mike[space] dot net

hmmm, a brief personal history ... what to write *ponder*. Well, I spent my formative years in the surprisingly well heard of Leighton Buzzard. It's a tiny little place that I don't particularly miss since leaving, but I guess it was okay to grow up in (at least it gave me the motivation to get out! ;-).

My first big escape was to the University of Warwick. I was there for 3 years, studying computer science. As most of my friends from that point will agree, I spent far more time studying the bottom of a beer glass, and methods for meeting women (both with varying degrees of success, I shall leave it to the reader to determine which I was better at!)

Having graduated, and blagged various contract work during my academic holidays, I bagged a computer support job in Peterborough, but I didn't really think much of Peterborough, and computer support can get a little dull after a while imho. A visit to my brother in London introduced me to a web design agency at the height of the dot-com boom, who were on the lookout for an Intranet programmer. I thought great, moved to London and got back into programming fulltime (well, alongside massages, pinball, table tennis and dreamcast ;-) Along with a million other people, the bubble burst (too many games?), but for me it was a voluntary departure in light of various differences of opinion I had with how the place was being run. A brief stint in contracting led to a permanent position working for RiskMetrics, a financial risk software company.

After almost seven years, I turned my back on my IT career to pursue a career in writing. For several years I managed to combine my desire for creativity with the IT, using my spare time to form a comedy production company called UnderHand and also getting involved in film making with Jeamland Productions. I was a writer/producer/cast member in StickMen. The work started to take up more and more of my time, and I soon found myself missing this side of my life. This eventually led to me working out how to get back into it, and I concluded that I had reached an opportune moment to take a gamble and see if I could develop my writing by focusing on it full time. And that's pretty much what I do now. Hopefully there'll be some of writing on this site over the next few weeks and months ...