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| Rob Turner |  |
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Hi, I find myself in the happy position of being the author of this novel. Whilst I never set out to become an author nor even anything more than just 'Mr Turner the Technology teacher' this is what has happened. I was inspired to write this novel after many years of looking back at the past. In my early adulthood as a college student I spent many happy hours with a group of friends playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), Runequest and countless others. I had played many characters within these games but as a Referee (The Dungeon Master) I created Merith (a play on words MIRTH) as a means of helping the other player's characters survive all of the pitfalls, traps and dangers. Merith is a survivor; she can escape virtually any situation with the combined skills of a thief, healer and the shape-changing ability of a druid. She is the perfect tag along character. She developed a sense of humour, my own actually and a series of tricks that she wanted to use. The character began to have a life of it's own. I created a religion around the character which had its own ceremonies and practices; this became Ichmarr, the Goddess of mischief, trickery and thievery. I left Scotland in 1993 to become a teacher and trained in London. The teacher training course was a SCITT course, the first of it's kind, which basically meant that we were based in schools rather than at a college. We were based in the ADT college in Wandsworth. Whilst it says it was a college, it was a secondary school, teaching at that time 11 to14 yr olds. During this time I also began to play Ice hockey more seriously. The team began to receive sponsorship and we were paid traveling expenses for games. We subsequently went on to win the league and the league cup. I interviewed for my current teaching post in April 1994 in Saffron Walden, a small market town, near enough to bustling Cambridge, where I had been told there was an ice rink (There is actually a Cambridge Varsity ice hockey team but they play out of Peterborough, some 40 miles or so away from Saffron Walden). My budding career as a hockey star had ended and I took the teaching profession more seriously. I have now been teaching in Saffron Walden for 11 years and have taken on the mantle of Second In Charge of the Area in Technology, which basically means that I take over the running of the area when the Area Coordinator is unavailable. In January 2005 I had a moment of inspiration. I thought to myself, 'what if I wrote down the life story of Merith and how she became the character she developed into. I could use Saffron Walden as the setting and some of the local history as the background to the story, "sort of flesh it out" from all the fragments I could bring together'. I had also the misfortune in the summer to visit my step daughter in Addenbrooks hospital. The children's ward C2 features as the starting point and returning point for Merith as she struggles with the memories of her past and the experiences of the present. I am currently working on several projects including a sequel to Future Echoes and debating with myself as to whether to release the original Merith novel without the future segments as a separate novel in it's own right.
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