Lloyd's Storefront

Hello. Although I now live in Queensland, Australia, I 'grew up' in a little village in the south east of England called Hambleden, where numerous films have been made, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Avengers and also, very fittingly, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. A few years after leaving school I stumbled upon the world of puzzles and was inexplicably drawn to it. Eventually I found the confidence to start writing my own puzzles, which are a mixture of creativity, humour and imagination. Nearly all of them have an "Aha!" answer because those are my favourite type and, for me, definitely the most fun to create and solve. A lot of them are visual too because I feel that makes them a lot more engaging and appealing. On the whole I dislike logic puzzles (i.e. Sudoku) and mathematical puzzles because they tend to be a bit too mechanical for my taste. So far I've written several puzzle books and contributed to lots of others besides. My first puzzle book to be published was Puzzles for the High IQ (Sterling Publishing). To date it has sold over 30,000 copies worldwide and it and its various translations are still selling. However, my best book prior to Amazing "Aha!" Puzzles was definitely Test Your Creative Thinking (Kogan-Page/The Times), which UK Telegraph puzzle columnist Barry R. Clarke and lateral thinking expert Paul Sloane have included in their Listmania lists at Amazon.com under Innovative Puzzle Books and Great Puzzle Books respectively. In addition to appearing on this web site, my puzzles can be found at Puzz.com, Crea-Soft, Smart-Kit, Creative Puzzels and BrainBashers. In the past they have appeared in OMNI, The Times, GAMES magazine and, more recently, in The Independent newspaper in an article on creativity entitled How To Become A Genius. Some of my puzzles also appeared on BBC1's Get Smarter In A Week in the creativity test section in 2006. More recently, a few of my puzzles appeared in David Bodycombe's The Riddles of The Sphinx and in Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's Captivating Lateral Thinking Puzzles. In addition to writing puzzles, I also love art and painting and some of my own artwork can be seen in the Gallery section of my web site Aha! Puzzles. Take care, Lloyd.