I write. A day without writing is a day I don’t feel right. It’s always been this way.

Some of what I write has been published, some not yet. I’ve had a huge gap of too many years from the first time I wrote something worth reading until now, the second time.

The first was called A Day For Pyjamas. I wrote it when I was 18, just after A Levels when I couldn’t stop writing. I had no idea how to get it published. I typed it up and stuck it in my bag and knocked on doors up and down the Grays Inn Road, which I thought was the best place to start. I sent a copy to Pan Books, deducing that Pan sold a lot so they might like a look. I got their name from the back of a Sven Hassel book, Wheels of Terror. I had a strange idea about how things worked, even then. Pan quite liked it. One of their editors read it over a weekend. They didn’t want to publish it because they said they preferred to re-print books other people had published first, and it was undeniably a bit short on Tiger tanks and swastikas.

I was running out of options. I didn’t know anybody in publishing. The interwebs weren’t even a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. So I had a chat with Bath Arts Workshop. They wanted to do it, except their grant was cut. Shortly after that their building burned down, after a pretend Rastafari getting back to his roots decided to build a cooking fire on a wooden floor inside the 200 year-old building.

The manuscript stayed in a drawer for the next couple of decades while I spent time doing things that weren’t anywhere near as satisfying as writing. Writing was always a part of what I did, but not the main part, the part that made me feel alive.

I ran a blog for a food company. And then last August I went down to the West Country again, where I was brought up, where things are done differently. When I came back I couldn’t stop writing. Competitions, short stories and a whole new 103,000 word manuscript, a whole new book. It’s called Not Your Heart Away.

They’re both on Kindle now and starting to sell and both being published on paperback very soon. Come back and find out when.