Of course, I have known that I would like to publish a novel for a long, long time. I was fascinated with books as a child then decided I might have something to add to the world of books sometime around 1990. The intervening years have seen me writing and ditching many a work, the few submitted inevitably rejected.

When I started working on THE NORTHERN BLOCKADE in 2013, I knew straight away that I was doing something different to everything I had done before. It was not just the subject matter (naval warfare in the first half of the 20th Century). I was more mature. I knew that I wanted my work to be character driven with easily recognisable views on our lives depicted so that a reader might see something of themselves somewhere in the narrative. This has only come to me through life experience and listening to other people's concerns, good and bad.

To build on this, I consciously widened the scope of the story beyond the confines of naval service so that we could attempt to see better what really made the characters tick.

The novel took two years to write and another year and a half to publish. This time I was going to persevere because I truly felt I finally had something to add. My first reviews seem to justify the effort.