How the Books Came to Life
Lots of people say that a certain set of books got them reading. Well for me, that certain set of books got me writing. Harry Potter got me writing – although it was just fan fiction at the time. Writing fan fiction gave me the opportunity to play in someone else’s sandbox while honing my talents, making mistakes and basically learning how stories work. After writing for a number of years, I started to get the same comments, had I thought about writing my own original piece and my thought was, wow, that sounds like a lot of work.
At the same time, I had finished teaching in the UK and moved to Bangkok to and teach as I wanted to try working abroad. This is something that I would recommend to anyone. After a year, I decided to return to Europe, primarily due to living so far away from family and missing them, but before I did I wanted to travel around Asia. I had trips planned to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia, having seen a far bit of Thailand in the year I was over there.
In the autumn to winter of 2009, I was travelling with a backpack, I decided to only carry one book with me and change it for others while I was travelling. There are several bookshops on the backpacking route where you can take a book in and exchange it for another – well worth looking into if you ever decided to backpack. Anyway, I had reached Seim Reap in Cambodia, and I was reading a book (which I will never tell people the name of the title or author) and I just couldn’t get on with it, so I put it down. The bookshop to exchange it at was closed for the evening, so I checked out the TV but nothing was on in English – one channel had a cartoon in Italian with Cambodian subtitles and on another channel the TV show was in German – neither of which are languages I speak. So I headed out, bought a notebook and pen and started to plot of my own story.
The characters of Abigail and Josef came to me straight away and the scene that ended up being chapter six in Firebound – although it has been through many changes. At the time, I had no idea what the different world was or how it worked, I just could see these two characters. Luckily, I still had over a months’, worth of travelling to do, both for the amazing places that I visited on these travels but also because I now had time without distractions to develop this world, jot out scenes and really discovered my characters.
I returned to England not long after, and contacted the woman that had helped me as the beta reader to my fan fiction with a simple question but a big ask – I’ve got an idea for original fiction would you help? Luckily, she said yes – well it would have been a short story if she had said no. Over the next year, as well as moving to Geneva for work, she became the backbone to many an idea. Not only did she look at my early dyslexic drafts of chapters, which let’s be honest at the time, was pure ‘throw-up on a page’ and a complete mess, but she acted as a sounding board as I tried to work out the ideas. A year in, it was finished, I was moving back to the UK again and I thought it was finished – how wrong could I be? The following year, work moved to Spain, I fine-tuned book one to a stage where I thought it was finished and started work for book two.
On my final return to England – I’ve not moved to work abroad since, I joined a writers’ group, listened to many writing podcasts and made the decision to indie publish. Making this decision, I knew I that I would need to have at least a draft for the first three books in the series and to know how the last two were going to go with the main plot points and a few scenes written before I took book one to publication. So, with working full time, buying a house, running writing events, writing the Escafeld short stories – also on this site, a world pandemic and many other bits of life getting in the way, it took until 2022 to get the world and the books in a decent shape.
In the summer of 2022, I took some time to write as I was determined to get the books out that year. Focusing on just the writing – Firebound came out that September, just a few days after my birthday and Fire Heir followed the July of 2023. The next three coming over the next three years.