I've been writing and publishing fiction for seventeen years. Victorian psychological thrillers, dystopian science fiction, and a Sherlock Holmes series that rode the BBC wave and crashed a few years later. I've written stories by the seat of my pants just to spend months untangling the mess afterwards. Others, I've outlined obsessively until my creativity felt trapped. Yet others, I wrote by mixing chaos and planning.
What I've never done is let anyone watch. This is going to change now.
I just started working on Book 5 of The 1/2986 Series, and I'm documenting the entire process. The outlining, writing, editing, and getting it ready for publishing. Every decision and every mistake. Every moment where the whole thing feels like it's collapsing (I’m not there yet, but I know I will be).
There are two ways to follow along:
The Backstage Pass (€5/month): Diary entries as I build this novel from initial idea to publication-ready manuscript. Every craft decision, structural choice, and character death, including the method walkthroughs so you can apply what you learn to your own work. The dairy lives in our community platform and is already live. The posts right here in this newsletter remain spoiler-free.
The Fiction Writing Workshop (€75/quarter — founding member price, available only this once): Everything in the Backstage Pass, plus craft lessons at your own pace, weekly live video sessions where we workshop each other's work, and once a month I give in-depth feedback on one member's manuscript live on camera. We kick off in the 3rd or 4th week of March. This isn't a masterclass. We have no stage and no PowerPoint slides. We sweat, we curse, and we support each other. You'll build a novel from raw idea through structural outline, first draft, revision, editing, and getting it ready for publishing.
Why it matters what framework you chose
To give you a taste of the method, here’s a spoiler-free summarised walkthough of how I’m building the concept for book 5 of The 1/2986 Series using John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. The raw application with all the bloody details lives in the community diary.
If you're going to write alongside me, you'll need a copy of Truby’s book, because we’re using his approach to build a story from the inside out: character psychology drives plot, not the other way around.