I am a Speculative Fiction writer based in sunny Brisbane, Australia. I have a lovely wife, Sandra, and three children, Aedan, Declan and Brigit.

Being able to escape into the realm of the imagination was handy growing up as the youngest in a family of eleven, and that storytelling habit continues today.

There is a special satisfaction in being able to share the worlds I create with my readers and have them enjoy the journey. For me, as a writer, that’s the ultimate destination. To have people allow you that special place in their minds is truly a privilege.

I am very passionate about music, if a little inconsistent. My musical taste is very broad, and I could not say at any given time what I might want to listen to. I can never answer the ‘What one record would you take to a desert island?’ question, because not matter what I chose I’d want something different once I got there!

At various different times I have sung in choirs and garage bands, as well as strummed away on the street with hat on the pavement.

Nowadays I sing and play guitar with friends, and particularly enjoy classical guitar.

Also an engineer, I am lucky to be able to apply this specialist knowledge and mindset to my writing. When it comes to technology and the mechanics of world building, I can bring an obsessive thoroughness that pays dividends in the depth and texture of the worlds I create, and in the scientific credibility of the concepts integral to my science fiction.

I have a PhD in Chemical Engineering, with a particular interest in space science, exploration and exoplanet discoveries — although my own field of study was more in the broad field of sustainability, specifically the reuse of byproducts in steelmaking. My subsequent work as a Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong extended this to the assessment of CO2 reduction in the steelmaking process, using sophisticated facility models in the Aspen Custom Modeler platform.

Favourite writer

My favourite writer is David Gemmell – a British Heroic Fantasy author that unfortunately died way too young in 2006. I love Gemmell’s books, and continue to return to them again and again. The only one I have never read is the crime novel he published under the name of Ross Harding – getting hold of that is like finding hen’s teeth. If you have copy – make me an offer!

If I was launched into space alone at short notice I’d take an ipod with all my music, my David Gemmell novels and a packet of Atomic Tomato potato chips.

Being able to make the journey from print into film would be awesome. I have always loved film, but there are limited opportunities for genre’ series and movies locally (Brisbane, Australia), and very little in the way of Writer’s Rooms. If I lived in L.A. maybe it would be different . . .

 

Martial Arts

I have always been attracted by the martial arts. A big fan of the martial-arts inspired films of the late 1970s and 1980s, I could not help but be drawn in by the gymnastic feats of those martial arts exponents.

Once I experienced the feeling of physical expression the martial arts offered, and that peculiar combination of discipline and technique that characterises the oriental martial arts, I was hooked. It says something about my personality that have spent so many years trying to perfect the very same movements!

Most of my time in this arena has been spent in Tae Kwon Do. For some reason the Korean martial arts have always attracted me. Probably no small part of that was the initial familiarity with Tae Kwon Do.

I hold a fifth-dan black belt in Moon Lee Tae Kwon Do, which includes an element of Hapkido. I have also trained in the Korean sword art Haidong Gumdo.