This is a little background about my life and how I became a writer. I was born and brought up near Stockport, England. I grew up with science fiction, right from sitting on my Dad’s knee watching Doctor Who starring Tom Baker in the seventies. I was a huge fan of Star Wars (I still have my toy collection) and also loved Blake’s 7, Space 1999, Knight Rider, Star Trek... If it was vaguely sci-fi related, I watched it. I guess it’s the complete fantasy that appealed to me. I would spend hours in my bedroom making Lego models of Airwolf or Daleks and acting out scenes with them.

In science fiction there are no boundaries to your imagination. You can create whole worlds, even galaxies, far, far away. I always loved a great sci-fi gadget, spacecraft or weapon; from a lightsaber to the drop-ship in Aliens, or a Martian tripod war machine. I used to make models of things that I liked out of cardboard cereal packets and loo rolls when I was younger. I guess that's where my model making career sprouted from. After studying Art & Design at school, I went on to complete a Foundation course in Art at Stockport College and then opted for a degree in Media Production.

I’ve been working on the #SpaceNavy universe on and off since I started my degree (Media Production including Animation BA/Hons) in 1992 at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, U.K. I first started working on the story ideas for the Unity story arc when I was in my first year and I still have my big red sketch book with my original scrawled ideas and drawings inside. I would doodle the designs for spaceships, aliens, robots and so on. Some of those designs have even made it onto the covers of my books. I always knew I would do something with them, I just didn’t know what at the time.

It was when I was undertaking the degree that I discovered a magical thing called a “film script”. I didn't actually take the script writing course, but a lot of my best friends did and I picked up a great deal from them, especially Paul Bird and Mark Collins. I worked on several other student films, mostly creating sets, props and various effects. Then I decided that I wanted to make my own sci-fi epic, called "Unity"!

The original idea was for a short science fiction film that I made in my third year entitled “Unity - Part Three”. It was a sixteen minute short that was shot on super-16mm film.

"Unity" was shot for the most part inside the old Wills cigarette factory on the coast road in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, which was abandoned, derelict and suitably industrial. My student film was mostly awful, but it was the precursor to the whole series and contained many of the essential elements of my books. A lot of people worked very hard on it, for which I am forever indebted.

I was heavily influenced as a student by the films “Aliens”, “Bladerunner”, “Akira” and “The Crow” and also by the “Foundation” series of books by Isaac Asimov. I can't talk too much about the plot of my student film as it would give away too many spoilers for the forthcoming books, but let's just say that the core idea for the books came straight from my student film. The film gave me a good portfolio which showed off my model making, design and art skills and enabled me to get my first job.

Above: Early drawings from my "big red sketch book" from around 1992 of a creature that will be making an appearance in later Space Navy novels. Below: The model that I made around the same time of the creature.

Above: The design for Maximillian Fisher's cybernetic hand and the finished prop...

Above: Design sketches for the Goth troopers in my film. Below: The toopers in costume. Photos Copyright Arora Parry / University of Northumbria.

After leaving the North-East when the degree finished, I found my first full-time job working in the animation industry. I was hired by Producer Jackie Cockle and I became an assistant prop maker working at Cosgrove Hall Films in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester. The first show that I worked on was “Brambly Hedge” for which I made endless tiny plates, bottles, blackcurrants and all manner of food for the mice in the show to feast on. It was a steep learning curve and I am forever grateful to my head of department, Owen Ballhatchet, for teaching me what he knew.

I then helped Owen with some of the props for Gerry Anderson’s “Lavender Castle” which was a strange sci-fi show where the good guys flew around space in a Tudor cottage. The designs were all drawn by Rodney Matthews, a famous fantasy artist who also did a lot of rock album covers. There were some lovely things to make for that show and it was fun to work on. Then I got my big chance and was asked to make and design a lot of the props for the show “Rocky and the Dodos”. The show revolved around a bunch of comedic dodos who lived on an island and had a variety of whacky adventures.

Featuring prominently on the show were the limpets. They were small creatures that lived in an old, washed-up toilet and would do crazy stuff that linked scenes together. As the limpets developed, they became more bizarre. I designed a Goth limpet, an alien in a UFO, a Terminator limpet and many others including versions of all the crew. In one episode where they held the “Limpet Olympics” there were even Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker versions in the background of a crowd scene. The Director of that show was the wonderful Sarah Ball (who now works on "Chuggington"). She let my imagination run wild and gave me a great deal of free reign. It was on that show that I learned all the tricks of the trade that really honed my skills as a model maker. Sarah has named a character from Chuggington after me, there's a train named "Fletcher"...

