What better way to handle all my angst than to pour them into short stories.

Born in a commuter belt city called Reading, like many a middle or upper class child of such times, I was shunted off to an all-male boarding school aged eight, away from my parents for periods of up to twelve weeks at a time. In such an institutions, where I was to rest until my seventeenth year, there was no getting away from the cruel jibes hurled at me from taunting tormentors. My refuge was the arts room, where I started to find some kind of redemption from the stark Dickensian surroundings, whose aim was nurture the army officers, businessmen, and gentry that dominate the class-ridden world into which I was born. The seeds were sown: I became an outsider.



Happier times were to follow, I went to art school, where I attempted to exorcize my time spent at school. At eighteen I turned my back on a parentally-enforced weekly visit to church and my head was filled with a range of nonconformist ideas. While at my first art college, through a friend I met a writer named Rupert Thomson, who was at the time in the process of writing his first book “Dreams of Leaving." He was a bit older than me, my being fresh out of school, but his personality and wit resonated and despite losing contact with him, I always read his latest published books with not only great expectation and unabashed admiration, but also a fascination for a person to whom I really looked up. His sentences were always tight, shooting arrows that always hit the mark. 

My yearning to be creative remained strong and diversified from my twenties through my thirties and forties. I made electronic music, doing concerts, in front of ecstasy-infused crowds, at one point, making videos and short films. When the age of the internet arrived, I was able translate my creative endeavors into something even more tangible. To earn a living, I worked as a teacher and moved to Austria, where I began writing in earnest. My writing at that time was rough, rugged and without direction. I dived into a story about immortality, the story remaining on an old, dusty, floppy disk somewhere. Then tried short stories for children with illustrations to go with them. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-forties, however, that my writing took shape.

I was at that point living in Paris, France. I spotted an advert for short stories for a magazine called Rat Mort (Dead Rat). I  sent off a quick noir short story in the hope it would match the seemingly dark world in which the magazine seemed embroiled. I got no answer. Not put off, I sent two more stories. Finally I got an answer. It seemed the magazine editor was a busy man prone to traveling. In fact, my first story had interested with him. His name was Alan Clark. He had a flat in the Montmartre area of Paris, where he seemed known to all, especially those who frequented his favorite drinking haunts. He offered me many words of encouragement. I was writing stories that were seeping into my head now at regular intervals, as if a monster had suddenly been awakened within me. I was writing them on scraps of paper, less I would forget them, while I travelled on the Paris metro, going about my teaching work with staid business types. I had found a format for writing that worked, a hunger to write about the demons of my past haunting me.

Moving closer to present times, the desire to put together an anthology began to resonate in my mind. FLIGHT OF DESTINY evolved slowly after many trans-Atlantic exchanges between myself and two Savant Books and Publications editors seemingly far away. This took my writings to a new level and injected into the stories more depth and resonance. The result: FLIGHT OF DESTINY, which I commend to you with warmest, dark wishes.