Poetry	Drama	Short Stories	Articles	Aphorisms	Journals

[My books will be found on my companion site - ASPEN]

MY WRITING LIFE

Writing has always been "in my blood".  Indeed my ambition, from my earliest teens, was to be a journalist, to which end I studied shorthand and typing at evening classes, and even persuaded the Central Welsh Board of Education to permit me to sit my Schools Certificate Examination in those subjects at the Llanelli Girls' Grammar School, as they were not on the boys' grammar school syllabus.  I still recall the embarrassment (I'm not sure whose was the greater, the school authorities or my own) when I won a bursary to continue my secretarial studies, having achieved the school's highest marks.  When they discovered I was Joseph and not Josephine, they hastily withdrew the offer.

Eventually I had to make a choice between a junior post I was offered on a newspaper or to continue to university.  I went for the latter.  45 years were to pass before I earned any money from my writing, although I never stopped.  Short stories, poetry, plays, a novel, even a musical comedy (including all the music and lyrics!).  It was a work of non-fiction (Refrigerated Transportation) that ultimately launched my commercially successful writing career.  Banners at the foot of this page will take you to examples of my work.

My verse was never particularly good, but I was always proud of it.  Most pleasing of all, I think, was an enormously long parody of Longfellow's Hiawatha, which I renamed the Song of Hiawalpole.  Other examples of my verse (much of which may be more appropriately described as doggerel) ranging from the acceptable to the downright awful, may be seen by clicking here.

In 1988 I successfully self-published Refrigerated Transportation, a second edition of which was published by Witherby & Sons in 1999. My history of military transport, Arteries of War, was published by Airlife Publishing Ltd in 1992, the same year that I self-published the first edition of An ABC of NLP and established the Authors’ Self-Publishing Enterprise with the acronym ASPEN. 

My writing career was put on temporary hold when the Finnish shipping line Containerships Ltd Oy, with which I had been associated for almost thirty years, persuaded me to establish a UK organisation for them based in north-east England. The one-year I offered them became five years (as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decision of the shipping line to start calling at St. Petersburg, thereby having grabbed a "tiger by the tail") before I was allowed to take another “retirement”, although I am still a non-executive director of the line.

Now I am once more devoting the major part of my time to writing and publishing. In addition to the revised edition of An ABC of NLP,  Peace of Mind is a Piece of Cake, written in collaboration with Michael Mallows, was published by Crown House Publishing in December 1998. My first novel The Torturous Scheme was published in Spring 2001. 2001 has also seen publication in electronic and hard copy form of my Mini Guide to Self-Publishing, full details of which are available on my companion ASPEN website, and a powerful novel by Abigail Freeman entitled The Chrysalid Years.

Work in progress includes Kick Me - a sequel  (of sorts) to The Torturous Scheme; TA from A to Z - a somewhat irreverent guide to Transactional Analysis; and further collaboration with Michael Mallows.

Poetry	Drama	Short Stories	Articles	Aphorisms	Journals

[My books will be found on my companion site - ASPEN]