About

Welcome to my page!

I’ve set this up to try and pull together my creative writing activities – something which I’ve dabbled in pretty much my whole life but this does include periods of fairly sparse activity, depending on what else has been going on. I used to write stories a lot (mainly fiction) but naturally other things took over and this stilted my journey.

I’m currently an Operations Manager at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, where we work on technology advances in the pharmaceutical industry – hardly the traditional background of a creative writer (whether this is important to the most successful ones, I don’t know). Perhaps most importantly, in the context of some of my writing projects, I’ve trained as a research scientist, completing a PhD in chemistry, and this has given me critical material to work with.

At the start of 2019, I attended a creative writing course – specifically one of Rufus Purdy’s Write Here classes in Edinburgh and this was an eye-opening experience for me. First and foremost, I would thoroughly recommend these classes to any aspiring writers. But as with most things, it’s important to manage expectations going in. It would be great if there were silver bullets etc, but unfortunately this isn’t the case. What the class did give me, was access to a new network of like-minded individuals (extremely powerful) and an insight into the non-academic publishing industry (something which I didn’t know much about before). The latter was through a session with Literary Agent Jenny Brown (from Jenny Brown Associates in Edinburgh) and I found her to be a truly inspirational individual.

So my plan is to use this page to share some extracts of my works in progress, post some reviews of other books I’ve read and really just keep people updated on how things are progressing with my creative writing. Any feedback you have is most welcome! Who knows, maybe one day I’ll get a break and secure a publishing deal. The reality of the matter is that this probably won’t happen but for me it’s all still fun just the same. It is important to indulge dreams now and again, even if only for short periods.