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About Me

Born in Edinburgh in 1965, I moved to Bearsden, on the outskirts of Glasgow, in 1979. I remained there, growing up (well, sort of) until 1986. During part of my time at school I had long, very messy hair (much to the despair of my friends, family and teachers) and wrote poetry no-one understood (not even me). I also played guitar in a band.

From 1982-86 I went to the University of Strathclyde (after first getting a decent haircut) and studied Marketing and Law. I should have gained a first class honours degree, but missed out by half a percent, mainly because I was playing snooker when I should have been revising for exams. (Let this be a lesson to all.)

Live on air! (October 2004.) Note: I don't usually have a seal growing out the side of my head . . .

(Thanks to Tracy Myatt for the picture.)

1986 saw me scrambling past the guards on Hadrian’s Wall to work in Bedfordshire, Yorkshire and Suffolk, first for a large car manufacturer, then for an investment company. I returned to Edinburgh in 1992, and it was there, one day when I was bored, that I first wrote something longer than a poem or song. It wasn’t very good, so I didn’t give up my day job.

1996 saw me move to London to work for a big, rather strange, financial company in which staff shouted not only at each other, but also at their customers and, very often, themselves.

At the launch of Lee Goes For Gold - 1,500 pupils came along over 2 days. It was great!

While in London I started writing a lot. An awful lot. Soon writing was taking over my life, so in 2002 I took a deep breath, gave up my ‘proper’ job, moved back to Glasgow and began writing full-time (or suffering for my art, as it’s also known), having decided that that was what I really wanted to do with my life

After completing a novel for adults, my two children nagged me to write a book for people their age. It had to have mutants and portals in it, and, most important of all, it had to be funny…..

I gave in. I sat down at my computer and, six weeks later, completed Lee & the Consul Mutants. I gave it to my children, who read it in the car on the way home from school and laughed their heads off, just as I had when I’d been writing it. Encouraged that I hadn’t been laughing just because I was bonkers, I sent the manuscript to a very nice man called Neil Wilson, who also laughed and then offered to publish it.

A few months later, I wrote Lee Goes For Gold, which was published in January 2006. I've recently completed the third Lee novel.