I wrote my first “lost city in the Himalayas” story when I was fourteen or fifteen.
I had not read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon* yet, but I was actually reading a lot of E.R. Burroughs and Rider-Haggard, and quite some Howard at the time.
Their style struck me as easily emulated.
Oh, and I also read a lot of Peter Kolosimo and some Von Daniken and other “mysterious archaeology” books back then.
Food for stories.

So I sat at my mother’s Olivetti Lettera typewriter (hey, it was 1982!) and started hammering away – no outline, no no plan, no nothing.
I was actually writing in the most unpractical way I can imagine, but I had never ever read a writing handbook, so I was winging it.
And I was painfully slow on the keyboard – which helped, actually, as it gave me more time to think the next paragraph.
Anyway, in two months flat I did put together 80 single spaced sheets.
Which strikes me as interesting, as it was very much in the “original novel” pulp format – not only in contents, but also in terms of word count.

The story, which I made up as I was going, was predictably called Shambhala and it was rather predictable indeed.
In a nutshell- a lone climber lost in the Himalayas chances upon a lost city (yeah, right, just like that, so sue me), gets captured by mysterious hostile dwellers, escapes, meets two female characters – damsel in distress and ruthless bitch. Bickering, politicking and conspiring among the city dwellers ensues, a rather Metropolis-like (in retrospect) upheval takes place, and our hero emerges like the Spartacus of the city oppressed.
Kiss the girl, everybody cheers.
Curtain.

Stirring stuff.

So stirring, in fact, that a few friends at school liked it.
Girls, too.
The kind of upstart teenage girls that used to read Stephen King and V.C. Andrews.
They actually liked it!
What the heck, so I wrote a sequel – called Beyond Shambhala.
This one got a little out of hand – and it took a whole summer; but it had an actual outline (but I did not know it was called like that) and it clocked at 120-odd, single spaced pages.
In true Burroughsian fashion I introduced another main character (the original hero being a little too cardboard even for me) and stealing a page – or four – from Edmund Hamilton, I reformed the bad guy (actually the bad girl!) from the earlier story.
More mysteries, more intrigue, more hot air baloons, more diaphanous female outfits, more ape-men.
And I threw in a system of caves below my lost city, just to change the scenery, and for my dinosaurs to have some place to roam.

Again, I never said this was original, ok?

But I was fifteen, and that was the first story – hell, the first TWO stories – I was able to actually close in a way that was satisfactory to me.
And to my friends.
I was clearly on to something.

I was hooked.
Thirty years on, I’m still here, still reading Burroughs and Howard (and lots of others!), and still writing for my friends as a hobby.
I cling to the illusion I got somewhat better with time and practice.

And right now I’d love to do a lost city in the Himalayas story…

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* We’ll have to talk about Lost Horizon…