About me

Biography

I was born in Guildford, Surrey in England in 1972. After we moved from Surrey (Goldaming) in 1974 I was brought up in Wiltshire and then Wales before going to Lancaster University to study History in 1991. After graduating with a BA (Hons), Upper Second Class, I relocated to Bath when I became Disk Editor on ST Format at Future Publishing. After eight years at the company, I left at the end of 2002 to pursue a freelance career in writing and editing.
    Notable events in my life include getting married to the gorgeous Toni in 1998 at Longleat Safari Park in the Orangery; then honeymooning in Kenya for two weeks - an unforgettable experience, which has only been matched by a two-week stay in Canada, covering Vancouver, Vancouver Island and the Rockies, an experience so good we returned to Canada another three times before environmental considerations made us look closer to home for future holidays - both Edinburgh and Paris have been sampled to our delight in recent months. Perhaps the most notable event of all came on 15th November, 2007, when Toni gave birth to our first child, a daughter Harriet Rose. You can keep up with her latest developments on my blog amid all the ranting about the state of the planet, Birmingham City FC and just about anything else in-between.
   My love of football has provided many ups and - in particular - downs over the years. I've supported Birmingham City FC since 1979 and the club is currently yo-yoing between the top two flights, looking likely to get relegated at the end of the current 2007-8 season unless something radically improves. Blues fans - or Bluenoses - are known for their streak of dark humour, so it seems apt that the club's most famous supporter (Jasper Carrott) has uttered the immortal phrase,"You lose some, you draw some." I am well aware that, in the grand scheme of things, football is unimportant. But try telling that to my stomach every Saturday afternoon*...
    Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it appears I was destined to become a writer in the field of computing from an early age. It was in Wales that I saw my name in print for the first time - over a period of three years I appeared three times in Crash! magazine, once in ACE and once in Computer and Video Games.
    Notable professional achievements: editing PC Answers for two years from October 2000 to December 2002. When I took over the magazine our ABC had fallen to just under 37,250. Within a year we had managed to grow the circulation back up to over 41,000 readers - no mean feat when just about every other PC magazine suffered a major drop in sales during that period. We also grew our subs base from under 8,000 to over 11,000 in that period. I had previously been Production Editor and then Deputy Editor on the title when its ABC had risen from 35,000 to over 45,000 in 1998-99. During my tenure, the magazine made seven-figure profits for both years I was in charge, making it one of Future Publishing's top 10 earners, despite the fact we lost three members of staff and had to share our CD editor across a number of titles.
    Since going freelance I've launch-edited Windows XP Answers, which went monthly after just two issues, and edited two issues of Practical Web Pages before semi-retiring from editing for the foreseeable future to concentrate on writing. I've also been Project Editor on various brochures for the PC World chain of superstores and was Contributing Editor to the Microsoft Windows XP Magazine in Australia for 18 months before reverting to plain freelance writer.
     Other professional achievements include having articles commissioned and published for titles outside the UK: first Dubai-based Charged, and more recently a slew of titles for Derwent Howard in Sydney, Australia. But it's not all about computing, either. I'm currently contributing to the Birmingham City matchday programme (I'm into my third season), and am also writing articles for BBC Countryfile, BBC Who Do You Think You Are? and Your Family Tree magazines. During my tenure at Future I also flirted for a number of years with science fiction, and interviewed Oliver Postgate (Bagpuss), Yeardley Smith (The Simpsons) and Rob Grant (co-creator Red Dwarf) for Cult TV and SFX magazines respectively. I also contributed to a book (published free with SFX 25 in 1997) by co-writing an episode guide to The New Adventures of Superman with my good friend Cav Scott (visit his Web site here). I've  apparently successfully made the transition to fully fledged freelancer - I'm currently into my sixth year as a self-employed geek, and during that period we successfully relocated from Trowbridge, Wiltshire to Colchester, Essex.