I don’t do interviews, I haven’t given Press Releases and I don’t talk to the Press. If you’re a writer you prefer to let the work speak for itself. That has always been my take on it and I have never really felt the need to change.

A little curmudgeon-ish of me, I know, but writing takes me somewhere I sometimes rather not go, where all my dreams and all my hopes lie either being born or dead and I bring that out into the book and it becomes something else, a journey into a place I did not even know existed with all the experiences and all the souvenirs lying there in the words.

So why this? Why the website? When I first put pen to paper I felt certain this book would be published. I sent it off, as writers do, I waited and got back glowing readers’ reviews and recommendations (one even called it “Mad Max on speed”) and along with it there was always a rejection because it didn’t fit into something. It was too short, too sharp, too graphic, too violent, too referential of a complex culture, too whatever and you know, I thought long and hard about changing it, increasing the length, making it softer  taking the graphic scenes of sex and violence out and in the end I decided not to and went back on stacking supermarket shelves for a living.

A book is a journey and some of us write because we truly feel compelled too. The Shade was wrenched out of me and when I was done I felt like I had ran a marathon in under an hour. It did something to my head and it took me a long time to forget it and go back to putting the notes for the follow up together and in that time the world changed.

The web took off, publishers became bigger glitzier and even less capable of appraising anything and Cool Publication (who in a more removed way helped provide some of the contact which made this site possible) came along and I tried them because they seemed different and offered a model where the author could at least be closer to his readers and more empowered and then they folded and I went back to thinking long and hard.

What I thought long and hard about was the next book and its implications and the journey inside my head became richer, darker and more convoluted. Authors write for many reasons. Fame, glory, riches and the undulation of the masses but, you know, this is work that goes on well past midnight, alone, when the rest of the world is asleep and no one else is about and for me it’s always been a case of being real, which is why I have stayed away from anything that has to do with publicity, to the detriment perhaps of my book.

So this. Now. Why?

Because I have started to write the second book and the pressure behind the eyes is there, driving me on, compelling me and because there may well be a truth to all this and what I write finds a home in your mind, your heart. Touches you the way it touched me when I wrote it.

Different times, different methods. I have no time for publishers and little respect for them, these days (and I know it sounds jaded, it’s not), so here’s the chance to prove them wrong. To show that a book that deserves an audience can find one no matter, to prove that the journey I made is not necessarily only for myself.

So I am publishing it here. Both on paper and digital and priced realistically to reflect the genre. I know digital books have not taken off and though I read so many things and so much on the screen I still love to hide inside myself with a book which allows me to be observer, participant, director, hero, heroine and villain all at once.

So the eBook has been priced at a price which allows you to not feel cheated even if you decide you did not like it and I have a sample chapter (like the complete First Chapter) which you can download and read to see if you would like to go further and see what is going to happen next.

I know self-publishing gets very mixed reviews these days and I agree. So it should. Many a self-published novel is utter drivel and should rightly be called vanity publishing, because that’s what it is. Many a normally published novel is also utter drivel these days and should be called rubbish published to fill the shelves because that’s what it is.

At the end of the day you can be the only judge that counts and your money, whether you buy the papercopy or the download is the only vote that I, or anyone else for that matter, can feel compelled to take notice of.

The book, as you expect, has been professionally edited and packaged. I have dispensed, in the eBook version, with the temptation to pack it full of active URLs and fancy gimmicks at the end. They are usually there to make a poor book feel better and this is not what I want here. If by the end I do not leave you wanting more, waiting anxiously for the sequel, I have failed as an author and I will take that judgement on the chin and will not try any sleight of hand just to make myself feel better.

Writing is a solitary profession and, I have always felt, it ought to be an honest one. So, dear reader (and I do not use the term here lightly patronisingly but rather in the full-blown meaning of the Victorian letter writer’s usage whereby you, in my mind, are now the most important person in my literary horizon), the only judgement I can accept has to be yours.

Either you will love what I have written or you will hate it (and I am prepared to listen to your views and opinion in either case). My part of the bargain is to give you something that has integrity and unflinching honesty.

Here, in The Shade, I have done just that.

Its characters speak in my head, in their respective blogs. But that is their voice. Not mine. What you read now is the only place where I have let my views and feelings be known and I may well get hanged for it (though, I hope not literally).

The decision is yours.

Tom