I was born in 1972, in Portadown, Northern Ireland, where I live to this day, a town once infamous across the globe as the epicentre of the province’s volatile politics (although a better word is probably tribalism). Despite the tension between the Protestant and Catholic communities, this is actually a pretty nice place to live.

In my boyhood I couldn’t care less about politics, and I still don’t. While some kids were painting the Red Hand of Ulster on their school jotters, I was more interested in drawing space battles. Art was my favourite subject, but on leaving primary school my creativity had escalated to the realm of computers, and by age fourteen I was trying to get my first computer game published, a graphic adventure called Alien Complex (which is now sadly lost). That was at a time when home computers were a new thing and their design was uncomplicated enough that games could be programmed by a single person.

Around the same time I discovered the joys of reading. Thanks are due to my junior high English teacher for selecting Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien as the class novel, through which I discovered that all books are not designed to bore the reader to tears.

The creativity bug unsurprisingly got a hold of me in this new realm of words, and I began to write short stories. In high school I hated homework, like any normal kid, except when my English teacher got us to write a short story – I felt exhilarated. I remember one particular occasion when most of the class was given a story to write as punishment for disruptive behaviour. Not me; I was quietly reading when the others were getting up to badness. But I had the writing bug so bad that I wished I’d been included in the penalty. The reason was simple enough: my English teacher was my readership. She may have been just one person, but she was still a reader, one who would care and comment on my work. I remember our class being asked to write a 500-word story called “The Dark,” and I ended up being unable to stop before 3,000 had flown out of my pen.

When I was sixteen, in the late 1980s, computers were getting more advanced. They could display photographic-quality pictures and near-CD quality sound. You might think computer art was the next logical step for me, but for some reason I got hit with a passion to explore the art of making music. Those years were exciting. A worldwide computer scene emerged, of bedroom programmers and graphic artists and musicians, all of us sharing our work using a disk-swapping network across the postal service – a precursor to the file-sharing that goes on using the internet today.

When I was seventeen, I started thinking seriously about God for the first time, and I became a Christian. However, it wasn’t long before I became quite uncertain about the whole thing. Doubts and uncertainties would plague me for over fifteeen years, during which time my belief changed from Christian to agnostic/athiest and back again, more times than I can remember.

In my late teens I stayed in school to pursue A-levels, working towards a career in computers, but secretly hoping that I could do something special with one of my creative pursuits.

Before my teens were over, video cameras were becoming an affordable purchase, and my friend Andrew Harrison had one. We dabbled in making our own little horror and science fiction films for a while. The breakthrough came one evening when we sat down and planned a massive epic entitled Zombie Genocide. Deciding on the name Midnight Pictures for ourselves, we “hired” our friends to act and embarked on the quest of making a feature-length movie. Andy would handle the gore, I would compose the music, etc. We managed to get it finished, which is a miracle because we stuck at it for two and a half years. Even more remarkable is the fact that today, after the experience of making several subsequent films, Zombie Genocide remains a firm favourite with many fans.

Art, programming, fiction, music, film. At varying periods in my early- to mid-twenties, I kept myself busy in all these areas, but it was clear that there were two favourites: fiction and music. In 1995 I got my first break, after submitting stories to the small press for years. Gavin Wilson, editor of Really Quite Cosmic (a small press fiction zine), published my time-travel story “The Paradoxical Son.” After running several more of my tales in subsequent issues, I got an ever bigger break in a bigger mag, Samhain, known as “Britain’s longest-running horror film magazine.” I’d written a zany story about Stephen King called The Pen-Name, where I pretended that Richard Bachman was a real person whose work King had stolen. What made this sale special was not only the calibre of the magazine, but the fact that they published only one story per issue, and I’d made the slot.

Meanwhile things were also going well on the music front. I contacted several computer games publishers and amazingly got accepted by three of them. Over the next year or two, I worked on around seven games, most of which saw the light of day. Better yet, an independent music label asked me to be a musician on an album called Immortal, featuring studio-quality remixes of game music themes. After a couple of bad experiences with companies involving money, and the death of the Commodore Amiga computer platform, I gave up on the games industry. However, my passion for music continued as I wrote scores for the films of Midnight Pictures.

