So, who am I?

Well, I’m British, an Oxford physics graduate, and now living in the flat part of Canada. I’ve been writing on and off for many years, but I’ve always been put off by the idea that once I’ve written a novel and polished it I’m then looking at having to beg agents to read it followed by waiting for publishers to decide whether they want to publish it and then if that happens having to wait a year or more for it to hit the shelves, after which a few years later I might get all the money. I certainly wouldn’t turn down a million dollar advance if someone offered it, but the whole traditional publishing industry just seems insanely inefficient.

I’ve written some magazine articles in the past, and being able to go into a store and see my name on the cover of a magazine on the shelf was always exciting. I co-wrote an indie vampire movie a few years ago which unfortunately didn’t get very far, though for good reasons; the budget was just too low and the director had to rewrite my wonderful ending as one of the actors quit part-way through. What’s brought me back to novel-writing is the recent growth in ebook sales, which have finally made rapid, low-cost publishing viable. In addition, the ease of electronic submissions has made selling short stories more viable as I no longer need to print them out and mail them across the Atlantic to the big markets.

So, here I am with about a dozen unproduced movie scripts, a couple of old novels that I gave up on part-way through revising and some old short stories. I grew up on pulp horror, SF and horror movies like ‘Evil Dead’, so I’ve always had a soft spot for them and wanted to write something that would entertain people as much as those entertained me.

I’ve also travelled all over the world, worked on numerous indie movies as everything from coffee-maker to editor, been a VIP at several space shuttle launches, survived earthquakes and a tsunami, climbed Mt Fuji, and visited ground zero of several nuclear explosions. I’m scared of heights and Saskatchewan drivers.

Some of my old travel posts from the 1990s are now on the blog.