When I was 13 I read a Terry Pratchett book for the first time and that was an eye-opener, I loved the comedic side of his work and enjoyed the characters and tight story that increased in intensity as it went on. After that for the first time I wondered if I could try writing, and over the next few days I did, it was terrible, probably no more than 4 or 5 thousand words but I had written a story and that made me want to write. I concocted many ideas over the next few years and started many stories but would always do the same, get so far and then stop bored or thinking it wasn’t good enough. When I finished college at 18 I was more or less forced to find work, any work and ignore any dreams I had because someone who shall remain nameless at this time said “Dreams don’t get you anywhere, you’re not good enough to achieve anything, just get a job” and I listened…

When I was 21 I started writing again while working for Lloydstsb, and wrote over 100 pages for the first time before I gave up, I still have that somewhere…Again I stopped writing but the ideas never stopped, every job I had I would be thinking through story ideas if I was bored with the work and on autopilot, every journey, with music on or cycling around was like reading a story in my head but I had given up on writing anything. This changed in 2003 I went to the cinema to see Underworld with a friend, I liked some elements of it, particularly that the obvious good guys might be the bad guys or maybe it was just one person who was the evil one rather than a group. I sat down the next day and started to write an idea that formed along those lines, I wrote more than I had ever before in one sitting, I wrote fairly consistently a few pages here and there, a few a day at lunch in work and in evenings. I took a long break making the worst decision of my life for several months but the less on that the better. I finally finished it in 2005, 567 handwritten pages and it is still in the same state it was then, it needs a lot doing to it, but what I learnt from it is how I like to write and conversations between people.

Again the writing stayed at that for a couple of years on the basis that I had the ideas but every time I started something I got bored and stopped or wasn’t happy. In 2007, after a long period of time I stopped playing world of Warcraft, but I liked how the world had been created, I drew a series of maps and created a world but had no story that would work with it. After going to a few live action role play events that year I came up with a story that I wrote over the next year I called Rakkata after the world I created. I wrote it on and off but never thought it would go anywhere, I even stopped writing it for about a year, where it sat collecting dust on my laptop.

At the age of 28 I decided to go to uni because I had been depressed with my life in Essex which was going nowhere. At uni I expected to be the weird older guy that no-one talked to so I resurrected some writing to do while there as I anticipated lots of time alone. One the fourth day I was sat alone in the bar vaguely trying to write some of Rakkata when two girls I had met on the first night came over to sit and chat, one of which was actually leaving uni that afternoon to return to distance learning, she was also a writer completing a masters degree in creative writing. She started reading some of what I was writing, she must have liked it as we became a couple within weeks and are still together and engaged (though the wedding is postponed until we have more money and I quote from Laura “being called Mrs, feels old to me”).

Since then I've been diagnose with Crohn's disease which has debilitated me somewhat and it's in writing that I'm finding new purpose in life, getting back to where my first love lay has given me a new lease of life. I'm now working on books featuring the character Sio, who is an absolute joy to write. I wrote a choose your own adventure book a few years ago where the readers themselves made the decisions to what happened next before I wrote them with nothing preset in any way. Sio was a recruitable character in that story and the love the readers had for her led me to try writing her own books, also this was the first time I'd tried writing something in first person. So far the people who've read her books have liked them and I'm not sending them to agents with the hope of finally taking this further and achieving my dreams.