The story behind the story: How I came to write "Billy Twigg and the Storm of Shadows" on a mobile phone and win a publishing deal for my troubles!
February 22, 2017 Writing a book was one of those bucket list items for me, I guess. A must do it before I die type of deal. That's certainly how it all started out, about ten years ago, in Australia. I'd always liked writing stories as a kid growing up in the Scottish Borders, and had spent a few summer holidays hunched over my parents old typewriter, trying to hammer out my "bestseller". It would invariably be influenced by whatever my favourite movie or TV show was at the time, or maybe by the books I was reading. I liked macabre tales of mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction mostly (and still do in many ways). It didn't take me long to realise that writing an actual book was a really big deal (particularly when I was 13 years old and only had six weeks off school!) so I switched to short stories (that I had a realistic chance of finishing) and had the odd one published in my high school magazine as a teenager in the mid-1980s. Tha...