Writing is a craft that I still do not take to very easily. Don’t get me wrong, I love the creative spirit, and I have no trouble sitting down to put my ideas down in chapters. For me, the story is king. Being a youth in the seventies and the eighties gave me a firm grounding in film and movies. I have devoured tens of thousands of them in the following decades. I had wondered whether I should be in film making, certainly my eldest daughter seems set on that path, which is very exciting. The problem I faced was that I didn’t seem to think visually, much as that was the format of my choice back then, but rather I felt a story through concept and character. Of course, all this input lead to my desire to output.
Back then we didn’t have smart phones or digital cameras, so film making was complex, arduous and expensive. So I started to write, just out of the blue. I produced a novella in no time, all hand written and then typed up by my mother, who was a fast typist. She had one of those electronic golf-ball typewriters – it weighed a ton and hummed constantly, poised to explode once a key was tapped. I was convinced it was more than typing: it was embossing!
At school, we had to produce a project for O-Level English consisting of a mandatory anthology of poetry reviews and any amount of original material. I asked if I could include my novella and the teacher agreed. Thus what had started as a personal project became work I could do in lesson time.
The next year, I wrote a sequel, about 50% larger, and submitted it for the school prize for original literature. As I understand it, the story won on sheer size alone: the teacher had declined to read it and it was about fifty times larger than any other entrant. Hurrah for brute force!
By this point, I had expelled the “story everyone has in you,” which had been a recurring dream as a younger boy, so I set to thinking about something bolder still. As I studied for my A-Levels, I began what was to become the largest project I had ever undertaken: one hundred and thirty six thousand words written across six and a half years.
Perhaps because I thought all three works were seriously lacking, I stopped serious writing and only started again three decades later. I had travelled, got married, had kids, and developed a career in software development; I had suffered the most deadly type of stroke and recovered 100%; I had become vegan with the rest of my family and enjoyed the fine art of growing as much of my own food as I could in a suburban setting with multiple allotment plots. Life is good. I hadn’t stopped developing stories, though, and by this time I had accumulated folders and folders full of ideas.
Interestingly, one idea I couldn’t shake and, although this remains unwritten (so far), it was like an ear worm, constantly reminding me of the fun of writing. Since we now have access to so much material on the internet, particularly authors promoting themselves by providing information about how to write and self-publish. This was the wood that fell onto my embers. Suddenly, I was absorbing knowledge that I had never learned, about the art of writing stories and making it good for the reader.
I began with a simple premise, adding a pinch of purpose (the kind of drum you want to strike), and dropped in a splash of my favourite plot device, and this lead to a lot of note taking. After a few months, I had started researching with earnest, knowing exactly what the story was but wanting to get the details right and the writing craft honed. A few more months later, I just started to write, and finished it in another three months after that.
Emboldened by early reactions from the few friends and family I could get to read Rogue, I set to the task of accepting that this was probably an eight book saga and set to work on Book 2. My hubris and excitement was short-lived and I soon realised that I had still much to learn. Book 2, Rebel, was considerably harder to get right. I struggled and ended up rewriting over half of it until, after two years, I got it right. That taught me that there was definitely a process, which I might have been a little lucky with on the first story, plus writing the first of a saga is always easier by nature since you are naturally world-building and following stories have more work to do to continue to feel that way but getting into deeper issues, all without compromising what made the original work.
So, the third book was a little easier. I dusted myself off and decided to get back on that horse. A more reasonable size, Book 3, Ronin, had many similarities with Book 1, but again we are deeper into the saga and a different tone was needed. That lead to some significant risks, and still it wasn’t as quick as three months but at nearer nine months it was still considerably less than two years. I was gratified that, eventually, my friends all agreed the third was my best so far.
All this was whilst I was continuing my full-time job as a hands-on, leader of a team of software engineers, and father of three girls, growing up fast, making it hard to fit the time in consistently.
Somewhere in the middle of Book 3, causing much of the longer time to write, my brother was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer and he had asked me to take on his autistic eight-year-old son. Since most of us are similarly inclined, with one daughter also diagnosed, that wasn’t our biggest concern: this child had been the victim of extreme neglect, missing out on all the opportunities to learn social skills and common sense. To all intents and purposes, he was like a boy Tarzan, a Mowgli or even simply an alien, and in our care he would begin a journey that ought to have started at birth, but hadn’t.
We also had to extend our house, with all the complications and mess that came with it. 2025 is now considered our annus horribilis, which we are glad to see the back of. The disruption to my daily schedule, going back to doing school runs after work, put my writing on the back burner – something I vowed to change come the new year, which I did.
On one of our many drives from London to Exeter, to manage the situation before the boy came to us, led to a conversation with my wife, about Book 2, and how and inversion to the premise that also led to Book 3 could be an entirely new story. I liked the sound of writing a story tackling the advent of AI in a much more relevant and contemporary way very appealing. Changing format to a SciFi Crime Thriller also gave me the chance to stretch my skills and grow.
It was also true to say that I wrote The Many and The Few for myself, and to satisfy my desire to engage with classic-styled hard SciFi, but this new story had a very marketable feel to it. Never one to write with marketing in mind, I decided this coincidence was an opportunity I ought not miss out on, so I put The Many and The Few on hold as I wrote “No Skin In The Game”.
During 2025, I was foolish enough to believe I could write Book 4 at the same time, bouncing between them as I saw fit, but I soon realised that No Skin In The Game was too complex and new for me to do that successfully. 2026 is about finishing No Skin In The Game and then writing Book 4 before Christmas.
Another resolution for the new year was to begin the one task that I had been putting off for four years or more now: marketing. Getting the word out, building a profiles, finding my readers – this was all something I was unfamiliar with, and frankly it scared me silly. However, at the time re-editing and improving the look of this website, and writing these very words, I am finally starting this process.
I hope that I find you, my readers.
I am sure I still have much to learn and plenty of room to improve. I hope you will join me on that journey.