F J Shindler

Originally from Manchester, UK, my former profession as a technical author almost always entailed living apart from home and family for the duration of the respective client contract.  Typically months at a time, the client-site would usually be in a town or city that was new to me.  In the main, living and working in different parts of the nation was enjoyable.  But it was a life-style that could be both challenging and lonely if not managed carefully.  In my case, fiction writing proved to be my escape.

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At the time, my preference was short stories rather than long fiction.  After hour upon hour of brain-churning technical research, composing short fiction in the evenings and week-ends allowed my busy mind to wander outside the rigid, template-confined world that is procedure writing.

 

Some years before retirement, my family and I left the UK to embark upon a renovation project in a very rural part of the Czech Republic.   It, too, has been challenging, and we have lost count of the number of times one or both of us has voiced, what the heck were we thinking?!  Thankfully, we're past that stage and are now settled in a rather charming English Cottage styled former farmhouse in the foothills of the Beskydy mountains, a beautiful place to live that offers endless rural pastimes.  It is here that I have turned to longer fiction, enabled for the most part by a more relaxed life-style.