Where It All Began

My first novel is being launched in Hughes and Hughes in Dundrum on November 8th.

People have already bought the Kindle edition and pre-ordered the print edition. Some have even told me they're getting multiple copies, and still showing up to the launch so they can get a signed copy.

This is so far beyond what I dreamed of when I was a 12 year-old boy thinking to himself that he wanted to be a writer.

My mind was made up, that being a writer was the only thing I really wanted to do, when my parents brought me and my sister down to Tramore in Waterford for a long weekend. While there, we went to Celtworld.

Celtworld closed long ago. It was a tacky place where you could go and watch animatronic re-tellings of Celtic mythology, then wander through a small gift shop and speak to a head hanging from a tree. Sure, the puppetry was awkward and everything was highly over-dramatic. But for a 12 year-old boy from Bray, jealous of the amazing things I saw people go and do in movies from America, this was the most amazing thing in the world.

I wrote the background for my first book that night on a sheet of paper, using a blue Bic pen. It was awful, full of cliches and stereotypes. My little fantasy world where the hero was told in the first chapter he was the son of a great hero who died a thousand years ago, and took it in his stride like it happened all the time.

But it got me started. From then on I spent most of my free time imagining different stories and characters to write about. I daydreamed in class. At dinner. Lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I started to look at everything around me, wondering how I could use different things in my stories. And I wrote. I wrote maybe a chapter or two, then got bored and moved on to something else. I wrote until my fingers were red and my wrist ached. Until my parents told me to turn off the light and go to sleep. I read books and watched movies, thinking to myself "I'm going to do that one day."

20 years later, and "one day" is now.

Welcome to a month of blog posts about Locked Within, the first of a new urban fantasy trilogy, telling the story of Nathan Shepherd. An office worker dissatisfied with his lot in life, Nathan ventures into the darkness he finds all around him, and has no idea what lies in store.

On Thursday, I'll talk about Nathan, and his more humble origins in my early attempts to write a novel.