As shamelessly camera-hungry as an MP.
Born in the UK, and educated in a variety of places around the country, I’ve always enjoyed arranging combinations of words and punctuation, whether on the page or out loud, and the flipside of this is of course a love of reading; as a child I loved comics, and my first professional writing credit was for legendary British comic 2000AD in my teens.
Portrait of the artist as a show-off
As I’ve grown taller and the UK comic market has sadly diminished (not that I’m suggesting any kind of correlation, you understand), I’ve moved into writing for radio and magazines (more detailed info can be found here), and in years gone by I also wrote and performed stand-up comedy, though the need to balance late nights with my need for sleep meant I didn’t pursue it with the vigour of some of the comedians I shared bills with, who can now be seen on TV with alarming regularity; for my part, I can be seen at home or asleep with similar frequency.
Cooking the books, indeed
Being a non-meat eater since my college years, and so pale that you might think it was vampirism and not vegetarianism, it was perhaps inevitable that I would be picked to model as an example of an vegetarian – no, that’s downplaying it: the Ultimate Vegetarian, and so you can see my hands on display in the book of the same name, holding a variety of kitchen utensils with a skill which has rarely been repeated since. However, the career lifespan of a hand model can be short and hazardous (as others with the same initials have shown in dramatic form), and so I got out before they kicked me out, and have been concentrating on writing pretty much ever since.
Frankly embarrassingly, it took me a while to realise that my interest both as a reader and writer seems to lie mainly in the crime/thriller genre, but now it’s clear to me that this is probably the way forward, my brain is all-too-frequently coming up with worryingly criminal plot ideas; it’s probably fortunate I’m one of life’s goodies, and not tempted to cross over to the dark side… on a related note, I’m super-pleased to be a member of the association that is International Thriller Writers.
A glamorous backdrop, no question
Perhaps belatedly compensating for a childhood mainly spent indoors staring at pages of books and comics, in adult life I’ve come to enjoy more physical pursuits, including trekking up mountains, distance running and yoga, and I completed the London Marathon, Duathlon and Triathlon in consecutive years. I’m currently working on completing the London Classics challenge, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the prospect of a medal for doing so is a strangely powerful motivation.
…But enough about me, how are you ?