2019 will always be a special year for me, as it was the year that I finally got my first original novel into print. It’s been a long road: for most of my life I’ve only been able to complete works of fanfiction, with a growing but dispiriting portfolio of three-quarters finished original novels piling up in my ‘resting’ folder on my laptop.

And then Nanowrimo 2018 came around and I thought, okay. This is your chance to write something start to finish. No getting sidetracked by fandoms, Masters Assignments, short stories. None of that. Just don’t stop until it’s done.

And I did. I did the obligatory 50k+ I usually do for nano – and kept going. A few months later I had a complete (complete!!) draft in my ‘resting’ folder. I edited it over the spring and early summer with the help of first readers and spag monitors, and Happy Antlers put it out in the world on a hot summer day.

And people bought it, and read it, and a lot of them really liked it.

I can’t really explain how happy this makes me. But it’s a lot.

Since then things have been really busy. My plan to write Hunter and Morgan II for nano this year came up against a lot of real life stuff that made writing near impossible. But I have nearly finished the first novel in another series (Flynn Anderson and the Cave of Echoes) and I’ll be doing the final edit on Moonside soon. Then Hunter and Morgan II will be in the works.

My priority for 2020 is to make sure I don’t have another time like this autumn, when work has taken over the energy that should be going into writing. This is my passion, my life; it’s what keeps my mind and soul healthy.

But 2019 will always have that gloss of being the year that I published my first novel. If you’ve read and enjoyed Hunter and Morgan, thank you. It will always have a special place in my heart.

Hunter and Morgan: Gatecrasher will be out on 1st August, and you can preorder your Kindle copy on Amazon now.

With this fabulous cover by Fragilespark

Please tell your friends!

I feel I’m very much on the cusp of a Thing. An exciting thing. A thing that feels really right. And terrifying. And liberating.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. My mum still has my first literary work in her treasure box. It says, ‘Once there was a dog. It was v fluff. One day it went for a walk. It fonded a stick. Dog was happy.’  Judging by the state of the lettering I think I must have been about six.

It could be argued I’ve been writing the same plot ever since.

From the heady heights of ‘Dog’ I trod the well worn evolutionary path of the writer through my school career. My pony-book phase when I was eleven. Pompous essays about the dangers of smoking when I was twelve. Stories about rebellious young women who smoked when I was fourteen. Melodramas about people taking LSD and flying out of windows (spoiler: they died!!) when I was fifteen. At the same time, I discovered that if I wrote about whoever people had crushes on, people would pay me to read it. And so it was that I wrote and sold love stories about boybands to my classmates. It wasn’t about the money, though. I mean, the money was nice – I had a 20-a-day nicotine habit to support by then – but what I really loved was when people read my stories and liked them. When a happy ending made for happy readers. It was such a happy symbiosis, that I could have fun writing something, and then someone could have fun reading it. Very different from most writing you do as a teenager, which usually consists of you writing answers to questions you don’t much care about, only to have them judged by people you’ve never met according to criteria that were themselves a mystery to be solved.

Fortunately I was quite good at that, too, so I got to University and went on to be a researcher and a politician, and my storytelling went into reports and leaflets and press releases. They didn’t always have happy endings, and only rarely did anyone enjoy reading them. But it was okay, because I spent a lot of my spare time writing fanfiction, which is honestly the best apprenticeship any writer could have. And every now and then someone would say they liked my stories, and occasionally someone would say something I wrote helped them through a long, dark night. That felt amazing. I didn’t care that there wasn’t any money now (I’d given up smoking and had a decent salary). I just loved the writing, and that people liked to read it.

Then life threw a few curve balls my way, and eventually dropped a (metaphorical) piano on my head. And I got the chance to start again. So I thought, okay. I’ll have a go at writing professionally. I did an MA to find out if I was good enough before I made a fool of myself, and that went pretty well. I wrote some short stories and the beginning of a novel, which I liked. I sold some of them, which was exciting. But there was still something missing.

And then I started reading romance novels for the first time in a decade or so. Queer romance novels of various flavours – and there were so many more of them than the last time I’d dabbled, and so many of them were good. Like, really good. I was between fandoms at the time, so I consumed romance novels in exactly the same way I read fanfiction: voraciously, passionately, devotedly. Then I re-read them with a critical eye and wanted to hug the writers so hard for being so amazing and talented and pouring that talent into a genre so many idiots look down their noses at. I remembered how important romance is.  I found myself eyeing my own half-finished romance novels, the legacy of nanowrimos past, and remembered how much I loved them. I realised something important.

I want to write about love. Yes, speculative fiction is awesome and (in my opinion) the best route to social change. It’s nice writing things that your more staid relatives will read and say nice things about. I’m going to keep doing that. But it’s not me. It’s not what my imagination really wants to do all the time. Every now and then, sure. But most of the time my head is full of people falling in love, having sex, fighting crime, snarking at each other, discovering things about themselves and kissing on beaches. With dragons. There’s always dragons, don’t ask me why, they just pop up.

A year on from this revelation, here I am. Writing what I love. Suddenly the half abandoned novels are getting finished, and new ones are springing to life. I feel free, and useful, and passionate, because this is me. This is what I do. And I love it.

I hope you will, too. I mean, if you don’t, that’s fine, there’s lots of other romance . But I really hope you do.

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Hunter and Morgan: Gatecrasher will be published in August by Happy Antlers Publications.