Wallace E Briggs

In and around Durham City - never living more than 5ml distance until I reached early forties.

I don't recall any 'hobbies' in childhood but I do miss the unfettered adventure playgrounds we made in mining colliery ruins and nearby woodlands.

The dream that 'when you wish upon a star your dreams come true'. They didn't, and I lived in poverty until I became a technical salesman at the age of twenty-three.

Without a doubt, my wife of seventy-eight years, Pat.

I always read bedtime stories to my two boys because as a child no one read to me. I didn't become a storyteller until I had to make up stories on the spot to entertain my son and his newfound friends on a wet beach holiday at Great Yarmouth, between showers. Those stories were not recorded until many years later and Pat copy typed my written account. Thereafter came the pain of submissions to publishers and agencies, followed by the inevitable 'sorry but' responses. Although one response from a major children's books publisher suggested that the then three stories should be unified into a single offering. A few more years passed by, several more rewrites, a year or two in the cupboard, another rewrite, then more submissions. Eventually, I decided that if ever my stories were to be available in print it would be via Amazon/Kindle, self-publishing.

The Last Footsies is one of my shorter stories at 2000 words. The concept came almost instantaneously; the actual writing not more than a day or two; the edits and rewrites a week or two, before I considered it good enough to publish.

This very much a brother/sister story, and Zach is the sort of person I aspired to be. Reliable, protective, adventurous and 'good'.

Writers' block thankfully doesn't happen very often, and it is very frustrating when it comes along. My solution is to leave that story alone for a few days (or more) and either play my Hammond organ or pick up one of the many other projects I am writing. Or, get lost in the mindlessness of trawling the internet for an hour or two.

Difficult to choose between the organ or painting fantasy scenes on china/porcelain and firing in my kiln.

Usually, I write chronologically except flashbacks in a story series.

I doubt that coming generations will ever again enjoy the freedom that was granted to my generation of children to disappear for most of the day between breakfast and evening meal, perhaps five or six miles away, without causing any undue parental concern.

The Angel of the North may be the primary recognised landmark of the North but there are so many more local landmarks, eg Penshaw Monument, a folly on a hill between Durham and Houghton le Spring; Durham's 12th-century cathedral built on a hill in the bend of the River Weir can be seen from many miles around.

A failure in co-operation between the many warring tribes that make up the diverse human race many of whom display extreme intolerance of anything different.

I am several pages into the third Jimmy Crikey children's fantasy adventures after which I look forward to re-editing a memoir of my life up to the age of seventeen years, the year my father died and the year I met my future wife. After which, if life is kind, I might get around to completing a YA adventure story based around a Gothic world setting.

It's a bit of a guess that I have been enjoying All Author for two to three years and highly rate the exposure that weekly tweets give my work.