
This started out as an idea for a story about how the world might end. Of course, there are lots of stories about how that might happen, but most of them tend to involve some kind of sudden, mass destruction, such as a nuclear war, or an asteroid, or an invasion from space.
I’d often wondered what would happen if the world just gradually started to go wrong, in a way which people perhaps wouldn’t notice until it was too late, and even then they maybe couldn’t do anything about it. Suppose perhaps that everyday things we take for granted, fundamental physical laws such as probability, just began to misbehave? Perhaps there were many different variations of reality, which were almost identical, and sometimes you simply woke up in a different one. That would be why your keys weren’t where you thought you’d left them, or why you were sure you’d done something and it turned out you hadn’t. Those are things that everyone can relate to, and that’s what I like to write about.
That idea had always needed a story to go around it, because it wasn’t particularly interesting in itself, and I began to realise it could be told through the eyes of a group of people who had been thrown together in an isolated world that was virtually indistinguishable from ours, and were unaware that their existence was gradually falling to pieces. It needed a protagonist, in this case a girl called Tilly, who had got lost on her way home from school one day because she’d moved worlds, had been unable to find her way home because it wasn’t there anymore, and finished up finding a little house by the river, where she was joined several years later by a couple – a hunter called Sam and his girlfriend Carrie, who had also found herself separated from her previous life. There had to be something mysterious about Sam, the hunter, so he was written to have no recollection of any childhood. They lived together in the little house as a ménage à trois, with the world slowly going wrong around them, and Sam not being able to decide whether he preferred Carrie or Tilly. Until the day when a mysterious little girl who never spoke turned up…
Their differences, driven in part by their various attitudes and desires, but also influenced by their disintegrating environment, and perhaps by the mysterious little girl, eventually leads to the complete destruction of their world… or does it?
If I say any more it would be a total spoiler for the story, which matters because I took that 2017 novel and rewrote it as ‘The Signal Tower’ which is book 2 of the ‘Twisted Land’ series.
Snowflakes is still available in its original form from various platforms, but it’s really been superceded in style and story by the ‘Twisted Land’ series.
At just about at the time I was gearing up to release it, the term Snowflakes became associated with a category of people who were overly emotional, easily offended, and unable to deal with opposing opinions. It was too late by then to re-brand it.
It went down quite well in the UK market, but wasn’t so popular in The States, I suspect because much of the writing and the subtle humour is unashamedly British. It did spend a while in the in top ten of Amazon Best Sellers in its category in Australia – by selling 8 copies! But you know what they say: “It doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning’s winning!”.
The mysterious little girl in the story gave me the idea for the central character in ‘Into The Darkness’, which I began writing as a prequel, but I couldn’t make her story and the plot fit properly with the timeline in Snowflakes, which would have had to be be rewritten, so it made more sense to re-issue that as Book 2 of a series, rather than write Into The Darkness as a prequel and have to rewrite Snowflakes anyway,