My first published fiction was in my primary school magazine, with a tense little piece called Into A Black Hole…and Beyond. I am still bitter that my teacher at the time made me use the goofy, overenthusiastic CONDITION: RED ALERT! instead of the icy, atmospheric, tech-savvy CONDITION: RED.

As I finished a degree in Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University, I started taking fiction seriously. Early stories like Out of Time found publication in Scottish Book Collector and similar magazines. Then I started thinking about writing novels.

My dark little gothic tale for grumpy teenagers, Mirror Widow, won a competition at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, beating off sixty other manuscripts to take the top spot. The Scottish Publishers Association issued a very limited run of the novel in only ten days, from copyediting to cover design, typesetting and production. If you want to read Mirror Widow, you can find a copy in the National Library.

2004 saw the publication of my first flash fiction collection, Crap Ghosts. Ten tales of incompetent apparitions and substandard spooks, this is very nearly sold out.

2005 was good to me, with the angry Glaswegian fish story, Pisces Ya Bas, in the newly released Scottish anthology Nova Scotia, and a couple of others in anthologies. I was also awarded a New Writers’ Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council which I very much appreciate.

Along the way I’ve appeared on Radio Scotland and Leith FM, written and acted comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe, and scripted several published comics. I collaborated with the band Spylab on their This Utopia album. Waiting for release is another track I wrote for the band Cinephile, performed by Christopher Cazenove.

I teach a night class in flash fiction at Edinburgh University.