When I wrote my debut novel Six Dead Men it was meant to be a stand-alone piece. I was already working on a Sci Fi Novel and had several other ideas floating about for new novels. It also had a very different ending to the current one. My ART at the time (a writing group run by Caroline Natzler) were insistent I change my planned ending. Here was this bunch of hard core writers who demanded the perfect word in exactly the right spot and my realistic ending was proving too traumatising for them. Who could have predicted it? Certainly not me. It took me a while to rethink my ending (an entire summer if I recall correctly) to find a closing which didn’t involve a rewrite of the entire novel. This made the writing process a touch challenging but I believe it produced a better book. However, it also woke the voices of the subsidiary characters who then demanded I write something just for them. It's the reason I now also have Six Degrees , a book of short stories in the ser