www.oneoffpublishing.com
I was born in the ‘city’ of Whitchurch, Shropshire in 1963. After a normal happy childhood I grew up into a strapping 16 year old whose aim in life was to play football and drink lager. My main hobbies were golf and fishing while drinking lager! Realising that this lifestyle was getting me nowhere fast, I decided to leave school, get a job and change my drinking habits. After several jobs and more than a few cases of whisky, my father expressed disappointment and suggested I do something more productive with my time. To my surprise my father asked if I had considered becoming a Golf Professional. With immediate thoughts of ‘holiday’ I agreed to this suggestion - but my father is a clever man who soon ‘helped’ me to become dedicated in achieving a new goal, which I duly did.
While working at my first Golf Club, I experienced one of the four notable events in my life to date when I met my wife Jenny. We concocted a plan together; we’d go abroad to Germany, work hard for two years and return home with pocketfuls of money that we could invest in our future together. Nineteen years and the other three notable events later – the births of three daughters; Sarah, Samantha, and Shannon – we still live in Germany, waiting for our fortune to materialise.
The only major problem with the area where we live is the three months of snow every Winter. Combine that with a house full of women and hobbies become essential. After trying several – including over two hundred oil paintings – I joked several times about writing a book. I had written several short stories while at school with limited publishing success – the school magazine – but I was confident I had not lost the knack! My wife told me to stop talking about it and do it, so I did.
My first serious novel – The Undiscovered – took two weeks to write in pencil and two years to correct. It subsequently turned into a 1400 hundred page trilogy. This was followed by a horror story – The Pack. After that a children’s book - Rammy - followed by a thriller - The Reaper – which is definitely not for the faint hearted. The novel I’m writing at the moment is a classic story of revenge in the Wild West – Can You Clap – but sequels to at least two of the above books are also planned. Writing has become a passion and one I hope to be able to do full-time, because after 25 years of teaching people to play the game, golf does tend to get boring!
