Gary Tinnams has worked as a barman, a call centre operator, an IT support analyst, and a software tester. But during all this time he was also an insatiable reader of science fiction and fantasy books like Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake and Greg Egan's Permutation City. He is very fond of weird, mind-bending stories and decided quite early on to try writing some. In 2006 and 2007, he was in the top 50 shortlist for SFX magazine's Pulp Idol and continues to write to this day.