About me
David
JAUNDRELL
Hello, and thank you for being interested enough to get this far.
A little about me and the writing….
Divorced, I live in Shropshire, England. A former businessman with an MBA, I built and ran my own companies and worked for others. Never getting rich, never being poor.
In my late fifties, for many reasons, I walked out of my new job.
Soon after, I started writing ‘H – When hell is the favourable option’. I plucked the title out of the air but, I now know, it was entirely appropriate (if you read H you see the underlying theme, but especially so in ‘Tiger’.
Writing H had been ‘easy’. I just sat down and wrote it. No plans, no notes. Ignorance has no bounds….
I completed H but wanted to continue writing.. I knew I couldn’t do another H as it would have bored me, and you, to tears. But I needed to write something….
So I decided to keep H as a running theme and write about anything I wanted as long as I could get it to fit in the storyline somehow.
I started to test my boundaries and certainly those of the readers. I became even more imaginative with the plots, the characters, their needs and desires.
The H series became even more ‘pacy’, and people would read the complete series on a two-week holiday.
When I wrote the books, there was one other rule They must be accurate, and I went to great lengths to make sure anything I wrote about was accurate. I would ring anyone to make sure I had things right, and I had help from just about everyone I approached.
Unfortunately, on one occasion, I took this too far.
I decided to include a rock star, but not an imaginary one. Now I don’t move in Rock Star circles, but a friend told me where one lived. Wandering on to his estate, obviously missing a large ‘One step farther and you die’ sign, I knocked on his back door. When it opened, and I explained to this Rock God in his towelling robe with wet hair, who I was and what I wanted he requested that I ‘go away’. Amazingly, weeks later and miles from his home, I bumped into him again at the Dentist. He looked at me suspiciously, as one would a dangerous dog.
‘We’ve met before’ said I.
‘I remember’ said he.
We started chatting, I put my request to him again, and he kindly helped me. Those times, when busy people take the time to help you, are precious, and I am extremely grateful.
I hope you enjoy H and the following books. I say that as, usually, if you read one, you read the lot. Last year I met Jeff, a man who I had been to school with. Not seen him in forty years and it was great. I told him about the books but he ‘didn’t read books’. They had a holiday home that they were going to the following week, and his wife suggested he take one. ‘I don’t read books!’ She glared at him, he gave in, and I gave him H a few days later.
On his return he had read H. He asked for H2, which he read that week. He read H3, and 4 the following week and H5 and 6 the week after.
So, if they are enjoyable enough for Jeff, who ‘doesn’t read books’, you may enjoy them too.
After the H series I wanted to continue writing and in due I course I wrote several other books, plays and film scripts, all on the site.
Everything on this site is free to download and you may wonder why?
Are they that bad that I have to give them away? I can’t answer that, you have to judge them for yourself.
But I can explain why, from my point of view, they are free.
Firstly, I couldn’t get an Agent interested and without an Agent there is no publisher. I did try but got nowhere. The final straw was when I sent all the H books in a large envelope to an Agent. Inside the envelope there was another, pre-paid to send them back to me as and when. I sent all six to ‘impress’ them. If you can sell the first, you have another five already written.
After a few weeks, hearing nothing, I rang them. They weren’t interested. Ok, just send them back please. They couldn’t, they had shredded them! ‘Look on our website’ I was told ‘we don’t send books back’. This, from the people who purport to love books.
I put the books (as downloads) on Amazon and Apple. After several weeks Amazon wrote to me about complaints of H1. I assumed it was the sex or violence, but no, it was chapters about a man in a coma. To try and show his coma I used the first coma chapter with just a few scrambled letters in it, dotted around the page. The next had more, the next had more and so one until, in the blast chapter, they all coalesced to make sense, hopefully showing his brain had reconfigured.
People were complaining that they had obviously been printed wrong, (the first book was free, all were downloads). Amazon took down H1 and I had to write those chapters again so that they were easier to read and Amazon accepted it.
I hated that with a passion. I want to write my way, describe things my way, explain things my way. I wanted to be me, not controlled by Amazon or anyone else (Amazon still have three of my books on their site which they refuse to remove. They say they need the Publishers permission. After lots of emails, chats and phone calls over several years, I gave up)
Another reason they do not sell in thousands is that this is the day of social media. If you can make a big splash on social media you can do wonders (e.g. Fifty Shades of Grey). But I don’t have any interest in social media. No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.
So, I decided to do it myself as free downloads. Not exactly profitable but I am comfortable doing it.
But the main reason these books are on my site is that, for many years, I had a story to tell but I had never told it. Never even managed to utter the first word.
A story that had been lost in the myths and lies and deceit of a bygone world that lived in the shadows of my existence.
I needed to tell it.
And now I have…….
David