I have! A few actually. A couple of examples from IL LUPO to give you a feel! Firstly there is the scene where Frobisher is hoping to avoid motorway traffic and he drives his car along the hard shoulder, much to the annoyance of the other road users. En route to my Stag weekend, my Best Man employed the same tactic to the same end... it was utterly terrifying!
Beyond that, the scene where Charlie experiences his first panic attack was very much based on personal experience. After my brother died when he was only twenty five (and I was three years younger) I suffered severe panic attacks myself for a time, and those descriptions are very much of my own experience.
There are a number of different measurements I'd employ in order to answer that question. In its most basic form, I hope that people are able to connect with my work, and they understand it in the way I hope for. But art is in the eye of the beholder, and if someone finds different meaning in my writing than I intended, that's another level of success. Of course, I have a dream that one day I'll be able to retire from corporate life and achieve all of my income from writing, but my breath is not held on that one >insert innate human tendency for negativity bias here
I’ve always felt I had stories to tell, and something of an ambition to put those stories into written words. As a small boy I would pen essays that I never showed to anyone else about how The Hulk was misunderstood, or why Spider-Man was the coolest superhero. When I was around twelve years of age I was introduced to the classic black and white horror movies of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jnr, and that started a lifelong affinity with the genre.
My wife, Dee, and I took a trip to Rome a short time after my father passed away, just so I could find some head-space. We walked the streets gawping at the ruins as tourists often do, and then we drove a hire car down to Amalfi and across to the bay of Naples. Along the way, I couldn’t resist stopping for a day at the ruins of Pompeii, it was utterly spellbinding. While we were there, something just sort of clicked and I knew what I had to write about, what the genre needed to be, and where to set it, too.
It actually took me close to a decade to write that first novel (IL LUPO), but the genie is out of the bottle now, and there's no turning back!
It's only happened once that someone I don't know has recognised me and spoken with me. It was at a business conference I attended in Barcelona in 2023, and I was just hanging out in the Expo with five or six thousand other people, just trying to do my job and persuade prospects to turn into customers. Mid way through a conversation, a passerby stopped in her tracks and pointed at me. I smiled at her, and said 'hi', assuming we might have met somewhere before that I didn't remember, but then she said, "you're the werewolf guy! I've read your book, it was very good. Are you doing a sequel?"
So my one and only experience of this nature so far was a positive one - phew!
I can't deny, it was completely thrilling.
