Dan Forrester

A big hello and welcome to my website. Thank you for visiting!  

What’s it all about, I don’t hear you ask? Well, I will soon be publishing my first novel, Havock, and I thought I’d best get my wotsits together and get organised. Let people know about it, and what have you. All the grown-up bits of writing. And then hope that someone buys it.

Cue the sceptics: So, you’ve cobbled together a novel and now you reckon you’re going to retire? Yes, please. That would be nice. But to be fair, it’s taken a while to get this far. And I’m realistic; the private island in the Caribbean might have to wait for the second bestseller.

I started writing short stories around 10 years ago. I was chatting with the boss, Angela (or my wife as she likes to be called), about our school days many, many years ago and I happened to mention that I used to love writing stories in English class. In fact, I remember one exam when I was maybe 13 years old where we were given a photo and told to write a story. To this day, that is the only exam or test that I remember actively enjoying.

Fast forward to adulthood with life and work happening quite a lot, and I had long forgotten about writing until that evening when Angela suggested I have another go. Why not? So, I set to it. I had no idea what I was doing – it would be a while before I discovered that there was actually a craft to it – but I finished what I thought was a pretty good crime story. I think it even had swearing in it.

I enthusiastically submitted it to magazines, convinced they would snap it up and request more in return for piles of cash. Of course, then came the silence. The waiting. The crushing rejection. Rejection? I couldn’t believe it, had they even read it? My first lesson in the life of a writer: don’t be discouraged.

It took a while, like any writer or artist, to discover my voice and genre, but I eventually found that I could make myself laugh. I set about with vigour breaking the golden rule not to laugh at your own jokes, and relentlessly chuckled to myself over the tip-tapping of the keyboard and tuts and groans from Angela (who had by now regretted lifting the lid from Pandora’s box) as characters and their dialogue came to life before me.

I joined my first writing group (Oldham Writing Café which is still going great guns, hello guys!) and started to learn the craft, reading how-to books, looking for tips online and attending workshops and author talks at the local libraries.

Soon I won my first award and websites, magazines and anthologies began publishing my stories. I was ready to embark on my first novel.

The novel that became Havock took around two years to write. I lost my way more than once but somehow, usually by dragging it by the scruff of the neck, managed to keep it on some sort of track. I tried my hardest to plan it, to be a ‘plotter’, but my brain just won’t work that way. It needs the characters to tell it what they need to do next. It’s a cliché, I know, but the story did genuinely surprise me in some of the turns it took. I just had to go with it and be grateful someone, somewhere, knew what they were doing, even if it wasn’t me. I knew the general ending so I hoped the story would find it in the mist, somewhere over the horizon. Eventually it did, and I’m not afraid to say I’m proud of it.

So, here we are. Hello, good evening and welcome to my website!