It always seems to be a bit egotistical to include this when you're not a company or institution but here goes anyway.

Always been an engineer all my life to pay the bills but also played in many bands throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties . I still perform when given the chance but mostly write, produce and record songs and soundscapes in my home studio. I suppose that makes me sound a bit of a megalomaniac but even in the past I used to put all the song parts down when I was writing for the bands I was in, sort of like notetaking. I always expected them to interpret their parts their own way and re-arange/re-write them afterwards which is what happened. I always thought a band was a sum of it's parts and worked better as a unit. Every member adds their own bit of magic. I miss collabrorating with other people but until I retire from engineering I don't seem to get the chance.

Alongside my song writing I also had a passion for writing short stories which I had done since my schooldays and when I was made redundant in the early nineties I went back to University and did a degree in writing and publishing. This included modules on the new up and coming internet. I think I was using the Mosaic browser back in nineteen ninety four and used to help run the mac helpdesk. Nowadays of course you can build better websites on your mobile phone and as you can see by this one I'm a bit out of practice 🤣.

Anyway back to the writing, I have written a lot of short stories and had a few failed attemps at writing longer work. I think this is due to writing so much technical documents over the years which in a roundabout way at least earned me money.

Now I have always been a voracious reader, sometimes reading two or three novels in a week while stuck in hotels in some god forsaken town whilst away working. Suddenly I found using cloud based software I could also write wherever I was and longer fiction just seemed to come naturally. In the last two or three years I have finished three novels and started to put my short stories into a compendium. I tend to forget about them for a few months then pick them up and look at them from a readers perspective which means I yet need to do a little editing on two of them. Hopefully I will have the other one up on Amazon by the time this website goes up. At least that is the intention and the reason to build it. I think my experience with publishing in my music career and my time at uni doing the media publishing modules has put me back a bit as I am a little wary of the whole publishing industry. I've known musicians and authors either being in quite a bit of debt due to crazy advances, or struggling to find someone to publish their work, so that is why I'm going to try Amazon. I'm not that enamoured with the whole Jeff Bezos corporate thing but I think it's the way forward with the least amount of risk and certainly better than vanity publishing.

Finally I have always been a keen motorcylist pretty much all my life and well before the Brexit vote had decided that I wanted to see as much of Europe, east and west from the saddle. I have done a couple of tours since 2016 but it's certainly taken the shine off traveling around Europe since. I go to Eire a couple of times a year for work in the van and there's a lot more paperwork such as customs declarations, extra vehicle forms and personal insurances to get to take a vehicle 'abroad'.

Back to the point, I have a lot of photos and videos that I have taken over the years. Some of them hopefully might interest anyone using this site so I will slowly but surely put up them. When I retire properly I intend to travel through the states on a bike for as long as posible as well as continuing my other tours. There's a whole world out there check the Aventure Bike Festival this year.

Well if you haven't given up from boredom yet? Keep your eye out for some proper content, coming soon.

Mark Mook.