Look and Listen

Biography

I grew up in England during the 1950s and early 1960s before emigrating with my parents to Australia at the age of 13. I have lived in Australia ever since. Growing up, I was a voracious reader, and at about the age of 10 decided that I wanted to write stories. I pestered my parents for the next few years to buy me something with which I could write these stories (my handwriting was, and is, atrocious). When they finally realized what I was trying to do and that I was serious about it, they bought me a real second-hand typewriter, an ancient Olivetti manual. On this typewriter I wrote my first science fiction novel at the age of 12. It was, of course, completely unpublishable, but it was a start. I was still using this venerable machine, on which I eventually taught myself to touch-type, when after some years of trying I began to generate stories which were good enough to publish. My first published story was included in an anthology called Beyond Tomorrow, edited by Lee Harding and published in 1974. I was also extremely fortunate to be able to participate in a one-week writer's workshop in 1975 hosted by the great SF and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Over the next ten years I had a number of short stories published commercially in various anthologies and SF magazines, together with two short fantasy novels for early teens published by Cassell Australia. Not long after this, though, I started to develop an interest in computers and programming, and essentially taught myself to become a software developer. This was the basis of my working life for many years. It was always difficult to find time to write, as I had a full-time job and a family to support. As my job and other commitments became busier and busier, I put my creative urges on the shelf for a very long time. For 26 years, as it turned out. But recently I began to wonder whether I could start writing fiction again. As it turned out, I could, and I returned to writing with a bang, writing no less than 30 original stories during November 2011. These are now collected into my book "A Torrent of Story".

Inspiration

I grew up reading a lot of comic books (DC and Marvel), and then moved to reading a lot of science fiction, influenced by my father's collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In my teens, I was given a wonderful gift of scores of 'Golden Era' SF magazines. I was heavily influenced by the great SF writers of that era: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury. It's not surprising then, that my first writing efforts were in the SF genre. But over the years I've read much more widely, and am very fond of the English classics like Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope, and my later short story writing has been less genre-specific and more mainstream. I enjoy crime fiction when it is well done (think Ruth Rendell and Kate Atkinson), and the odd thriller. But I'm not sure that my own writing would be in these areas.