Choosing the Independent Path

Today feels like something of a milestone.

Over the last several months I have spent a great deal of time thinking about where my writing sits and where I want it to go.

I considered publishers, submissions and whether I should try to follow the more traditional route.

Eventually I realised something rather obvious.

I do not want to.

At this stage of my life, freedom matters.

The freedom to explore strange ideas.

The freedom to spend six months photographing ruined quarries if I wish.

The freedom to write about industrial South Wales one year and psychological mysteries set in Victorian North Wales the next.

The freedom to follow curiosity rather than markets.

This week I finally stopped overthinking and decided to lean fully into being an independent author.

Both Unseen Souls and The Silence of the White Shadow are now being distributed beyond Amazon for the first time.

More importantly, it feels as though the pieces are finally beginning to connect:

History.

Memory.

Landscape.

Psychology.

The human thread running through them all.

I spent much of my working life in technology, moving through very different industries and environments.

Writing has become something different.

A way of exploring people, places, and the lives history often forgets.

There is something strangely liberating about reaching a point where success no longer means building the largest possible audience.

It means building the work you actually want to leave behind.

Quiet progress perhaps.

But progress all the same.