Contemporary author of pub fiction and beer enthusiast
About the author
I am a novelist, script writer, poet and member of the British Guild of Beer Writers. I was born, with another name, in Sunderland in 1970 and grew up in the North East of England. Despite having been in an admittedly little-known band, 3am Decision, and having worked in various guises in the legal sector, I have always managed to maintain a love of both the English pub and the written word. ‘Collapse of the Wave’ is the natural result of such a love and became my first novel.
I started writing ‘Collapse of The Wave’ while sitting in a pub, celebrating finishing co-writing a sit-com script with a friend. I looked around the place, thinking of the well-known writer’s mantra ‘Go with what you know’. I wish I could say that the notion of writing about a pub came to me straight away, obvious as it should have been, but it took about another hour and a couple of pints before the idea started to form. From that day however, what I then started to do was to write down ideas and observations on the memo pad of my phone while I was down the pub, rather than relying on remembering the next day. Well, you never remember the next day, do you? That soon made a massive difference to the amount of raw material I had to work with, and it quickly started to take shape as a novel. Don’t worry, to those who drink with me. All names and details have been changed!
And thus there and then, possibly, Pub Fiction was born, one chapter at a time. I avoided thinking about the whole thing too much and…eventually, I got it finished in 2015.
Once the first book was done, reception was rather favourable, and I kept getting asked when the second one was coming out. This was usually while down my local or at beer festivals, where many of my target audience may be found I guess. Also, we did leave Dan in a bit of a situation, so I thought that I had better let myself and other people know what he did next. ‘Another English Civil War’ is that story and the book was launched in late July 2018.
Since then I have been writing poetry, preparing to write a science fiction trilogy and am working on an increasing number of interesting projects.