A.R.Yngve (hopeless at relaxing before a camera)
1. A Very, Very Brief Life Story
I don't buy the theory that one must know all about an author, in order to "understand" her work. Also, I believe in privacy - and that vanity is a destructive influence.
Anyhow... I was born in Sweden.
If I recall correctly, my earliest childhood ambitions were to work in comics, film or animation; it was from comic books that I first learned to read at the age of 4 or 5 years. (Writing came a few years later, in school.)
My childhood was dominated by one institution: public libraries, which were to me what the church is to the faithful. I read voraciously, especially science fiction and popular science. (It could be that the Internet has partly substituted that role to me in later years.)
One particular novel I read many times as a child was Tove Jansson's COMET IN MOOMINLAND. And in retrospect, it seems to have influenced my own novel TERRA HEXA, much later.
Writers of comics and literature that affected me deeply were Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Christopher Priest, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl & Cyril M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, James Tiptree Jr.(a.k.a. Alice Sheldon) and Fredric Brown. Stephen King's writing about how to write also stuck to me.
Another great influence was film - especially Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A SPACE ODYSSEY and DR. STRANGELOVE - and music, also from 2001 among other films. As a child, I read several comics based on films, notably the PLANET OF THE APES series - thus making the cinematic influences even deeper.
I distinctly remember a vivid, recurring dream during my childhood nights. In the dream, I overcame gravity by jumping, and then flew by sheer force of will. Does every child have that fantasy, to "leap tall buildings in a single bound"? I certainly hope so, for we need impossible ambitions to drive humanity toward self-improvement.
As for humor, I together with my generation was "warped" by MAD Magazine, and the televised antics of Monty Python's Flying Circus and British humor in general. Thus, satire and parody became my humor of choice.
Like so many others, I began writing, drawing and painting in school - short stories, often of the horrifying "twist-end" variety - it was one of those phases an immature writer must go through. Also, influenced by "Star Wars" and science fiction TV shows like "Space: 1999" I produced an incessant stream of strange drawings from age 7 and onward: violent space battles, planet-sized cataclysms, advanced but inhuman aliens who merged with their otherwordly technology (all this before the age of 10!).
Much later, I actually published my own comics for Semic Press in Sweden - however, this remained an infrequent hobby activity, and I soon gave up cartooning for the computer game business. (You can't eat art.) Some of the more ambitious ideas for comic strips, such as ALIEN BEACH, have now become novels instead - and that will happen again.
2. The Struggling Writer
Since 1993, I have attempted to write novels and get them published in print. Most refusals have been of the "Not bad, but our schedule is full" variety, or even "Not obscure enough". That didn't deter me from writing, though - because friends, relatives and acquaintances who actually read my books enjoyed them. The dilemma eventually led to my decision to start an author website in March 1999.
From 1999 to 2009, I ran a homepage with the title "Read My Books For Free" - the concept being that in order to get published, I needed to build a following and get some feedback from readers.
In order to afford this kind of thing - and because I'm a typical Swedish cheapskate - I only used a free website, paid for by advertising banners. These sites tend to run out of memory space (and plain run out), so the "Read My Books For Free" site had to migrate to a new URL several times in ten years. (I've lost count of the number of times I moved the site...)
The "Read My Books For Free" experiment ended in October 2009, when the accumulated mass of free reading samples became too large for any free website. Finally, I bought myself a domain name (aryngve.com) and started this official author website. (And about bloody time...)
3. A Modest Measure of Success
So has all this effort paid off?
Well, so far I haven't been able to quit my day job, but I've gotten some stuff published here and there...
I'm convinced that genre writers should seek out new markets with growth potential for genre fiction - specifically India, Latin America and Asia. So far, three different Chinese SF/F magazines have printed my short stories. (I'm not satisfied with only those three, though...)
In 2004, the Swedish publisher Wela Fantasy discovered my novel TERRA HEXA through the "Read My Books For Free" website, and soon signed up to publish it. TERRA HEXA was released (in Swedish translation) in August 2004. (The sequel, TERRA HEXA II, was released in 2006, followed by TERRA HEXA 3 in 2007.) Even though I'm now starting to see some success in getting published, I still believe that electronic publishing will eventually replace print on paper.
In 2009, Norwegian state radio released a broadcast (and limited-time podcast) of my fantasy radio series "Magiens Arv" (="Heirs to the Magic").
In my spare time, I've sometimes made rare guest appearances as a standup comedian at small clubs and various events - not always without success.
I found out that I enjoy writing comedy more than performing it, so I've started to write more humorous novels - such as THE TIME IDIOT.
I've also discovered that the horror and comedy genres work well when combined. In 2009 I wrote my first vampire novel, BLOOD & SWINE (still unpublished - take note, publishers and agents!).
What next for me? I've become a parent, so I'm thinking of writing and drawing books for small children... I'll come up with something.
-A.R.Yngve, Oct. 2009
P.S.: My goal is to become one of the most influential writers of the 21st century - or the next one. I'm not kidding.
