Where you can find my works:
Free to read, early drafts, works in progress (i.e. not yet finished): Wattpad
Complete works out in the wild to purchase: Kindle (inc. Kindle Unlimited)
To read works on Wattpad, you may have to create a free account. To read stories for free you will have to tolerate adverts, but the platform does work on laptops, tablets and mobiles alike.
Will you find other stories like mine on there? Possibly, with some serious dedication to key word searching and investment in time. If you find any, please let me know and recommend.
The site has literally millions of works by first time writers, many in their teens, and many writing in genres that include werewolves, vampires, CEOs, and often all three, and that's fine as it is a seriously enabling platform that supports people from all walks of life who are putting themselves out there to flex their creative muscle. Being a middle aged white guy, I'm on the periphery of Wattpad writer membership and content, but hey, it works.
What Do I Write?
I write across several genres, and often blend them. Primarily you could place my works in science fiction (hard, not speculative or fantastical), historical fiction, and adventure. Other genres might creep in from time to time. You can sample some of my writing on this blog site by following the links.
I am currently working on a series of short stories based on the United Kingdom's Shipping Forecast areas. I'm also working on a comic-paranormal adventure that started as a joke but took on a life of its own, and have a mostly complete first novel in a future dystopia about climate change and human infallibility. I've also written one and a half novels that are pure WW2 boys-own adventure (the first is on Kindle) and a couple of stand-alone novellas.
Why Do I Write?
Answer: For fun.
Once, in 2012, I found myself browsing books online, not long after doing such a thing became, well, a thing, and began to feel a growing frustration that I couldn't find the kind of books with the narrative style that engaged me and that I wanted to read. I'm a committed re-reader. When I like a book, I read it a lot, like you might listen to a playlist of favourite songs (and there are parallels here) to the exclusion of other works of a similar genre, content or style, and the reasons for that are obvious to me, yet hard to put in writing. It's a visceral thing, made up of a gut reaction to the overall style, mixed with a ridiculously critical focus on bad science or lack of reality, a dislike of clunky writing, and a frustration that the story isn't as good as that last one I read.
This leads to instances of my experiencing the Escalation Of Expectation Effect, a term that I just made up, which means that I regularly give up on books after a few tens of pages and go back to re-reading ones that I know. In turn, this led me to wonder if I could write something better. Before 2012, this would have meant putting words down in a word document on a PC for which I knew almost no-one would read, and that knowledge made it feel like a pointless exercise.
Then Wattpad came along. Here was a platform that allowed a person to write and share their writing, get engagement and comment from readers, and feel a sense of purpose. It was the thing I needed to prompt me to start writing. Other platforms exist now (as then, probably), but Wattpad is the one I joined and for reasons that are purely selfish (lazy), I haven't changed since. This despite the fact that Wattpad is, to be frank, not exactly aimed at me or the type of readers I expect might enjoy my works. Put that aside for one moment though, as Wattpad does give me a platform, and does help me to refine and test my work. Even if very few read it, even there, where it's free to read and so on. For me, Wattpad is a stepping stone to serf-publishing, which I do on Kindle (or Amazon, whatever).
So, for those reasons, there is more 'stuff' on Wattpad than Kindle, but with luck and a following wind, more will be published soon. Soon, in this case, means soon after you read this sentence.
If one of my books ever gets published, or made into a film, that would be great. And, given the lack of self promotion and time I spend on advertising my works, a miracle.
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