Bob lives in the south-east of England with his wife and kids and Sony Vaio. In his spare time he likes to lie motionless on his back, whistling and staring at clouds.
Bob left school in 1976 and didn’t write a word of fiction from then until 2004. One day in town he noticed a book titled How To Write A Novel and somehow left the shop with a copy. After a month of reading it and thinking about it he did a search on Google and landed on the Short Stories Uncut forum at the East of the Web site. So it began.
The Short Stories Uncut forum closed in March 2006, and at that time Bob had an unpopulated phpBB forum sat on his web space, so a bunch of EotW refugees ended up at what became the Critters Bar writers’ forum. Bob managed the forum until September 2009, when he handed over responsibility so that he could concentrate on writing a novel.
Since 2004 Bob has been active in a number of online writing forums, where he has attempted to develop some writing skills. In October 2004 he placed 3rd in the Milton Keynes Speakeasy competition with a short story titled Me, Myself and I. Around the same time his first story (Meet Shakespeare) appeared online at Skive Magazine. He has since placed 2nd and then 1st in the JBWB quarterly competition (www.jbwb.co.uk), and his stories have appeared online in various places, including Defenestration, Skive Magazine, Blue Almonds, Backhand Stories, Dogzplot Flash Fiction, Diddledog Flash Fiction, Six Sentences, The Pygmy Giant and Thieves Jargon.
Towards the end of 2008 he decided that to invest further time on writing would only make sense if he was to write something at novel length and of a commercial standard, so he drew a line under everything that had gone before and set out a plan for writing a science fiction novel by the end of 2010. That’s still his intention, and although he hasn’t yet started writing the words he has been and is currently investing a lot of time on preparation for writing the novel, including reading a great deal of contemporary science fiction, reading a heap of science fact and working on his writing technique. Bob expects to begin writing in January 2010 and to have the manuscript completed by the end of the year. Updates on progress will appear from time to time on the blog.
Bob’s day job, which generally keeps him pretty busy, is in software development.
His favourite authors include Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
