About

I came back to creative writing in my forties, after decades of technical work. Proposals, tenders, the precise and bloodless prose of IT consulting. The first novel took years. I was learning how to access a part of my mind I'd sealed off.

What I keep returning to, in fiction and memoir, is the question of authentic selfhood. The masks we wear so long they fuse to the skin. The selves we suppress because they're inconvenient, or frightening, or simply not what was expected. I mine my childhood and teenage years — a displacement from Melbourne to Queensland, the 1980s alternative music scene, the slow discovery that the person I was performing wasn't the person I was — because that's where the fractures are.

Horror lets me externalise that. Folk horror especially: communities with their own logic, landscapes that want something from you, the creeping sense that you've been welcomed for reasons you don't understand. It's a genre that takes seriously the weight of place and tradition. The cost of not belonging.

My writing practice is modest and consistent. Sunday afternoons with my local writers' group. A monthly book club. Time set aside for drafting, researching, and editing. I still have a day job; I've learned not to wait for perfect conditions.

Outside writing, I make music on the same vintage synthesisers I played in the '80s. I've written code since my high school got their first Apple ][. I follow the Australian Football League, drink whisky, and never entirely left the goth scene.