David Tallerman has been making up stories for about as long as he can remember.  His infant school teacher complained about him writing too much like Enid Blyton, and looking back he can see both sides of that one--Ms. Blyton may not have been the best model for a five year old to found their literary career on, but she sure sold a lot of books.

Anyway, he kept at it.  At about age sixteen he started a hugely ambitious novel heavily influenced by Joseph Conrad and, of all people, Thomas More.  When he was eighteen he lost all his work in a gruesome word-processor accident.  With hindsight, it was probably for the best.

Then he got side-tracked by university, and a lot of creative energy went into first one degree and then another: he's still quite proud of his MA dissertation on the literature of seventeenth-century witchcraft, and the fact that he managed to work both H. P. Lovecraft and Kate Bush into the final draft.  If you're ever in York University library then please have a look for the one and only existing copy (another equally unpleasant word-processor accident took care of the back-ups).

 There followed a series of jobs that Mr Tallerman would heartily recommend to no-one, and a second novel that aimed for a point somewhere between The Manchurian Candidate and Leonard Cohen and fell far short of either.  Finally a couple of years ago he he stumbled into an IT career and realised that he liked it a hell of a lot more than all the other things he'd done.  At around the same time he was struck by another revelation: he was never going to be a writer unless he got down to actually doing some writing, and he was never going to get published unless he started sending to publishers.  So, conquering a fair amount of trepidation, he began to do both.

So far it's going quite well.