From childhood I’ve been on a long journey towards something. Something elusive. Something that while I’ve always thought myself capable, I’ve never in my long career managed to achieve. That something is tackling and completing writing a novel. On 29 May 2020 I typed the 100,625th word of my first novel. The journey to write this novel has been long. The journey to write a novel has been longer. I always felt that if I could complete one book that I would not only prove to myself that I was capable, but I will have taught myself by having undertaken the journey, how to do it again. And again.

In the last 3 weeks I’ve been working on the first rewrites of my first novel. I’ve always known that the real crafting is in the rewrites, and that is proving true. This is where you finesse the work, craft the story into something that becomes more than just words on a page. But my enthusiasm hasn’t stopped there. I outlined the second book of the series and I’m now on Chapter 5 of the new book. I’m also outlining the first book of a second series that I intend to start working on soon.

My intention has always been to publish my work as an independent. So alongside of the writing, I’ve been learning about book cover design, copy editing and book production as well as building a following, marketing and PR. It’s a complicated process, with no guarantees of success. For me, writing and eventually publishing the first book is a learning journey, and one that I hope will enable me to both write and publish more books in the future.

I hope you are able to follow along with me, and I hope that this journey is a long and successful one. But I guess we will see. It’s definitely going to entail a lot of hard work, trial and error, and ultimately luck. And so, please, wish me luck.

Am now nearly 25,000 words into the first novel of the trilogy I’m working on. Once again work intervened, but am now back on track and writing.

I took some time in the last month to go through all of the story lines I’ve developed over the last ten or so years, and clear them up to see how my ideas I had for novels – credible ideas. Turns out, there are 13 in total. Though the novel I am working on now is more horror – a genre I’m not used to reading or writing – the rest are all crime/spy thriller genres.

I’ll try to keep track of progress here going forward, and intend to publish some of the short fiction and poetry I’ve written over the years. Don’t panic – though the short fiction and poetry have more of a literary focus, it seems my novel-length work is purely focused around horror, crime and spy thrillers.

Read my first contribution, a poem entitled Herring Cove, 1997.