So, do you want the long version or the short version?
The short version - I've wanted to write books since I was a kid.
The long version involves ten years of dragging myself out of bed at 5am, a career in TV news, a global pandemic, and a cat falling out of a tree.
You're still here? Good. Pull up a chair.
ABOUT ME
I was about ten-years-old when I first learnt the power of words. My teacher set us an assignment to write about our favourite meal. I described my mum's roast beef, in loving, stomach-rumbling detail.
The teacher was so impressed, she asked me to read it out to the whole school in assembly. I’ll never forget the sound of 200 kids salivating noisily. I didn't know it them but it was a sound that was about to set me on a 30-year career revolving around words and writing.
Not sure you could feasibly make a career out of writing books, I spent nearly two decades in journalism instead, starting out on the West Sussex Gazette and various papers in the south of England, before joining ITV in 2000, where I spent most of my career behind the camera, planning stories and putting together news bulletins.
I loved it. But the itch to write books never went away.
For ten years, determined to become a full-time author, I would rise at 5am to squeeze in an hour’s writing before work, then wrote again in the evenings after the kids were in bed. Weekends. Bank holidays. All of it.
And while other self-published authors were building careers around their books, I struggled to shift more than a handful every month. I could have given up. I probably should have given up. But I was determined to make it work.
I started writing men's action thrillers, but in 2018 I tried something different. I'd always loved reading psychological thrillers like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, but never thought I had it in me to write one.
Eventually, I plucked up the courage to give it a go. It turns out that stories about ordinary lives turned on their heads by horrific circumstances was exactly what I should have been writing.
Ordinary people in extraordinary, terrifying situations that could happen to anyone.
The breakthrough came in the Covid lockdown. My second psych thriller, His Wife's Sister was placed into Amazon Prime Reading in the winter of 2020, and just after Christmas, in a moment I still find hard to believe, I became the number one bestselling author in the entire Amazon UK store.
In March 2021, I handed in my notice. I haven't looked back once.
These days, I write full time from our home in Kent, which I share with our three cats and my wife, Amanda, who writes her own thrillers under the name A J McDine.
Sadly, our two boys are now grown up and leading their own busy lives.
Amanda and I run our independent publishing company, Cherry Tree Publishing. People have often asked whether we’d ever write together. We don't. And probably won’t. We work quite differently.
I'm more plot-driven, Amanda is more character-focused. And to be honest, if we tried to write together it would more than likely end in the divorce courts.
It doesn’t stop us spending most evenings dissecting whatever thriller or drama is on TV, accurately predicting every twist before it happens. Our boys used to find this absolutely insufferable when they were at home. We consider it a professional obligation.
As for the cats: there's Minstrel, Amber and Charlie.
Minstrel is our elder stateswoman and has been with us since the boys were small.
Amber is our princess and notable middle child, who’s already used up several of her nine lives. When she was a kitten she fell from a tree and pushed every one of her internal organs into her ribcage and needed emergency surgery which she miraculously survived.
And then there's Charlie, our newest rescue moggy, who is the soppiest creature alive. He spends almost every night either tucked under Amanda's chin, wedged against my legs, or sprawled luxuriously across the full length of the bed while we cling to the edges and say nothing, because he looks so peaceful. And you know, you can’t disturb a sleeping cat, can you?
They are, without question, the best characters in this household. Just don't tell the boys I said so...
.jpeg)
