Are you an astronaut?

I’m not an astronaut and I haven’t worked for any space companies, but I have worked in technology and software development for most of my career. 

What made you want to write about Mars?

Mars has fascinated me since I was a child. It’s the planet that is closest to humanity’s grasp as a second home. In writing Diary of a Martian, I wanted to explore what it would be like to live in an established Mars colony, but from the perspective of younger people, Elliot, Mei, and Dimitri.

When did you come up with the idea for Diary of a Martian?

I came up with the initial idea during one of the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. I was writing a lot of short stories, and I wrote one story about a boy and girl on Mars who meet in class, but an emergency evacuation cuts their introduction short as they have to evacuate onto the Martian surface during a powerful dust storm. It was this short story that sparked the initial idea for the Diary of a Martian series. That short story made it into the first book as chapters five, six, and seven.

How long did it take you to write the first book: the discovery?

Once I decided I wanted to turn my initial short story into a novel, it took me eighteen months to write the first book. During this time, I signed up to a ten month writing course called Faber Academy, where I learnt all about the craft of writing popular fiction. I worked on Diary of a Martian as part of that course. I didn’t want to write book one too fast. I wanted to let the ideas develop over time as I learnt the craft of writing a full novel.

Do you believe in aliens?

The universe is vast, and I think it would be a mistake to believe we are the only intelligent life out there, so yes, I do. Whether we will meet any in our lifetime is anyone’s guess. Just imagine, there may be another planet, just like Earth, where someone is sitting there thinking: do aliens exist?

What was the biggest surprise when you wrote Diary of a Martian?

When I began writing the first book, the character Dimitri was not part of my initial plan. At the beginning of the book, I needed Elliot to be injured in someway so that he had to visit the doctor, therefore I came up with a bully who was mean to Elliot at the start of the book. The more I wrote Dimitri into the story, the more I loved the character, and he became an integral part of the books. I love what Dimitri turns into - no spoilers!