The Day It All Changed Forever might be my 10th book, but it’s been on a journey that none of my other books have gone through. It’s taken me 22 years to write it. If you’re curious why, here’s the full story.
The core idea is from a story I wrote when I was at school, back in the 90s. I had the idea in science class. Not because it’s based on science, but because I was really bored and my mind started to wander. I wanted something exciting to happen. The event at the start of chapter one is exactly what I imagined that day in class.
From there Kirsty and Bob, two of the main characters in the book, were born. I called the story “Brain Implants” but this isn’t a spoiler. That whole plotline drastically changed over time.
As much as I loved this story, it was limited. And there it stayed, in its perfect limited form, for years.
Fast forward to the early 21st century, while I was at university, and one night I had a dream. It was such a vivid and emotional dream, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was in my dream that I conjured up the character of Woody, who was called Woody for reasons I can’t explain.
I knew I had to write this story about Woody. But this dream alone was quite limited.
I had two great ideas that weren’t enough on their own. It didn’t take me long to realise that if I bolted them together, I would have something pretty amazing.
Now I had the core twist and the romance. Even before I established myself as an author who writes love stories with a twist, I was planning a love story with a twist.
Developing the Plot
In this book, there is something that is driving the action. There is something that the characters need to resolve. My first thought was that it could be a bank robbery. It would have worked brilliantly. But as I started to jot down some notes, I realised that I knew nothing about how to rob a bank, and I wasn’t about to start researching it.
I quickly moved on to another idea. I came up with a plotline where Kirsty was pregnant with Jason’s baby. If you read the book, I’m sure you’ll see where I was going with this. I wrote this as the plot in my first few drafts, but when my editor finally read it, he pointed out a lot of holes. This idea, while great from a dramatic point of view, was riddled with issues in terms of it making sense. I needed to go back to the drawing board.
Timeline
I first properly started to write this as a fully planned novel in 2004. I was living in London at the time, I was starting a promising career in marketing and I had a very active social life.
Writing a novel wasn’t my first priority back then. Writing is and always has been my main passion, so it was never out of my mind, but I didn’t have a lot of time to sit down and type.
In 2009, I got made redundant. I was actually out of work for six months. It was during this period that I managed to sit down and get the book redrafted to where I wanted it to be.
Over the next few years, I shared it with friends and family, but they all offered feedback pointing out issues with the book. Issues I couldn’t ignore.
I was very ambitious with my plotting, but I wasn’t giving myself the time to think through the complexities to tighten all the edges. This was proving to be harder work than I wanted it to be.
In 2014, the year I got married, everything changed. I was finally settled in my life, and I knew it was time to stop dabbling with a story riddled with problems and give myself a break.
This is when I wrote Bird, my official debut novel. And it proved to be a success. I then followed that with many other novels.
But between writing most of my novels, I have gone back to The Day It All Changed Forever (or whatever work in progress title it had at the time), and I’ve tried to edit it. But with each edit, I managed to solve one plot issue only to open up three more.
I knew there was a key to the plot that I was missing. I knew I could solve this. I hadn’t been working at it for this many years only to give up.
Light Bulb Moment
In 2025, I sent another book off to my editor. I was now running two businesses, organising the Rugby Literary Festival and trying to finish my new novel (which I’m hoping to publish soon).
I got feedback from my editor and he said the first half was great, but the second half needed work. He was right. I had rushed the ending to get it finished. It was the same story: big ideas that needed a bit more work.
But to work on them takes time. And time isn’t something I had hanging around.
Determined that I would get this book finished, one night, late at night, I lay down on the sofa and I decided I was going to think. I was going to do nothing else for however long it took, and I was going to think of how to solve the plot holes in my new book.
That’s when the weirdest thing hit me. It was almost as if the proverbial light bulb did indeed ping above my head. By allowing myself the time to sit quietly and just think, I had a fantastic idea.
Not for the new book, but out of nowhere I realised how to solve every single plot issue in The Day It All Changed Forever. It was such a simple idea and it was so obvious. Why had this not occurred to me before?
So, towards the end of 2025, I put the new book aside and I redrafted my old favourite. I sent it off to my editor just before Christmas and we agreed I’d finally got it to where it needed to be. The end was in sight!
Times Change
