How my latest novel, The Golden Bridge, came into being is very strange – and I still don’t fully understand it.

It was in the middle of COVID, it was the middle of winter, and it was the middle of the night.

I woke up and there it was, right in front of me, fully formed.
I can’t explain it better than that.
The whole story was fully formed.
The character, the journey, the arc.
Everything I needed to start writing.

I hadn’t dreamt it.
This wasn’t the stuff of dreams.
But it woke me up.

I said no.

I didn’t want to write the story. I didn’t think there was a market for it. I didn’t want to spend 12 months of my life writing something that no one would ever get to read. It wasn’t the kind of story that I would normally write anyway. The whole thing just made no sense to me.

And so I said no.
I’m not going to write this.

They came back immediately and they said: Yes, you are going to write this!

Who were “they?”
I don’t know.
They were those that had delivered me the story, and they were insistent that I write this.

Again I said no.

I knew that to do the story justice, it would require a level of writing expertise that I didn’t think I possessed. I knew intuitively that it would be the hardest thing I would ever write.

I flat out said NO, this is not something I can do.
This is not something I want to do.
It will be a total waste of time.

(Here I am, in my bed in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, during the middle of the pandemic having this weird conversation in my mind with God knows what, or who. The whole thing was completely bizarre.)

They held firm.
They were not going to budge.
They told me I had to write it, and that was that.
No arguments.

So, a few days later I started.

I would get up at 4am or thereabouts, go downstairs and have a double espresso, and then in a half somnolent state I would begin to write. My job was to keep my mind clear so that I could allow an unfettered passage to whatever wished to come in.

I didn’t want to impose, I didn’t want to interfere.
I wrote with craft, of course, and with style.
To deny ego in a creative process is to deny your own unique voice.

I didn’t meditate.
I just tried to keep my mind clear.

I started out thinking it would be the hardest thing I would ever write.
It turned out to be the easiest.
And in fact now I look back at the manuscript and wonder how on earth did that happen?

I would write from about 4am-4:30am till about 9:30am. By that stage I would have written about 1,000 words, sometimes a little more. I didn’t take a day off until I’d finished. The book is approximately 75,000 words.

At times I would need to do research. The chapter The Dowser required research. I found myself reading a lot of Alice Bailey’s work, in particular The Soul and its Mechanism, and The Consciousness of the Atom. Also Saint Germain on Alchemy.

But most of the book just came to me.

When I finished the manuscript I did some revisions, and then I sought publication. I got an offer from a major New York publishing house and suddenly found myself with a publisher that had published the works of some incredibly famous people. Like, seriously famous authors.

But the fit wasn’t right.

I wasn’t happy with the commercial deal terms, and I wasn’t convinced that the publisher would really work my book. I worried that it could just get lost in amongst everything else he was doing. So I pulled away.

The book is now set up with a smaller imprint based in Melbourne. I know this publisher, James Terry at Arcadia Press, and I know James will work the book hard to get it into the best bookstores and outlets. The book will be formally launched by Arcadia early next year.

In the interim I have put the book out on Amazon –

The Golden Bridge on Amazon.com
The Golden Bridge on Amazon.com.au

Some people who’ve read it describe it as “the new The Alchemist.”
Someone else described it as “a quiet little masterpiece.”

All I know is that this book came to me in a seriously weird way. Was it channelled? All creative endeavours are channelled. That’s how creativity works. Having a work channelled doesn’t make it special. That’s the norm.

But if I leave this plane having written The Golden Bridge and made the film The Way, My Way, then I’ll be happy that my work here is done. Anything else is a bonus.