When I was about nine, my mum started working late shifts in a factory, and my brother, older by eight years, had to babysit me.

To be alone with his girlfriend, he used to pay me a few shillings to go to bed early. In order to distance it from some sort of solitary confinement, he also used to help find stuff for me to read; comics, magazines and all types of books. I ploughed through dozens of the Readers Digest abridged hardbacks. 

This meant that, not only did he give me a kidney in later life, he also turned my small bedroom into a place of wonder, igniting in me a passion for fiction. Reading became everything to me. 

Much later, and after completing a series of books and concluding they were all essentially the same story, I decided to try writing. After several years and many iterations, I completed Madness of the Turtle.

Then came the more arduous task of trying to sell the book. Eventually it was suggested I write something else, and so produced The Collection of Heng Souk.  This also went nowhere and, deciding that traditional publishing was a club I was probably never going to join, I self-published.

Initially, I was hoping to get a sense of where I was with writing. The feedback was eye-opening, ranging from kind to absolutely brutal. Yet it didn’t put me off. Just helped me develop a thicker skin.

Today, I still see writing as trying to solve a puzzle, striving to ensure that the thousands of choices made between start and finish can produce something better than what went before. 

That, and it’s a release for all the thoughts crowding my head.