Andrew Toynbee

I’m a writer and a wannabe Author, but at present I have to fit it in around my full-time job, home life, pets, classic (for ‘classic’ read old and in need of work) cars, house fires and all the other day-to-day trivialities that take up everybody’s time.

So I spent the 'spare' seconds and minutes of my days making notes about story ideas, characters and even jotted down dialogue between as yet unformed characters.  Those notes ended up (after a particularly nasty illness) assembled on my first-ever laptop and coalesced into a writable story. 

But it isn't the same story with which I hoped to get my career going. HomeWorld’ was the story I’d wanted to write since I was at school in one guise or another, but when ‘Elementals’ exploded into my head in 2006, it became the driving force that really got me motivated.   I began to read books on the craft of writing, follow blogs and even found time to complete an on-line course (Holly Lisle's) in order to improve my work.

However, after 3 years, I became aware that ‘Elementals’ was nowhere near ready for submission.
Despite the urging of several people around me to submit it anyway, I took the (painful) decision to place it on the back-burner and turn to a completely new project, something that would hopefully catch the Supernatural Romance (alright, Vampire) wave that began sweeping around the globe in 2008/2009.

The novel was completed in late 2011. I spent a year trying to interest Literary agencies in the resulting manuscript, but with no success. But I realised that I simply couldn't wait around to be accepted - I needed to be more proactive. So, with a lot of patience and a great deal of persistence, I converted my manuscript into html format and uploaded it to Amazon as a self-published novel. In October 2012, my debut novel 'A Construct of Angels' went live. I'm now working on the sequel.

Additional: A Construct of Angels was re-edited during 2013 and was re-released at the end of February 2014.