My Fantasy World

I have no idea whether this is true of other writers, but I do tend to sometimes live in a bit of a fantasy world. I can’t help but drift off at times and imagine wonderful or dramatic things happening that lead to exciting adventures, taking me away from the mundanities of everyday life.

These little dreams I have are more often than not where I get ideas for stories from. Without exception, they’re all fundamentally built with the purpose of escapism.

Just as I get lost in a daydream (or night dream) and it takes me away from the world for a bit, I hope to entertain readers in the same way, helping them to get lost in someone else’s story.

When I say fantasy world, I think it’s important to note, however, that there is a strict rule to my dreaming: I like everything to exist within the world that we live in. There’s just something so much more exciting to me about fantastical things happening but with the hint that they could, possibly, just maybe be true.

Two of my favourite stories of all time are The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula. I find them utterly inspiring. I was so drawn into these stories and they’ve always stayed with me. It’s so interesting to imagine that a simple cat statue could change your life forever. It’s simple yet exciting and it all plays in the world that we know and love.

It may sound bizarre but I also think Vampires are logical. You never know, they could actually exist, and just the idea of that makes stories like Dracula spark my imagination. I love the idea that the premise of True Blood, with Vampires ‘outing themselves’, may be just around the corner. Ridiculously unlikely, but never say never. After all, Vampires have a human foundation, and so their reality isn’t too far a stretch.

With my imagination illuminated when I come across a bit of the unknown in the safety of our known world, that’s what I always end up writing about, and that’s what you can always expect from my stories. I like to make the world that we live in just a little bit more fantastical.

Bird

My debut novel is called Bird and the story is very typically me: two people in London with jobs, cars and houses, but magical things happen that send them on an adventure like nothing they’ve encountered before.

I came up with the idea of Bird when I was a teenager. I had a horrid nightmare one night about a man who turned into a Bird. I remember this red bird, a truly unique bird, sitting on a window sill. It looked around at me and a tear trickled down its cheek. Not long before, this bird had been a man but his life was never to be the same again. I knew there was no way to ever turn him back.

I couldn’t let go of this dream, it had been so vivid. As always, in such cases, I grabbed my notebook and starting to turn it into a short story. I’ve recently published the original story on Scriggler if you were interested.

About twenty years later, clearing some stuff out, I came across the short story typed out on yellowing paper. It was my dad who suggested that it might be interesting to work on and expand in to a novel and so, from there, using a few other daydreams along the way, I turned my little story into a full length adventure.

Obviously, being my debut novel, I am very proud of it. I’ve had great feedback from other people too. If you wanted to take a look, it’s available on the Kindle or in paperback from Amazon.

I never originally intended to write a sequel, but there was one that naturally came from the story and I had a lot of people tell me they wanted to read more about Beth and Simon. So Book 2 called The Birds will be published on 19^th November. I’ll keep you posted.