About The Author
01 May 1982, I suppose the ‘The Chariots of Fire’ hitting number one in the charts wasn’t enough that day without me being born into the world.
Born in Chester (England) I spent most of my younger years drawing pictures of virtually anything. Letting my imagination run riot on the page as an image. During my secondary education I’d be found in art classes replicating versions of Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and figuring out how to draw portraits, and so art — or at least creating art — has always been in me.
Outside of school I spent my time either kicking a ball about a field or kicking someone’s head from their shoulders on the martial arts mats, and as I grew into a young adult, I began to fly hawks.
Stories and books were something I’d never considered. I had a love of Movies, but not books.
It was a stubbornness that paved my way to books. I’d watched a popular movie, and it wasn’t to my taste. After voicing my disappointment towards my sister, she simply said, ‘Do you think you can do better?’ and the challenge was set. So, I started to write. And I found a new way to be creative away from drawing a picture. I found that by writing I could make the images in my head move without animation and I began to enjoy it. To enjoy it much more than may day job of creating technical drawings for the building industry.
Although the challenge was set by my sister, I never knew what to write about. ‘They’ say write what you know, and what you love – not understanding this at the time I wrote a story about a hawk that learnt how to fly – it was 140K words of crap. Even my mother used a four-letter word to describe it to me.
But I’m stubborn, and so in 2020, I decided it might be best if I started to read – and I found a love for fantasy. In October I began to write the first draft of Holly – which was easy when I began – I only had one child who would be in bed by 7 and left me with the rest of the night to either read or write – now I have 3 children who stay up all night and so my writing now is done as and when I can.
2 years later, the first draft was done. Not knowing what to do with it – I started to write book 2 on New Year’s Day of 2022. And as 2023 was approaching I set myself a deadline to finish the first draft by the end of the year. New Years Eve, I finished it. But I was still none the wiser with what to do with it, and so I gave a copy to some friends and family. The spelling was awful, the grammar even worse, but I told them to ignore the technical stuff, just read it and see if you like the story – I didn’t want to waste my time polishing it, if it was another 200K words of crap.
But the feedback I received was encouraging – well my mum liked it, and after her last honest review I believed her – and so I decided to send it to an editor, Jess, and my writing world was never the same again…
The years that followed were spent revising – which actually takes a lot longer than you may think.
For those who don’t write – the process (my process)
I began writing Holly. It started off as a YA novel, basing my ideas on the things I didn’t like about the books I’d read, thinking of ways on how I’d have done them differently. But if there was one thing I took from the crap book about the hawk, was that I tend to slip into the darker scenes and so the YA novel began to age. The darker scenes became more uncomfortable for what I’d consider YA. They say write what you love – and so I did, and I abandoned my original target audience. They say write what you know – and so I made a lot of things up (the unspoken licence that is given to the fantasy genre).
Some people say they’re pantsers or plotters – I sit somewhere in between. I usually think of a scene which I think would be cool. It’s usually one I’d like to see in the cinema. These ideas typically come to me when I’m away from the desk whilst walking for a bacon butty, or as I drive past someone’s house and so that’s as far as my plotting goes – all I have to do is get to that scene – but that is my target.
For book one I had the fortune of time – my son would go to bed early and so I’d write a few paragraphs. Friday nights my partner would go out, and I’d happily stay in writing, finding a way to reach that cinematic scene I’d thought up whilst feeding my face.
But the biggest part of the writing – for me – is the editing. It took me 2 years to write the first draft of book 1 and a then a year to write it again. Constantly revising the plot, adding breadcrumbs to greater things, revisiting to include parts that would eventually become more apparent in the next book. Cutting out the bits that only matter to me, but then that allowed space for expansion on the areas that would matter to the reader. But I like this part – I start to see the story lift off the page. The characters become people and not just names. Each pass made the story better and my mind wonders deeper into each chapter or adds another. But I also like this stage because here I’m not alone. I’m blessed to have found Jess, a wonderfully, magnificent editor, one who befriended my characters more than I did myself, and she fed my hunger for my own story. She gave me homework, advised me on books to read, and she worked with my manuscript to a level I never expected… and suddenly, I felt like it was all worthwhile. I owe a lot of thanks to her, and it was nice to have someone to run through Snjodreki with — someone to hold Holly’s hand.