I wrote my first treatments for film scripts the year I left school and started working as a Runner in the film business in Joburg. In late-night writing sessions in the warehouse production offices for bad B-movies, painstakingly picking out the letters on what was in 1986 a still quite modern IBM golf-ball typewriter, I dreamt of The Killer List (an Ai controlled building determined to protect itself by murdering its creator) and Glove (a dystopian world where people fight over war, and love equates to weakness).

I wrote my first two films while working as a Production Manager/Line-Producer between ’88 and ’91 when I was commissioned to re-write Honeytown, a 13 part TV series about the music business. When I was then commissioned to originate Season 2 of Honeytown I had officially made the transition to paid and (at least nominally) professional writer-for-hire. 

The next ten years saw me writing and directing mostly corporate films and by 2000 I was running my own small production company.  

In 2010 I returned at last to where I started when I was asked to step in as Script Editor and then Head Writer on Zone 14 and my career came full-circle as I spent the next 12 years writing mostly television drama in Joburg.

By the time 2022 rolled around I’d been earning my living as a ‘writer’ for over 30 years but, in all that time, had never really thought of myself as any kind of ‘artist’. Indeed, I was not even sure if I could really consider myself a ‘writer’ so much as a word-smith in the sense that I hammered on words until they were a mostly functional shape for fun and, more essentially, profit.

Even worse, part of me always considered screen-writing, at least as I practised it, to be a lesser form, barely writing at all, just smithing really. Certainly theatre writers are more properly real, and novelists the most real of all. And then there was that still, small voice that always asked the question Steve Hogarth so perfectly crafted as a song lyric: ‘who you gonna tell when there’s northing left to sell?’ 

Put simply, if no-one was paying – or there was not, at the very least, the prospect of getting paid – would I still want or indeed need to peck away at that ever-present keyboard? And, before you ask, the literally thousands of pages of spec-scripts, proposals and other unpaid development work I have done over the decades (all the way back to The Killer List and Glove) does not count because it was always done in the hope it might one day get  ‘daddy’ paid!

But then I woke up one night with a final scene and the starting point for a storyline fizzing in my head. Even more crucially, I knew even while scribbling sleepy notes to myself, this was not TV or Film, this was a short-story and I wanted to write it for the sake of writing…

Once that first sub-verted (some might say perverted) story was written - and re-written, and written again – I came upon another, then another, then enough for what was fast looking like a book. An actual honest to Glod book, like what a real boy might write.

Even when we decided to ante-up, double-down and go all-in by publish the bloody thing it was not in the expectation of earning money. By then it was all because I wanted to share those words, in the perhaps arrogant hope they would give some book reading strangers joy. 

As prolific as I’ve always been, I forever had a nagging fear I really am just a hired-gun, without much in the way of actual talent as a ‘proper-writer’. If and when you read The Sub[bed}version Anthology, you might very much agree with that assessment. But this remains an act of honest (and you might even say legitimate) creation that has also had the unexpected benefit of making me an at least somewhat better ‘hack’ for having done it. 

The 18 year old me adopted a soek ‘n’ kry approach to typing. Decades later it’s still eyes down, two fingers and two thumbs, just substantially quicker. More importantly, it turns out the boy who wanted to write because there was joy and hope in doing so, still lives… and he cannot actually believe he’s got away with it for so damn long.