The Quick Version:
I’m Saxon Bullock – I’m a 41 year-old writer, journalist and freelance proofreader, currently based in Nottingham in the UK. I’ve written for a wide variety of websites and magazines, although I now chiefly do regular freelance work for genre magazine SFX, for whom I’ve been a contributor for fifteen years. I’m currently in the process of finishing my third completed novel, my literary agent is John Jarrold, and I completed a Creative Writing MA at the University of Manchester in 2015. My shoe-size is 11, my star sign is Leo, and in the near future I’m going to be living on a narrowboat, which is the working definition of “not where I saw myself ten years ago”.
The Less-Quick Version:
I was born in Cornwall in 1974, and can happily blame my wild imagination and passionate love of literature, science fiction and cinema on my eclectic and film-loving parents (who made sure I watched everything from Fred Astaire movies and black-and-white Hitchcock thrillers to war epics and sci-fi horror). I ended up a voracious reader who wrote stories and scripts from an early age, and this led to me experimenting with filmmaking throughout my teens. It also resulted in me hi-jacking an entire segment of my Media Studies A-Level just so I could write, direct and produce a 1-hour, no-budget sci-fi adventure spectacular entitled ‘The Alchemist’.
Further writing and filmmaking adventures followed, and after A-Levels came three years at Bournemouth University studying for a Ba Hons in Media Production. Along with plenty of student angst, drunkenness and far too much reading of comic books, I also gained my first official experience of journalism here on the Documentary side of the Media Production course, where I researched and produced my own audio documentaries on a local Cinema projectionist, anarchic pop renegades The KLF, and the many facets of the comics industry.
After completing my course with two short films – a superhero monologue, ‘Return of the Crimson Avenger’, and a surreal existential drama, ‘Suicide is Painless’ – I moved to London in late 1995, convinced that media domination would soon be mine. After spending two years working as a post-production runner, making tea, delivering meals and ferrying packages around London, I finally decided that maybe this whole ‘dominating the media’ thing wasn’t working out. However, during 1997 and 1998, I did gain interest from several production companies in a TV drama series I’d written and developed entitled ‘Sanity Claws’. The interest didn’t go further than a handful of meetings, but did convince me that maybe writing was the best way for me to go.
A shift into retail soon saw me working in an Oxford street bookshop (the flagship store of the late, somewhat-lamented corporate giant Borders), and then in 2000, a series of unlikely and bewildering events resulted in me suddenly (and without entirely intending to) becoming a fully-fledged freelance film journalist. By 2002 I was running the Science Fiction section at Borders Oxford Street and also writing for outlets like Hotdog, Total Film, SFX and Channel4.Com – while at that point I also started working in the world of publishing, doing a variety of freelance Editorial Reports.
After a number of adventures (including a six-week voyage across America visiting obscure movie locations), I left bookselling and went full-time freelance in 2003, while 2005 finally saw me deciding to give novel-writing a serious go, and I began my first novel ‘The Hypernova Gambit’. After eleven years in London I left the city and moved to Hampshire in late 2006, and shifted away from film journalism in 2008 (although I still write regularly for SFX). My efforts on my book finally saw me gaining representation from literary agent John Jarrold in early 2008, and that’s also the year I moved to Manchester, where I established myself as a freelance proofreader, sub-editor and manuscript-reader with a side-line in book and comic reviews.
In 2013 I began a part-time MA course in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, and graduated in 2015 with merit, which was also the year I moved to Nottingham. When I’m not proofreading or writing, I divide my time between reading, watching strange and unusual films and TV series, playing computer games and some truly epic DIY projects. I’m currently in the process of fitting out a canal narrowboat that my partner and I are going to be living on, and I’ll be undergoing some exceedingly interesting life changes in the very near future…
Saxon Bullock 