something fun, whereas I had ulterior motives. I wrote the first chapter and handed over to them to add to. They wrote a chapter each in which they set about trying to kill each other’s character in inventive ways. Frustrated with them not taking it seriously enough, I set about writing the story myself. I wrote furiously for around 4 weeks, using up all my school exercise books and wrote the first draft of The Changeling King, which at the time was called The Trollking (I had to change the title because someone else managed to publish a book before me called The Troll King). I was aged 14.

A few years later, I volunteered to work on a magazine on Sufism, titled Subulas Salaam (Peaceways). I was a staff writer for two years. In this time, I translated a book, then added some more content and called it Madinah to Kufa: An Oddsey of Fiqh. I also wrote my first fiction novelette, Alauddin. I self-published both of them and sold 100 copies of each to fellow students. I was also doing a correspondence writing course with The Writing School which taught me a lot of the basics of how to write articles and fiction.

On completing my time at the boarding school, I enrolled onto an English and Creative Writing course in a British university and started rewriting The Changeling King (still called Trollking at this stage). I contributed articles to the student union magazine and even wrote videogame reviews for a video game store’s website. For a while, I thought that was want I wanted to do, write video game related content for a games magazine. However, the pull of home was too strong and so I returned home and found work in the Non-Profit sector. All the while, I continued to work on my craft and redraft The Changeling King.

Over the years, I wrote a number of short stories. Some got published, others did not. I started submitting queries to publishers and agents (by post, as it was done then). The rejection letters piled up slowly. I even sought advice from one of my favourite author’s, Janny Wurts (co-authored the Empire trilogy with Raymond Feist). She took a read of my manuscript and told me that it wasn’t there yet. She was right of course, but I was young and impatient. After a year, and on the advice of a writer friend, Nerine Dorman, I decided to self-publish.

I first self-published an ebook with Smashwords. It did okay, I guess. But I wanted to see The Changeling King in print. I commissioned artist Paul Davies to design me a book cover and then turned to Lulu Publishing to produce the print copy. I even updated the ebook and released a Kin

dle version on Amazon. The book did okay, but didn’t turn into an overnight bestseller like I had imagined it would.

My writer friends encouraged me to write more. They advised me that this was a volume game, so I needed to have more titles out there to build momentum. So I did some market research and started working on my second book, The Adventures of Some Kid. This time I hired artist Elbert Lim to design me a cover. I even worked with a group of high schoolers and their teacher to beta read the book. I was happy with it and I released it simultaneously as an ebook and paperback through Lulu Publishing and Kindle. The book didn’t land nearly as well as The Changeling King. Disappointed, I made the decision to take a break from writing fiction.

Nearly a decade, a career change and a Doctorate in Education later, I’ve decided to come back to writing fiction. I’ve thrown myself into relearning as much about writing as possible, the craft, the tools, as well as the publishing and agent landscape. I’m working on a bunch of new projects and am more resolute. Writing is a long game. Persistence and consistency are key factors in whether you are successful or not. If the next three or four books don’t land, I’ll carry on. Eventually, either I will become a successful writer, or, at the very least, I will have written a bunch of books that I enjoyed working on and that would have been appreciated by at least some people. And after all, grandfather Noor didn’t tell stories to get likes or make money. He did it because he loved telling stories.

This post originally appeared on Substack. You can follow me there at my Muslamantasy site.