I'm a professional technical writer, occasional proofreader/editor, aspirational writer, and community thespian based in Ĺtautahi (a.k.a. Christchurch, New Zealand). I live with my wife, Nina, and two cats, all of whom are dreadfully adorable.
I've been obsessed with stories and the written word for longer than I can remember; even as a toddler I am told I couldn't get enough of it. My childhood was spent inhaling every book I could find that sparked my interest (primarily anything with dragons or pirates on the cover). I also discovered at a young age that I have a bit of a talent for wordsmithery, though I seem to have a lesser talet for actually finishing things...
After graduating high school I completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English, with an accidental second major in Theatre and Film Studies, then avoided entering the workforce by earning a Diploma in Proofreading and Editing. I was eventually badgered into becoming a technical writer in 2016, which I have discovered is a job I very thoroughly enjoy and excel at. I decided to go back to university part-time to pursue a Master of Writing just in time for the pandemic to hit, but nevertheless managed to graduate with Distinction in 2022.
EVERYTHING.
Alright, that's not entirely true. I'm pretty much incapable of taking myself seriously for long enough to write anything spanning more than than a few dozen lines that isn't some sort of comedy, and I discovered very quickly that I haven't the attention span for a novel. As you can see, though, I do like a lot of variety in my writing projects.
My primary focus at the moment is to develop more plays, with a few short stories on the side. I also like to write a lot of quick little pieces to help keep my hand in while I'm between sessions on larger projects, such as the examples you'll find published on this site. You can expect my work to include a lot of wit and irony, snappy dialogue, lovable characters, and an entirely unnecessary but satisfying level of structural complexity (it's only fun if I'm making things difficult for myself, after all).
I have not lost my love for books with dragons on the cover; the bigger, the better! I also enjoy massive tomes of historical and/or capital-L-Literary fiction interspersed with shorter, more humourous books. My biggest indulgence, however, is murder mysteries. I cannot resist a juicy whodunnit, especially the ones classified as "cosy". According to my data from The Storygraph, my three all-time most read authors are, in order:
You can keep up with what I'm reading at the moment via The Storygraph.
Because I write such a wide range of things, I tend to draw a lot of influence from whatever specific texts happen to be most relevant to the project at hand, whether that's Tom Stoppard, P G Wodehouse, or '70s rock music. There are, however, a few key texts from my childhood that have profoundly shaped my person.
First: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The full series was gifted to me by an aunt for Christmas one year when my hereditary slightly-absurdist sense of humour started growing in. Reading Hitchhiker's was the first time I can remember reading a book and being really aware of the craft put into writing it. Wow, I thought, I never knew words could do that! Douglas Adams may not have inspired a love of science fiction in me, but he did spark that lifelong drive to write in a way that is inordinately clever and highly astute, but mostly just very, very silly.
Second: William Shakespeare's Hamlet. This play is very important to me on a number of emotional levels, one of which is that it was my first introduction to the Bard. I was searching for a short speech to recite for school when I was about 11 or 12, and stumbled onto the first half of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. BAM! I was immediately hooked. There was something undefinably delicious about those words, that metre, that left me craving more. I memorised the snippet for my speech (presented complete with masking-tape skull), then decided that the next logical step was to check a copy of the whole play out of the library and memorise that. It took me a very solid effort with the first dozen or so lines over a couple of weeks to realise that this was perhaps a bit too ambitious of me to achieve within the loan period, at which point I just read the rest of it. Half a dozen years later, Hamlet was also my gateway into community theatre, and after that production and a very close study of the play for an Honours paper at university, I eventually managed to memorise most of it, in chunks at least.
Third: the film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner. This movie was a family favourite when I was growing up, and I watched it so often that I can still recite entire scenes off by heart. It has everything a budding dramatic writer could want to learn from: tight pacing; witty, memorable dialogue; a dream cast to deliver it; lashings of sarcasm (looking at you, Mr Elwes); high stakes; colourful characters; fencing; fighting; torture; revenge; true love; miracles... you get the idea. It was also baby's first introduction to metatextuality, which is a technique I have been frankly obsessed with ever since. I have been told that my dialogue is reminiscient of Oscar Wilde (which I take as the highest of compliments), but in truth I think it might have been William Goldman's screenplay that was the real source.
I tend to be inspired first and foremost by technical challenges; more than what story I want to tell, I am intrigued by how to tell it. I also find a sense of peace in places of natural beauty, especially where I can see the sea, that makes me feel somewhat poetical and stirs the creative process.
