About

I'm a writer. I've written many things of variable quality and relevance but I did write them. My first serious attempt at long form fiction was a dreadful fantasy novel I wrote in my early twenties. It's long since lost but I still burn with shame at the memory of it.

In the mid-nineties I lived in Los Angeles and was utterly seduced by its sun baked nihilism and centrality in contemporary culture. I wrote a detective novel based in LA which took influences from Hammett, Spillane and Ellroy but with a garnish of pre-millennial neurosis. It wasn't very good but was partially redeemed by some interesting ideas and language. I no longer have a copy of the manuscript.

In the early noughties I lived in Brussels and once again turned to writing a novel. The third time's the charm. Wait, maybe it isn't. I wrote an alternative history murder mystery set in a Warsaw Pact aligned United Kingdom in the mid 1970s. It was an improvement in every way on the two turds that preceded it but still not, in my judgement, good enough. I have a hard copy of the manuscript and may return to it one day.

By 2010 I was living in Perth and, after almost twenty years and three novels, finally realised that I should be concentrating my efforts on my favourite genre: science fiction. I began to experiment with the themes and characters that would eventually be incorporated into Without a City Wall.I completed this book in early 2015 and decided that, at last, I had a work worthy of an audience. Then began the long, strange trip of getting it published. I'm closer than I was but I'm not there yet.

I am now working on Redeeming Blood which forms a companion piece to Without a City Wall and is simultaneously a prequel and sequel to it. This book will be finished in early 2016 and, after that, there will be something else...