Anatomy

 

How do authors get that way?

​

Many would say they were born to it.

When I was eleven, my school held a mock-census. One of the questions — a very obvious question to include — was “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

There were the usual answers you'd expect; soldiers, firefighters, pilots, and the inevitable wit who put “A man”. Out of the whole school, over a hundred pupils, only one person put “Novelist”. (Not even “writer”, you'll note. “Novelist”.)

If you guessed that one person was me — well, you win a no-prize, I suppose.

I bowed to pressure and went off to be a lawyer instead, but sanity prevailed and I got out of the legal racket to find a career that left me with enough spare brain-power and time to write. And so I write; sharp, distinctive fiction, most often in my first love, the science fiction and fantasy genre.

My first novel, The Psychopath Club, appeared in 2021 from The Canal Press. The same publisher, failing to learn any better, is also responsible for The Devil's Finger (2023) and Three Men In Orbit (forthcoming, August 2024).

 

Doffing my novelist's hat and replacing it with a poet's one, I'm also the author of Poetry Slum, a collection of verse covering a broad range of topics, most of them controversial or argumentative. (I don't see much point in cosy poetry). I continue to pen poems alongside my fiction, and I expect I always shall; prose I have to work on, but poetry just happens to me.