And then there were two....

Summer 2007, the start of year-long trip around the world, a train carriage, a PDA – a personal digital assistant that back then was its own thing, rather than being a phone – and an idea for a thriller story. To be fair, not much of an idea, but a teeny tiny seed, I won’t call it a germ because as the idea grew into a story in 2020 the word germ just doesn’t feel right.

The train was the Trans-Mongolian Express, a journey from Moscow to Beijing that, seeing as it takes six nights, doesn’t really feel like an express but that does give lots of thinking time. During that time, I jotted down a few notes, a little about characters but mostly about a plot that centred around a protagonist suffering violent nocturnal disturbances. Six or so months later, now in a bach (holiday home) on New Zealand’s North Island, I returned to the outline and wrote a few pages of the first chapter, describing three characters independently dying. And then I stopped writing, or at least stopped writing my story and returned to journaling the trip that my wife and I were then halfway through.

12 years later, Spring 2020, England, and I was freshly furloughed, forced into lockdown with the rest of the world, and intrigued to find out what was going to happen to my characters. In what now seems to have been a fugue state I had knocked out a draft of the whole story by the time I was back at work in the early autumn. Encouraged by positive feedback from my wife I spent the next two years variously editing and sending out queries to agents. In late November this year I pushed the button to self-publish a much-changed version of Dare to Dream as a paperback and ebook – minus the character deaths I’d written in 2008 (so no spoilers here then!)

All that remained was to promote it……

Carriage on the Trans-Mongolian Express, birthplace of Dare to Dream