Can you tell us who you are, what you do and where you grew up and how did this influence your writing?
I’m an author. I was born in 1951 in a little village called Cleobury North in England. I was the third of five children. We moved to Canada in 1957. We grew up in Hamilton Ontario, forty miles from Niagara Falls. My father was an electrical engineer and an amateur radio operator. Five children became seven, and we returned to England in 1967.
I was unaware that I had an imagination until one of my teachers pointed it out to me. As usual, after a boring summer holiday, I had to write a composition about it.
I couldn’t just say that I went swimming, hiking, and biking, so I invented a story about our camping trip in Algonquin Park, which was over two hundred miles north of where we lived. While the rest of the family slept, I saved them from being attacked by a black bear. My teacher, Mr. Hanson, liked the story but he wasn’t too impressed with my handwriting. Yes, I owned up and told him that it never actually happened.
I used to love Superman comics and Mad magazines. I also read Gulliver’s Travels, short science fiction stories, and books by Mark Twain. I progressed to every Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and closed room mysteries. I also enjoyed Isaac Asimov’s books and astronomy, but my greatest love is music.
When I was fifteen, my childhood may have not officially ended, but that is when I started working. I eventually joined the Royal Air Force for nine years, and when I had finished, I worked in storage and trucking. I am married, have four children and twelve grandchildren. When I retired, I started writing.
What inspires you to get out of bed each day?
When I wake up, it’s as if I’m on a mission which needs my full attention. Of course, the goal is writing. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. That’s why I work seven days a week. I sometimes wake up and write down new ideas that I just thought of or dreamt about, which could be a new story or the first one or two lines of a new poem. Inspiration is at its best in the morning. Writing means an endless quest for information, which leads me down new and fascinating roads where I learn incredible facts about the universe, our world and the people in it. One hour of every day is spent walking and running in the wilds of Bedfordshire. It’s there that I can witness the sights and sounds of Mother Nature close-up. Sometimes it’s wild, but it’s always beautiful. At weekends the regime is not as bad. I catch up with correspondence and socializing with family and friends.
Read more of this interview.