I was born in the late 1970s and grew up on stories that were mainly of a sci-fi, horror, and fantastical bent. One of the few benefits of being the youngest brood of a number of brothers (or 'prototypes' as I affectionately refer to them!) is that I often got previews of stories that perhaps should have waited until I was of an older age. Taking these new tales back into the school playground with me, I found both great joy and popularity was to be gained in disseminating them to an eager audience. Those years turned me into a 'cultural hub' of sorts, and convinced me that all human beings hold a slightly reverential place in their souls for story tellers.

​

It was at university in Bristol when I first started to write seriously. Now in the late nineties, and with Word Processing available, there was plenty of time in between my studies of hexadecimal equations, Q Basic programming, economic theory and marketing planning to write, and over those precious years I wrote a lot. And I read too. I studied history in my own time, and I laboured my way through many of the classical works of the last two centuries (a thanks must go to the Penguin Books £1.00 classic editions, which I hunted down with a religious fervour - especially in Blackwells and Borders on the Triangle in Bristol. I would fill a basket up with 20 novels, and cart them home on my walk back up to Cotham, where I would recuperate with tea and biscuits - they were good days!).

​

The next stage of my life brings me into the first decade of the 21st century. This was the time of work, of call centres, account executives, account management roles, and the cloak and dagger world of the office politics. But still, in the dark hours, I wrote and read and wrote some more and even put my first novel length work together, a pastiche to the Victorian and Edwardian horror and spiritual genres that were a benchmark of what I grew up with (such as MR James and Wilkie Collins). Writing was a big part of my life then, with all the excessiveness of optimistic youth, and in between running half marathons and working in the nascent digital marketing industry I wrote probably dozens of short stories and attempted many others, ranging across many different types of genres. Very few of these were good, (though none was wasted) and some were imitations of other writers: a love story of mine in a style of Somerset Maugham, a Victorian adventure along the lines of Haggard, and in one case a 'bawdy military history' adventure taking its cue from George MacDonald Fraser's excellent Flashman series (incidentally this is one of the first stories where I put my friends in as main characters - an Italian friend of mine was nearly asked to leave the train in London as she was giggling too much as she read it). This last work, 'The Alma Intrigue' which had as its background the Crimean War, gave me valuable experience of historical investigation as I tried to get as much of it right as I could: trawling first hand accounts, viewing old daguerreotypes of the landscapes, and reading as widely as I could about the period in question. (Amusingly, for this research I read a published novel of historical fiction by a military writer who was writing about the same war: imagine my surprise when the British general is said to 'have raised his hands' or something to that affect - especially as he lost his right arm at Waterloo some decades earlier! Oh the woes of writing historical fiction with an eye to accuracy!)

​

This all came to an end mid-way though the first decade of this century, when I left the port city of Bristol and returned to the green fields and hills of Worcestershire. Here my writing took a break as I was involved in setting up a small marketing agency and my work in sales, account management, setting up and running digital campaigns, took up my time. It was only when we were comfortable that I turned to my next writing enterprise: The RuneScape books.

​

And that brings us pretty much up to date.

​