It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since I published Karma’s Burden. I mentioned in another post, that the first surprise was that it sold, and not just to people I knew. I was always fairly certain that friends, family and a few sympathetic colleagues could be relied upon to buy a copy, if only to avoid an awkward conversation with me later, but strangers bought it too, which somehow made the whole thing feel much more real. Some people liked it, some people really liked it, and a few people really hated it too. That last part took a little getting used to. There is quite a difference between understanding, in an abstract sense, that not everybody is going to like your book and discovering that an actual person has read something you spent years working on and genuinely thought it was awful. For a while, that was difficult to come to terms with, but eventually I did, largely because there isn’t really any alternative unless you intend to spend the rest of your writing life hiding manuscripts in a drawer. There have also been some lovely comments. One person described Karma’s Burden as a cross between Scum and The Hunger Games, which was not a comparison I had ever considered, but one I am now perfectly happy to repeat whenever anybody asks me what sort of book it is. One of my favourite moments, though, had nothing to do with reviews. I was sitting in a [...]

I read something the other day that unsettled me. An article about a woman who had lost the ability to read novels, something she once loved deeply. She picked up Watership Down, a book she had devoured as a child, and found herself struggling, distracted, unable to focus. The immersion was gone. What struck me wasn’t just her experience. It was the explanation. Neuroscientists confirmed that the brain rewires itself around how we use it. We haven’t stopped reading—but we now read in fragments. We skim. We scan. We extract. And over time, that becomes our default mode of thinking. When we return to something slow, something deep, something that requires sustained attention, we struggle, not because we’re lazy, but because we’ve trained our brains not to do it. I closed the article and thought, that’s not me. Then I sat down to write. Flip-Flopping I’ve been thinking about photography a lot recently. It’s something I used to do a lot of. As a young man, I was convinced I was going to be a wildly successful artist, and I did a degree in Fine Art focusing on photography. I consciously gave it up a few years ago. It was just one distraction too many, and I wanted to focus on writing. Recently though, it’s been an itch again, something I can feel myself wanting to return to. Within seconds of starting to write, a thought creeps in. Stop what you’re doing. Just check the price of that camera. Then [...]

I’m sitting here working on Book Two of the Karma’s Burden story, and it feels like a good time to stop for a moment and look backwards before pushing on again. When I released Karma’s Burden, I set the bar embarrassingly low. If one person chose to read it and liked it, that would have been enough. That sounds ridiculous written down, but it was genuine. For someone as perpetually anxious and self-critical as me, that was honestly all I expected. Then there was that first sale. Not to a friend. Not to someone I’d nudged or apologised to in advance. Just… a stranger. Someone, somewhere, found my book and decided to spend their time on it. That feeling hasn’t really gone away. Four months later, around 130 people have chosen to read what I wrote. Some of them have been kind enough to leave ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. Around 30 people read it through Kindle Unlimited. These are small numbers in publishing terms, but they are not small to me. Of course, new anxieties arrive immediately. They always do. The story doesn’t fully belong to me anymore. People have expectations now. I owe it a decent sequel. I owe them something. And not for the first time, I find myself wondering whether writing is really the right activity for someone like me, someone whose nervous system treats every draft like a potential threat. I also forget, every single time, how much rewriting expands the book. The first 5,000 [...]

When I launched my Goodreads Giveaway for Karma’s Burden, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. As a debut author, there’s always that quiet fear that no one will care, that your book will just disappear into the void without a sound. I’d told myself to keep expectations low. A few entries, maybe a dozen people adding it to their lists. That would have been enough. Instead, within hours, the numbers started climbing. Dozens, then hundreds of readers entered. So many added Karma’s Burden to their “Want to Read” lists that I found myself refreshing the page in disbelief. I was overwhelmed, in the best possible way.  It’s hard to describe how much that meant. Writing is a long, lonely process, and when you finally release something into the world, there’s always a part of you that braces for silence. As an autistic person, that uncertainty hits even harder. I’ve always struggled with the unpredictability of life, never quite knowing how something will be received, or what to expect. My autism doesn’t make it hard to recognise emotions in others, but it does cause intense anxiety around the unknown.  So watching complete strangers show interest in my work was emotional in a way I hadn’t anticipated. It reminded me that stories do connect, even when everything else feels uncertain. But this was also accompanied by a growing realisation that I should have made more copies available. My first thought of course, was how can I fix the mistake and get [...]

I put a Goodreads Giveaway live this morning, and I’m thrilled to share that almost 150 readers have already entered for a chance to win a copy of Karma’s Burden! As a debut author, it means the world to see a book I’ve poured years into beginning to reach readers. Writing is often a solitary, sometimes lonely journey, but moments like this remind me why I keep going: to share stories, and hopefully connect with people who love dystopian fiction as much as I do. A huge thank you to everyone who has entered so far — it’s exciting to see Karma’s Burden starting to find an audience.

When I was writing Karma’s Burden, sometimes I would see it unfolding in my head like a film. The atmosphere was as important as the characters. The shadows between the streetlights, the weight of silence in a room, the sense that every choice carries a cost. I wanted to capture some of that visually, even if only in a small way. So I made two short video trailers. They’re not films in the traditional sense, but more like glimpses—visual fragments of the world as I imagine it. You can watch them here: 🎥 Trailer 1🎥 Trailer 2 My aim wasn’t to retell the story, but to show how the world feels. The grit, the tension, the uneasy beauty that runs through the book. This is how I pictured Karma’s world. Not glossy or polished, but raw and textured. I’d love to know what you think, whether the trailers capture the same tone you felt when reading, or if they take you somewhere unexpected.