Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I was born in London and now live in a small sea coast town in the south of England, a place with its own very British charm. I guess 13 was my defining year. I had only learnt to read with great difficulty at age 9 and wasn’t much of a reader.

But I had joined the Public Library and in my 13th year I checked out Red Planet by Robert Heinlein. I lived in a gray London slum. The idea of another world with exotic people and creatures completely changed my perception of reality. Later that same year I found the three-volume second edition of The Lord of the Rings in my school library. It was unbelievable that someone could write a fantastic world like that. I was utterly addicted to the story.

From then on I read all the time. I was 18 and found a stained, torn paperback copy of Hemingway’s The First 49 Stories in an empty Tube-train carriage. He wrote about boxing, fishing, being broke, things I understood intimately. Then I read somewhere that Raymond Chandler had been influenced by Hemingway. Chandler led me to Hammett. I was reading and enjoying writers like Frank Belknap Long and didn’t know what the pulps were. I wanted to be a writer, I wrote but in a chaotic undisciplined way.

When I was 28 I joined a writer’s group at London’s City Literary Institute, led by prestigious literary authors. But though I was in the group for a year I really wasn’t ready to write fiction. Mostly I polished my non-fiction skills.

At the time I was also learning martial arts and was burning the candle at both ends, so I gave up the writers group. I still wrote occasionally. I had articles and reviews published over the years, usually about books or cinema. I still write critical essays and my essay on Alfred Coppel, a great pulp writer, was published on the DMR Blog in 2022.

I wrote a lot of fiction over a long period of years but for me “real” writers were Michael Moorcock, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert B. Parker. I felt I wasn’t good enough for publication.

I’m not sure what changed, but in 2018, I entered a worldwide crime novel competition. My novel was longlisted and that was the spur which led me to start writing fiction for publication.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
Robert E. Howard showed me that the heart of a great adventure story was in energy and excitement. That storytelling had to be sharp, active, concise. And for me that means virile masculine energies infuses my male protagonists. I have written some very Conan-like S&S, but also stories about a sorcerer-swordsman on an Alt-Earth, which are not derivative of REH/Fritz Leiber. None of them have yet been published.

Leigh Brackett was a huge influence on me, the way she creates a dense atmosphere that makes a story feel real, draws you in. It helps that I am not writing in worlds that she created or colonised. My other big influence in building atmospheric exotic worlds is H. Rider Haggard of King Solomon’s Mines fame. When I was a younger man I tried to read every novel that Haggard ever wrote. I really enjoy Lost World stories. I have been experimenting with writing Lost World stories in a more modern idiom.

Vintage SF/Fantasy writers have been a huge influence. Poul Anderson, James H. Schmitz (both came out of the pulps) and H. Beam Piper especially. Writers of colourful adventure and larger than life characters. My biggest SF influence is Poul Anderson’s trickster hero, Nicholas Van Rijn. Anderson saw that to be a hero in an inhuman technological society, you had to be tricky, brave, decisive, and a master of human nature. Several of my male protagonists have some of Nick Van Rijn’s traits.

But I love all the tricksters, from Slippery Jim DiGriz to Sir Harry Flashman. My first published story was “Ascension Star” in Cirsova Magazine, Summer 2020 edition. It’s about a wily space pirate who isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is.

I am also influenced by Celtic and Norse mythologies. Stories where heroes play drinking games with giants and the loser gets his head chopped off. I really enjoyed the mad Celtic fantasy bits of Le Morte D’Arthur, like “Sir Lamorack and the Questing Beast.” I sometime include strange bits of Celtic-flavoured mystic jeopardy in stories.

The movies I always loved were the Hollywood technicolour swashbucklers. Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, Gene Kelly’s Three Musketeers (truer to the spirit of Dumas than any other movie) and best of all, the Stewart Granger Prisoner of Zenda (another Lost World). I intend to write a Ruritania-alike story one day.

