Why I Started Writing at 48

I was about eight or nine when I read The Hobbit. That was it, really. Before I'd finished the last chapter I was reading Lord of the Rings, then the DragonLance Chronicles, and somewhere in the middle of all that I discovered Dungeons & Dragons. I didn't just play it. I drew it. Dungeons, maps, corridors that went nowhere, rooms with traps I'd designed before I knew what a trap was for. I spent hours on graph paper building places that other people could walk through.

I didn't think of that as writing at the time. I think of it differently now. I was building worlds, and worlds need stories, and I just hadn't got round to the stories yet.

Then life happened, in the way it does. I left school at sixteen and joined the Army. Eighteen years later I was in business running teams and infrastructure projects, and after that I moved into the classroom. None of that left much room for a boy with a pencil and a dungeon, and I didn't miss it in any way I could have told you about. It was just quietly parked.

Around 2021 I stumbled across Sentenced to Troll by S.L. Rowland. I'd never heard the word LitRPG. I just knew that I was reading a book that treated game systems, levels and stats with the same seriousness I'd once given to a character sheet, and doing it with real heart and a lot of humour. From there I found Aleron Kong and Jez Cajiao, and eventually, years later, I'd count both of them as friends. Which still sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud.

What struck me was how familiar it all felt. The rules, the progression, the satisfaction of a well-built system. Here was a genre that spoke directly to the kid with the graph paper, and it was being written by people who clearly loved it. I read a lot of it. And somewhere along the way I stopped only wanting to read it.

I started writing my first series in 2022. It wasn't The Amatherean Tales, and I won't pretend it was polished. But it taught me things I couldn't have learned any other way: how long it actually takes to write a chapter, what it feels like to carry a story across months, and that I was capable of doing it at all.

Then in February 2024, at 48, I started something new. A world called Amathera, a character called SJ named after my wife, and a story I couldn't leave alone. I'd like to say there was a dramatic moment, a lightning bolt, a midlife crisis with a motorbike. There wasn't. I just sat down one morning, before work, and started writing the thing that had been waiting for me since I was nine.

Looking back, I don't think I could have done this at 28 or 38. Here's what turned out to matter.

I knew how to work. Eighteen years in the Army and a decade in programme management had taught me the one skill that actually finishes books: turning up every day whether I felt like it or not. I'd never have called that a writing skill, but it's most of what writing is.

I'd stopped needing it to be perfect. Younger me would have agonised. At 48 I'd done enough, seen enough, and been wrong enough to know that a finished imperfect chapter beats a perfect idea in a drawer every time.

I had something to write about. Not in the sense of life lessons. I mean practical, physical, grounded experience. What it's like to be cold, tired and a long way from home. How people talk when they're under pressure. How a team behaves when someone's let it down. All of that ended up in the books, whether I planned it or not.

I wasn't waiting for permission. At some point I realised no one was going to hand me an invitation. If I wanted to write, I just had to start.

People ask how I fit it in around teaching, and the answer is unglamorous. I get up at 4am. It isn't discipline so much as arithmetic, because the early morning is the only part of the day that nothing else has claimed yet. A chapter takes about two weekday mornings, and weekends are where the bigger pushes happen. It's not sustainable in the way a motivational poster would define it. It's sustainable because I designed it to fit around a full life rather than demand a clear one.

If you're sitting on a story and telling yourself it's too late, I'd gently suggest that you're doing arithmetic on the wrong thing. You're counting the years you didn't write. Count the years you've been collecting. Every job, every mistake, every strange conversation, every map you drew as a kid is material, and you can't buy that at 25.

I started at 48. I'm now 51, with books out, more on the way, and a community of readers I never expected to have. I'm still working it out as I go, and I'm still writing before most people have found their alarm clock.

If that's the thing you needed to read today, I'm glad. Now go and find a pencil.