How Grief, Depression and Burnout Changed My Life: A Personal Story (2021) (Copy)

Life can be like driving a very fast car in difficult conditions...and the bumps and scrapes can damage both you and the people around you. Between 1997 and 2016, I wrote twenty-eight books and two short stories for a bunch of the biggest publishing companies in the world. This journey transformed me in many ways. I went from having no money in a minimum wage job to earning a fortune, virtually overnight. It also turned me from someone who had never left the country (even for a holiday) into someone who visited America, France, Italy, Ireland and Bulgaria in the space of a year. I appeared in every national newspaper and on every major TV channel, bought myfirst house and watched as my books hit – and occasionally missed – the children’s best‐ seller lists. Having been quite a solitary and isolated child (I now know that I have many autistic tendencies that I simply couldn’t identify, growing up), I suddenly found myself happy and content: I had a wonderful wife and two beautiful children who I simply adored being around.