As the publication date approaches for my debut novel, I find myself reflecting on the journey that brought me to this point. I’d thought that I’d share it with you in the hope that it might encourage you to write down the story you have inside you.

The outline

My own story is about how a military officer and public service bureaucrat came to write a work of fiction. When this chapter started, I knew that I’d be retiring after thirty-eight years of full-time work and was wondering what to choose to do with all the free hours that would soon be mine.

My work back then allowed me very little time to read for pleasure, but it was my adult daughter’s love of reading and my son’s undergraduate degree in film production that led me at first to focus on the idea of trying my hand at writing a script. Once you understand the format, a script is a wonderful way to take in a story, in about the same amount of time that it takes to watch a movie.

During the autumn of 2023, I’d already started scribbling down ideas for characters and had settled on a setting for my story, but I knew little about how to tell it, so I decided to enrol in a UCLA Extension course, Film 1, during the spring of 2024. The result by the end of that April, after a solo writing retreat to Carcassonne, France, was a plot outline for ‘What is Hidden’, the working title for what has since become The Myths That Bind Us.

I finished work at the end of June 2024. No longer sure if a script was the best format to tell the story that I wanted to write, I enrolled in two UCLA Extension courses, Film 2 and Novel 1, for the summer, starting the week after my last day of work.