I realise that I haven’t really spoken about my post-apocalyptic thriller story The Thaw since I briefly mentioned it in my April 2026 update (and then I promptly lost track of doing those posts too).

There’s been a exciting amount of work happening with The Thaw recently, but I figured it may be helpful – if primarily for my own purposes more than anything – if I were to document the process this book has gone through to get to this point before talking about where it goes next.

What is The Thaw?

The Thaw is a post-apocalyptic thriller set twenty years after civilisation collapsed, following a young doctor, Elian Sarkov, whose comfortable life in the Denver Frontier Camp is shattered when he realises the society he serves is built on dangerous lies. It’s been a labour of love for many years, and it’s the book I’ve kept in my back pocket as it were for too long.

I’m changing that very soon.

I’ve written many posts over the years about The Thaw which you can go through by clicking here.

Early Days

I’ve gone through my notes and found the original “Backstory Ideas” page for The Thaw, that was created at the end of June 2015. What’s most remarkable to me isn’t that the idea is that old, but that most of it has survived into the book today. The setting, many of the locations and some of the central themes and ideas are still recognisable in the novel I am preparing to publish today.

Looking back too, the timing wasn’t accidental. I’d recently rediscovered my enthusiasm for studying and had decided to pursue a Creative Writing & English Literature degree at Kingston University. For the first time, I wasn’t just writing stories; I was consciously trying to become a better author.

Over the following year, the scattered ideas gradually formulated into a proper novel. I didn’t yet have the story-planning approach I use today but developed a three-act outline and eventually a full narrative plan (written at a time of night on a June 2016 evening that I won’t confess to!) that would guide the first draft.

The first draft was written between July 2016 and July 2017, eventually capping out at just shy of 110,000 words.

Over the next number of years it was reshaped through university work, beta-reader feedback and a few rounds of revisions. Eventually, The Thaw hit the fourth draft by 2022.

By then, I had the book I’d always wanted to write, or that’s what I thought. The surprising part wasn’t what happened during the drafting and editing process then – it was what happened afterwards.

Benching

For a while, The Thaw sat shelved. I took the feedback from the third draft, and a fourth draft existed by April 2022.

Four and a half years ago. What happened?

I decided fairly early on that The Thaw was a book I felt was good. I think The Thaw was the first novel where I felt I’d found my voice as a writer, and I felt I’d landed on a pretty kickass idea to boot. It brings together the kinds of stories I enjoy telling – ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances, believable worlds pushed just beyond reality, and characters forced to make impossible moral choices.

For the first time I wasn’t just excited to have finished a manuscript, I genuinely believed this was the sort of book I wanted to really build what kind of writer I am around.

Perhaps it was rose-tinted glasses but I had aspirations to submit The Thaw to agents and to pursue the traditional publishing route and… just didn’t get around to it. Maybe that’s partly out of procrastination and fear of rejection but I never did quite get around to doing the research, preparing the query package… and the project remained shelved.

A New Direction

As 2026 beckoned, I realised something uncomfortable: this would be the tenth anniversary for starting The Thaw. I’d spent years working on this book, believing it was a book worth publishing, yet it was still sitting dormant, gathering dust on my hard drive.

Something had to change.

For a long time I’d envisioned The Thaw to be my attempt at traditional publishing, but the longer I waited, the more I realised I wasn’t actually pursuing that path – I was simply procrastinating and postponing making a decision. I decided, therefore, that this would be the book that represented everything I’d learned about independent publishing.

I made one decision: the story wasn’t changing. After four drafts over ten years, the story was done. There comes a point where the rewriting and editing stops making a book better and just makes it different, and with The Thaw I had reached that point.

I read over the fourth draft and I was happy with how the story played out.

However, this didn’t mean the book was ready to publish. I’d deliberately put off paying for professional editing while I still imagined the book might be traditionally published – why pay for edits a publisher may reject? – but now I wanted to give it every chance to succeed. If this book was finally going to reach readers after this long time, I wanted it to be the strongest version that they read.

I was elated by the results of the copy edit that I have recently had done. The book feels tighter, clearer and more confident, but more importantly, it feels finished. After spending more than a decade with this story, I feel I’m ready to let it go.

Eleven years after that first page on OneNote was created, The Thaw is becoming the book I always hoped it would be. Now comes the final step: getting it into readers’ hands!