[Prologue]

My interest in writing started off with fan fiction.

Believe it, baby.

Like most 8 year-olds, I was completely in love with movie monsters. Scared shitless by them, but also awed by their strength, anger and their imperviousness to harm.

But it was fan fiction with a twist.

I used to imagine that the monsters would have fantastic and interesting lives of their own, not just relegated to 2-D cannon fodder for the heroes who always got the buxom wenches nervous and the loser sidekicks cheering on in admiration.

No, these monsters were 3-D, they had personality, a sense of humour and dammit, they knew how to occupy their time.

I'd write about how the octopus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would rise out of the ocean and terrorize people on land, how the Cyclops that Sinbad fought would live again and go on more adventures in search of plunder, how the Iron Man would fight aliens from outer space that came to invade England.

(The Iron Man destroyed the aliens, but was badly hurt, so the town people let him live in the junkyard. One day, he got bored and went to back into the ocean and was never seen again)

My favourite one was my own sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; in my version, the heroes travelled to New York with their captured dinosaurs and ran a freak show, which other children would fear and enjoy.

I had a wild imagination.