H. O. Charles is just a pen name for me to write with complete freedom, but now you've gone and put all that effort into clicking on 'about', I really owe it to you to say a little bit on the 'real' me.

Well, the real me is a bit shy (I know, right - you're now thinking I must look like a troll with bad hair and deeply unfashionable clothing... okay, so you wouldn't be far off, but meh).

That is why we have a placeholder image of Silar just here, and because I'm not sure what gender to choose for H. O.. I dunno. Maybe I'll become brave and post a pic of true me here soon.

Before writing, I used to make radio shows and talk about scientific research. I was meant to complete a PhD whilst doing both of those things, but the novels kinda took over, and now we have The Fireblade Array instead of The Thesis. Whoops.

Other jobs I've done include selling cakes at a bakery, operating a telephone switchboard and building computers. I gained my BA from the University of Cambridge, and followed it up with a Masters at UCL. The PhD was supposed to be finished at Cambridge too, and I'm hoping one day to make enough money from writing so I can donate ££££££ to them to make up for leaving early...

More recently, I have been working hard on harvesting the respective beards of fantasy authors both living and dead, because magical writer beard is something I lack.

As you can see, the collection includes pieces of G.R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Robert Jordan and Terry Pratchett. I hold on to the hope that by collecting beard snippets of successful fantasy authors, I might acquire some of the power therein.

If you know of any free fantasy author beard going spare, please do not hesitate to send it to me/my pen name digitally via one of the contact methods below.

**disclaimer** Beard hair may in fact be dog floof