Biographical
Information (photo courtesy of Jerry Bauer).
I was born in 1961 in Billericay in Essex (Ian Dury's got a lot to
answer for), had an uneventful childhood and an inadequate and detestable
schooling courtesy of the comprehensive reform that would have us all equally
uneducated. My love of the strange began, as it does with so many children, with my hearing The Hobbit, and a later reading
Lord of the Rings. It
also helped that my parents (a school teacher and a lecturer in applied
mathematics) were also SF aficionados.
I
started writing SF and fantasy at the age of sixteen, perhaps motivated by a
compliment from my English teacher for a story I had written in class after an
overdose of E.C. Tubb books. On leaving school there was a hiatus of a few years
while a grappled with the adult world. During this time I worked with one of my
three brothers for a firm which made steel furniture, ran a card school, and for
which it seemed the prerequisites of employment were an ability to drink huge
quantities, accept minimum wages, and make tea. It went bankrupt not long after
I left.
At my next place of employment operated a milling machine and was dispatched on day release to do a Tech III course on 'Mechanical & Production Engineering'. While I was at this company I began writing again and produced a fantasy book which is still gathering dust amongst my other files. From this company I went with a breakaway company which went through various ups and downs before collapse which, incidentally, again came after I left. Okay, I'm a rat. At that time my only successes as far as writing was concerned were to win a snack and sandwich toaster for a rhyme, and five pounds for a story about adolescent suicide.
With my college paper I managed to get myself into
a high-tech machining company. I was twenty-five. Here was where I grew up and found direction. Firstly I
began to write more regularly, this mostly assisted by joining a writer's folio of which I was a member for ten years.
Secondly I took an English 'A' level (B pass) at night school, mainly to prove a point to myself. Thirdly, I began karate
lessons and am now green belt (Useful, this, when writing fight scenes. It also means no one can build houses on me).
After
three years with this company, by which time I was programming computerized
machine tools, I left in the pursuit
of more money. It was then that I began the Hadrim fantasy trilogy, wrote
the first version of Fool's Mate, and began seriously to write short
stories.
My
next place of employment was a disaster and it was there I asked myself what I
really wanted out of life. I wanted to be a writer, and I had come to hate the
sight of factory walls and the smell of coolant oil. Again I left, this time to
become self-employed: cutting grass, tree felling, and hedging etc. This got me
out in the open air and left me much more time to write, and in the years that
have followed I have been gradually crawling up the writing ladder.
Sitting
in my files now, I have the first book of another fantasy trilogy Creatures
of the Staff first book of The Infinite Willows, and a contemporary
novel called Frog Wine. In one deviation from my usual writing practice,
I have written a script for a three-part TV series called Trines, which
is an amalgam of the strange and the contemporary, and a one hour drama called The
Executioner's Lie.
Up
until 2000 the limit of my success had been stories accepted by a large
proportion of British small press SF and fantasy magazines, publication of my
novellas Mindgames: Fool's Mate by Gordon McGregor's Club 199, and The
Parasite and The Engineer by Tanjen, serialization of my SF novella Africa
Zero in Threads, a short story collection called Runcible Tales
published by Piper's Ash.
Post 2000, things have changed. My expectation of being a lonely perpetually knackered spare-time writer has been defeated. I am now married to Caroline and am a full-time writer. Cosmos Books have brought out the two novellas Africa Zero and The Army of God in one book under the title of the former. One of my 'synopses and samples' hit at Pan Macmillan and they offered me a three-book contract. Pan have now published Gridlinked and The Skinner, and The Line of Polity was the lead SF title in the launch of their SF & F imprint Tor UK. Now I am on a second three-book contract Cowl was published last March, Brass Man is due next April, and I have finished The Voyage of the Sable Keech. Some if not all of these books have been published or are due to be published in America, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Watch this space. Alternatively, go to BFPO for current updates.