Well, I wrote two books, three screenplays, two pilot teleplays, and about twenty-five short stories. And that’s just the ones I finished, there were countless other failed attempts along the way. What would be more accurate to say, ‘ I wrote one book worth sharing.’ So here we are, with my debut novel on the horizon, it felt like a good time to reflect on how I got here…
I suppose it started in primary school. I used to write ghost stories with a friend of mine. I even recall one night while my cousin was babysitting I wrote a story about an evil school bus driver who took the kids off-road into hell and was laughing maniacally as the kids erupted in flames and disappeared one by one. The sole survivor was Joe, the cool kid who sat at the back of the bus, who stole the driver’s keys and managed to escape. If you read the blurb for Lullabies for Satan – pre-order available now at Waterstone’s, Amazon, and direct from Pegasus Publishers – you can see that my style hasn’t changed much since those early days. Although now I use words like maniacally.
I read a lot in those days, I suppose I was somewhat inspired by the Saga of Darren Shan YA books that I read in their entirety. Couple that with the biblical stories I was surrounded by while being raised Catholic and it’s not hard to see my early influences. As a teen, I was more into comedy, and I even attempted my first teleplay, handwritten in a spare school hotter, and shared only amongst close friends. I don’t have it anymore, and probably for the best, as I imagine it was quite shit. As I neared the end of high school I became a self-proclaimed cinephile – in other words, a snob – and felt I was destined to be an underappreciated screenwriter. In that final year of high school, I wrote a horribly disjointed one-hundred-and-sixty-page screenplay about… being in the final year of high school. It was my attempt at getting better by making things personal, à la Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Of course, I forgot the personal part and just wrote a jumbled-up, cliched, piece of nonsense. Moving into Uni I became even more of a snob, I started reading the American classics, starting with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the degeneracy of Bukowski and Miller, and the beat generations Kerouac and Burroughs – some of whom I still like. Now I felt destined to become a down-on-his-luck author and poet, traveling the back woods of… East Kilbride I suppose, with no one recognising my genius till I died, long before my time and not a penny to my name.
It would take me most of my twenties to get over myself and start to find my own style. I took a break from reading and writing for a bit after leaving Uni, I took it back up around my mid-twenties, primarily with short stories as I struggled to find the time to commit to anything much longer. Then a twist of fate in the form of a redundancy, paired with a global pandemic. This left me with a lot of time on my hands and fuck all to do. Thankfully, I’d written a short story about an insomnia-suffering Devil. The short story became the first chapter, and the rest dutifully followed over two months of unemployment, before I had to find a job again – bloody bills. At the end of it, I had something I’d never had before, a piece of work I was proud of. It’s a ridiculous premise, and the story is laden with absurdity and eccentric characters, but still, there was something to it, a little piece of something real.
After a heavy – and often brutal – review by my partner, Zenash, it was ready for a second draft, and then, to the publishers. Perhaps the story of the publishing process will come another day. Today, fuck it, I’m just happy. I wrote a book, and now you can read it.