About Me

Michael Joseph is a not-too-subtle pen name I use for my fiction work. I’ve lived, worked and traveled throughout Southeast Asia for more than twenty years. My home base is Bangkok, where I’ve lived since 1992.

I’ve been writing about travel, mostly around Southeast Asia, since 1997. That’s why I use a pen name. I’m not sure how my reputation as a honest reporter of travel opinion would be affected if people knew I also wrote fiction.

I have written the odd piece of fiction over the years since I was at university, but Journey to Angkor was my first novel-length work. The idea for it struck me one day when I was on a business trip to Indonesia. Traveling in Indonesia always involves a lot of down time, sitting in cars, airports and planes, so by the time I sat down in front of a computer to start writing, I had much of the story already mapped out in my head, and wrote more than half the book within a few days. The rest, however, took a couple of years.

The experience gave me a taste for more. While writing Journey to Angkor, I got the idea for another story, a sort of sequel. It follows Henry, a character I introduced in Journey to Angkor to move the story along, but whom I later realized might have a tale of his own to tell. The result was Journey to Rai-Lay. A third, and [I believe] final, book in the series has now been released, called, naturally, Journey’s End.

As a reader, I’ve become somewhat fascinated with BDSM lately, especially D/s relationships. What I read definitely influences what I write. You can see a little BDSM creeping into Naga’s Treasure, and of course the next book, Holding On, is all about a D/s relationship, albeit a rather gentle one. I like reading some of the hard core stuff, but I haven’t yet wrapped my imagination around it well enough to write it. There were some ideas that didn’t get developed in Holding On - characters have a way of hijacking a story in unexpected ways - so I saved them for a sequel, the just-released Five At Table. There will be at least one more collection of stories around the main characters from this series to come.

Since what I read influences what I write, I felt it useful to share through this site reviews of the books I’ve just read here as well as news about what I’m working on. If you’d like me to review your book, you can check out the Reviews page for details, or simply use the Contact Me page to send me the blurb and other information. I’ll get back to you within a reasonable time frame as to whether or not I’m interested.

Please note that as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases made through links to Amazon, which are clearly labled. That’s in part how I pay the running costs of the site, which includes purchases for most of the books I review.