Neal was born in 1961 in Billericay in Essex (Ian Dury's got a lot to answer for), and had an uneventful childhood, an inadequate and detestable schooling courtesy of the comprehensive reform that would have us all equally uneducated. My love of the strange began, as it does with so many children, with my hearing The Hobbit, and a later reading Lord of the Rings. It also helped that my parents (a school teacher and a lecturer in applied mathematics) were also SF aficionados.
He started writing SF and fantasy at the age of sixteen, perhaps motivated by a compliment from his English teacher for a story he had written in class after an overdose of E.C. Tubb books. On leaving school there was a hiatus of a few years while a grappled with the adult world. During this time Neal worked with one of his three brothers for a firm which made steel furniture, ran a card school, and for which it seemed the prerequisites of employment were an ability to drink huge quantities, accept minimum wages, and make tea. It went bankrupt not long after he left.
At his next place of employment he operated a milling machine and was dispatched on day release to do a Tech III course on 'Mechanical & Production Engineering'. While he was at the company he also began writing again and produced a fantasy book which is still gathering dust amongst his other files. Next he went with a breakaway company which went through various ups and downs before an eventual collapse which, incidentally, again came after Neal left. At that time Neal's only successes as far as writing was concerned were to win a snack and sandwich toaster for a rhyme, and five pounds for a story about adolescent suicide.
With his college paper he managed to get him self into a high-tech machining company, he was twenty-five. This was where Neal grew up and found direction. Firstly he began to write more regularly, this mostly assisted by joining a writer's folio of which he was a member for ten years. Secondly hetook an English 'A' level (B pass) at night school, mainly to prove a point to him self. Thirdly, he began karate lessons and has now gained a green belt (Useful, this, when writing fight scenes. It also means no one can build houses on him).
After three years with this company, by which time he was programming computerized machine tools, he left in the pursuit of more money. It was then that he began the Hadrim fantasy trilogy, wrote the first version of Fool's Mate, and began seriously to write short stories.
Neals next place of employment was a disaster and it was there that he asked him self what he really wanted out of life. The answer was "I want to be a writer", he had come to hate the sight of factory walls and the smell of coolant oil. Again he left, this time to become self-employed: cutting grass, tree felling, and hedging etc. This got him out in the open air and left him alot more time to write, and in the years that have followed he has beed gradually crawling up the writing ladder.
Sitting in his files now, he has the first book of another fantasy trilogy Creatures of the Staff, first book of The Infinite Willows, and a contemporary novel called Frog Wine. In one deviation from his usual writing practice, he has written a script for a three-part TV series called Trines, which is an amalgam of the strange and the contemporary, and a one hour drama called The Executioner's Lie.
Up until 2000 the limit of Neal's success had been stories accepted by a large proportion of British small press SF and fantasy magazines, publication of my novellas Mindgames: Fool's Mate by Gordon McGregor's Club 199, and The Parasite and The Engineer by Tanjen, serialization of his SF novella Africa Zero in Threads, a short story collection called Runcible Tales published by Piper's Ash.
Post 2000, things have changed. His expectation of being a lonely perpetually knackered spare-time writer has been defeated. Neal is now married to Caroline and am a full-time writer. Cosmos Books have brought out the two novellas Africa Zero and The Army of God in one book under the title of the former. One of his 'synopses and samples' hit at Pan Macmillan and they offered me a three-book contract. Pan have now published Gridlinked, The Skinner, and The Line of Polity which was the lead SF title in the launch of their SF & F imprint Tor UK. In his second three-book contract they published Cowl, Brass Man, and The Voyage of the Sable Keech. Some if not all of these books have been published or are due to be published in America, Russia, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Romania.