During this time I had found employment in the computer industry, but of the lowest possible quality. Sitting at a computer terminal staring at a marriage register and making sure that the database on the screen matched the original paper records. Soul-destroying. After a couple of years of this kind of thing, the only escape was to go to university and get myself better qualified. That was another couple of years of torture, but I made it through, and obtained the ridiculous piece of paper that it takes to get somewhere in this world.

In 1999 I wrote a story called “Terror on Tarthlogue Road,” featuring several real-life teenage friends in dire straits. It was purely a novelty piece, but when one of these friends decided to read the whole story aloud to the others one evening, something special happened. He read at a fast pace, and even at that, the story was long enough to keep him going for three quarters of an hour. During this time, every mouth in the room was silent, every ear attentive, from the first line to the last. In light of the notoriously short attention spans of teenagers, what I was witnessing here was exciting to behold. I thought, You’re onto something here, Sloan.

It would be another couple of years before I attempted a novel, during which time I acquired a job as an ICT technician at Clounagh Junior High School. I fell in love with the place. Working in an environment with 650 kids beats a stuffy old office building any day. You’re around people at an age when they’re full of life, not set in their ways, brimming with potential, before the world has had much of a chance to wear them down, close their minds, or grip them in a nasty vice. And you have the opportunity to help them along life’s way.

And so Ulterior was born. My first novel, set in Clounagh Junior High School, and born out of my affection for the place. I turned the mundane into the fantastic, filling the building with mystery and danger and adventure. I shopped it around a few publishers and agents, and got nowhere fast, just like ninety-nine percent of writers who try. The choice was then to either consign my baby to the shelf or do the whole publishing game myself. My computing background had already given me the needed skills in desktop publishing and graphics, so I set about doing just that. I invested £2,000 in a print-run of 1,000 books, and sold the whole lot in a period of three and a half years.

In 2003 I moved house for the first time ever, aged thirty, finally breaking away from my parents and buying a place of my own. Women have not played a large part in my life to date. That may change, or it may not. There are advantages to the latter, chiefly the issue of time, for those who wish to write, because it takes a tremendous commitment that not everyone is willing or able to give.

In 2005 Midnight Pictures reached a turning point. After making six films on shoe-string budgets, it was time to either shift up a gear or quit. Andrew and I mutually agreed to bring Midnight Pictures to an end. However, since then, we haven’t been able stop ourselves from planning future films. It’s very likely Midnight Pictures will rise from the ashes before long.

In 2007 I published my second novel, Chion, which is selling successfully at present. I have full synopses for two more, plus a short story collection, all of which I hope to write and publish over the next few years.

In 2008 I obtained a sense of clarity about my the great spiritual struggle of my life between Christianity and athiesm. The real reason why I couldn’t stop bouncing between these two opposing beliefs is because (cue drum roll) both are false. On the one hand there is God with all the trappings of religion, a rigid belief system with imposed dogma that must not be questioned, holding your mind in bondage. On the other is a belief system entrenched in assumptions that the physical world is all there is; no afterlife, no meaning to your life, no meaning to the universe itself. Each of these two belief systems comes with its own set of problems, and in my experience neither can satisfy the human spirit.

What I never realised until now was that I didn’t have to pick one or the other. There were other options that I had never considered. I learned to put a little trust in my intuition, and the view of life that resonates most deeply with me is that the universe is not all matter but all mind (or rather, all consciousness). We are all one consciousness undergoing an experience of separation from each other. We’re like droplets of water, but collectively we make up the ocean. In practical terms, this belief dramatically affects how you treat people, which is perhaps why I put so much stock in it. Beyond this physical framework, if I am you and you are me, how can I ever be unfair or callous or mean? When we hurt others, we hurt ourself.

Coincidental with this radical change in beliefs, I started looking into the so-called paranormal, particularly themes in keeping with understanding consciousness. My specific area of interest was telekinesis (moving objects with the mind), because I had seen it done for real when I was a teenager. I now decided to attempt it myself, and to my delight I discovered quite quickly and easily that telekinesis is indeed a reality. I have continued to practice and develop the ability from its humble beginnings as a miniscule, erratic but measurable force into something stronger and more streamlined. Don’t ask me to pick up my light sabre from the ground without bending down, but who knows what’s ultimately possible? It’s an exciting journey.

Darryl Sloan, 27 December 2008