I grew up in an ancient and remote farmhouse, not unlike the Gry house, although mine was in rural Somerset, England, and my family has nothing in common with the Grys; I am certainly nothing like Torny Grysdaughter. My education was principally of a technical nature—I graduated in construction. After a short spell with a building contractor, I found myself working in local government; although neither was a utopian environment, my dystopian thoughts predate both.

I was an avid reader from an early age, enjoying all genres, although my first love has always been science fiction and fantasy. I have always had a great passion for real history as well: the rise and fall of empires, and all that goes with those shifting tides of human endeavor, have always fired my imagination. It was while reading of the Hudson Bay Company and the undertakings of the East India Company, that the idea of the World Overseas Corporation was born. An illustrated account of the 1757 Battle of Plassey - where a private army of the East India Company defeated the Mogul army of the Nawab of Bengal - inspired my first thoughts of the Security Section and a private enterprise that continued its own diplomacy by other means, in a manner normally only the preserve of nation-states.

I always enjoyed writing, having a reputation for producing the longest pieces for composition when at school, and I nurtured an inner desire to produce a novel one day. After completing my formal education, and all the distractions of diligence that go with that, I set about the project that eventually became Ancient Evils in earnest. I went through the usual anticipation, optimism, then subsequent disappointments of most aspiring authors as the manuscript went out, and the rejection letters came in. Undeterred, I carried on with The Conflict Within but, by the time Perpetual Motion was complete, I began to realize that literary success might be more elusive than I'd hoped.

I have always been something of an independent thinker, not drawn to paths well-trodden, and my writing is in much the same spirit, not readily of any formula. Alas, long books of no established genre were not what publishers—or even publishers’ agents—were looking for from unknown authors of no provenance, it seemed.

Other things were beckoning, such as career developments, and computer programming, to say nothing of family life, and for a while, the characters of my post-apocalyptic Earth languished in the far future, while I pursued a brave new world of my own in the here and now.

However, in the intervening time, the topography of authorship changed, and another brave new world of self-publishing began to open up. I saw an opportunity for Life After the Death to come out of my loft, and appear in the public domain at last, if not on the shelves of the bookstores, then on the virtual shelves of the internet.

I still live in Somerset, along with my wife and grown-up children. These days I write purely because I enjoy writing, and I hope my readers enjoy my writing as well.