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Welcome To My Nightmare
Well, Hi! Somehow you have found your way to my website. Keep a firm hold of your reality, and maybe you'll escape! So, what's here? Well, if you have found your way over here you probably already know that I'm an author. Actually, that sounds a bit pretentious, doesn't it? And I certainly never think of myself that way. Graham Greene, he's an author. Sir Terry Pratchett, he's an author.* Me? I'm a scribbler of bad jokes, a teller of tall tales, possessed by a spirit with an impish imagination. Not an author. Yet I do write books, and some guys have been generous enough to tell me they have been entertained for a quiet hour or two whilst reading them. That's enough for me. I'm a novelist, poet, story-teller and occasional stand up comedian. Who says men cannot multi task? It's all a bit scary doing this for me, so bear with me... Not bare with me, please - there would be complaints. Other than that I'm a sixty something International Tax Consultant - yes, really - living in West Wales with my partner and our collection of dogs - best of all being Magic Molly, my adored Golden Retriever. And there's a picture of Fred the Skull, who sits on my desk while I write. Although in the interests of safety, I don't let him light up his cigar in the house. What does he smoke? Hamlets, of course... On the Meet Me page, you'll see the list of events. I usually have a table selling paperback copies of the books and CDs of the recorded storytelling tales. Accompanying grandchildren are not for sale, however. As a curiosity, I was in an Amazon discussion the other day about reading fantasy and I've realised that I've been doing just that all my life. My father is to blame, he started reading Enid Blyton's stories about elves, goblins, wizards and the like to me when I was very young. I've never stopped, and never regretted it either. My grandfather's house, featured in The Showing (the first book in my paranormal mystery series) also introduced me to horror. As a child I was given complete freedom to browse his books, including his Dennis Wheatley collection. I can only hope that nobody has regretted that decision - I know I don't! Prizes: 2013 One of my pieces won the Northampton Literary Group National Flash Fiction 2013 prize! Me! You could have knocked me down with a feather, only I was already sitting down when I found out, so that would not have worked. http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/nlg-flash-fiction-competition-results/ 2014: Both Snort And Wobbles and Have Frog, Will Travel (The Banned Underground, #6) were short listed as finalists for the 2014 The Wishing Shelf Awards Bass Instinct was longlisted for The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize 2015: I also belong to The Swansea & District Writers circle. 2015 we produced an anthology of World War One pieces (Accent Press, who acted as editors for the project, selected my offering 'The Leaving Times' as the lead poem in the anthology - WOW!). The anthology won Best Anthology Award from the National Association of Writing Groups 2016: Working Title, the seventh Banned Underground book, received a Red Ribbon for being Longlisted in The Wishing Shelf Awards 2018: Space Scout of The Free Union makes The Wishing Shelf Awards final. Live performances Great fun for me, hopefully for the audience, too. Check out the page for The Showing to see a clip of some performance - in this case the prologue to that book performed live in Llanelli to an audience. * Footnote. (I'm addicted to them. Some like heroin, others cocaine, I like footnotes. Bite me.) Present tense is deliberate. 'No one is truly dead whilst their name is still spoken.' Sir Terry Pratchett. #GNU |
