Almost every
website in the world has a kind of About Me page
and I can’t think of a
good reason why my website should be any different. However, if you
think this
page will give an exposé of the real person behind the pseudonym,
you’ll be disappointed.
I won’t reveal even such personal details as my gender, age or
nationality,
although I don’t believe any of these things are much of a mystery to a
perceptive reader.
The
illustration above is of the real Bradley
Stoke: an English suburban town
distinguished, if at all, by being so very boring and unremarkable.
But, of
course, that might not remain so forever. Even the dullest places, from
Hillsborough to Columbine, can become famous for all the wrong reasons.
I chose
the name simply because it sounds a bit like a real name and because
not many
people, even in the UK, have ever heard of the place.
I don’t know
when I started writing fiction. It was probably as a child while at
school, but
nothing has survived nor deserved to. The earliest stories I wrote that
can be
found on my website are Omega
and
Alif.
These were optimistically written for paper-based publication, but as
there
were no takers, they’re now available for free (like almost everything
I’ve
written).
When I wrote
these stories the internet was nothing like what it is today and I
didn’t write
them with online viewing in mind, any more than with the Sex
Fantasies
I wrote at about the same time. These were written entirely for my own
gratification and with no hope or expectation that they’d ever be read
by
anyone else. I was wrong, of course. These are now my most popular and
most
read fiction, despite being sometimes of questionable merit and not
always on
the right side of being decent and honourable.
I sort of
mostly forgot about the fiction I’d written for several years until I
became
aware that the internet had evolved to the point that there were
websites where
I could post my fiction and where they might be read. Not too
surprisingly,
perhaps, most of those places were of a decidedly adult nature (even if
much of
the fiction was, and still is, remarkably juvenile).
So, at about
the turn of the century, I began posting my fiction on various now
mostly
defunct websites of which now only Literotica
remains. In fact, this website is one for which I have particular
affection because
Laurel, the website’s owner, took quite a shine to Innocence
Lost and gave me a lot of encouragement at the time. It was
also thanks to
Laurel and Literotica
that I chose to
write short
stories, which at first were exclusively written for the
site. This was
because I’d come to recognise that the bias on the internet, especially
with
regards to sex fiction, is towards the shorter form. Although I think
much of
the best stuff I’ve written include some of my short stories (such as The
Price of Prejudice, Peace
Returns
and The
Silent Tutsi), it’s still not the form in which I feel most
comfortable
writing.
However, in my
early days of enthusiasm about the internet, I became active in a
number of
different ways. I contributed to several newsgroups, including alt.fiction.original
and alt,sex.stories.d
(both
now mere shadows of what they
used to be); I started posting on Storiesonline
and other story websites; and, most significant of all, I created my
own
website on asstr.org.
The pinnacle of
this early period was when I began contributing stories to the now
defunct Ruthie’s
Club, a website that charged
its readers and paid its writers (a very modest amount) for the stories
it
printed. From my perspective, what was best about contributing to the
site was
that my stories were properly edited and even illustrated. The zenith
of the
period in which I wrote fiction for the website was when my fiction was
celebrated on 19 January 2004 by a Bradley Stoke Festival where several
of my
short stories were presented. It was also at Ruthie’s Club that
I published my novella Degrees
of Intimacy,
which marks, if you like, the start of my mature style of writing.
However, my
enthusiasm for writing fiction declined as the years went by. I stopped
contributing to Ruthie’s
Club (or
anywhere else for that matter) and didn’t even notice when the site
ceased to
exist, which was long after the death of the eponymous Ruthie who
edited so
many of my stories.
I started
writing fiction again in about 2011, which was when I wrote The
Anomaly
Trilogy, Glade
and Ivory
and No
Future,
all of which are pretty long and are also, almost undoubtedly, the best
fiction
I’d yet written. These were published over a period of about three
years, with
the last chapter being submitted in 2014.
This was also
the time that I started publishing my fiction in e-book format most
notably on Smashwords,
but
also on Lulu.com
and Amazon.
In
my new burst of enthusiasm, I even started
my own WordPress
blog,
as I’d got tired of posting on news boards where my views and opinions
were
swamped by trivia and spam or on Storiesonline’s
blog,
where most other blog posts are of mind-boggling self-regard.
Since publishing these three novels, I’ve posted a number of short stories that are no less varied than any I’ve ever written before and a fourth novel, Crystal Passion, which is the account of a British all-woman band touring America in the 1990s.
If you want to see what other people think about my fiction, then please read these independent unsolicited reviews.
My most recent story publication was on 16th May 2016 and is the novel Crystal Passion in e-book form.
My most recent blog
entry was on 5th November
2020 and is a good place to find out even more about me.
