Something about
me
I was born in
My family moved from Pori to Helsinki at the end of 1960’s and there I spent my quite happy childhood until one day a friend of mine introduced me to the mysterious world of Role-Playing games and Fantasy literature. My first experience of fantasy genre was the Dragonlance –trilogy and as I studied the rules of the original D&D at the same time, there was no going back. I started to devour fantasy, books, magazines, fighting fantasy game-books and so on. I could not start playing RPG’s though, since I didn’t have enough friends (I was a lone wolf even as a child, a hermit so to speak). A little time before going to the army I succeeded in getting a group for games and from 1985 to about 1997 I played RPG’s almost every weekend – designing most of the scenarios myself.
At some point I got bored with ready-made worlds and game
systems and so I started designing a game and a world of my own giving birth to
Wyrmia – my dream-world of fantasy. We played in Wyrmia for some years until it
all stopped when guys got older and started to get interested in other stuff. But not me. My imagination gave me a break of maybe one
year, after that I had to do something and so I started writing short fantasy
stories. One night I started to write a short story as a present for a daughter
of my friend – a 11 year old girl named Minni. Name of
the story was “Fenris and the Ice-witch”. Minni liked the story so much (as did
her mother) that she wanted to hear more. So I wrote a whole book for her. I
let some other people read the story too, and they all encouraged me to send it
to publishers. I edited the manuscript, sent it to some publishers and went to
a holiday in
At the end of 2001 I had forgotten all about the manuscript until one day I got an e-mail from the publishing company Otava. That’s how my career as a fantasy author got started.
Why do I write fantasy, and why for children and juveniles, people have asked me quite often? And why do I write “classical” fantasy, stories with dragons, magic and swords? I write classical fantasy (high fantasy) because that’s what the word fantasy has always meant for me. I know it best and for me it’s soewhat of a challenge to create everything myself and see if it works. I love fantasy, mythological stories, traditional folk stories, ghost stories and everything “not from real world”. I have a vivid imagination and fantasy is my genre. And why for children and not for adults? I’m not overly joyful about the modern, adult world and the fact that the stress and anxiety of adults is too often transferred into the lives of children. Children need time to be just children, time to enjoy about imaginative stuff. I don’t want to write about all the things in the “adult world” – I enjoy making up stories which are free of those things and because children still have the sense and ability to enjoy their imagination I love to write for them. That’s it. Maybe some day I will write something for the adults too, but not yet.