Martin Hussingtree is a former businessman with an outstanding career of notable achievements as a groundbreaking author of managerial and technical subjects. In recent years he has turned his attention to narrating and recording audiobooks and their challenges.
He’s meticulously applied his analytical skills to reveal obvious shortcomings in a complicated process, crying out for simplification and clarity. The need for a constantly up-to-date reference work and “How-To” manual was obvious in a rapidly evolving and expanding environment.
A message from the author…..
“Martin Hussingtree is not my real name. My real first and surname are often misspelled and mispronounced. I don’t use my middle name …………No-one would!
Samuel Langhorne Clemens had a similar problem. He wasn’t a marketing expert. They didn’t have them in his day, but he was years ahead of his time. A literary genius, he rightly found fame as Mark Twain, a phrase called out when measuring the depth of the shallow Mississipi, on board the old paddle steamers.
Where it all began…
In my “proper” career, as well as my day job of being in charge of building hospitals and the like, I wrote reference works, articles in technical magazines and lectured on various building management and environmental related subjects. I designed and built my own house and started up a successful building company until the calamitous Recession of the 1990s decimated that industry and me as well.
After a long and distinguished career in the UK construction industry I was accredited with being one of the pioneers of modern scientific project management techniques applied to increasingly complex fast-track schemes. Because of that I was presented to HM The Queen and HRH Prince Philip at St.James Palace.
I remember Prince Philip, who was taller than me, looking down at me, like a hawk about to devour a mouse, sarcastically asking “… and what are YOU supposed to be good at?” To my surprise, without thinking, I blurted out “… knowing what can go wrong, Sir”. Little did I know then, how good I was to become at that.
Moving on
I spent the next ten years as a high-level head hunter and career change counsellor, re-writing their CVs to make them sound more inviting, advising and successfully promoting many folks who were victims of similar situations to turn their lives around before migrating into “sales”.
After two decades of stress and trauma, I opted for a steadier life at a lower, slower level with the object of finding time to writing. This had always been my ambition from an early age.
Why Audiobooks?
With the advent of audiobooks, someone suggested I had a “nice” voice, which got me into narrating, voice acting, and producing the published works of others. I now do this full-time while trying to find time to complete a number of my own part-finished books.
I now live in the middle of England where William Shakespeare was born. I reinvented myself as Martin Hussingtree. This seemed like a suitable pen name, as, one day, my concentration drifted after passing a road sign for an ancient hidden hamlet near my home; it was a sign in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. How appropriate!”
It reminded me of Adlestrop, the First World War poem by Edward Thomas a soldier in a train, going home on leave, about a deserted railway station at night, also not far from where I live…