My Story
I was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia, where my parents demonstrated through hard work that absolutely anything was possible, no matter where you start. After finishing school, I set off with this in mind and built successful careers across three completely different industries, giving me a broad range of experiences, personalities and adventures to draw on whenever I sit in front of a word processor.
I started as a computer tech in the Bunnings Head Office, where I sharpened my software skills through the booming dot-com era and fell in love with writing lengthy emails (some even work-related).
By the time I moved on in ‘06, I knew in my heart, the world had more to offer than Bunnings could give. After some soul searching on a charity mission to Africa, I decided on a career in aviation. Upon my return, I went for a trial flight in a helicopter, and immediately fell in love.
I sold everything I had and maxed out two credit cards to stump up the $50k buy-in. Thankfully I did enough during flight school to be noticed for a full-time gig with Heliwest. They saddled me with a brand new, cherry red, Robinson R44, called Oscar-Oscar-Echo and sent me south to setup Heliwest – Albany, WA. The bulk of my flying time was spent whale watching with the public and running scientists out to the untouched islands that line the spectacular coast. Unfortunately, that gig fell apart a year down the track when the Global Financial Crisis hit and all the junior fly-boy work, dried up.
That’s when I fell into Mining as a Driller’s Offsider, for Egan Drilling, a company owned by my mentor, Matthew Egan, before he passed. Initially, it was to tide me over until Heliwest picked up again. But as the theme of my life would go, I fell in love with yet another machine, the hydraulic giant known as the drill rig. After a year of the most physically grueling work on the planet, I graduated to Junior Driller with the accompanying paycheck, and never looked back.
After eight solid years in the field, Egan promoted me into the office as the Operations Manager. This role was amazingly fulfilling and taught me how far I could push my mind without breaking. But the role wasn’t without its stresses and sacrifices. So, when the opportunity came up to take a redundancy at the end of 2019, I leapt at it to finish the project I’d started on the side, two years prior, Dahlia.
“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”
– Viktor E. Frankl –
Writing Life
A small travel journal on a family holiday to Italy in 2005 would become the catalyst for my first book. After bad weather forced us inside, I found myself scribing a story about a fictional character named, Lucca from Portofino. Balcony Nights – Tales of a Moonlit Guitarist was born, and for the next year, my keyboard took a beating as my imagination leapt into print.
But being young and unsure of myself, I eventually succumbed to the voice inside my head that kept telling me I wasn’t good enough and I shelved the project. Over the next decade, I would get random hot flushes of enthusiasm and open the manuscript. Though usually after a day’s tinkering I would see a complete rewrite was in order and quietly back away from the near-finished draft.
Ironically, another holiday would change all that, when I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (the Holy Bible for anyone suffering with procrastination). It was time to kick my own ass into submission and get a book finished. The idea for Dahlia came into my head a few days later, and once again, I spent morning and night, before and after long days of work, bashing away at the keys. One day I looked up and there it was. A 120,000 word, completed manuscript.
Not long after, came the redundancy call from Egan. And just like that, I was a full-time writer. It’s now been a year and change since that day, and I couldn’t be prouder of sticking to my guns and working my ass off to make this dream come true. In that time, I’ve started and finished a novella called Travel Infinity, completed a second, 100K manuscript called Scarecrow, and have just finished the final polish of Dahlia which I’m submitting to publishers and preparing for Amazon-Kindle.