THE AUTHOR IN ME
"Writing, for me,
is all for the joy
of words."
The beauty of writing is that you
can be whoever you want to be,
wherever you want to be and
whenever you want to be.
It is almost impossible to fully describe oneself. So much of what you are is what others find in you. But the basics are simple. Having left school without any great academic success, I embarked on a career in advertising and marketing, progressing through the client side (Cadbury's), then London and Midland agencies (even part owning one) to restarting my career at 50 primarily as a freelance copywriter, with an additional penchant for providing semantic internet content and simple web design. By my early seventies I decided there must be plenty of younger folk around to fill my shoes and slowly faded into retirement. Only to retain that constant urge to write. But this time fiction. (No comments on my copywriting, please!)
I'd penned a few odd pieces over the years, but never taken story writing particularly seriously; more just to amuse family – children and grandchildren especially – and provide the occasional escapism of living someone else's life. The last few years have changed all that. It started with "Tuna on Tuesdays", as a writing exercise, but, once completed, it seemed a shame to merely consign its characters to languish in a dusty drawer - or worse, confined to magnetic digits giddily spinning on some backup hard drive – so the work was released to the world as a Kindle book and later a paperback. It's a quiet read, meant primarily for a more mature generation, but with an otherwise wide, general appeal.
Then followed a more ambitious novel, "Darkness of Voices", followed by "Dandelion Days", a collection of short stories, flash fiction and a little poetry, culled from pieces I had written across the years, plus a few more recent works.
August 2018 saw the novel "The Spider Man'" published and subsequently the collections "The Schooling Chair" and "Colours in Darkness" were added. Two novellas, "Emilia's Sorrow" (2021) and "From A Dark Cell" (2022), which were followed by my latest full length novel, "With Only the Waves As Witness" (2023) and finally (or perhaps not finally) the novella "From A Dark Past" (2024).
At heart I am just a family man who enjoys the hobby of writing hopefully entertaining reads, rather than reaching out into the realms of high literature. I relish the the whole creative process of delving into storylines, manipulating all the twists and turns and then, for the books, laying them out, designing the covers and producing the digital artwork ready for print. The fact that a few folk like to read them, is a bonus.
I'd penned a few odd pieces over the years, but never taken story writing particularly seriously; more just to amuse family – children and grandchildren especially – and provide the occasional escapism of living someone else's life. The last few years have changed all that. It started with "Tuna on Tuesdays", as a writing exercise, but, once completed, it seemed a shame to merely consign its characters to languish in a dusty drawer - or worse, confined to magnetic digits giddily spinning on some backup hard drive – so the work was released to the world as a Kindle book and later a paperback. It's a quiet read, meant primarily for a more mature generation, but with an otherwise wide, general appeal.
Then followed a more ambitious novel, "Darkness of Voices", followed by "Dandelion Days", a collection of short stories, flash fiction and a little poetry, culled from pieces I had written across the years, plus a few more recent works.
August 2018 saw the novel "The Spider Man'" published and subsequently the collections "The Schooling Chair" and "Colours in Darkness" were added. Two novellas, "Emilia's Sorrow" (2021) and "From A Dark Cell" (2022), which were followed by my latest full length novel, "With Only the Waves As Witness" (2023) and finally (or perhaps not finally) the novella "From A Dark Past" (2024).
At heart I am just a family man who enjoys the hobby of writing hopefully entertaining reads, rather than reaching out into the realms of high literature. I relish the the whole creative process of delving into storylines, manipulating all the twists and turns and then, for the books, laying them out, designing the covers and producing the digital artwork ready for print. The fact that a few folk like to read them, is a bonus.
All the content of this web site is self produced, except for a few library images used to head up a few of the stories.
author & publisher
