Featured Interview With John Paul Bernett
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in South Leeds in West Yorkshire on a council estate in the middle of the last century. My home was right next to the slag heaps (Excavation debris from the nearby mine) of which was my playground in my early years. It was upon my (mountains) that my imagination was set free to wonder where ever it fancied. They became the Himalayas when I was a mountaineer, The canyon when I was a cowboy and the landscape of Mars when I was an astronaut. My ability for telling stories I put down to those days of play rather than anything I learned at school.
I suffer from Dyslexia and back in the late 1960’s that wasn’t heard of and I was just passed off as an illiterate because I couldn’t read or write properly. That never stopped me writing (in my own way) my stories down, but I never showed anyone and used to burn the stories in a bin in the garden so nobody could see my bad spelling. Very much later in life my wife convinced me to show her one of my stories, that was in 2012 and since then I now have eight published books.
I love animals and with and help my wife look after 7 Hamsters, she has always kept hamsters and we have at least six living with us at all times.
I still live in Leeds not far from where I was born. I have crossed the river but only just as I now live in an apartment in the city centre. I love this city and if I ever move away it would only be to one place and that place is Whitby.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I began writing when I was about eight years old. My stories were usually linked to whatever adventure I had been on during the day. It seemed to me a strange thing to be doing; because I was having so much difficulty at school, being ridiculed by the teachers and laughed at by the other children in the class. The laughter and ridicule was because of my writing but here I was writing stories in my note book. Because of my inability to read I had no fascination with story books but I loved the ones with pictures.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Unfortunately I have never read a book in my life, but in many ways that has helped me because all my books are written from dreams and imagination. My story telling has not been influenced by other authors and my style and content are quite different to anyone else. Of cause many people don’t agree with that and work on the notion that you have to be a good reader to be a good writer and I am cool by that. I don’t need to become a millionaire, I have already had my rewards. The day I saw my name at the bottom of my first novel was one of the best days of my life and no monetary reward will ever top that.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The book I would like to talk about is book 1 of my Reaper Series ‘Atkinson’s Administration’. This was my very first novel published in 2012. The story is based upon a recurring dream I have had since childhood. In this dream I am a reaper in a different realm cutting peoples mortal cord that links them from their realm to mine. I am the one who slices in two this cord one half of which slips back to it’s owner and they die. The other half I join to a new cord and the deceased’s soul is passed to a baby being born.
Atkinson’s Administration begins the story of the Grim Reaper. It is set at the turn of the century as a new Reaper want’s to change the system with catastrophic results to life and death. In this book you are introduced to the main characters within the series and are given a background into how the reaper system works, but more importantly what happens when the system breaks down. It took me around two years to write this book because the dreams only had me working in the realm of death and how the system actually worked so I let my imagination run wild and invented the characters that would work with and against the Grim Reaper. After the characters were in place I had the basis of the story. The rest of the series so far only takes around three months for each separate book to write.
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