Looking Back

Huge excitement – Just One Damned Thing After Another has twenty-thousand reviews and ratings on amazon.co.uk.

Huge excitement – Just One Damned Thing After Another has twenty-thousand reviews and ratings on amazon.co.uk. Even now, twelve years on from its first appearance as a self-published story, I can hardly believe it.

Firstly, before I start rambling on – thank you to everyone who bought it, read it, took the trouble to leave a review, and/or recommended it to their friends. A grateful author says thank you all very much.

Given that these days I can barely remember who I am, let alone what I had for breakfast this morning, its quite astonishing that I have such vivid memories of the first day I started to write. Even the very first sentence.

I was staying in Harrogate at the time, getting a house ready to sell. I worked away every day, scrubbing, painting, doing the garden and so forth and listening to the words running through my head. I’ve always dreamed stories but there was something new and different about this one. An urgency. A compulsion. Ideas, phrases and images were crowding through my mind – appearing from nowhere. St Mary’s. Max. Big Dave Murdoch. The Boards of Honour. The Outdoor Survival Test. Tea. Chocolate. Pods came slightly later, if I remember rightly.

I was painting a stairwell at the time. I don’t know about anyone else but I think better if my hands are busy and all this was ricocheting around my brain until eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put down the tin of paint and my brush, washed my hands and walked down the road to the Co-op where I bought a recycled A4 exercise book and three blue pens.

Returning home I made myself finish painting the wall first – which wasn’t the best move, because now I was concentrating on the story rather than the painting with the result that I picked up the wrong tin – vinyl silk instead of matt. Same colour – different finish – which resulted in a very obvious dividing line between the two. I couldn’t be bothered to repaint – I had better things to do now – so I had to adopt a rather strange position when showing people around just to disguise the join.

For the avoidance of unnecessary stress – something we should all do these days – the house sold and yes, I did point it out and they laughed. I’d followed all the house-selling guidelines about keeping things neutral and I suspect the first thing they did on moving in was repaint over all that beige anyway.

I’ve gone wandering off again, haven’t I? Sorry.

Anyway, filled with a strange excitement, I sat down at the table, opened the exercise book, smoothed the page, and without a clue what I was doing, dived straight into the maelstrom in my mind and wrote the first sentence. Which I can still remember today.

There was such a logjam of thoughts in my mind that I couldn’t seem to think straight.

This was Max’s reaction on seeing Clive Ronan and his men in the Cretaceous. It didn’t survive the edit but I still remember it.

And yes, I was writing longhand, but my plan was to write longhand in the morning and type it all up in the afternoon on my what was then the latest thing in desktop computers. It was huge and with a tower processor. Remember them? And dial-up?

It was also round about this time that housework disappeared from my life. Along with regular meals, coherent thought, normal human relations and the desire to go outside.

About three days later, I skipped back down to the Co-op for another exercise book because I’d filled it up with dinosaur notes and sketches. Two days later I had to do it all again, although with rather less joi de vivre owing to an unfortunate accident when, not looking where I was going as I chased the DPS lorry, I fell off the steps to the front door, wearing only my pyjamas – just to be clear, I was the one in the PJs, not the steps – crushing a ceanothus, catching my foot between two bricks and breaking two toes. Incidentally, not the only writing-related injury I’ve sustained during my career.

Ah – memories.

House sold, I returned to Turkey – whence I came. I finished the story, showed it to some friends, and then had to rewrite the entire ending and resurrect everyone I’d killed off. Including a young scamp named Markham.

My attempts at self-publishing were somewhat shambolic and I embarrassed myself utterly in front of Amazon’s customer care department, but we got there in the end and Just One Damned Thing After Another burst upon an unprepared world.

No one was more surprised than me when it seemed that people really liked it. I watched, astounded, as it forged its way steadily up the Amazon charts. Which I didn’t even know existed until that moment.

Still stunned by this unexpected success, I was contacted by Hazel, who ran Accent Press. I’ve no idea how she tracked me down, Trust me, two thousand miles away wasn’t anything like far enough. Naturally, her first question was – What about the next one? I’m pleased to report I’d already made a start and was actually at the part where Jack the Ripper was giving Kal and Max such a hard time.

From that moment on there was no holding me. Goodbye work/life balance and hello work/work – but as I think Sir Terry Pratchett said – Writing is the most fun you have on your own.

I have a lot of fun on my own.

So, once again, to all those who has been kind enough to leave a review – thank you so much. And now, back to work.

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