About Me — Mark Farrar. Expatriate Brit — Entrepreneur, Writer…
By: Mark Farrar
Tags: Writer, Introduction, About Me, Entrepreneur, Dog Lover

Hi! My name is Mark Farrar, and welcome to my About Me page!

I’ll be talking a bit about my personal background and history, my interests, and, of course, my writing.

Childhood

I was born in the United Kingdom, where I was an only child. (I was also an only grandchild and only nephew, which meant I was spoiled rotten.)

I went to a small, local, private day school until I was seven, and then attended one of the country’s less well-known boarding schools, about 25 miles away from home, which I left at 17, having completed my A and S Level exams.

Photo courtesy of Chongsparks on Flickr

Early Adult Life

After leaving school, I declined the option to go to university and ended up working for my father for three years — as a yeast merchant. It was not my desire to continue the business he started, but it was a job I fell into when another one fell through at the last minute.

After that, in 1979, I decided to go into information technology, or data processing as it was called back then, with a large insurance company. In 1986, I moved to a household-name bank, where I remained until 2005.

During my years in IT, I worked as a programmer, systems analyst, data analyst, and strategist.

Mid-Life Onward

In 2005, I moved to the USA — for love. I’d just ended a 24-year marriage that had turned sour (actually, positively acidic), and met a lady online who was based in the USA.

My wife and I started and ran several online businesses, some of which worked, and some of which didn’t.

These businesses still required my IT skills, building bespoke websites for ourselves, some using WordPress but some from scratch, as well as writing business articles, doing customer service (for a year or two, we even offered 24 x 7 phone support, which was as exhausting as it sounds), and more.

My Twilight Years

In 2018, my second wife died, suddenly and unexpectedly, just before Christmas, an event that brought home how fragile life is and how quickly your world can change. We went to bed one night, and the next day, only I woke up.

Photos by author

I now live with my three dogs, Cassie, Mini, and Cruz respectively, in rural Arizona. My late wife bought this 20-acre property (with no neighbours) in 2003 because she valued her privacy and because she was not the sort to need or want the company of other people.

And I am the same — primarily a strong introvert, bordering on reclusive. For example, I’ve been into the nearest town, which is about 12 miles away, once since 2013, and that was only because of an emergency I could not resolve online.

Self-isolation and social distancing were our choice long before the coronavirus scare made them a thing.

My Writing

Since my second wife and I met online (not via a dating site but by a mutual interest in working from home), to help strengthen our growing bond, I started writing her a love poem each day.

This tradition continued for the nine months we were dating, and then for another year or two after I moved to the USA and we were married.

These poems were typically short, from 8–20 lines, and most of them were acrostic in nature — because I love playing with words.

After that, I had long had a desire to write a novel featuring a magic square, another interest of mine stemming from my years as an amateur magician. It’s not the greatest novel in the world — although it’s probably not the worst either — but at least I completed all 400+ pages of Ring Of Daggers.

I wanted to write more novels, but our businesses got in the way, which is why I turned to flash fiction instead, those being shorter and easier, in some ways, to write. I have now published about 35 of these stories on Kindle under the series title Twisted Flash Fiction, although you can find newer stories right here on Medium. These are mainly 500-word stories, with a handful of 2,500-word ones too -all with a twist at the end. The twist component was inspired by Roald Dahl’s short stories, which I first read in my teens at school.

I also wrote a handful of erotica — novellas, for the most part — and a few children’s books under different pseudonyms.

Sadly, the time to do that also became a luxury, which is how I transitioned from short stories and poetry to haiku, which is my current love.

I have published several books of haiku, with themes such as love, Christmas, and mothers. I also write and publish at least one haiku per day on Medium in a publication I created called 17 Onji, as well as on other sites online.

Most of the writing I have done over the past two years has been for my main business site, Self Help Nirvana, where you will also find a few autobiographical-style articles amongst the hundreds of self-help ones.

It’s only during the past month or two that I’ve really started to think more about writing on Medium.

To that end, I have created another publication called Mark’s Meandering Musings, where I write about some of my travel experiences from my younger days, when I was based in the UK.

Other Interests

My other interests include:

magic (of the conjuring variety)

mnemonics

crosswords (preferably cryptic, which I enjoy both composing and solving)

puzzles

and, of course, reading.

I used to be, with my first wife, an arctophile too, once having a collection of over 600 teddy bears and other soft toys, but those days are far behind me now.

As an interesting aside to my interest in and use of mnemonics, it’s worth pointing out that I, like an estimated 3% of people, suffer from aphantasia. This condition, which was only officially recognized within the past decade, means that I cannot create mental images — my mind’s eye is effectively blind.

Most of the people I know of who are aphants, as they are often called, have suffered from this for as long as they can remember. However, it can also happen as a result of medical events, including strokes and surgery.

Since mnemonics usually requires the creation of mental images to help you remember things, then having aphantasia makes this far more difficult than it does for “normal” people — although it is possible to make it work.

My Goals

My ultimate goal during my twilight years is to close down most of my other online businesses, so that I can focus more on writing. That would include my self-help site, here on Medium, and hopefully a few more books on a variety of topics, because, like many writers, I have far more ideas on my list than I could ever hope to complete.

Beyond writing, I want to move to another country. Not back to the UK, but somewhere the weather is more clement all year around — 75–80 degrees would be about right, without the threat of earthquakes and hurricanes.

This will depend, of course, on my health and finances, and I won’t consider doing this until my three dogs are no longer with me because I don’t want to inflict the stress of international travel (e.g. flights, quarantine) on them.

Who knows, I might find somewhere — a small cottage on the beach in the Caribbean, perhaps — where I am truly inspired to do my best writing ever.