How This Novel Came About

Love, Secrets, and a Plate of Sushi

Plenty of people say they'd like to write a book one day. Some actually do. Most don't, usually because life has other plans and rarely asks permission first.

Mine started on a train.

Rewind to 2004. I'd been in Japan for eight years, the last three in Tokyo, and had recently swapped a shaky career as a freelance English teacher for something steadier: a desk job in finance, the field I'd left home to escape and somehow ended up back in anyway. Then my company moved offices from the east side of Tokyo to the west. I'd only just settled on the east side. Overnight, my commute got a great deal longer.

That's where the idea took root. Smartphones hadn't arrived yet – hard to believe now, when half of Tokyo's rush hour is spent staring at a six-inch screen – so a long commute left three options: read, sleep, or do something useful with the dead time. I picked useful. Or what felt like it at the time.

I had material, plenty of it. Years of an international relationship, years of muddling through life in Japan as a foreigner who never quite blended in – there was a novel in there somewhere, I was fairly sure. Fiction, but not far from the truth.

Only problem: I didn't own a laptop, and they were expensive. So I went old-fashioned. Every day I scribbled a scene or a chapter by hand on the train, then typed it up at home in the evening.

Less than six months later, I had a finished draft. I was thrilled – convinced, in fact, that I was sitting on a future bestseller, with the kind of confidence only a first-time writer with zero outside opinions can muster.

Then life did what it does. I had no idea what 'next steps' even meant for an unpublished manuscript, and no time to find out. Into a drawer it went, and there it stayed.

Nearly a decade passed before I looked at it again. Two things were obvious: it wasn't the masterpiece I remembered, and I'd changed rather a lot in the meantime. So I edited. I rewrote. A few months in, I was once again convinced it was ready.

For a professional opinion, I sent it to a literary consultancy in the UK for an editorial assessment. That meant printing three hundred pages of double-spaced A4 and posting them – yes, actually posting them, in an envelope, like it was still the previous century.

What came back was a nineteen-page report that dismantled most of my confidence in one sitting. It introduced me to terms like 'dramatic arc' and 'show, don't tell' – concepts I'd apparently written an entire novel without once considering. The verdict, kindly phrased but unambiguous: a lovely story with real potential, but nowhere near enough drama or tension to hold a reader for three hundred pages.

The suggested fix was a full overhaul, backed by page after page of specific notes. It was a lot. Manuscript and report went back into the drawer together, and I told myself I'd get to them once things calmed down. Life, as it turned out, had other ideas for the best part of another decade.

Fast-forward to 2024. Twenty years after I'd first put pen to paper on a Tokyo commuter train, I finally – finally – felt ready to do the work. I dug out the old report, went through it note by note, and started rewriting in earnest. Slowly, the story I'd been carrying around all that time began to feel like something worth reading.

The internet had changed a great deal too. Where I'd once had a stack of printed pages and one editor's opinion, there was now endless advice on writing, editing, publishing and marketing a first novel – none of it within reach when I started this whole business on a train, with a biro and far too much confidence.

So here we are. Twenty-odd years, one drawer, and a manuscript that finally stopped hiding in it.

That manuscript became Love, Secrets, and a Plate of Sushi. You can read Chapter One free here:

Read Chapter One Free