Burning Writing

More about the Wolfhound novels

Burning Wolfhound was originally started when I was in Ecuador in 2011. I was volunteering with Itapoa Reserve, saving the rain forest (long story… maybe I’ll re-post it on this site at some point) anyway, they left me alone for three weeks in the jungle house and I was soooooo bored. They have a hostel on the coast and when I was there I saw a military ship in the bay and I thought, wouldn’t that be fun to be going around the world in that. It was a bit larger than the Wolfhound. So when I was back at the jungle house, alone, I wrote my autobiography and started Burning Wolfhound, actually, just to entertain myself.

It had been a while since I’d written fiction and the first draft was a bit bad. My grammar had suffered over the years with writing web content. I did send that version to some agents. One guy was honest and said my grammar was terrible. Therefore, I re-wrote it entirely from memory. This version was much better. I also had a friend help me with grammar.

Burning Wolfhound went through quite a few drafts to get it where it was publishable. It took three years. Then, I tried more agents and subsequently gave up. I just put it on Amazon.

During 2014 I was doing my writing access course in Norwich and the HMS Vale was very handy (I lived just down the road) for working out details about the Wolfhound, including deciding the size of the Wolfhound, as the Vale is twice as long. As a point of note, there is a ship in Before the Wolfhound called the Firecrest, and that is based directly on the Vale.

Codename is more action and adventure thriller as Burning was trying to be a little more literary. Though they all use the thriller angle for page-turning interest.

Before the Wolfhound is action adventure but more heavy on the psychological thriller angle.