Bio:J. J. Beazley

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Having spent several decades trying unsuccessfully to write fiction, JJ Beazley was pleasantly surprised to be suddenly handed the gift in the summer of 2002. He still doesn’t know where it came from, but he does know what precipitated it. It was seeing a tree shake violently and unaccountably one windless night in July, and it was hearing a low, menacing growl in a quiet country lane a few nights later. He wrote both incidents down and extended them into a short story called More Things in Heaven and Earth. The first draft was rough, but it was recognisably fiction in form and mode of expression. Needless to say, it has been polished a little since then and was included in the first issue of the Candlelight anthology.

Forty two more short stories and a novella followed, and sixteen of them have now been published with a couple more waiting in the wings. Since he is what most people would describe as ‘weird’, the majority of his stories are speculative in nature.

He knows his fiction will never make him rich or famous, and neither would he expect it to. He wrote the stories that wanted to be written. Whilst it pleases him that some of them might be enjoyed, their value to a reader was never really the issue. Whether any more will ever be written remains to be seen.

He lives the life of an English peasant in a small house in the depths of rural Derbyshire. He does so alone and is presently unemployed, which means he is rather worse off financially than most English peasants. He takes comfort from the fact that poverty helps to ward off the smugness and conformist attitudes common among the better off.

He tries to live life simply, not only because he’s poor but also because life makes less and less sense to him the older he gets. He knows what he likes – the scents of nature, the communion of animals, burgeoning spring growth, acts of kindness, Scotch whisky, English beer, good coffee, peace, plain speaking, humour, freedom. He knows what he dislikes – right wing bigotry, left wing bigotry, the totalitarian hypocrisy of modern Liberalism, racism, materialism, religious intolerance, excessive state control, the growth of global capitalism, aggression in pursuit of power or wealth, people who claim that because something can’t be proved ‘scientifically’ there’s no reason to believe it can exist, instant coffee. In fact, he generally dislikes most things with ‘ism’ – including atheism - on the end because they tend to discourage free thinking.

What he doesn’t know is why he’s here, the extent to which ‘here’ is truly real, what he should be doing about it and whether it matters anyway. These shortcomings make it difficult for him to relate to the majority of people in modern culture. The following facts disturb him:

• That most people still think the government is running the country.

• That most people still think that happiness increases in direct proportion to material prosperity.

• That most people still think that those at the bottom of the social heap are there because they are either lazy or stupid.

• That most of the women he finds attractive have parents who are younger than him.

• That many of the animals he most admires would probably eat him if he came face to face with one of them.

It’s hardly surprising that he lives alone.