I’ve been writing for most of my life. That’s a number of decades, if you can’t tell from my profile picture. In grade school I told my teacher I wanted to write and direct a play. She gave me the go-ahead, but I never finished the play and it never happened.

In secondary school I started drawing my own comic books – more vignettes than full fledged stories. Our school didn’t have a newspaper, and frankly yearbook seemed less about creativity than sentimentality, so I avoided that too.

Then came university… Our newspaper wasn’t particularly open or inviting to people who weren’t part of the clique. So I started my own very sarcastic one-page newsletter, published whenever the mood struck me. That might be once or three times per week. It turned out that the school newspaper was making enough enemies that another group started a second newspaper, and one of the founders sought me out about joining it, as he’d enjoyed my one sheet newsletter. So I became an associate editor of a new newspaper, wrote sarcastic editorials, news stories, short fiction, and learned all about desktop publishing, back when it was new. Eventually I became the editor. Along the way, I also wrote and directed a play (finally). It ran for five or six performances over four days (I’m not sure if there was a Sunday matinee). It sold out the Friday, Saturday and Sunday night performances. And I started two different novels, both conceived as epics, one fantasy, one space opera.

So I must be a writer, a real writer.

I’ve written a play, some short fiction, many editorials and a poem or twelve. I’ve got two trunk novels in my desk and a bunch more under development. After university, I went on to be the editor of a weekly entertainment newspaper, a copywriter for hire, and a communications manager for an educational charity. I’ve had big name clients (think pharmaceutical companies, expensive cars, large financial institutions).

So I must be a writer, a real writer.

I’ve had six very short stories published on a curated website, and one longer short story included in an anthology published in the UK.

So I must be a writer, a real writer.

So why do I keep saying this? Because I suffer from imposter syndrome as much as the next writer. And it sucks.

I don’t feel like a real writer. I feel like a wanna-be. A friend of mine recently said of my writing career, “It’s really more of a hobby, isn’t it?” I don’t think she knows how much that hurt.

I can counterbalance that with an experience I had last year. The UK anthology that contains one of my stories showed up for sale in my local bookstore here in Malaysia. There it is, a book with my story in it, for sale to anyone who walks in. I almost cried (seriously) it was such a re-affirming experience. Hell, that one story also got me entered into the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

So I must be a writer, a real writer.

Why don’t I always feel like it?

It all started with open-heart surgery.

Yes, an odd spot to start. I was the recipient of that surgery. Afterwards, lying in the ICU recovery room, a very uncomfortable tube stuck down my throat, I started dreaming, perhaps hallucinating.

In this dream was a young man, looking like a cross between Harry Potter and Matt Smith’s Doctor Who.

Tonally, it was kind of Peter Pan for twenty-year-olds. It was innocent and playful, and just a little bit naughty. Other stories that I could compare it to would be The Magic School Bus and Carmen Santiago, with some Terry Pratchett mixed in.

He was walking on air, feet not touching the ground, spouting weird little limericks and other poetry-stubs. A lot of them were about how Meghan Markle is misunderstood. Some of them were about her blonde friend. I tried to remember them, I did, but I had no writing utensils, no digital tools to record what was unfolding in my mind.

The tighter I tried to hold onto the memories, the more they slipped away (or were replaced by a new one). The common denominator was that they were irreverent and fun. As much as I can’t remember the details, I remember the feeling it gave me.

And in my head, there was a word: Spybrarian.

One of the first things I did after being discharged from the hospital was to register spybrarian.com. Then I started writing down anything I could remember, but so much of it was lost.

I may not be a good enough writer to capture the fanciful tone and fantastical elements of my fever dream, but I hope I am a good enough writer to recreate, as best I can, what it made me feel. And, of course, they won’t be about Meghan Markel. Instead they will be about his interactions with two women, a blonde historian and her friend who has a passing resemblance to Meghan.