Look and Listen

Biography

I'm a writer by profession (www.style.com.au), and while making a living from corporate writing comes easily to me, it’s pretty dull stuff. I live by the sea in Australia near Sydney and, as I now have three kids (3, 5 and 7), I no longer have time to play bass in bands as I used to (for example www.thetelltales.com). I love board games too, not the sesquipedalian Monopoly, but the sort pored over on www.boardgamegeek.com, as well as strategy games on the computer.

Inspiration

I love history, especially military history, and historical fiction is my favourite style of book to read. I was literally inspired by Mary Renault, in particular her book 'The King Must Die', which turns the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and into a brilliant book. The most inspirational part though, is that Mary Renault wrote it while commuting to Bristol on a train during the Blitz where she was doing 48-hour nursing shifts in a hospital tending to the wounded coming in from Dunkirk. I wrote most of 'Blood and Blitzkrieg' on a train while commuting to an office job in Sydney. it seemed to me that if Mary Renault could do it during wartime with a pen and paper, I should be able to do it in peacetime with a laptop. As a tribute, there's a scene in the sequel to Blood and Blitzkrieg (currently in progress) where I slip Mary into the story.