Week four behind a coffee machine, and somewhere between the noise of a toddler disco and the quiet of midnight, a sci-fi trilogy is being written. New job, same midnight sessions — exhausting days don't stop the writing, they just change its shape.

Burn the Sky: Book 2 Redemption is have its final chapters edited, the next trilogy is taking shape, and the writing desk is seeing more late nights than it probably should. This one is about editing the past while building the future, the trap of chasing perfection, and why the version you almost published is the one nobody reads.

A KGB defector sits down for an interview.
You expect talk of spies, secrets—something explosive. Instead, he describes something quieter. A process that takes years. One that changes how people think without them realising it.

It doesn’t sound like a thriller. It sounds like science fiction, and a familiar one at that.

This is Stage One.

From piles of rubbish, remarkable things can be created. Entire worlds are imagined. Stories are written. Characters live and breathe in places that began as nothing more than scattered ideas and discarded fragments.

Over the past month I’ve been doing something similar on a much smaller scale.

A stack of weathered old decking boards full of screw holes and years of use, has slowly been turned into the desk where those worlds and stories will be written. Piece by piece the timber was cut down, layered, glued, and shaped into something new.

This post is a small look at that process: how a pile of old boards became the table where the next stories will begin.