Geoff Hancock

I started my working life in agriculture, after spending my childhood split between Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire (England). After spending several years moving around the Midlands working on several farms, I eventually washed up in Herefordshire in 1979.

After training to teach and an even shorter spell teaching Craft Design and Technology, as it was called back in the eighties, I decided to set up on my own as a furniture maker and antique furniture restorer; which I've been doing now for the last twenty-five years.

I'm fifty-seven (b. 1956) and have been married to my wife, a Headteacher, for twenty-seven years. We have two grown-up children, twenty-six and twenty-one years of age.(If they can ever be called grown-up!)

I started writing about five years ago, and went on an Arvon Foundation residential creative writing course, on the recommendation of a friend. The course tutors, all successful authors were really encouraging of my writing; so my family can blame them for my persistence.

The Funny Farm is my first novel, although I did have a humorous article published in The Smallholder several years ago. I am currently working on a murder mystery; which is a completely different genre and far more complicated than I'd envsaged.

I decided to self-publish as an e-book on Amazon because rightly or wrongly I was under the impression that in the world of traditional publishing, etiquette dictates one should only approach one publisher or literary agent at a time. This route seemed to take months, just to receive the standard rejection letter, before I could approach another.

I am also making it available on Createspace as a print on demand, as I was rather concerned that only being available as an e-book would discourage readers like me who like to handle the real thing, so to speak.