Born July 15, 1957. Played precociously until I had to go to school. A bit of an imposition that - I found it difficult to believe that these were, as I was assured, the best years of my life. If people had said they were the least bad years of my life I might have believed them.
After wasting my adolescence at Henry Mellish Grammar School, but still emerging with 5 O levels and 1 A level, I drifted into driving a fork-lift truck, working as a coal miner and filling shelves on the supermarket night-shift.
After wasting my late teens and early twenties I decided enough was enough, did a sociology A-level by correspondence college and did a BA Social Sciences (philosophy, sociology and psychology) at Trent Polytechnic. Then I squeezed some more money out of the state and went to Lancaster University to do an MA in Religious Studies (philosophy, sociology, psychology and anthropology of religion).
And then, thirteen years after I thought I'd escaped from it all, I signed up at Trent (now a university) to do another MA - this time in Writing.
For two years I was a temporary part-time lecturer at Trent Polytechnic, teaching The History, Philosophy and Methodology of Science and Social Science as well as introductory sociology and psychology.
I also wrote some stories and articles, very few of which I managed to sell.
After flogging allegedly humorous articles to Men Only and Knave, in 1985 I got the job of Assistant Editor at Knave and moved from Nottingham to Essex. Eighteen months later I was a civil servant - writer/editor with the Central Office of Information. Nine months later I was freelance. Sub-editing for The Sunday Correspondent, The Independent, Independent On Sunday and writing fiction, features and reviews for all sorts of magazines from Fiesta to the Canadian Writers Journal.
Apart from a few months as Deputy Editor of FEAR, before Newsfield went into liquidation, I've been doing itinerant editing and writing gigs. From comic strips and SF to CD-Rom reviews for The Independent and pseudonymous erotic novels. For my sins I once even authored a Fiesta CD-Rom. Online, I did a stint writing the science fiction news and reviews for CompuServe's now defunct sci-fi channel. And for a couple of years I edited the literary reviews and links section of trAce.
While temporarily back in Nottingham I did an MA in Writing at Trent University. Fortunately, I managed to leave the dank East midlands hell-hole called Forest Fields and escape to Cornwall in 1999, the week after the eclipse. Now, instead of inner city strife, I go surfing in the Atlantic unless I'm writing news columns, reviews and features for the Independent and, under a variety of pseudonyms I sometimes cannot keep track of, general features, columns, fiction and humour wherever it sells.