I always wanted to write but growing up on a council estate in Post-War England, I never expected it to become a reality. It wasn’t until I emigrated to Australia as an unaccompanied twenty-year-old that I plucked up the courage to start submitting my work. The threat of failure is a lot less oppressive if nobody knows you.

Inevitably I was a lot more familiar with film and television than I was with literature, so I naturally became a screenwriter. Even now I consider myself a storyteller rather than a literary writer.

The problem with Screenwriting is that a lot of other people have input into the final product and it can stray a long way from the initial concept. My response to that was to become a Producer so that I could control the process as well as the creation.

For fifty years I rarely wrote a screenplay that I hadn’t either been paid to write or had already been commissioned to produce. This was very satisfying on one level and I have a lot of film and television work I am extremely proud of, but inevitably one has ideas or hears stories that can’t find an immediate commercial market in television or film.

Consequently, by the time I retired, I decided to start writing these stories both as novels and non-fiction.

Initially I tried self-publishing but after having millions of people view my work, getting lost in the labyrinth that is self-publishing was a very frustrating experience.

‘The Odyssey of Rufus Jones’ is my first attempt to get a book published. The process was surprisingly painless and, who knows, maybe it will encourage people to search out my earlier self-published works online, or maybe get them published sometime in the future.

In the meantime, I’m working on ideas as diverse as the Wreck of the Batavia re-imagined as a Space Odyssey and our experiences travelling Sri Lanka in the wake of the 2019 Easter Terrorist bombings.

Having written on Commission for so many years I’m greatly enjoying the freedom to write about just what interests me and although I may not be as successful as an author as I was a screenwriter and producer, I know, when I first receive copies of my latest book that the story it contains is exactly the story I set out to write.

I just hope others share my interest.

Get yourself a copy of Ian’s book here!