Authors Electric

I am Conrad Jones a 50-year-old Author, originally from a sleepy green-belt called Tarbock Green, which is situated on the outskirts of Liverpool. I spent a number of years living in Holyhead, Anglesey, which I class as my home, before starting a career as a trainee manager with McDonalds Restaurants in 1989. I worked in management at McDonalds Restaurants Ltd from 1989-2002, working my way up to Business Consultant (area manager) working in the corporate and franchised departments. On March 20th 1993 I was managing the Restaurant in Warrington’s Bridge St when two Irish Republican Army bombs exploded directly outside the store, resulting in the death of two young boys and many casualties. Along with hundreds of other people there that day, I was deeply affected by the attack, which led to a long-term interest in the motivation and mind set of criminal gangs. I began to read anything crime related that I could get my hands on. I link this experience with the desire to w...

Being relatively new to the professional writing scene, I don't have that much experience with events and festivals. I organised many FantasyCons in the late nineties and early noughties, and have attended lots of conferences and festivals as a reader and wannabe-writer, but very few where I've been up-front, where people have actually turned up to see me. I'm still convinced that in many cases they just didn't want to leave their comfy chair after the last speaker, or were simply having a chat to their mates in the vicinity of a stage.       There was Wales in March at Sci-Fi Weekender . And then there was the Northwich Literary Festival in June. Now we're not talking Hay-On-Wye here - Northwich is a small market town in mid-Cheshire, but this is, I think, the third year in which it has run a small literary festival, consisting of a couple of dozen events in local cafes, libraries and theatres - talks, readings and discussions. Plus there was a "poetr...