My dad used to say, Darran, you’re too deep. What do you want out of life?  

Writing found me late.

Until my thirties, I believed that pensiveness held me back, ‘too much’ depth, a flaw that I tried my best to get rid of—until I started releasing music and was a foundational part of a new movement of dance music called Complextro, complex EDM (electronic dance music). But it wasn’t deep enough for me. In 2015, I went travelling—cycled across the UK, western Europe, over the Alps, and then I lived for 4 months on a Thai island. There, I wrote a travel journal, which I published soon after as Fields of Nettles. Some might have caught the travel bug, but I caught the writing bug. 

I needed to get deep into writing. Fix one corner of things. One piece of a chaotic, unfixable world. Organise one mind. Save one life. Make one person who finds it hard to smile, dream. Even if that one person was me. 

I think all writers are like that—lone warriors: find the right words and you find the key to existence.

I threw myself into writing fulltime and wrote several novels before self-pubilishing my debut novel TREOIR: CURSE ON THE ISLAND at the end of 2020.

Three New Novels.

In 2016, I set a goal to write for 10,000 hours before I dared call myself a writer. I haven’t stopped writing. I haven’t kept track. But somthing clicked in 2023 after I finished a writing course. The course itself didn’t teach me anything more than I had already obsessed over, but it erased a few miconceptions I had about my writing—good and bad.

I’ve been redrafting a novel since 2021 called Last Train to Anywhere and shopping it around to agents and redrafting. During 2023-25, I wrote a few books including Forest of Lies and The Balleyer.

For info and enquiries, email me here