I am never any good at this part – that’s why it has been vacant for a bit – but I guess I better put something in here because you guys keep looking at it!

I was born in Papua New Guinea where my folks were working at the time, and lived there for about 14 years before we came to Australia to live.  Being brought up with no TV or shops (in the way we are used to these days), where I came home from school and went outside to play until it got dark, I was an avid reader from an early age.   I spent many nights reading by torchlight in my bed.  I have been writing poetry since I was a child on and off, but in the last ten years I have found myself with words playing around in my head more and more often, and have hundreds of pieces, not all pretty or insightful, but plenty to develop if I feel like it!

I write for a living (by that I mean my work involves copious writing, not that I am a writer!).  I write reports on investigations that I do that are not always a lot of fun to write and are sometimes very lengthy and complex, and I write various business documents.    I am well known for being able to write anything about anything, and I love words in any form.  So I consider myself lucky.  I love my job, I have been doing it for 33 years now.  I get up at 3:30am every day to do a 5 hour round trip commute to get there, so I guess that proves it!

I have been playing with my poetry for a while now, a few years, thinking about self publishing some little books to give as gifts to my family, but as we all do I imagine, I have a crisis of confidence now and then about whether anyone would like to read them!  So for me, writing this blog is about starting to share my work and see if anyone else does like it, and then if they do, using the feedback to help me work out exactly what other people like and what doesn’t really float their boat, so I can work out what might be good to go in a book.  I have three working titles for my planned books, and an idea for a set of books on a theme.  So I’m somewhere in the space of ‘thinking about it in a meaningful way’, but not really going anywhere yet!

Many of my poems have arrived in my head without warning, a line or a thought, which I pour out in words, and then later, I read it and have no memory of putting it all together.  Sometimes they are great (well I think so anyway!), other times they need a bit of work to be okay, but that’s the fun of the process I think.  I think there are somerepeating themes in there too, words I seem to use a lot, subjects that get a regular airing in various attempts to give voice to feelings or thoughts.  It’s all part of the way writing works for me.  I don’t usually work too hard on ‘fixing’ my drafts, but I know I probably have to start doing that and softening up the rough edges!

In short, I love to read, I love to write…..

If there’s any  more people want to know – if this is not what you put in here – leave me a note and I’ll update this!