Finish what you start.

Describe one positive change you have made in your life.

Looking back over my writing life, it’s clear that there are essentially two separate parts to it.

Part one spanned from my earliest scribblings in 1997 through to when I was made redundant from my day-job in 2009.

Part two started in 2018 and continues to this day.

There were the odd dabbles in fiction in the nine years between, but mostly those years were a void.

There’s also a distinct difference in my approach to my two writing eras.

Between 1997 and 2009 I had loads of ideas, but never really finished anything. Sure, I had a lot of completed first drafts but nothing (barring one novel) was polished.

Redundancy caused chaos and it would be nine years before life settled down enough for me to turn back to writing properly.

And this time, when I did, I made myself one promise; finish what you start. And by finish I mean finish, edit, redraft, edit and repeat and then submit.

Has it worked?

Well, last week I published a collection of short stories, the Mistress of the Crows, most of which were written post-2018 (the two that weren’t have been extensively re-written in the second part of my writing career).

And I’m also the proud book daddy of two novels published by Darkstroke Books.

So, yeah, I’d say it worked perfectly!

Check out all my published books here.