As long as I can remember I have been surrounded by books. Certainly I was read to every night as a child, and most often these books were the same books that my own mother had read when she was young. They were usually fantastical in nature - as most children's books are - but rather than involving the usual 'Disneyfied' talking animals and magic dancing furniture, they were stories about children going to other worlds; they were stories that didn't dumb down or were patronizing in any way. Unlike the way we see children's books now, these works had very few illustrations in them, and when there were they were few and far between and highly detailed. The authors of these books had spent a great deal of time on their stories, where as now every page has to have a bright and colourful picture and the story is almost secondary to the images. These books were a product of the 1950's when my mother was a young child, and printing images was expensive on a large scale, so the writers had to conjure up the images with the words they wrote. That's not to say I wasn't a fan of illustrated books. One of my favorite authors as a child was Roald Dahl, and his work alongside Quentin Blake's illustrations was a firm favorite to read as I was growing up. Certainly the humor and twisted nature of Roald's collective works set me on the path to writers of fantasy and humor. As I got older I became influenced by authors such as Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin and Tom Holt. These authors, like Roald Dahl, mixed their fantasy with a healthy dose of humor, and I collected and continue to collect every book they write. Even in the age of tablets and e-readers I still buy the physical book rather than the electronic version, and try to buy the hard backed versions when first released. As mentioned the comedy-value of the aforementioned authors always interested me, as did the worlds they'd created, but I always wanted there to be a slice of reality to these elements. The every-man character was also important, and I always wanted to read about the 'everyday-Joe' who, through no fault of their own, would find themselves in situations that were beyond their control and in surroundings that were alien and unfamiliar. For a number of years I have worked as a graphic and manufacturing designer, and am lucky enough to work for a company where I have my own office and a computer monitor that faces the wall where only I can see it. During quiet times - and there are more than a few - I find myself lazily flicking through the internet. Not being the sort of person who Google's their own name and not interested in what some third-rate celebrity is doing or who they're doing it to, this means there is a great deal of time spent staring blankly into space and off in my own little world. To kill the boredom and time between jobs, I find myself jotting down ideas for stories. These stories have characters, and I start writing down a back story to these characters and then fit them into plot-lines. After a while I begin to flesh out these plot-lines, and it was doing this that I found myself starting on my first book. Unfortunately this first attempt failed, and found myself becoming bored with it. Never-the-less, I knew this was something that I wanted to do. After a number of failed attempts to get started on other stories, and with a large number of note books filling with the aforementioned characters and plots, I decided to knuckle-down and combine a number of different ideas I'd had into one storyline. I didn't have a name for the work, so for a great amount of time it was known simply as 'The Book'. 'The Book', as it turned out, would be written over a period of nearly two years, and was complete with back stories, histories of various lands and deeds of individuals that, although may be of interest to the small minority who actually read it - and was certainly adding to the world I was creating - was essentially unnecessary 'waffle', and was more likely to bore the casual reader to death. I decided that 'The Book' needed a sever 'chopping', and cut out anything that was moving away from the main story. I also wanted to keep a certain pace to the story, and by removing the unnecessary padding I was able to achieve this. 'The Book', whilst now in a more manageable format, was still quite a size as I found the scope of the work becoming grander and grander. I was also confident enough to pass it on to other close friends and family members, and was encouraged when I was told that I should submit it for publishing but that it was still a little on the long-side. 'The Book' eventually got the name 'Magika: Mirror Worlds', and was split in two parts for submission. Unfortunately this process was not without its own problems, and after a number of rejection letters decided to publish it myself, if for no other reason than to see if there was anyone else out there that would be interested in my work. 'Magika: Mirror Worlds Book 1' was eventually released in September 2013, with the follow-up finally released in September 2017. Quite a wait, I know, however the 'waffle' that had been removed from 'The Book' in the initial stages of editing meant that there was clearly two if not three books there ready to go. So, not long to wait for the next one: 'Magika' - Fearie, which I hope to release in the Summer of 2018.