Chris Page
Chris Page (www.chrispageauthor.com) is my real name. It's simple, I can spell it correctly pretty much every time and am spared the nom de plume nonsense of trying to remember who I am at any given moment. I live in Wiltshire, England, a couple of miles from where I was born, am married and have two adult children.
As a boy I was a ragged - arsed village tearaway far happier with a home-made fishing rod in my hands than a school bag, but driven by a restless and insatiable curiosity. I desperately wanted to be a writer from an early age but, apart from having a poem called 'The Poacher' published in the school magazine, had nothing to get me there. University was never an option, even if I'd had the nous, which I didn't. With that background it will come as no surprise that my constant boyhood reading companions were Mark Twain's country boys, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
At age fifteen I borrowed a jacket and tie and presented myself at the offices of the local newspaper and demanded to be taken on as a trainee star reporter. Less than five minutes later I was back in the rain and here I am all these years later, still fighting to get my work in print.
Like most I have a few pet hates. People who close their eyes for long periods of time when talking to me being one (I'm not that ugly!), wire coat hangers, television ads and an indifference to punctuality. I could go on but must resist the urge to whinge, it's far better to nourish, cherish and smile in private at our little malevolence's.
Above all, I write. Every day, for a great deal of the day. If I'm not writing I'm thinking about it. Such introspection makes me look and function like an inebriated idiot for most of the time because I bump into things, ignore people and generally blunder through life in a world of my own. So be it. Having striven for many years to write around the inconvenience and tiredness of sixty-hour week employment and bring up a family, it is such a pleasure to do it on a full-time basis that I can't stop. The delight and enthusiasm with which I approach my little 'art hole' every day has produced ten novels and twenty-five short stories in the last ten years. Others from way back are stuffed in boxes in the attic. I haven't even started, there are many more to come and the idea's ferment and tumble continuosly.
Twenty years ago I began to channel my restless curiosity into early English history and it now informs around half of my fiction, the other and current half being modern novels, usually about genius and/or obsession of one sort or another and featuring all the action and sexual hangups of the modern age. Sometimes when writing in this vein I can't stop giggling about the absurd situations I create and Hollow Bosoms is an example of this.
Based around the conflicts endured by a strong historical narrative, my historical books, especially the latest Renegades Series, are packed with colourful characters, whimsical locales and brutal combat. As a reaction to writing historical fantasy for the so-called 'kidult' market with my Venefical Progressions Series, where the narrative and language must necessarily remain sexually naive and expletive free, I am increasingly turning to a more raunchy output in my modern novels. My three latest and completed offerings are called Hollow Bosoms, From Flash to Bang and Motherkill and are all very much of this type. I am also well into the next, called Sweet Chariot and am considering a third in the Renegades Series called Renegade Crusader.
I had previously been pounding the treadmill for years looking for a publisher or an agent, a situation not helped by being a venerable, unpretty nobody, but have - like many authors - given up trying to interest the British literary commonality who consist of arrogant, greedy types with an inbuilt mechanical snigger coupled with low intelligence and an inflated view of their own inportance to literature - who never read anything sent t