You knew that already – right? – that age has nothing to do with quality when it comes to writing.  We were reminded recently, when we discovered Robin Chambers’ Myrddin’s Heir series sitting quietly in the Amazon Kindle Store, hidden in amongst a million other books all jostling for attention.

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Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House in the Prairie, didn’t publish her first book until she was well into her sixties.  Frank McCourt didn’t become a published author until he was 66 - Angela’s Ashes, became a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize.  Joe Corso – a 4 time top 100 best-selling author - started writing to help his grandchildren pay for their college education.  He’s still writing at the age of 79.  The list goes on…

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Now we at Publishing Push are on a mission: to get as many of you as possible to give Book 1 in 72 year old Robin Chambers’ Myrddin’s Heir series: “A Wizard of Dreams” just 15 minutes of your valuable time: because we firmly believe that’s all it will take to turn you on to this exceptional series written “for bright children from 10 – 110 years”.

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That’s pretty much the readership that was/is captivated by The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis was 52 when the first book in this series was published), The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien was 56 when he finished writing it) and the Harry Potter and... books. (OK, so J.K. Rowling was only 25 when she first got the idea for those – we did say age had nothing to do with it!)

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R.B. Chambers had his first flirtation with writing when he was 32.  At the time he was Head of English in a tough all-boys school in Hackney (London), and he wanted some stories that would grab their attention; so he wrote some, sent them to Penguin and in 1976 they published them: first as a Kestrel hardback and then as a Puffin paperback.

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But he was en route to headship of a coeducational comprehensive school in one of the most stressful social services areas in the UK, and a job like that takes everything you’ve got; so he told himself there’d be time to write one day…

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He took early retirement in 1993 – after nearly 15 years of headship – to create that time; but his parents both became ill with the diseases that ended their lives some seven and eight years later.  He and his wife cared for them both full-time for most of those years...

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…by which time, the first of his two precious step-daughters had reached university age, with her sister just two years behind her.  Both needed a hand to get on the first rung of the housing ladder, and our would-be full-time author went back to full-time teaching to help make that happen.

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He retired – again! – in 2007, when he was 65, and still thought he had plenty of time; but it was narrowly surviving a murder attempt in a third world country in 2010 – skull crushed in 2 places, 17 stitches in the head-wounds – that finally made him realise how easy it was to run out of time...

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So here we are: 4 years later and 5 books down the line: quality writing from an author who has spent most of his quite long life immersed in the art and craft of writing.  Give A Wizard of Dreams a chance.  In the words of one reviewer, “you’ll be glad you did!”

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