After about a year, I left Cosgrove Hall Films with a group of other people who were setting up a brand new animation company called Hot Animation. I was offered the job as head of the props department and given the opportunity to design and build my own model and props workshop. My first job was working on the second series of “Brambly Hedge” and then the pilot for a brand new show called “Bob the Builder”. I built the first cardboard prototype for Scoop, the JCB, and most of Bob’s tools, traffic cones, piles of dirt and so on. I didn’t know at the time how big a part Bob was going to play in my life.

Over the many years at Hot Animation I gradually worked my way up and eventually became Series Art Director on Bob the Builder. I was responsible for designing sets, based on the drawings of the very talented Curtis Jobling (now a successful author of fantasy books) and producing technical drawings for the set builders, the “As and When Men” (Rick, Jeff and Richard). Sets were continually re-used and moved around, forever needing to be refurbished and extended. It was very hard work.

I got the chance to work with some incredible model makers including Lucy Beckett, Jon Kershaw, Michael Gilroy, Steve Cox and the fantastic Chris Sievey (who was also Frank Sidebottom in another life). There are really too many brilliant people to name, but it was a fabulous crew!

While at Hot Animation, I made a short film entitled "A Slash in the Shower". It was a comedy take on the Hitchcock film, "Psycho". We recreated the famous shower scene using Punch and Judy puppets. The crew was made up from good friends, including the wonderful Paul Bird, Ben Jones and Mark Collins.

I was also heavily involved in the reboot of Bob when he moved to Sunflower Valley and everything had to be redesigned from scratch. The show became more environmentally friendly and I had to research solar panels, wind turbines, straw bale houses and all sorts of new things for Bob to build. My fondest memory is of going to see the Bob live arena show in Manchester and going backstage to play with the full scale machines, including Scoop, who I had a hand in designing. It was a fantastic experience. While working at Hot, I toyed with the Unity stories, mainly as film script ideas. I developed the scripts into a TV series idea, which I've been tinkering with ever since. The books I'm writing now have come directly from those scripts.

Finally, I worked on the show “Built to be Wild” which was a cowboy themed wild west Bob special. I got to sculpt “Mount Bobmore”, a huge version of Mount Rushmore with the faces of Bob, Wendy, Spud and Pilchard on it. It was one of my most memorable creations and as it turned out, one of my last for the show. After around fourteen series of “Bob the Builder” and a few feature length specials, Hot Animation was taken over by another company and they instigated a round of redundancies. I had been thinking about leaving for a while as the work was quite stressful and so I decided to take the redundancy money and set myself up in business as a gardener. Hot Animation no longer exists which is very sad. They were a wonderful bunch of people.

I then opted for the “good life”, became a professional gardener and married Louise, who was the only one that would put up with my nonsense. I've been working as a gardener now for over seventeen years. We moved from Manchester up to the beautiful Northumberland countryside, which is where I now do my rounds. Gardening gives me the time to think and a break in the winter to write my books.

Although I love working as a gardener, after nearly ten years I found there was something lacking in my life. I needed an artistic output. I hit upon the idea of turning the Unity scripts that I had written into novels. All I had to do was convert my stories from film script format into prose, which took time. When I was reasonably happy with the books I looked into publishing via the traditional route, which seemed very hit or miss. Then my friend Mark suggested self publishing on Amazon. He had a work colleague who was now making a fair income from writing books for Kindle.

I wasn't happy putting all my eggs into one basket and publishing the full length novels first. I wanted to dip my toes in the self publishing waters with shorter stories. As I had never published a story before, either a short story or full length novel, I thought it would be better to walk before I could run and start small. I came up with the idea of a series of short novellas that would work like a TV series, with different episodes but an overall linking story arc. Because I had already written about the adventures of Maximillian Fisher in the "Unity" novel, it was a fairly easy step to write about a different star-ship Captain and follow his adventures in a series of novellas. That's how Josiah Trenchard was born. I already had some off-shoots from the main Unity story in mind and so I decided to write a series of shorter novellas following the adventures of one mighty star-ship and one infamous Captain. Most of the best military sci-fi follows the voyages of an iconic vessel, from Star Trek to Jack Campbell’s “Lost Fleet” series, so that’s the format that I chose.

In essence, the Space Navy series is about a ship and crew that are sent into the most dangerous situations to clean up other people’s mess. Trenchard is the absolute antithesis of Star Trek’s Captains. Trenchard is certainly no Captain Kirk! He is foul mouthed, no nonsense, hard drinking and hard fighting! He drinks, he swears, he fights dirty! I based his character a lot on Gene Hunt from the TV show “Life on Mars” with a little Dirty Harry thrown in for good measure; he gets every dirty job going, which eventually earns him the nickname, the “Fixer”.

