Rik Roots
Rik was born in the small village of Dymchurch on the Romney Marshes in Kent, England. Dymchurch has three Martello Towers and a station on the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway. This was Rik's world for the first 24 years of his life, except for six terms away at college - the North East Surrey College of Technology: Rik somehow managed to fail his final school exams and thus never made it to university.
Rik only lives part-time on Earth; for the past three and a half decades much of his spare time has been spent in his constructed world, Kalieda. In this world, Rik has learned to be a benificent and bountiful God, populating the place with a paradise-worth of beasts to go alongside the various civilisations and societies that have grown up there.
Since 1998 Rik has spent an unhealthy amount of time transferring Kalieda to the web. The Kalieda Encyclopaedia is the gateway for visitors to come and experience this world, with maps, descriptions, histories and languages peppered haphazardly across the site. The Encyclopaedia is a form of living book, subjected to regular review and improvement.
The Kalieda novels, starting with 'The Gods in the Jungle', are intended to be a second gateway into the Kalieda world, offering people glimpses of the world through stories based on the histories and mythologies of the people who live in that world. The Kalieda novels can be thought of as the 'bottom-up' complement to the Encyclopaedia's 'top-down' approach to displaying Rik's world to the Real World; each (novels and website) is the equal to the other.
Poetically, Rik has been writing since he was 14 or 15. He happily acknowledges that no work from that early period survives, thanks to a fortuitous kitchen fire which may or may not have been started deliberately. The kitchen was relatively unharmed, in case you were worrying.
Rik's major claim to 'proper' poetic fame is being part of the group that established Magma Magazine - he even edited Magma 6, for his sins. The magazine's subsequent success has nothing to do with Rik; he left the Management Board a few weeks before Magma 7 was published.
Rik's main poetry publishing credentials are, strangely enough, in Magma Magazine. Nowadays he rarely submits poems to journals and has no plans to seek 'proper' venues for his chapbooks and manuscripts - Rik has a website, after all, which makes him very happy!
When he is not daydreaming, Rik finds himself studying for that elusive degree with the Open University and writing the occasional screed of verse. Rik used to work for Her Majesty's Civil Service which is, he says, a perfect training ground for people wanting to write novels based on alternate realities and fantasy.
