When I first escaped from the clone farms my first visit was to Building XZ-636, home of Project Rebound, where I knew I could escape into the past.
Arriving in South Wales in 1993 I paid some actors to pretend to be my family and attempted to adjust to society three thousand years before my birth in Dr Zagralliphant's drone factory. Sure, it took me a few years to adjust to the social mores of 20th Century Britain but I managed it, eventually.
I thought, foolishly, that I could do whatever the hell I liked in the past, so I went to school to become some sort of arty theatrical type. Turns out people can starve in that line of work just as easily in the year 1998 as they could in the year 5012. I had to leverage my skills with technology, in order that I might, in the end, pay the bills.
Of course, eventually The Network approached me. That shadowy cabal of loosely federated outcasts that lurk in the corners of the world. A mixture of trans-dimensionals, time travellers, monsters, aliens and accidents of science. Not what I'd call a community, but they helped me out a couple of times when the powers that be came too close.
A quick house move, a convincing career step, use of nano tech and psychotropic consciousness altering. No one in Department X even knows they had a file on me... except I've just written it down here and...
Nope, plot holes in my own science fiction bio, can't do it.
Look, like Zaphod Beeblebrox I am just this guy, you know.
Born in York, brought up in Wales (not in a cloning vat, not to be used in a mad scientist's drone army). Studied drama, media, and eventually computing. Worked as a teacher and then a software engineer. Married to Sue, father of one terrific son, owner of one terrific Beagle.
And I write.
I write stuff weirder than you would think would go on in my mind. I write about gods and monsters, fantasy kingdoms and the mechanics of magic, angels, demons and things in dreams and nightmares. I do it because I enjoy it. I do it because it is the thing that I am very, very best at and talent won't let you rest, it demands to be used.
I fully believe that I am a successful genre author, who happens to have had very little success indeed, and the only thing that puts a line between me and someone with that success I would like is that I don't have it. And literally nothing else.
Maybe, if I had been harshly criticised for my work then I might believe differently, but the world has largely been indifferent to the work I have released, so I can cherish my own self-image.
It is entirely possible that this thing that makes its demands of me is a talent for writing awful, terrible, incoherent and rambling fiction. That would be a dreadful thing, having an uncontrollable urge to write laughable dreck. If it turns out that's what's happening I might even have to attempt to seek therapy.
Until then, have a look and see if I am underrated, or in need of counselling. It would be good to know which before I am fifty, so I have about seven and a half years to get a result.
