After being immersed in dreams of ancient
Egypt since I was a child, it’s difficult to get the ancient Egypt monkey
off my back.
I've written a small
library of Egyptian adventure fiction titles:- The Smiting Texts, The Hathor
Holocaust, The Ibis Apocalypse, Rising of the Nile Gods, Egypt Eyes, The
Forbidden Glyphs and The God Dig (the Anson Hunter alternative Egyptologist
series).
Then there are my stand-alone works
like The Egyptian Mythology Murders, The Delta Dilemma, The Ra Virus, Aeon Jump:Ancient Egypt and Vengeance of the Mummy God.
(Not to mention my children’s
ancient Egypt titles.)
He who drinks from the Nile waters
of inspiration will always return – to paraphrase a saying.
I start to look back at my earliest
writing influences – Rider Haggard, Mika Waltari, Ernest Hemingway, C.S.
Forester, Alistair Maclean, Ian Fleming, to name a few.
They stuck to the knitting, with few
exceptions. (Should I too? I always said that a writer should be allowed his subject.)
I look back at an unusual and nomadic life lived in Central
and Southern Africa, and now in Australia.
I feel I am engaged in a kind of archaeology of my past in a search for inspiration. Will I keep on turning up Egyptian artefacts?
I’ll keep digging. Maybe something different will gleam
down there in the next layer…
My first published story was actually a spy short
story, appearing in The Ellery Queen Mystery
Magazine New York, in the same issue as an Ian Fleming story and so of
course, instead of embarking on a career writing spy novels, I
became an adman, copywriter and Creative Director in a slew of
multi-national advertising
agencies, while I flirted on the side with my first loves of fiction
writing and ancient
Egyptian history.(My best known advertising campaigns were ‘Natural Gas - The Living Flame’ for AGL and ‘Cancer is a word, not a sentence’ for the Australian Cancer Society.)
I didn't rush things and thirty years later published 13 children’s novels in a period of about four years, seven of them Egypt-based, the rest Australian fantasy adventures.
Then came my first adult novel, an archaeological thriller The Smiting Texts and 7 novels in the series as well as the stand alone books.
One thing is a constant.
I am addicted to escapism.
Today I am on the road with my wife Brenda and a dog Anubis, writing fiction as I explore in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van RV and I still keep my advertising skills sharp by writing occasional freelance advertising appeals for several causes and charities.
For fiction "that grabs hold of you and won't let go, even after you turn the last page" - see these titles on Amazon Kindle
or here on my blog
