Oh no! Not the Blogosphere!

Mark was born in 1967 in Harlow in Essex, and as an illustration of his grasping ambition and irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit, still lives there. He attended Jerounds Community Infant and Junior Schools and then Passmores Comprehensive Secondary where he spent seven years, being a member of the last ever sixth form intake. He went on to Hatfield Polytechnic (now the University of Hertfordshire) to study mathematics, graduating in 1988.

He began his career as an IT developer on the Monday following his final exam, eschewing the near-obligatory 'year off for travel' as at that time his total fortune amounted to something less than that required to get to the other side of town by bus. Having fulfilled a variety of roles, Mark is currently employed by an asset management company in west London, where he has worked as both contractor and permanent employee since 1994 (if you don't count a two year gap spent elsewhere).

There have been several false starts in Mark's writing career, which began in the opposite of earnest in 1988 with some desultory plans for a short story, which soon fizzled out in the face of crippling self-doubt. In 2007, Mark signed up for the first of two Open University creative writing courses and it was these, and the excellent guidance of his tutors, that finally helped him overcome his mental block and to start writing. Mark is currently working on a number of short stories with a ghostly or supernatural theme and a novel which he reluctantly admits, when pressed, is probably 'Sword and Sorcery' despite the fact that he has never read any of that genre. He fervently hopes, after nearly two years of effort, that there is a market for it.