Making hand-crafted furniture is the unlikely time when Malcolm Hogarth gets much of his inspiration for writing sci-fi novels, Between carving and sawing, he is already working on his second book. Ian Lamming meets him.

NOBODY puts words into Malcolm Hogarth's mouth as the quietly-spoken furniture maker goes about his business. But even he cannot explain the source of the phrases that pop into his mind at any time of the day.

A word, a sentence, a plot can come to him as he works the wood which is the essence of his chosen career. A character, a command, an alien name is conjured up as he drives about the North-East. Even in bed, when he's fast asleep, the words come from somewhere into his consciousness.

Consequently, he is never without a pen and notepad - by his bed, in his car, in his toolbox. Sometimes, it is eerie where the words come from. It is like they are being placed there by an alien lifeforce - which is not a not a bad idea for a book.

And that's how Malcolm came to write his first novel, Dark Harvest. And it's why the malevolent baddie of the book, Kobaal, uses telepathy to invade and control his human prey. It's a shock to his victims, but then it's a surprise to Malcolm that the script comes to him when he never considered himself to be good with words.

"The book is the first time I have ever written anything half decent," says the 44-year-old from Stanhope, in Weardale. "The only thing I was good at at school was woodwork and technical drawing. But, for some reason, I always felt I had a book in me."

It took time to surface. When Malcolm left school, like his brother Maurice, he went to work as a labourer in Weardale's only major industry, the Blue Circle cement works at Eastgate. It was dirty, monotonous work but Malcolm stuck at it for 14 years before he, like Maurice, was made redundant.

"Like I said, I was good at woodwork at school and enjoyed doing a bit of marquetry," recalls Malcolm. "I once made the picture that's on a Quality Street chocolate box out of bits of wood. I was really proud of that. So I joined my brother in the furniture-making business and just picked it up as I went along."

But the longing to write a sci-fi novel never went away. The seed had been sown in childhood. "I was always watching Thunderbirds, Fireball XLV, Stingray and Captain Scarlet," he says. "Then it was Star Trek - I thought Captain Kirk was fantastic - and Babylon 5. I never missed an episode. I remember watching Dr Who from behind the sofa. I was terrified when the Daleks came on. I've still got a collection of TV21 sci-fi comics, about 300 of them."

And so, four years ago, it was time to sit down and write the book. "All the things that had come into my head - the words, the sentences, the plots - were on bits of paper. It got to the point where I had hundreds of them," recalls Malcolm. "But I knew which chapter they all had to go in so I sorted them out. I had the plot right from the start and I wrote the book on four pages of A4 paper. Then I expanded it from there."

The result is a hair-raising romp through hyper space and time, pitting the chiselled hero, Captain John Ericsson, against a loathsome 10ft-long scaly reptile with a cobra's head, bad breath and a taste for human flesh. It's a quick-moving plot with more twists than a reptile has scales, with techno-speak used in the description and dialogue, drawn from science and astronomy, for the reader to grapple with along the way.

The weird names come from a variety of sources, some of which are derived from magazines. "Modor, the small, furry creatures that inhabit one of the planets, comes from 'motor car door'; it's all things like that," Malcolm explains.

"I get Scientific American, a monthly magazine that is full of articles about Space, and I pick up a lot of the language from there," he adds. "I like reading about technical things, so the words come easy. In fact, the hardest part was getting my old word processor to work."

The next challenge was finding a publisher. "It took another two years. The manuscript kept coming back and I'd just about given up when Minerva Press - the last one I had sent it to - said they would publish it. I couldn't stop jumping up and down.

"They sent the manuscript back for revision about three times to correct a few spelling mistakes and suggested a few alternative words where I'd made repetitions. But it's basically how I wrote it. When I read it now there are bits I would change, but, at some stage, you have to let it go."

Now the book is on sale, Malcolm hopes to enter it for the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Sci-fi Writers' Award. But it doesn't stop there. He is already working on his second novel - another sci-fi adventure of course. "Someone once told me that you should write about what you know, which is what I do," he says. "So I've already got the outline and lots of ideas for another book." Put there by an alien life force, no doubt.

* Dark Harvest by Malcolm Hogarth is published by Minerva Press, £10.99.