MT-B was born in Sighișoara, Romania on December 25th, 1431. Since being Vlad the Impaler he has undergone many incarnations - Vincent Price, Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, Yekaterina Alexeyevna, Lorena Bobbitt, a prostitute in Victorian Whitechapel, a passenger on the Titanic and a buccaneer executed for treason on the high seas to name but a few. Currently he is manifested as a former businessperson and resides in the UK. He was CEO of a pan-European telecommunications company, held a number of senior Marketing, Sales and Strategic Development posts in other ITC companies, built forty eight call centres and has most recently been active in solar farm development and other renewable energy initiatives. Now the poor deluded fool believes that he’s an author!

In this lifetime he has lived in Germany, Minnesota, Texas and California in addition to the UK. In previous existences he has dwelt in places ranging from the Alaskan wilderness in the North to Tierra del Fuego in the South. He is an inveterate traveller having visited more than sixty countries and has a particular affinity for volcanic tropical islands, dramatic seascapes, deserts, mountains and pubs. He is less keen on swamps, urban blight, taiga, tundra and 80’s revival disco bars.

He has eclectic musical tastes which tend to reflect a primary love of reggae, metal and punk.

What inspires you to write?

Just as Nature abhors a vacuum so I loathe the dearth of utterly puerile but funny literature and feel compelled to fill the void. When not altruistically motivated I mostly write to prevent terminal boredom. Earlier this year I learned that the rest of the world regarded me as too old for employment. Time hung heavy on my hands and no amount of scrubbing would remove it. What were my options in this age of austerity? A life of crime beckoned but the competition was stiff and well-established. A life of debauchery held immense appeal but, if anything, the competition was even stiffer than crime. My lack of computational and mathematical prowess precluded a life of Pi. So writing it had to be. I dutifully dusted off my words, jokes, cobwebs and dingoes and set about the task of creating an assemblage of words that I decided to call …. a book.

Tell us about your writing process.

I am an anarchic, spontaneous writer. Other than laptops my tools are so primitive that Petronius would feel perfectly at home using them. I use two notebooks the first for processes and ‘to do’ lists the second for jokes and scenes that I want to incorporate in books or future book ideas. To me the greatest revelation to me about the writing process is that I have learned that I carry the whole book around in my head. I may be out walking or conducting some other innocuous activity unrelated to writing when a thought crystallises about how a specific sentence or paragraph should be amended and need to capture the idea in my primitive notebooks before it escapes.

For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?

No, I’m quite mad enough without chatting to fictional characters…..except for that enormous rabbit called ‘Harvey’.

How did you decide how to publish your books?

I squandered three to four months waiting for Deputy Junior Apprentice Editors to excavate my magnum opus from their ‘slush piles’ and issue a dismissive uninformative rejection email. Allow me to qualify that statement, nearly half the Deputy Junior Apprentice Editors bothered to issue a boilerplate rejection email. All the others couldn’t even be arsed to do that! In business I learned the importance of feedback and rational decision-making supported by evidence. In other words if I rejected an idea, a proposal, a strategy I explained my reasoning. Publishers and literary agents have yet to learn these basic lessons. Self publishing has begun the disintermediation of this antediluvian industry and it is long overdue. As a consequence the universe of available literature has increased geometrically, new markets have been created and new career opportunities created. Carpe Diem.

What do you think about the future of book publishing?

Like other sectors revolutionised by on-line businesses disintermediation will continue apace. Publishers and literary agents will need to identify viable niches and specialise or go out of business. Change will be bloody and remorseless and the most arrogant and antiquated will perish. The number of authors and books will continue to increase exponentially. In an increasingly cluttered market differentiation and profitability will be increasingly difficult for those authors seeking to make a livelihood from self-publishing. New pay for marketing businesses will emerge. Bookstores will continue to vanish as physical retail outlets while Amazon will become increasingly Amazonian.

So, what have you written?

When living as Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade I knocked off a few saucy tales but never got to sell the movie rights. Since then my wordsmithing has becom