Roger the Wyrd

Roger the Wyrd is a work-in-progress that I started in April 2020. It involves the eponymous hero, Roger, who must go to a new Secondary School, it being September 1969 and him being now 11 years old. He lives in a town in Southern England, and at first assumed the school would be the same one that his friends from Primary School would be going to. Instead he goes to Norham Priory school, which turns out to be a very different kind of school indeed. As a result, Roger finds out that he is a Wyrding, one of a group of people with magical abilities.

So there is some self-insertion here, which happens a lot in my stories, but this one is worse than usual. This photo is actually of me, in my new school uniform for my Secondary School in 1969, which unfortunately was not Norham Priory! Writing the story is a lot of fun as I try to immerse the reader in the period as much as possible. Thankfully online resources are such now that I can actually work out what would be on the television on a given night, including who was playing on Top of the Pops, from online resources, plus information like which were the popular songs of the day, the weather, and contemporary events which impact Roger's world.

The story is presently at over 47,000 words and got bogged down because I knew exactly where the rest of the story was going. This has happened to me twice now, as I tend to write for fun, allowing the characters and plot to largely develop as it wills. Once I know what happens, I stop writing.

I do still think of Roger and his world, and think of changes, so once I have the time I will finish the story and be able to share it more widely.