With self-publishing easier than ever, there are tons of books being released every day. What makes your work stand out from the crowd? What can readers get out of your work that they can’t from anyone else?
In straight adventure stories like “The Gold of Palladias” and “Terror Trap” I try to write a strong moral polarity between the good guys and the bad. There’s no gray in my villains, they are truly evil. My protagonists are not perfect men, not sappy, but they are very clear about what is evil and what’s to be done about it. I think that gives the stories an energy and a tempo which makes them fun. P. Alexander, who publishes Cirsova Magazine, said of “Terror Trap,” “it’s a fun story.”

For other stories, I am an advocate of making the protagonists struggle, writing so that readers can feel it, identify with it. I think making characters struggle before victory or redemption is an important writing skill. Struggle has to be relative to the story style. The beatings that Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op takes are so brutal that they would probably be unacceptable today.

Action. I was a martial arts instructor and a martial arts competition fighter. I was also a county-level competition archer. I have tried to use my experiences to inform my writing. Martial artists know that fights are terrifyingly quick and ordinary folk do not have the strength or stamina for a real fight. A writer has to translate this meaningfully into fiction. It’s not about putting an infinity of details into a scene, which drags the action down. It’s about describing speed of action, emotional responses, realistic timing, concisely, putting the reader in the fight. Action in my stories is short, sharp and believable.

I have read submission criteria that say “If your story contains a blow by blow description of every sword-stroke and tactical move in a fight, we will reject it.” I am absolutely onboard with that.

I think my stories have good endings. I forget who said it, but a famous writer once said “Ending are hard.” I am a plotter and will rework a story completely to ensure the ending is satisfying to the reader. The only online review I found of “Ascension Star” said it had “a good ending, if contrived.”

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
I have had two stories published recently. In November 2022 my Weird Western Horror story “Alchemista De Almas” (the Alchemist of Souls) was published in A Fistful of Demons, a compendium of stories set in the best-selling The Widow’s Son universe. I had read and enjoyed The Widow’s Son by Ryan Williamson, and in fact reviewed it for the DMR Blog. When the submission call came out, I was very pleased to have my story accepted.

In “Alchemista De Almas” a tough cowboy and a young Commanche teen are riding in the southwestern Texas Desert in the 1870s. They come across a prospector dying from sword wounds. They ask him what happened. He says, “A Conquistador stabbed me.” It had been 350 years since the last Conquistador died…

My Lost World story “The Gold of Palladias” was published in December 2022 in Cirsova Magazine, Winter edition. In it I tried to capture the sense of exploration and fantastic adventure that classic pulp Lost World stories embody.

In 1902 an ex-US Cavalry officer and his two companions are commissioned to find a lost city of incalculable wealth. In unexplored Brazil he finds a mysterious amulet in very dangerous circumstances. Is it a clue to the fabulous city?

I have been working hard and have had a writing streak that has lasted for months. I have another Lost World story in the making, featuring the same characters as in “The Gold of Palladias.”

I have a sorcerers & swordsmen novel set in the European late Renaissance, where magic and sorcery is real. All the demons and monsters the early Catholic Church warned of exist. The novel is complete but very rough draft. However I have drawn a story from it, about killer cryptids and swordsmen/assassins. I have just submitted it to an online magazine.

I have a horror story set in modern-day Florida. A man who has had been beaten down all his life has a terrible thing done to his family. After that happens he discovers he has an invisible power that cannot be defended against, and he sets out for revenge. It’s for a submission call closing end of January 2023.

And I have completed a 14,000 word novella about a man who is desperate to escape the messed-up world we live in now. There may be a way out for him but to take it will be at the risk of his life. There’s no sex, no violence, there is romance and emotional drama. It’s like a Saturday Evening Post story for modern times. I am a huge fan of Jack Finney (he wrote “I love Galesburg in the Springtime”) and his folksy gentle fantasies. My story is inspired by his beguiling, twisty, but kind stories. I can’t imagine where it will find a home unless I self-publish it, but it’s the finest story I have ever written.

