Some are born with silver spoons in their mouths. Michael Forester was born with a pen in his hand.
Of course, it was immediately pinched by his big brother who put it
on a shelf too high for him to reach. He got his own back though. He
nicked his brother’s abacus and hid behind the sofa with it. Thus his
accountancy and entrepreneurial career was born, but always clouded by a nagging suspicion that his true calling had something to do with
writing.
By the time he was 30 he was finally tall enough to reach the shelf,
and took down the pen. This induced a bout of split personality disorder in which he oscillated between pillaging the stock market and writing
books teaching others how to make incalculably vast sums of money (one
was called Going for Growth and the other, How to Make More Profit). Unfortunately, they didn’t make incalculably vast sums of money themselves.
The millennium year saw a complete volte-face (millennia can be quite feisty like that, Michael says – still, not to worry, he’s fully
prepared for the next one) in which he determined to devote his life to
poetry, fiction and life writing. The first result was If It Wasn’t For That Dog, about his first year with his beloved hearing dog, Matt. (Michael has
been severely deafened from the age of 30). Sold on behalf of the
charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, the book is still in print.
Short stories followed on subjects ranging from goblins and dryads to inter-racial love in a racist age, marital breakdown to bureaucracy,
nursery rhymes to Alzheimer’s disease. Not far behind came poetry from
haiku to epic fantasy poems and New Age mind-body-spirit writings on
subjects as diverse as self-worth and the nature of physical death.
In 2009 he won first prize at the Winchester Writer’s Festival in the ‘Writing can be Murder’ category. He has been short/longlisted three times in the Fish Writing Contest.
Eventually Michael felt ready to start his first novel, Vicious, a story of Punk Rock, reincarnation and the second coming of the
Messiah. It took six years to complete the manuscript which passed
through five drafts and will be showcased by The Literary Consultancy in November 2015. It was followed by its sequel, ‘Daughter of Man’. Both volumes await publication while Michael works on the third and final volume of the trilogy, ‘If The Dead Be Not Raised’.
Now at the venerable age of 59 (deep respect, master, deep respect)
Michael divides his time between Tenerife and the UK. He numbers dryads, angels and Liberal Democrat Voters amongst his closest friends (but he
acknowledges the last of these are widely considered to be mythical
creatures).
Michael is now blessed with the opportunity of devoting the better
part of his time to the pursuit of literary stardom. His children look
on aghast as he squanders their inheritance on such profligacies as A4
printing paper and laser toner cartridges.
They need have no concern. He plans to leave them the pen.
