I started out writing when I was about ten and a teacher gave me an exercise book to direct my overactive imagination and hopefully tame my awful calligraphic skills. One out of two, I suppose, isn't bad. My imagination has been directed but my handwriting remains appalling to this day nearly three decades hence.

At first I wrote what people write, genre novels, trying to make something I would be proud of, a dark fantasy novel to capture the imagination filled with relatable characters and new ideas. After producing a heap of badly written generic tripe with wooden characters, appalling dialogue and wonky plotted garbage I finally fixed the dialogue in the first novel I wrote that doesn't make me blush with shame Hidden Predators, Dangerous Prey.

After that I noodled around trying to make something a publishing house might want to publish before realising my chances of a satisfying career as a writer were about as good as my chances of winning the lottery four weeks straight.

Thereafter I got involved in the murky world of self-publishing and it was a short leap from there to the design of RPGs and other such ephemera. I designed several RPGs and had a whale of a time before Amazon's Kindle brought e-readers to the masses.

Since 2005 I have tried to complete 50k in National Novel Writing Month and have only failed in 2007. In 2012 I have begun to rewrite, ressurrect, polish and produce some solid genre work that I have been proud to publish through KDP Select.

Check out my work (and the artistic stylings of my artist friend Justin on one of the RPGs) at my creative blog: leostableford.blogspot.com