I've been a professional writer all my working life - which is a lot longer than I care to say.

I began in advertising, worked in Sydney and London then back in Sydney again, with a brief stint filling in as Creative Director in a Singapore agency. Then I switched to television and worked for eight years on a comedy called "Hey Dad!", among other shows. In the nineties, I started doing corporate work: conferences, videos, corporate songs and so forth.

But all that time, I wanted to be an author. And I was writing books in my spare time.

The Ranger's Apprentice series was born out of a set of short stories I wrote many years ago for my son Mike, to encourage him to read. I wrote and illustrated them for him and I've tried to reproduce some of those original drawings through the website.

There were twenty short stories in all and they served to develop my main characters - Will, Halt, Tug, and Horace. Interestingly, in those original stories, Horace was the villain and he and Will actually fought a duel with practice weapons. When I expanded those original short stories into first ...