I live in Scotland on the edge of a river, between the mountains and the sea and I’ve been writing for so long that everything has changed. When I started writing, novels were written by hand and/or typed on a manual typewriter. Computers belonged to big science labs and the internet wasn’t even a dream. But, however much things have changed since then, two things remain the same; people still want to read stories and writers still want to tell them.
I started out by writing short stories which I regarded as something you had to do to learn how to write. Well, I must have learned something because many of them were published. I compiled the best of these into a collection The Man who Loved Landscape which was published in November 2020. I’ve also written quite a few poems, some of which appeared in various collections, and the best of these have been collected into The Ghost in the Machine which was published in March 2021.
However, I always saw the writing of short stories and poems as steps toward what I really wanted to write – a big novel. I was brought up on myths and legends and I like reading historical fiction and fantasy. I live in Scotland. I like complicated plots with lots of interesting characters. So that was what I was going to write – an epic novel based on a legend but set in a defined historical period in Scotland. And so I wrote Wolf in Winter, a retelling of the Tristan and Isolde legend which research had led me to believe was based on stories whose origin was Scotland and Ireland. But when I finished The Wolf in Winter I hadn’t finished the story and so I wrote The Swan in Summer and then The Serpent in Spring. Together they make up The Trystan Trilogy.
Click here to read about The Trystan Trilogy
Click here to buy the short story collection
Click here to buy the poetry collection
I’m currently working on a new novel. Once again it’s set in Scotland but at a slightly earlier period, and is about the Roman invasion of Scotland, under Agricola, in the first century AD.
Contact me via the Contact page.
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