The idea for the first story was fairly easy to come up with. I knew that I had to introduce the prototype Wolverine star-ship, the "Might of Fortitude", and that the adventure would be set in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter and involve space pirates. To be honest, the most difficult thing was coming up with the name of the illustrious Captain, probably the single most important thing for the books. For a start his name would be on every book cover. Secondly, it had to be something new that nobody else had already used. I spent a while trawling through Google and searching for different names; nothing would do. Then one day, the name “Josiah Trenchard” suddenly popped into my head. It’s memorable and tough sounding. The name translates as “the lord saves man of war”, which is quite cool. Was it divine inspiration or just my subconscious finally working it through? Whatever the reason, the name was perfect and the series was born.

I knew that the Wolverine hunter-killer spacecraft would be important to the plot of the full length Space Navy novels and so it was a fairly simple step to build a series of shorter novellas around the voyages of one particular vessel, the “Might of Fortitude”. The spacecraft is inspired by a Royal Navy hunter-killer submarine. It’s cramped, smelly and full of consummate professionals working in one of the hardest environments in the galaxy. The United Worlds (my version of Empire, Federation, etc.) are trying to keep the peace, but there are insurgent terrorists (the Rubente Dextera) who are fighting for independence, pirates praying on interstellar craft and all manner of nasties lurking out there in deep space. It is the Wolverine’s job to police them.

The name of the space-ship was the next most important element. Most science fiction vessels have bold sounding single word names like “Dauntless”, “Nostromo” or “Enterprise”. Alternatively they have two word names like “Red Dwarf” or “Millennium Falcon”. I wanted to use a different format, one that could be adapted for many different star-ship names. I was near the sea one day (I tend to spend a lot of time at the coast when I can) and I started noticing the names on fishing boats in the harbour of Cullercoats. A large number of the boats were named “the something of something”, for example the “Pride of Newcastle”. And so after a fair bit of brain-storming, the “Might of Fortitude” was born. Other vessels in the series include the “Gift of Stealth”, the “Hand of Valour” and the “Breath of Vengeance”. It’s a format that suits military vessels and has millions of possible combinations.

My premise for the Josiah Trenchard series was basically to take the marines from “Aliens” or the squaddies from “Dog Soldiers” and pit them against a series of classic horror monsters, updated for the sci-fi genre. Each story takes a well known horror theme (Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, zombies) and re-tells the story in a military sci-fi setting. Morgenstern obviously draws heavily upon Frankenstein. Berserkergang is a Jekyll and Hyde / Wolfman inspired plot. Part four, Onamuji, is an action packed story and pits the crew of the Might against space zombies!

My Twitter handle is @JonGardener. The fabulous people on Twitter have helped me publicise my books incredibly well. More importantly I've met so many nice, supportive people on Twitter. I've learned so much from the #indie #author community. People are generally very free with their advice. The problem can be sifting through the advice for the nuggets that apply to you. If it wasn't for all the indie authors out there who have interviewed me, promoted my books, offered advice and RT'd my mad rambling; I wouldn't be half as good at writing.

#JosiahTrenchard

#SpaceNavy

#DrinkRumAndKillBadGuys

I don’t think people judge a book by the cover AFTER they’ve read it. But, when you’re selling and promoting, the first thing that people will see is the cover. It has to be eye-catching. This is especially important on a web-site such as Amazon, where the reader will most likely see the image as a thumbnail. I design all my book covers myself as I build the models, photograph them and then use my Photoshop skills. I’ve tried to make my covers look enticing, even when viewed as a thumbnail. They're high contrast and contain bright, primary colours. If your target audience doesn’t like or even notice the cover, then they’re not going to hover that mouse pointer and click on your book to find out more.

See how I create my book covers by clicking HERE:

A recent activity has been attending Newcastle ComicCon. I've built costumes and designed an eye-catching stall to promote my books, ably assisted by Space Captain Dave, without whom, my life would be significantly less fun. Dave, I salute you!

The U.W.SN. Trooper costume is a combination of off the shelf items (like the elbow and knee pads) and things that are entirely constructed. The helmet is based around a Japanese riot helmet that I bought from Amazon. The chin and "ears" are completely made by me, from MDF, card and plastic. The Logo is provided by the wonderful Alex Scott @alscottsigns. The shoulder pads are based upon half basket-balls. The grenades are broom handles and tubing. The rest is just glue and paint effects.

See how I built the trooper costume by clicking HERE:

In summer 2017, I've now come full circle, right back to where I started; building a Tardis. This was for my wife's primary school project. Some things never change...

Vworp! Vworp!

If you want more up to date news, click on the link for the "Captain's Blog" below. Honour, strength and unity!