About the author

simon rumney

<p>Before going to school, I remember writing naive poetry for the spontaneous pleasure of forming words. Unfortunately for me, this instinctive need to write was crushed by my teachers&rsquo; seemingly obsessive need to humiliate children who struggled with &ldquo;correctly&rdquo; written words.</p><p></p><p>At my tiny 1960&rsquo;s English village school we adhered rigidly to a curriculum based on the three &ldquo;Rs&rdquo;, and my inability to distinguish characters required for &ldquo;reading&rdquo;, &ldquo;writing&rdquo; and &ldquo;arithmetic&rdquo; (a play on words that went completely over my head for most of my life) made my teachers very angry.</p><p></p><p>Being a sensitive child, I deflected their years of calling me &ldquo;lazy&rdquo; and &ldquo;stupid&rdquo; by creating a protective alter-ego who played me like a character on a stage until leaving my secondary school, with no qualifications, at the age of fifteen.</p><p></p><p>After working as a chef, airport loader, builders labourer, and any other job that allowed me to hide my &ldquo;shameful weakness&rdquo;, I decided to harness my alter ego&#39;s deflecting humour and verbal skills to become a salesman.</p><p></p><p>Many unfulfilled years spent selling for companies like Xerox brought me to a financially successful career within the computer communications industry. But the constant stress of pretending to be someone I was not, both professionally and socially, led to serious depression and my inevitable mental breakdown.</p><p></p><p>During years of recovery, the origins of my alter ego had to be faced, fully explored and truly understood. This confronting healing process, coupled with a lifetime of tumultuous relationships and calamitous conflicts with extraordinary characters, is what I now call upon when writing my stories.</p><p></p><p>From the age of five until my recovery I made it my mission to seek out artful ways of avoiding the written word, too afraid even to write a love or business letter. But after being diagnosed with dyslexia, I learned to use something as mundane as &ldquo;spell check&rdquo; to win a scholarship to The Film School in Seattle and a writing course at AFTRS Sydney.</p><p></p><p>Now unable to contain the urge to write, I have written four books, fifteen screenplays and, just as I could before attending school, I sense that there are many, many more characters and stories to come.</p>