Well, where do I start? At the beginning as I always do, one word at a time.....
Born and raised in St. Helens, Merseyside, I obtained some qualifications from school and college and then went to study at university in Leeds in 1995. That only lasted a year due to various different reasons so I got a job at a bank back in St. Helens.
After an internal promotion which resulted in me spending some time working in Liverpool, in 1999 I decided to go travelling and I spent a year in Australia and then a few months in South East Asia. After ending up in a Thai hospital for a few days I decided to return to England where I got a job at the now defunct STA Travel in Manchester.
The travel bug had well and truly bitten me though so I decided to go away again in 2002, this time travelling across Russia, Mongolia, China, Hong Kong (all overland up to this point), flight to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, back into Malaysia (again, all overland), Indonesia by ferry then a flight to New Zealand where I worked for a few months in late 2002 at… STA Travel.
It was during my time in Auckland that I moved into a house share and it was there that I met my now wife. After a whirlwind romance she was due to leave New Zealand and go back to South Korea to finish her studies. I had nothing to lose so I decided to follow Sun to South Korea where I worked teaching English for two years.
In 2004 I decided to return to England and return to university where I obtain a BA (Hons) in English with Qualified Teacher Status with the plan to work as a teacher.
However in another twist I decided that teaching wasn’t going to be for me so in 2007 I obtained a job at a bank as a Systems Test Analyst and I lived in Manchester with Sun who had moved to England in 2006 after us living apart for two years (with frequent visits by both of us to England, South Korea and other places too).
In 2009 we decided to move to London when we both obtained jobs in the City. We first lived in a flat in King’s Cross then in 2014 we bought a house in Greenwich where we were delighted to welcome our only child to the world, a girl born in 2016.
During 2020 our daughter was accepted into a very good school but on the other side of London so in late 2020 we moved to Southfields where we are now living very happily.
These two novels, and hopefully more novels to follow, have been written part-time, almost as a hobby, while I have been working full time therefore lots of late nights and early mornings which became more difficult when our daughter was born hence the long delay between publishing Part 1 and Part 2.
I have an idea where I want Part 3 to go, I just need to find time to write it. I would love to be a full-time writer and it is certainly a goal of mine to try and find an Agent and Publisher and actually turn writing into my profession.
Mark Henthorne, 9th June 2022.