In August 2020, I was a thirteen-year-old boy sitting on my uncle and aunt's sofa with my laptop.

I decided that day I was going to write a story.

At first, I felt optimistic that it would be finished and published by December 2020.

However, it took three years, and after three years of creating, drafting, restarting, backspacing, and slamming fists on the desk, I finally finished and published WARNING.

Throughout writing, I went through a mix of emotions, fluctuating between excitement to exhaustion.

WARNING is a story set at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows Ava Middlestone, a wealthy teenager, and her secret friendship with Cole, a parentless gang member.

Ava's unseen uncle, Jamie Pickwell, reappears in her life, and as the pandemic unfolds, Ava and Jamie find themselves under the same roof.

But Jamie is a cruel, abusive, and savage man, making Ava’s life at Middlestone Manor a living nightmare.

Fearful, Ava decides to run away from her privileged life to experience Cole's world away from their treehouse.

However, her escape is short-lived when an anonymous account called WARNING starts adding certain gang members and reveals Ava's Middlestone identity.

But nobody knows who’s behind the phone, who’s stalking her, and who’s following the gang’s every move.

That's the essence of my novel WARNING: friendship, danger, envy, and the mystery of an unseen adversary.

Initially, though, the hours were very long and the creation of the book was even more complex than I had anticipated, given the additional school work and exams that were always approaching.

I briefly gave up writing in July 2021 and then decided to restart the book in January 2022.

For 18 months, the Middlestone family and Ava and Cole’s friendship was my source of escapism amidst the difficult school life and GCSE pressures.

A month after finishing my GCSEs, I completed this novel and it’s now available to buy on Amazon.

Becoming a published author at sixteen is an incredible feeling, especially after being told by several classmates that I couldn’t do it.

The reason why I began writing this book is because I wanted to put my vivid imagination onto paper, and also after playing Bloxburg where my friend and I created the characters of Ava and Jamie together.

And I wanted to give them a full story.

It’s complete now and I realised you can achieve anything you want to achieve if you put your mind to it.