After graduating from high school, my family and I emigrated to the UK. I’d been offered two university places in the States, but wanted to go to art school in London instead. I enrolled in a cram school to gain the A-levels required to get in (it didn’t matter if you could draw or not). Two years later I got my A-levels, having wasted precious time on stuff I already knew, but, being impatient to earn a living, I decided to take a one-year advertising writing course at Watford College of Art & Technology as opposed to spending three years at art college.  

In 1968 at the height of the Vietnam war, I was drafted into the U.S. Army, but after taking the medical at Ruislip air force base, the childhood asthma that had prompted the move to Arizona earned me a deferment. If not for the asthma, this website would be in Swedish. 

In 1969 I found work as an advertising copywriter, going freelance in 1977. By then I knew I didn’t want to be in advertising anymore. Between 1976 and 1981, I made three animated films - Reel People, About Face and After Beardsley [See FILMS] – in an effort to break free of my chains. I managed only to break even on my films, and so copywriting, the only job that would pay the bills, strengthened its grip on my soul – until 1985. 

I left England that year with my wife at the time, and another family to set up a walking tour business in Dubrovnik in the former Yugoslavia. But after three frustrating years trying to work with the authorities in Belgrade, and with cracks beginning to appear in that country, we fled back to the UK. Once again, I was a freelance copywriter with an ongoing novel itching for completion in my bottom drawer. 

I have two children by my late wife, Laura – Kes James, born 1986, and Bonita James, born 1988 – and two grandchildren, Louis and Noa. In 2003 I married Melinda, my American girlfriend from high school, and in 2009 we moved to Penzance, Cornwall. 

In 2014, The O.D. – the book I had been writing for 27 years – was finally published.