I have another story coming out in Cirsova Magazine Summer 2023. “Terror Trap of the Jintra” is pure pulp. Its starpilot treasure hunter has a bubble space helmet, jetpack and raygun.  

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
I am still working on that. I post on Twitter and promote my work there. I post on my personal Facebook page, where I get responses from my friends and my alpha readers.

I post on Horror and Pulp Forums on Facebook. The Pulp forum isn’t very lively but I have persevered and got some good responses for my review of Cirsova Magazine Summer 2022.

The Horror Forum is extremely active and I always get multiple responses there. Of course I have only published one Horror story so far.

I hope this interview leads more people to learn of my writing. I’d be happy to hear from folks/take questions, in the comments.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?

Never.

As a new writer I don’t yet have a particular audience in mind. And the main reason I don’t compromise is that it’s just a hall of mirrors out there, it’s impossible to understand what our messed-up culture feels is acceptable.

Sometimes what you write and what you create is politically incorrect. I don’t care, it’s my work. That makes it harder to sell. Even good editors/publishers are wary, don’t want aggro from the woke. Mainstream fiction, and even some indie, is in a sorry state because of the complete spaghetti of spiteful Byzantine rules about what is politically correct and acceptable.

I have scenes in stories which my alpha readers have disagreed with. Two of my readers, both women, suggested it was non-PC, although one liked a scene a lot and the other disliked it intensely. I am very open to commentary on my work, no matter how critical. I just don’t want to be obliged to conform to an ideology.

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (“Newer” meaning from the past year or so, and “older” meaning written before 1980.)
The best new book I read last year, head and shoulders above any other indie or tradpub, was Warlord – A Green Beret conquers Mars by Doc Spears, published in late 2022 by Wargate Press. Such an enjoyable roller-coaster read.

Notionally a Mil-SF novel, it quickly morphs into a glorious Pulp adventure. A remnant of a Special Forces team fly through a wormhole and are accidentally exiled in a variant of Barsoom (with the Burroughs serial numbers filed off). It’s pure pulp with incredibly compelling characters and a breath-taking wild adventure.

The oldest book(s) I recently reread were the Analog anthologies (Prologue to Analog, Analog 1, 2, 3). I have these as very old paperbacks (published 1964) and I cherish them as precious beyond price. Two stories from those books:

“Omnilingual” (orig. published 1957), one of SF’s greatest novellas and the finest thing that H. Beam Piper ever wrote. Set on Mars, it’s poetic, elegiac, tragic, and yet a paen to the greatness of Western civilisation. Post-pulp, it is one of the two best Mars stories ever written. The other great Mars story is Roger Zelazny’s heartbreakingly beautiful “A Rose for Ecclesiastes.”

My second story from these collections is “Novice” by James H. Schmitz. A unique first contact story. And hugely underrated.

Any final words?
I can only speak for England, but it’s been a bad few years for my beloved country, with Covid and its knock-on effects.  

Writing has been my salvation. The more the British media shrieks of drama and doom, the more grateful I am that I can write myself into planets of exotic aliens and purple-skied fantasy worlds. Almost all my free time is now devoted to writing and I feel so much better for it.

And the indies. I remember the first time I read Matthew Pungitore’s mad Lovecraft-on-drugs story “Wychryst Tower” in StoryHack. That was something different! And Jeff Stoner’s super-ambitious extravaganza “What Price the Stars” in Cirsova. Pulp on a literally cosmic scale. Vran, the Chaos-Warped which, with a single defining characteristic, the unpredictable effects of magic on a warrior, takes us on a fresh journey through Sword and Sorcery. And I was completely bowled over by Jon Daker’s “Sister Winter” in Cirsova, just this clean, crystal clear, scary spiritual folk fantasy. Indie stories are life-affirming in a way most mainstream fiction is now incapable of being.

I believe the seeds of a rebirth of good genre fiction are present in the indies.