I have a somewhat chequered history in publishing, but this has led me to develop an eclectic range of skills which include the following:
Many of these skills can be found on my Client List and CV.
Having left school in 1981 with A levels in Art and Technical Drawing, one might have expected me to go into graphic design. However, a lack of available options and need to find a proper job led me into engineering. I had after all studied Industrial Engineering and my A level in Technical Drawing (TD) seemed to impress some people. What people didn't realise was that I had got through my TD exams with my art skills and I had got through my art exams with my TD skills.
Pushing a pen for five years, while working in engineering, very nearly killed me, but I was thrown a lifeline when a friend who edited a magazine said "well you can write". The emphasis was on the word can, and I was off. I had never thought about writing apart from occasional experiences at school with good English essay results, but I always thought writers somehow came from backgrounds unlike mine.
My career as a journalist started back in the mid eighties with small articles for hobby magazines for Argus Specialist Publishing who were then based in Hemel Hempstead and Golden Square in Soho, London. After trying my hand at this I decided it was worth taking the plunge as a journalist and at the start of 1988 I found myself a position at Bowman Publishing in Luton, England.
At Bowman Publishing my responsibilities
were divided between writing copy and selling advertising space. Bowman Publishing
were a producer of trade publications for the photographic and media industries
with their flagship title Panorama going out to professional photographers.
These were free distribution magazines funded by advertising. My work was for
Panorama's sister publication Dealerama, a less than inspiring magazine for
independent photographic retailers. Dealerama tried branching out into brown
goods, as the independent photographic retail sector was in decline, but I suspect
that the title eventually folded as the recession hit at the end of the eighties.
By the end of 1988 I decided I had enough contacts to go freelance and started writing articles for local newspapers in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire (England). At the same time I found some work writing a short monthly column for CB, the magazine for Britain's CB radio enthusiasts. This column was entitled The Devil's Advocate and tried to take a controversial stance on issues within the world of CB in Britain. My newspaper work ranged from advertising features and restaurant reviews, to historical articles about local villages and other features for local newspapers.
1990 saw the beginnings of the recession in Britain so I moved to Rolls-Royce to work as a technical author where I stayed until 1992 when the firm moved to Bristol.
After leaving Rolls-Royce the technical publications sector looked very much like it was going to move in the direction of freelancing, so I bought myself a PC and started to learn desktop publishing. For a few years I worked from home producing leaflets, brochures and occasionally a complete magazine or newspaper for my clients. In recent years, with my move into formal contracting, I have been less involved in DTP and have spent my time doing a mixture of technical writing and copywriting with my most recent copywriting contract working for DHL.
Since the late eighties I have had my own publishing imprint Winged Feet Productions which reflects my interest in matters esoteric and what has become known as pagan. Winged Feet Productions has over the years produced fanzine type material for this area which is growing in popularity with the millennium. Occasionally I also agree to write the odd article for other new age or pagan publications although this is now very rare as this work never pays and is therefore of little interest.