My very first attempt at a novel...

There are quite a few typos - this hasn't been edited since it was committed to paper/file!

I have slowly been getting back to work on my third novel The Right Place, and for some reason I have been thinking about my journey as a writer so far.
2010-2015 were really the best years as far as my fiction work is concerned: I planned, wrote, edited, published and promoted two novels, I launched Arcane Publishing and I planned and started work on a third novel. 
Since then, it's been very stop/start and I have never found my mojo again as I tried and failed to find a balance between paying the bills and writing/developing my imprint. To say I am disappointed in myself is an understatement! I was on such a roll! 

I moved to Dorset to write a couple of novels inspired by the county but the house hunting, the move and the necessity to pay the bills after the move away from London have actually prevented me from writing and dedicating my time to completing my two projects. I will admit that I also became distracted by the pre-loved/vintage and rare book side of Arcane. But then, alongside writing, having my own bookshop has been another dream of mine! 

And so here we are, ten years later and still no books 3 and 4 to show for it. And things have shifted once again. 
Not only am I getting impatient, but I now struggle to get inspired by the county (I haven't really managed to get out in the countryside properly since spring 2025 - a mixture of having a lot of work, catching a virus and more recently being defeated by the awful weather we've had for several weeks!).

My mindset has switched back to finding inspiration in urban environments where I can get the cultural stimulation I need. We have some idea of the area we want to go to next, but the bonkers housing market is preventing us from moving at the moment, and therefore, I need to ignore my longings for another place and make the most of my time here. I am determined to at least complete book 3 here in Dorset!  
 
Writing books has been a dream of mine since I learnt to read and write (aged 5!) and my passion has always been English literature - I got hooked on Agatha Christie at around 8 or 9 and haven't stopped reading and studying ever since. I have always considered being a writer the best job in the world! 
As a teenager, I wrote (and drew) countless first pages of comic book stories, and I actually completed two full short stories (The first one inspired by the movie Dead Poet Society; the second one by the superheroes comics I used to read and by the classic Hollywood movie Cat People). 

2001 was probably the worst year of my life for reasons I won't go into here. During that period, I wrote many strange and dark texts/poems in the English language which I still have on my hard drive (what to do with them? Anything? Nothing?). Later on in 2005, I had another look at them and did a little bit of editing: I discarded some of them and they got banished to their own lonely Word document. Then I kind of organised the rest of them, not changing anything to the actual poems as their only merit was their rawness and the way they were reflective of spontaneous bursts of rage and creativity usually in the middle of the night (I think I barely slept for about three years between 1998 and 2001, but that's another story...). I named this weird little collection of texts "Dysfunctions". 

Also during that period, I did start writing a book which reflected my lifestyle at the time: chronic insomnia, dodgy flat sharing in London and one foot and a half firmly in the alternative culture of the capital. I had just started writing music reviews for an online French magazine (in both French and English) but hadn't completely found the confidence to write 100% in English, something that would suddenly happen the following year as I developed my freelance music journalism career and started writing for English-language only mags (I did this until 2011). 

So the as-yet untitled novel was written in French and I only committed three chapters to paper (now to Word Doc file). Reading it again this week, I am astonished at my fluency in the French language (this has now faded as I don't really speak or write in French day to day) and I can see the seeds of what will probably become my fourth or fifth novel. I could basically translate the chapters into English and use sections of this long-aborted manuscript... 
I admit that I had completely forgotten about this attempt at writing fiction! 

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