I’m delighted to welcome fellow Darkstroke author, Anne-Marie Ormsby, to my blog today.
Why I write…
Thanks for having me on your blog, its an honour!
I wrote my first story when I was 9 – it was for a school project on Deserts and it was just a descriptive piece describing a day in the desert and man walking through the desert seeing a mirage. My teacher showed it to my parents and asked who had helped me write it but neither of them had even read it before. My Dad told me he loved it, that it reminded him of Ray Bradbury. And that was pretty much it, I’d just started reading Ray Bradbury and I had decided that all I wanted to do was write for the rest of my life.
There used to be an Irish tradition for telling scary stories, I grew up being told ghost stories by my grandparents and my parents, tales of haunted country roads and banshees. It’s no mystery how I ended up writing supernatural fiction.
I wrote short stories constantly until I was about 13 and then I discovered poetry and started to write that too. I still have all the short stories I wrote when I was younger, initially I used to write them all by hand on A4 lined paper, and then my dad bought me a little manual typewriter from a charity shop which I used for years after.
My parents read a lot and so did all of my brothers and sisters so I was constantly surrounded by books, mainly crime thrillers, science fiction and horror and I read as much as I possibly could, in my head escaping into other worlds and adventures. As I got older I wanted to create my own worlds and stories so that I could be like my literary heroes, weaving magical plotlines and creating characters.
I dreamed that one day I would be a published author, but I kept going and going writing whatever I wanted to hoping one day to write something that I could share with the world.
One day at work in around 2002 I scribbled the first seeds of a story on the back of a payslip. That story eventually became supernatural thriller, Purgatory Hotel which I released through Crooked Cat Books in 2017. Since then I have written another novel, The Tower along with a short story for a charity collection published by Darkstroke Books called Dark London. That was the first short story I had written since I was a teenager and it made me remember how much I enjoyed short form stories, so at the moment I am writing a collection of short, paranormal stories. I have ended up back where I started, writing short stories, just because I enjoy it!
In short I write because I was inspired by several amazing writers that I have enjoyed reading throughout my life. Those stories mean a lot to me, and I remember still how reading Ray Bradbury that first time made the hairs on my neck stand up, the exhilaration of fear. All I really want from my writing is to write another world for people to get lost in; I think perhaps – I just want to scare people.
Blog – https://pirateburlesque.wordpress.com/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/AOrmsbyAuthor
Facebook – www.facebook.com/annemarieormsby78
Website http://www.annemarieormsby.com/
