About me:

I've always wanted to write, and many years ago I started on a typewriter, remember those? and I tried to write science fiction; that is a hard genre to write in! It’s really easy to write about spaceships, monsters and lasers, or tyrannical leaders in a dystopian near future, but to come up with a genuinely original sci-fi idea is difficult. Hats off to anyone who can do it. (In my humble opinion, ‘dystopian’ is a vastly over-used word and it's time for something new).
But life gets in the way doesn’t it; there’s work, marriage, buying a house, starting a family, and bringing up a child; all these things take up time. But the urge didn’t go away with me, it just hibernated, and some of the ideas from my first failed attempt stayed floating around in my head, and to use a modern expression, they got ‘repurposed’ or maybe even ‘up-cycled’ into my current writing.
Speaking of work, I’ve done a few things. I started out working in laboratories that analysed metals. I actually hated that job and did it for far too long, but that was where I met my wife, so it wasn’t all bad. After a couple of changes, I ended up in an electronics laboratory just at the start of the internet age, and I had no idea what the internet was; back then, if you didn’t know something, you had to buy a book! Anyway, all the engineers were talking about this thing call broadband and how it was going to change the world. I didn’t even have a computer then.
At this point I have to say that all the while this was happening, I was actually going to be the greatest guitarist in the world. That didn’t happen.
What did happen is that the electronics company closed, and everyone got made redundant. There was huge downturn in the economy, and I was told that my chances of getting a full-time job were zero, which was a major bummer. But this turned out to be the best thing that happened, as a casual conversation with an acquaintance led to me starting work in the live music industry, an industry that I then worked in for over twenty-five years and loved, only reluctantly retiring early to look after my ailing mother.
I was driving home after work one day, thinking about a terrible book that I had just read that was filled with wholly unlikely scenarios. Now I know that the reader is supposed to suspend their disbelief, but some of the plot lines were simply not believable with terrible dialogue and the same phrases repeated over and over again, and I thought to myself ‘I could write a better story than that’, and my next thought was ‘well I’d better try then.’
My drive home was quite long and over the next few weeks I got the germ of an idea. I’d had the name Astrid Peterman as a character name in my head for years and I guess that meant I would eventually end up writing something, so I just sat down and started writing about her.
A few weeks after I started, I bumped into my old English teacher and told him that I had started writing and how I wish I’d paid more attention in his class. He gave me some great advice, he said, ‘just write something every day’ and that is what I do now.

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