The Unravelling - Fresh New Futuristic Thriller - Unveiled!

I work a lot. Nothing unusual there. However, one consequence of that 'workaholic' ethos in my line of work, is a lot of down time. Boredom.

Airports.

Aeroplanes.

Hotels.

In the period 2017-2020 (pre-covid or "the good ol' days") I travelled over half a million air miles, regularly hitting 200k miles in the air in one year.

That's a lot of airports, a lot of aeroplanes, and even more hotels!

There is only so many in-flight movies a guy can watch before he's forced to succumb to "Paw Patrol - The Movie" - or something like that!

This is me in my "day-job" probably being all evangelical about how the Telecom Industry is pretty awful at selling to customers. It puts me in a great place to know the future, and to forecast out some of the trends in my own industry and outside of it. After all, Telco's are embedded in cars, wedded to cable and TV companies, and they power our communications the world over, be that cables in the ground or under the sea or over the air.

So how did I come to write a book?

So I started jotting down some thoughts using the notes app of my iPhone. I'm not sure that's a regular (or even recommended) process for any author let alone a budding first timer! I started off with just some bullet points about the things I wanted to say;

• 3-4 day working weeks the norm

• Drugs commonplace

• Massive crime in the underclasses

• The continued rise of the police state

• The rich 0.5 have everything

And I just kept on going till I had a few pages of things I thought would come true over the next twenty to thirty years. I knew I wanted to write a futuristic thriller as it's a genre I really enjoy. So I kept going.

Next I started putting in what I wanted my story to say;

• 4 families in real time - moving back and forth

• Places I had lived or visited - Moscow, Singapore, London, New York

• Something strange - system malfunction

• Associated weather events

• Riots, a Wall St crash

It took me an age to get to the characters, but here is my description of the protagonist in "The Unravelling" - Joe.

"Hero is a mind detective, like Minority Report. Family man, 20 hour week, normal, but he catches Mister X due to his fantasy about Suki which mirrors how he feels about Monica".

That's the exact sentence, and from there Joe Jones was born!

My next task was to draft the storyboard - 15-25 "chapters" that would show the flow of the story. It went like this;

1. New York intro to Joe - Google Crash

2. London intro to Mister X

3. Moscow Dystopia

4. Singapore Intro to Suki

.....and so on! Once I got to 25 (I think it was) I literally just started writing. A few pages at a time, a chapter on a long flight, all with two thumbs on a tiny screen.

Then covid hit. I had half a novel, roughly 20,000 words, but a good skeleton, and I knew I had to get it to 50,000 words to stand a chance. The project stood still for 2 years while the world went crazy.

I got serious about finishing in the summer of 2022, and I transitioned to my home office, a triple screen sanctuary I work from most days, complete with a TV blasting out my music of the day to help power my creativity. Arctic Monkeys, Morrissey, Radiohead and The Cure before you ask!

And now I'm here - with a real book in my hand, a proof read manuscript, properly edited, and finished with care in character building, back stories and world building. I'm now starting the whole marketing piece which is another short but hilarious tale.

My official job title is "Vice President of Sales & Marketing" for a tech company. So I should know what I am doing right? Despite an amazing team of talented marketers who I know would help me in their spare time, I've decided to do it ALL myself. Well apart from the cover art and some associated images which is way way beyond my skill set.

So now I'm into this "work away from work" journey in my spare time. Write a new blog? No problem? Connect my website to google analytics and master the merry go round of Tik Tok sign in's and the differece between a profile and a page on facebook, and I may yet be asking for help haha.

I will keep this blog going and detail more of my process, my marketing journey, and even some of what my back story is. If I can inspire one more would-be writer to understand that they CAN DO IT, that would be fab, even better if I inspire my two little children, for whom I am really doing all of this.

Speak soon!