I was probably scribbling on the inside wall of the womb while Mum was pregnant with me. I don't recall. I do recall writing a very great deal pretty much from my first moment. For a long time, however, my writing resembled strange scratches and wiggles, and was generally considered somewhat obtuse and difficult. Then one day at school they started teaching us how to print, and a few years later actual cursive script. A few years after that, when I was about 8 years old, I encountered a typewriter for the first time. I remember this now as practically a religious experience.
So while I was always writing some damned thing or another as a young tacker, I didn't get really serious about it until I was about 14, when I completed what I thought was my first "proper" short story. Many more terrible short stories followed. Then, starting at age 18, came a succession of ghastly novels about improbable characters, including the one with the hitman whose index finger is six feet long and weighs two hundred pounds by itself. When I hit university in my early 20s, I got side-tracked over into theater, and wrote a bunch of horrible plays to go with all my ghastly books and terrible stories. It was all good fun, though. After university I got distracted by role-playing games, in the course of which I met Michelle, who would later be my wonderful wife. I have always loved board games, role-playing games, computer games, and still pursue that interest when I can. Writing eventually lured me back, or, more accurately, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and frog-marched me to my writing desk and planted me in the chair and made me write Actual Proper Fiction. Thus was spawned yet more disastrous novels. Somewhere in there I also had a series of frightening jobs working for the Australian government in their public service, where I learned I was really not suited to office work.
Another fit of university life interrupted the bliss in the mid-90s, during which I attempted to learn philosophy by correspondence. It was exceedingly interesting, and I learned a great deal, including how I really don't know bugger all about anything. I also learned, after tackling the deathless prose of the Philosophy Essay, that I much preferred writing ghastly books. Fortunately, in the middle of this course, one of these ghastly books actually got bought by these nice Canadian people, who clearly had no idea about my long-standing reputation as a purveyor of ghastly books. I suspect it would be best not to tell them about this in correspondence. We'll just go along with the fiction that Orbital Burn is my "first novel," and say nothing more about it.
I take my writing very seriously indeed, which is a relatively recent development. I see myself as a journeyman apprentice sort of writer, more craftsman than artist, and I expect to continue learning my craft for the rest of my life. Writing continues to be a struggle for me, in more ways than one, and I see that as a good thing. I have instructed my wife that if I ever pronounce that I have mastered writing, she is to hit me hard with a squid. I now live in fear of the squid.